The Prodigal Song

He was a legend in SA but unheard of at home. Now a movie is giving him a new career high. Rowan Philp tracks down The Sugarman Photograph: Gary Malerba

These days, Sixto Diaz Rodriguez is cheered when he walks into the Motor City Brewing Works bar in Detroit's working class Cass neighbourhood. A few people call out "Hey, Sugar Man!" and grin, and quietly brief others about this man's unlikely journey from obscurity to fame.

He still sits at the bar alone, waiting for his friend, John, and orders a tonic water, or a Faygo Pop - though only the red berry flavour.

But things are, he says, "A little different; no fuss or any of that, but, sure, there's something else - hard to articulate."

A few years ago, the barman, Dan DiMaggio, tolerated the musician as "a character I had to deal with - no, that's too strong. The thing is, he really wasn't a customer at all. He'd come in wearing this outlaw costume, all black with a hat, and nurse his pop, and wait for John. I honestly thought he was homeless."

Rodriguez had no phone and took his messages at the bar. When he did get a phone, he refused to give out the number.

Even for bar-owner John Linardos, tracking the troubadour down to transmit strange messages from distant lands "got frustrating at times", especially when the message would likely wind up as another crumpled wad of paper in his black music bag.

Sometimes, that outlaw outfit was dusty from his work, gutting the rotting dry wall from houses for close to minimum wage.

Linardos says that, in the '80s and '90s, Rodriguez played his guitar in parking lots and on street corners along Michigan Avenue - mostly singing covers - but never with the case open for change. "Cause they told me everybody's got to pay their dues and I explained that I had overpaid them..."

Last month, Alec Baldwin pulled some strings to clear the stage for Rodriguez at an exclusive club in the Hamptons. Then Baldwin warned him about the hazards of A-list fame: "After my set, Mr Baldwin told me fame was a double-edged sword," he says.

More than a decade of tours to South Africa, Australia and England had done nothing to change the way Rodriguez was seen in his own neighbourhood. The hippie loner still walked everywhere in a city made for cars and generally carried a guitar, seen as often out of its case nowadays as a gun out of its holster.

But Searching for Sugar Man has changed all that.

Directed by first-time Swedish filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul, the documentary relates the strange comeback tale: a Chicago street musician records two albums of stunningly good protest songs and street reflections by late 1971, and then disappears from the formal music scene for the next 27 years; the albums having somehow sold just "six copies" in the US, according to the record-label owner.

Rodriguez works as a construction and renovation labourer, utterly unaware that a few bootleg copies of his records have been resold hundreds of thousands of times in South Africa: his anti-authoritarian ballads having founded the progressive rock movement there, and inspired Apartheid resistance among white liberals.

Two of his most fervent South African fans, Cape Town record-store owner Steve Segerman and music journalist Craig Bartholomew, set out to find out what happened to Rodriguez - and whether the rumour is true that he committed suicide on stage.

They find him alive in 1998, living in a tumbledown house in a poor part of Detroit, with no idea of his astonishing popularity in South Africa. They invite him on a triumphant tour during which he performs to tens of thousands of fans .

He flies in from the US and is astonished to find a limousine waiting. More incredibly, cheering fans have made their way to the airport to herald his arrival.

What the movie doesn't describe, is the uniquely schizophrenic public life Rodriguez lived between his discovery in 1998 and the film's release at the Sundance Film Festival in January this year. He was feted as a cultural icon and superstar on tours to South Africa, Australia and elsewhere, while still totally anonymous in the US - still walking the streets of his decaying city and doing occasional odd jobs tearing down walls in condemned buildings.

I tee him up with a line: "So you were breaking down barriers everywhere, one way or another." He won't swing at it, but he bunts: "Ha ha, I like that. Yes, that's right."

Having grabbed the Audience Award for world documentaries at Sundance, and almost universally strong reviews, Searching for Sugar Man started playing in 84 cities in the US a month ago. Rodriguez shared a stage with Van Morrison and Joan Armatrading in June. Last week, he appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman.

"It was the first time I've performed with a 25-piece orchestra - really quite something, a real honour," says the 70-year-old.

Though the touring Rodriguez has been politely accessible for the past 14 years, the Detroit Rodriguez remains tough to find.

He has no professional agent or manager. He has gigs lined up at major venues in New York and Washington DC this week, so I call the publicity people at those venues. Nothing.

I go back to Segerman, who refers me through a string of South African cinema people, which seems ridiculous, since I'm here in the US, poised to jump on a plane to Motown.

Eventually, I'm connected with Rodriguez's daughter Regan, who says he doesn't receive guests at his house. She gives me a number and a time to call him. The number doesn't exist. The time is wrong.

Then my Skype phone rings and a woman says: "We heard you were looking to speak with Rodriguez. You thought 3pm was the time? He's here with me and doesn't have too much time, but you can try calling at that time . " I can hear someone moving in the background. I say "No, no, I'm happy to ." Click.

Then my Skype credits run out. How do you recharge credits on an iPad?

Bob Marley. Rodriguez. Peter Gabriel. Those were my three.

Minutes later, a voice I remember comes on the line - the voice in the treble-only speakers of the Datsun bakkie, sitting astride the gearshift with three in the front, headed for Ruby Tuesday night club near the Durban waterfront; the voice in the army hospital mental ward, as we malingerers plotted new kinds of crazy; the Marmite-tang voice that seemed to be the soundtrack to every flat-warming bash and students' union after-party there ever was.

He says: "Hello, how are you? You know, South Africa put me on the map."

Rodriguez addresses his interviewers by their family names. It's "Mr Morales" or "Miss Smith."

My surname is a little tough to say, but Rodriguez is too shy to ask me to repeat it, and too polite to risk mispronouncing it. So he calls me nothing at all, filling the gap instead by praising all South Africans as "gorgeous people" and studiously thanking me for bringing things to his attention.

The menu of questions is impossible to prioritise.

Surely 40 years after your last recorded song, the dam must be bursting on things you've wanted to say? "Well, I went back and ran for office, I helped raise a family. I've had plenty to say to them! I'm still a musical political."

Why did you perform with your back to the audience? "I don't like to eyeball my audience, though I do turn around. I think a lot of musicians give confrontational performances."

What does your home life look like? "I cook, I iron, I sew. These little things help me stay [grounded]. I think all of you youngblood men should learn these things, ladies shouldn't have to do it for you."

Down at the Motor City Brewing Works, Rodriguez's old-fashioned notion of chivalry is the trait most of the regulars think of first.

Linardos says: "Maybe 10, 15 years ago, Rodriguez was doing this house job with a lady tile-setter. They had to get this radiator up the stairs and he absolutely wouldn't let her help at all. Just muscled the thing on his own. He carried all her tiles too. There are plenty stories like that - he's just got all these chivalrous ideas."

Rodriguez says he's physically well - "I'm a solid 70" - thanks to his Mexican home cooking and long walks around the inner city. But Linardos reckons the movie and the touring it's triggered may have added years to the man's life.

"He's looking better than I've seen him in a long time - it's not just his career that this has re-energised."

The film has also turned Rodriguez into a myth factory; a memory mill.

Segerman - whom Rodriguez calls "the hero of the film" - told me a woman he met in Durban last month insisted Steve Biko had been inspired by Rodriguez's music.

"She was an elderly Indian lady who had clearly been involved with the Struggle, and I believed her - what she said blew my mind," he says.

More chilling for Segerman was this: the woman said Biko knew lyrics not from Cold Fact - his debut album, which sold over half a million copies in South African - but from his second and final album; a vaguely sad set of songs that almost no one was supposed to have heard in the country until the mid '90s.

And a new musical detective story is launched.

Mighty Ntsatha, a store assistant in Cape Town, says his dad was friends with Biko and, for the past 40 years, has known all the words to songs like Cause from the Coming from Reality album. Ntsatha sings the opening line: I lost my job two weeks before Christmas.

Rodriguez himself responds with: "Oh my goodness, thanks for telling me that - yes, I have heard that independently. I know about the leadership of Biko and the brutality."

It's something that could and should be checked. But, somehow, I don't want to. Those three hearsay sources will do.

There's more. This week, Nasim Asadi, an Iranian expatriate in Britain, sent an e-mail intended for Rodriguez:

"You might be surprised to know your music was popular in Iran before the 1979 revolution. So Iranians too have been passing your songs to each other for years."

For Segerman, the myths around Rodriguez are great but the reality is better.

After all, what if, in 1998, Rodriguez had turned out to be a gold-digging opportunist? Or a corporate sell-out? Or a person who had abandoned his guitar and forsaken the principle behind his own derision: Yeah, they're all here: The Tiny Tims and the Uncle Toms . Who talk to dogs, chase broads and have hopes of being mobbed; who mislay their dreams and later claim that they were robbed .

Or what if he'd turned out to be simply a normal person, embittered by lost fame and fortune?

Segerman says: "Maybe this is over the top, but think about it: after 27 years of hard labour, this man is revealed to us and he's full of forgiveness and humility and wisdom, which is exactly what we needed him to be, for the sake of all of those ideals we forged through his music. I think there is a parallel with Madiba."

To be fair, there seems to be a certain flakiness to Rodriguez's politics.

In less than 10 minutes, he suggests dark, authoritarian patterns in everything from fuel prices and Rupert Murdoch to the Federal Communications Commission and unequal pay for women.

Later, reviewing my interview notes, I find that he said: "We're being taken to a place pre-Civil war era; back to slavery," but can find no argument that brought him to this alarming conclusion.

Until recently, Linardos - himself a part-time musician - would bend his own bar rules to allow Rodriguez to play on his roof deck and collect messages at the bar.

This month, Linardos asked his friend if he would consider playing a small charity concert at a Vietnam veterans' bar next month, where he, Linardos, would be the warm-up act.

"The fact is, he's playing major venues right now and going on international tours, so it's a lot to ask, and a lot of guys wouldn't consider gigs like this when they're hot. But Rodriguez hasn't changed at all and, of course, he agreed right away," he says.

Rodriguez says: "All this is quite overwhelming. But you know: Sugar Man, a 42-year-old song, is Esquire Magazine's song of the month. That's something, isn't it? So it's never too late, though I guess I'd better get busy - who knows how much time I've got."

• Searching for Sugar Man is currently on circuit.