Sixto Rodriguez

This is an interesting story, if you haven't seen it there's a documentary called Searching for Sugar Man about him. He cut a good record in I think 1970, and it was all set to go, but someone pulled the plug on distribution. He would have been big, but they decided to just shelve the record and eat the production cost.

Someone had a copy and started selling bootlegs in South Africa, where it became popular, and eventually they tracked the guy down, and he was doing construction in Detroit. 

People have speculated about what happened, was it possibly racism because Rodriguez was Mexican, whatever. I think the gatekeepers just said, this guy is dangerous, just a general apprehension that this guy was not going to be so easily controlled.