Bucking the trend
Richard Terfry’s hip hop will expand some minds at the Jazz Winnipeg Festival
Jen Zoratti



Buck 65 is a music fan.

Not just an ‘I like music’ kind of fan but the college-radio-station-listening, obscure-album-collecting kind of music maven, the kind who actually knows what ‘math rock’ is and actually spends time agonizing over how to file bands that start with ‘the’ — in other people’s CD collections, no less.

“I’m in my friend’s studio right now and I caught myself getting into one of my diabolical urges. I’m organizing his CDs,” Buck 65 (a.k.a. Richard Terfry) says over the phone. “This is really bad, though. Some are upside down.

“I find myself going into businesses and start, like, tidying up,” he continues. “You know, sorting the magazines and stuff. It probably comes from jobs I had before. I spent a large amount of time tidying up.”

Obsessive-compulsive organization aside, Buck’s love for music is what makes his own sounds decidedly different. Though he’s often credited with “saving hip-hop,” Buck isn’t your average saviour.

Rather, Buck creates an unorthodox mix of traditional hip hop, folk, country and rock. He does most of his DJing and mixing on his own. He raps about baseball. He’s a white Nova Scotian who sounds like Tom Waits.

He’s different — and in the highly commercialized world of modern rap and hip hop, different is good.

His eclectic style should be a hit when Buck plays a June 23 set at the Pyramid as part of the Jazz Winnipeg Festival — a party that continues to expand the tastes of music fans each year by not restricting itself to standard definitions of jazz.

“There’s a communality of a breaking of boundaries, and I’m all for it,” Buck says. “I’m sure there will be people that won’t want a scumbag like me loitering around their jazz festival, but as a music fan I like to see that in a festival.

“There’s some effort to tailor my set. I think I’m pro enough to do that, play different cards on different nights. There are few things I relish more in life than standing in front of an audience that I know I have two strikes with and taking that one song and hit it right out of the park.”

Buck has indeed dealt with his fair share of audience backlash. He’s been rapping since the early ’90s, and most of his current fanbase probably remembers him doing the grocery-store rap on Sesame Street. Buck let himself get back in touch with his roots after cutting his early albums, which he often refers to as “boring,” and his sound has undoubtedly grown and matured. Nevertheless, it took some prodding to get his audience to come along for the ride.

Rap purists still thumb their noses at a brand of hip hop that easily fuses blues, country and electronica, but Buck says its simply maturity that makes the seemingly enormous gap between commercial rap and jangly folk tunes not so big after all.

“As I’ve gotten older I’ve broken walls I’ve had within myself,” he says. “I can appreciate the genius of music. I think even that willingness to listen is a sign of maturity. When I listen back to when I was younger sometimes I think, ‘Wow, if only I had been more open-minded when I had that piss and vinegar in me.’ I was limiting my experiences.”

Still, it’s sometimes hard to have a wide range of musical experiences in a small town. With no music stores or college radio stations, country kids are forced to rely on trips to the city, wait for mail orders that probably won’t come or get someone’s cool older brother to lend them that much-coveted Buzzcocks album. When Buck 65 was going to school in Mount Uniacke, N.S., his experience was the latter.

“When you grow up in a city you’re around hundreds of kids, thousands sometimes,” Buck says, “and little social groups form, usually defined by music. There’s the punk kids, the hip hop kids.

“When you’re from a small town, that can’t happen. My friend Jason, who lived up the street, was into punk. My cousin Burt, who I worshipped, was into hip hop. And when you grow up rural, you’re exposed to a lot of folk and a lot of country.”

Perhaps rural exposure to music is less limited than we thought, and perhaps Buck’s eclectic take on hip hop is a direct result of growing up with so many different kinds of music — but it’s not like he didn’t work to get in touch with his muse.

“I once discovered a radio station, and their signal was a little out of our reach,” he recalls. “It was this cool little college station. The only way I could get their signal was to walk around town and find the biggest tree.

“I climbed to the top with the radio, and I’d sit on a branch, with maybe a sandwich, and listen for hours. I was known as ‘the kid in the tree with the radio.’”

So how does a genre-transcending, slightly obsessive-compulsive hip hop visionary put away his own CDs?

“I’m like the guy in High Fidelity,” Buck laughs. “I always change it around. Sometimes it’s by genre, sometimes it’s the classic chronological. Sometimes it’s by colour. It’s hard on the head. I need to learn to leave it alone.”