Happy belated birthday to
Jesus Murphy,
Haslam,
DJ Critical, Uncle Climax (NSFW audio),
Stinkin' Rich (NSFW audio),
Dirk Thornton,
Buck 65, or as his mom called him,
Richard Terfry.
Born in the year of the rat, and he's a Pisces, which makes him a rat fish, but by trade, he's a turntablist/ MC/ producer/
broadcaster. Generally he makes
some form of hip-hop (some NSFW lyrics), though as of late, he's been broadening his style, as heard in his cover of Leonard Cohen's
Who By Fire (
previously) and
Paper Airplane (official "lyric" video). In tribute to his 41st birthday, there's a lot more music inside.
Born in 1972 in the farming community of Mount Uniacke, Nova Scotia, Rich Terfry's musical background starts in hard rock and heavy metal, when he was a "
a child soldier in the Kiss Army," and a fan of Black Sabbath and Deep Purple.
At age 16, he was scouted by the New York Yankees, but his dream of being a major league baseball player ended early with a shoulder injury.
In the 1980s, he heard hip-hop on the radio (
or maybe from his babysitter's roller-rink DJ boyfriend), and his path was set. He headed to Halifax in 1989, ahead of the
local hip-hop boom of the early 1990s. In 1990, he recorded his first track,
which Terfry confesses wasn't very good at all (the audio link is dead, but
this is a live link). Nonetheless, it got play on college radio, where Terfry
DJ'd as Jesus Murphy for more than a decade.
Rich Terfry's first official recording was under the name Haslam, and he had
two tracks on a Phunky Lobster cassette in 1993. He released a few more tracks in the following years, using a number of different stage names, including both Uncle Climax and Stinkin' Rich on
the '97 cassette Cock Dynamiks (which is now
online via Bandcamp), and his first solo Buck 65 album,
Language Arts, that same year (
re-released in 2001;
Grooveshark stream). That year or the next,
a 120-minute cassette opus titled Vertex was released, and a year or two later,
a shortened version was put on CD (YT Playlist;
Discogs entry), and followed a few years later by
Man Overboard (Grooveshark), and
Synesthesia, which was originally mis-pressed without track breaks.
In 2002,
Terfry signed to Warner Music Canada, seeing a number of his original albums getting remastered and re-released (and untitled tracks given names), including old material going back to 1988 and
features more rapper bombast than later releases, under the title
Weirdo Magnet (YT playlist), which keeps with the style of many past releases and doesn't include track titles. In 2002, Warner also released the new concept album,
Square (MySpace stream). The whole album consisted of four long segments, each containing a few songs, and much of it instrumental. The next year saw the release of
Talkin' Honkey Blues (YT playlist), which consisted of "
a continual thematic series of songs revolving around a single river."
Those first six Buck 65 albums were part of what the Language Arts series (with Weirdo Magnet retroactively listed as Language Arts #1), spanning from minor to major labels.
The seventh installation, Strong Arm, was released as a free mixtape online that has since disappeared from Buck's site, but it's on YouTube in 3 parts:
1,
2, and
3.
That interesting lean towards country/rural themes that continued into
This Right Here is Buck 65 (YT Playlist), in which old songs are recast as "
honky-tonk parables," replacing the original samples with
actual instruments. He went even farther backwoods with
Porch, a tour CDr that
paired Terfry with even more pared down instrumentation, consisting of guitar, banjo, dobro, and mandolin, depending on the track.
Secret House Against the World (Grooveshark)
continued the path beyond hip-hop, with some odd turn-offs into turntablism, though on the whole, there's a lot more folk, blues, and jazz than hip-hop beats, and where such beats are present, they sound more like Tricky's
Maxinquaye-era trip-hop. But hip-hop wasn't gone for good, as Terfry
teamed up with DJ Signify and
Scratch Bastid for the next album,
Situation, a concept album/ode to 1957 (
Grooveshark stream).
Originally it was a casual collaboration without intention, where Scratch Bastid (Paul Murphy) made beats and sent them to Terfry to rap over. Those tracks were passed around their friends, eventually making it to Warner, who liked it enough to want it to be a proper album. There was a serious problem with the songs in their current form: Bastid made his beats from loads of uncleared samples. So the album was re-recorded with studio musicians, and the original demos faded from view, until
Scratch Bastid was kind enough to share them.
Before the release of Situation, Terfry posted on Buck65.com (
and his message spread elsewhere) that while he wouldn't stop making music, he didn't see music as a viable full-time job, that making money off of records is "hopeless now," and touring was fun, but a rough life. He even mentioned giving his music away and no longer making physical releases. He wrote "It’s just a thought. But if anyone wants to give me a job (I’ll consider just about anything), get in touch."
Situation was released on a number of formats, so he hadn't foresworn physical releases just yet, but
in 2008, he took a full-time job on CBC Radio 2, as part of the
stations's shift from a strong classical music focus to more pop sensibilities.
He's still there, more than four years later, and the show he hosts, Drive, features more pop/indie rock and folk than anything else. For a taste of the artists,
here's a YouTube playlist of 58 live performances on Drive. Terfry, "known to the kids as Buck 65,"
shared his "fave books" as part of the
CBC Book Club.
But that day job didn't mean an end to Buck 65. True to his word, Terfry released some non-physical music, for free:
three huge albums worth of music, about 70 tracks, written and produced in 3 months. Tell him a country and your email address,
and the music (plus a PDF booklet) is yours. Or, stream and/or download them directly from Soundcloud:
Dirtbike 1,
Dirtbike 2 and
Dirtbike 3.
In that same year, Terfy collaborated with Symphony Nova Scotia, as you can
hear in this YouTube playlist, or in a slightly different breakdown on
Grooveshark. There is a nice bit of chatter between the songs, with both Terfry and conductor/director
Dinuk Wijeratne, who composed a piece (
Hymnpeace Remixed) that Terfry improvised with live.
After two decades of making music, Buck 65 returned with
20 Odd Years, first as 4 EPs, then as an album (
MySpace stream),
featuring a diverse number of guest artists alongside the diverse sounds. There are also
a number of videos to accompany the album, both
music videos and
odd clips with Terfry talking on collaborations.
And speaking of collaborations, Terfry has done a number over the years, from limited work with
DJ Flip as
Dirk Thornton (
stream tracks on MySpace), to the much more electronic project
Bike for Three! with
Belgian producer Joelle Le aka
Greetings from Tuskan (Bandcamp) and their single album
More Heart than Brains (Bandcamp stream).
If this is too damned wordy but you made it this far,
Tom Hull has his notes on
the broad Buck 65 overview through 2003 by covering the Warner Music Canada (re)issues, and
Robert Christgau (
a serious Buck 65 fan since hearing the first 6 minutes of the fourth quadrant of Square) hits
Man Overboard to present, including comments on Buck 65's two free downloads and the Dirtbike mixtapes. There's also
Terfry's own discography, which includes links to his personal reflections on selected works (no longer on his own site, but Archive.org has some snapshots).
Bonus links
posted by mazola at 11:22 PM on March 8