One of the early pieces of
advice I received before I started at Appleby was to meet with the school’s
auditor, lawyer, and major partners. So, last week I had the pleasure of having
lunch with our lawyer, Eric Roher of BLG, a national leader in the field of
education law.
Aside from all the interesting work
chat, Eric told me about a fascinating story from the music world that
captivated him. It is the story of a singer-songwriter named Sixto Rodriguez
and a documentary called Searching for
Sugar Man.
According to the Sugar Man
website, “After his two critically acclaimed, early-1970s albums flopped in the
United States, Rodriguez all but vanished from the music scene. But copies of
those records found their way to South Africa, where they became, unbeknownst
to him, the soundtrack to the anti apartheid movement.” He was “bigger than
Elvis” there. The documentary film-maker set out to tell Rodriguez’s story (he
is very much a Bob Dylan-like figure) and find out the circumstances of his
death. The unbelievable story has helped spur on the most recent rediscovery of
the artist.
Eric told me about the
story’s twists and turns - it sounds fascinating. I can’t wait to see the
documentary. (I heard that 60 Minutes also did a recent piece on the story.)
In the meantime, I managed
to find a few of Rodriguez’s songs online and recommend them to you. It is
great stuff and hard to figure out how they didn’t catch the imagination of
North America 40 years ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment