J.D. Salinger, Sixto Rodriguez and the Enduring Mystery of Missing Art
In 2013 Shane Salerno, a screenwriter with credits like Armageddon and the godawful Shaft reboot to his credit, released Salinger. It was a documentary about J.D Salinger that made quite the splash upon its release and subsequently sank like a stone.
Salinger was a truly obnoxious piece of work, a juvenile exercise in facile hero worship that posited its subject not just as the truest, most authentic voice of adolescent angst but also as a real-life superhero.
Part of what made Salinger noteworthy was its revelation that Salinger had written a bunch of books after he became literature’s biggest recluse and we would all soon get a chance to see what Salinger was up to after he turned his back on a society that, to be fair, is full of phonies.
It’s now been a solid decade since Salinger’s release and I could be mistaken, but I don’t remember even a single posthumous Salinger book being released, let alone five.
The most recent update I can find is from 2019, when Matt Salinger, the author’s son and an actor best known for his role in Revenge of the Nerds and the Cannon Captain America movie, promised that he was working on bringing his father’s unseen work to the public and was excited about releasing the books within the next decade.
It’s been four years since then and no progress seems to have been made.
I mention this because Sixto Rodriguez, the enigmatic folk singer who rocketed to cult fame thanks to the not entirely factual documentary Searching for Sugarman has died at eighty-one.
After watching Searching for Sugarman I became a huge Rodriguez fan. I bought his albums Cold Fact and Coming From Reality and listened to them compulsively. I saw Rodriguez two or three times live.
And I waited for Rodriguez to release new material. I assumed that someone as talented as Rodriguez couldn’t turn his songwriting brain off just because he was working as a laborer and not a musician.
I very much wanted to believe that Rodriguez kept writing songs after Cold Fact and Coming From Reality and that somewhere in his home lie notebooks full of song lyrics or tapes containing hundreds of songs that Rodriguez had written in the forty-one years between the release of Coming From Reality and the breakout success of Searching For Sugarman.
I’m a writer. I have to write. Even if I was working an actual job with actual responsibilities I would still feel the need to write because that is who I am on an existential level. I am a writer. I write. That’s who I am.
I naively thought the same must be true of Rodriguez. How could anyone write such wonderful songs as a passionate young man and then just stop because the world had rejected his art and, by extension, him?
I waited. And I waited. And then I couldn’t help but notice that no new music seemed to be forthcoming from Rodriguez. The troubadour was content to travel the world delighting audiences with old songs that he never tired of playing and that they never tired of hearing.
It’s entirely possible that Rodriguez didn’t write hundreds or thousands of songs after the world stopped paying attention. It’s possible that when he left that part of his life he left it for good and did not continue to pursue music.
I understand that impulse. I also do not understand it. I suppose on some level I have the fan’s narcissistic conviction that they’re owed new music and that musicians are somehow failing them by not making new songs or new albums.
I love Catcher in the Rye as much as any other former tortured adolescent. Hell, I even a Garbage Pail Kids drawing parodying Salinger’s most famous creation. That’s how you know I’m a highbrow intellectual. But I would much rather have an album of songs that Rodriguez wrote and secretly recorded in the mid-1970s than a new/old J.D Salinger book.
Did Rodriguez die with a treasure trove of great music he never shared with the public? Or does his recorded output of essentially two albums represent his life’s work?
We may never know but we can dream about what might have been and what still might be in lieu of any actual, you know, new songs.
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