Everyday struggler
Buck 65 and his dark, lyrical hip-hop
Hard living doesn’t have to involve drugs and alcohol, disaster or betrayal. Take the story of producer/MC Richard “Buck 65” Terfry, who hails from Nova Scotia. Currently residing and recording in Paris, Terfry would raise a glass of Perrier, not vintage Bordeaux, to his increasing profile following his recent album, This Right Here Is Buck 65. It’s an introductory overview of his material from 1998-2003, newly released Stateside on V2 Records. Because Terfry doesn’t drink or do drugs, he hasn’t lived out a “Behind the Music” crash-and-redemption storyline. But he’s had his share of tough times.
Living a life of “zero glamour and heavy ass kicking” to build an independent following, Terfry has been crashing on couches since the early ’90s. Terfry curled up each night with a microphone, sampler and/or four-track, not a bottle. “I was a bum for close to 10 years,” Terfry says. “I picked myself up by the bootstraps and said the world would never show up on my doorstep in the middle of nowhere Nova Scotia, so if I wanted anything I had to hit the road. And in that time, from playing night after night, my body was being abused - in particular my throat.
“My voice started to break, and I saw these qualities emerge in it I liked,” continues Terfry. “So at the same time, I found my voice in a physical and artistic sense, and the record labels started coming knocking. So I owe it to the road, as cliché and ridiculous as that sounds. After all, doing 10 shows does so much more for your craft than doing 10 takes in the studio.”
Indeed, “the road” plays an integral part in Terfry’s development. In Nova Scotia, Terfry lived in a former gold mining town left ghostly after being bypassed during the building of a major highway. Terfry’s kindred spirits were not whiskey and wine, but David Lynch and Tom Waits, Bukowski and Visconti - artists who share a dark sensibility.
“When I discovered artists like David Lynch and Tom Waits, there was an instant appeal I couldn’t find in, say, Woody Allen, because I was never a guy around a town like Manhattan,” Terfry says. “I was a guy finding the ear in the deserted lot. My town was tiny, quiet, but underneath there was a weird dark side. Hotel porn and phone booths and parking tickets and barking dogs and heartbreak and getting sick - these things are universal. I’ve devoted my life to showing people how to see the stuff lurking in their periphery.”
Terfry’s recordings as Buck 65 featuring a five-person live band show the influence of someone who’s transitioned through periods and places both bleak and barren. Terfry’s approach is indeed one best described as wide open, featuring characters edging on absurdly imaginative. With fuzz guitar and vibraphone, he strives to conjure the palpable longing of the outsider, like an aural companion to John Fante’s Ask the Dust. He works in the medium of hip-hop, drawling rhyming cadence along metronomic beats, but Terfry’s experimental yet lyrical approach probably has more in common with Leonard Cohen than Jay-Z.
”[This Right Here Is Buck 65 has] moments that took a year to make and songs that took 10 minutes,” Terfry says. “And there will be moments on stage that are the same - some wild dog, some proven routines. I’m always battling within myself to strike the balance between methodical and intellectual and spontaneous guts, and writing songs informed by the struggles of living on both sides of that line.”
tony.ware@creativeloafing.com
Living a life of “zero glamour and heavy ass kicking” to build an independent following, Terfry has been crashing on couches since the early ’90s. Terfry curled up each night with a microphone, sampler and/or four-track, not a bottle. “I was a bum for close to 10 years,” Terfry says. “I picked myself up by the bootstraps and said the world would never show up on my doorstep in the middle of nowhere Nova Scotia, so if I wanted anything I had to hit the road. And in that time, from playing night after night, my body was being abused - in particular my throat.
“My voice started to break, and I saw these qualities emerge in it I liked,” continues Terfry. “So at the same time, I found my voice in a physical and artistic sense, and the record labels started coming knocking. So I owe it to the road, as cliché and ridiculous as that sounds. After all, doing 10 shows does so much more for your craft than doing 10 takes in the studio.”
Indeed, “the road” plays an integral part in Terfry’s development. In Nova Scotia, Terfry lived in a former gold mining town left ghostly after being bypassed during the building of a major highway. Terfry’s kindred spirits were not whiskey and wine, but David Lynch and Tom Waits, Bukowski and Visconti - artists who share a dark sensibility.
“When I discovered artists like David Lynch and Tom Waits, there was an instant appeal I couldn’t find in, say, Woody Allen, because I was never a guy around a town like Manhattan,” Terfry says. “I was a guy finding the ear in the deserted lot. My town was tiny, quiet, but underneath there was a weird dark side. Hotel porn and phone booths and parking tickets and barking dogs and heartbreak and getting sick - these things are universal. I’ve devoted my life to showing people how to see the stuff lurking in their periphery.”
Terfry’s recordings as Buck 65 featuring a five-person live band show the influence of someone who’s transitioned through periods and places both bleak and barren. Terfry’s approach is indeed one best described as wide open, featuring characters edging on absurdly imaginative. With fuzz guitar and vibraphone, he strives to conjure the palpable longing of the outsider, like an aural companion to John Fante’s Ask the Dust. He works in the medium of hip-hop, drawling rhyming cadence along metronomic beats, but Terfry’s experimental yet lyrical approach probably has more in common with Leonard Cohen than Jay-Z.
”[This Right Here Is Buck 65 has] moments that took a year to make and songs that took 10 minutes,” Terfry says. “And there will be moments on stage that are the same - some wild dog, some proven routines. I’m always battling within myself to strike the balance between methodical and intellectual and spontaneous guts, and writing songs informed by the struggles of living on both sides of that line.”
tony.ware@creativeloafing.com