For his second album,
Rodriguez decamped to London at the request of producer
Steve Rowland, who had heard
Cold Fact and wanted to produce him. Since
Cold Fact had made little in the way of commercial movement,
Rodriguez jumped at the opportunity. Session musicians like renowned guitarist
Chris Spedding lent a hand on production, which was overseen by
Steve Rowland. (Curiously, the latter would go on to use about half of
Cold Fact for Family Dogg's oddity The View from Roland's Head.) By far not as striking as his debut,
Coming from Reality offers up some haunting stream-of-consciousness gems in "Sandrevan Lullaby" and "Cause."
Rodriguez's lyrics still come off as mildly anti-establishment; "Heikki's Suburbia Bus Tour" apparently recalls a trip
Rodriguez and friends undertook to Grosse Pointe to retaliate against the rich folks who often came to the inner city of Detroit to make fun of the hippies. He also spends lots of time with the low life, as he reminisces in the prologue to "A Most Disgusting Song": "I've played every kind of gig there is to play now/I've played faggot bars, hooker bars, motorcycle funerals, opera houses, concert houses, halfway houses." Slightly more slick than the debut, but still retaining the haunted personality (if not the gritty funk), the album sadly went nowhere in the United States and Europe. Faced, however, with the unexpected success of
Cold Fact in South Africa, Sussex re-released
Coming from Reality in 1976 as After the Fact. It lay out of print worldwide for several decades until 2009, when Light in the Attic resurrected it, along with the debut, and added three bonus tracks recorded during 1972-1973, back in Detroit, with
Mike Theodore and
Dennis Coffey again producing. ~ Quint Kik & John Bush