Review
Genre and Mood
Rodríguez’s “Rich Folks Hoax” is folk with a psychedelic shadow, a singer-songwriter’s song that sounds dark and defiant, short enough that its point arrives before you are ready for it.
Song Summary
It is the eleventh of twelve tracks on Cold Fact, released by Sussex Records in March 1970, written by Rodriguez and running three minutes and five seconds. Its title names its target: in most of his songs, Rodriguez took a political stance on the hardships of the inner-city poor. Pitchfork called it “wonderfully dark psych-folk”; Culture Catch found that its concision does little to settle a sensitive listener.
Musical Breakdown
No source walks through this song part by part, so the breakdown stays with what is documented about the record it belongs to.
The Core
Rodriguez sang and played acoustic guitar. Pitchfork describes his compositions as ultra-basic guitar-and-voice songs, built around a workmanlike voice and simple melodies.
The Band Around It
The sleeve credited no musicians. Rodriguez and Mike Theodore later named them: Dennis Coffey on guitars and bass, Theodore on keyboards and brass and string arrangements, Andrew Smith on drums, Bob Babbitt on bass, with Detroit Symphony strings and a horn section. Which of them play on this song is not documented.
Concepts in Focus
Cold Fact is a record whose mixing is part of its character. Recorded at Tera-Shirma Studio in Detroit in 1969, it was remixed by Ray Hall at RCA in New York, and Tape Op’s Larry Crane notes that the acoustic guitar sometimes pans back and forth between the speakers during a song.
He also notes that whole songs sometimes descend into a wash of plate reverb. Listen for both habits here; if they are present, they help make a short song sound larger and stranger than a voice and a guitar.
Artistic Context
Rodriguez was born in Detroit in 1942 to Mexican immigrant parents and later studied philosophy at Wayne State University. Cold Fact was his first album, after a single in 1967 under the name Rod Riguez. Coffey and Theodore were Detroit soul veterans, and Coffey had played the wah guitar on the Temptations’ “Cloud Nine”.
Impact and Reception
Cold Fact sold poorly in the United States but found an audience in South Africa, where his anti-establishment songs fed the protest culture against apartheid, and in Australia, where it went five times platinum. Reissues by Light in the Attic in 2008 and the Oscar-winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man in 2012 finally brought him fame at home. Weighing it against “Like Janis” and “Jane S. Piddy”, Peter Viney of Toppermost found it hard to put a Rizla paper between them: all worth it. Play it, and remember how long it waited.
