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Honky Talk

How Buck 65 found rural Canada in the side streets of Paris Who: Buck 65 Where: Garibaldi Lift Co. (GLC) When: Wednesday, Jan. 21 Tickets: $15 Buck 65 is listening to Bob Dylan.
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How Buck 65 found rural Canada in the side streets of Paris

Who: Buck 65

Where: Garibaldi Lift Co. (GLC)

When: Wednesday, Jan. 21

Tickets: $15

Buck 65 is listening to Bob Dylan. The unmistakable squeaky harmonica and simple guitar chords have soundtracked a conversation that so far has touched on everything from artistic pilgrimages, to books, to homeless people to college radio.

But suddenly, Dylan is front and centre. "Listen to this," says Buck (real name: Rich Terfry, but who's counting?) disappearing for a second to turn up the volume for a few phrases, delivered in the unmistakable laconic tuneless style that made the folksman a legend.

"He's rappin'!" says Buck with almost childlike glee. "I know he picked that up from Woody Guthrie and old blues records and stuff, but to me that's where I'm at and that's the most exciting thing in the world."

If Dylan is a rapper it makes it somehow OK to apply the title to Buck 65. The Nova Scotia solo artist now based in Montreal, via a sojourn to Paris, turns out a blend of folk music, country twang guitar riffs, hip-hop beats and beat poetry that gets filed under rap for lack of any other category.

There's no reference to standard genre fare on his latest album, Talkin' Honky Blues , a masterful ode to a small town childhood and raw human emotion - both good and bad. Instead of booty calls and libido braggadocio there's a heartfelt deconstruction of a relationship torn in half by cheating. Instead of shout-outs to tha' homiez over shiny samples there's quirky descriptions of the down and out that fall beneath the cracks of society's polished veneer set to lumbering accordion riffs reminiscent of a 1930s traveling freak show.

The fact that he has been able to mould hip-hop to fit with Maritime rural roots, a literary love for authors like George Orwell, Charles Bukowski, and William Burroughs, an artistic people-watching infatuation, and a folk-twang tradition has made him somewhat of an anomaly. This puzzles him to no end.

"People think I'm some sort of weirdo, but I think I'm just more based in tradition than anything else," he says, his gravelly voice matching the hard luck delivery from his recordings.

"I think it's weird when you don't have any roots to anything," he continues.

Modern glossy hip-hop creations like 50-Cent he deems as surreal as a Dali painting.

"It's funny more people don't see it as surreal. I see it as surreal," he muses. "What the hell is it? I don't know what that is. It's like the guy pulling the piano with the dead horses on top of it and stuff."

The visual imagery in his speech is consistent with the latest album, full of dogs and old cars, beards and guys without teeth. There's reference to talk radio, and a bittersweet exposition of a perfect world, where "milkshakes are two for one on Tuesdays and you can pay for a room with your good looks."

But it wasn't in a remote cabin in the hills that Buck found his inner hip-hop Honky, but in the side streets of old Paris where he lived for the past year and a half, and to which he feels compelled to return. The trip was an artistic pilgrimage of sorts, he confirms.

"I had my Henry Miller fantasies. I wanted to be down and out in Paris like George Orwell. Some of my biggest influences always had a lot of success there more than anywhere else, and I kind of wondered what that was about," he says.

By leaving the Maritimes he freed himself to look back with inspired nostalgia - the underlying theme of the album.

"I always lived in Nova Scotia before I moved there," he says. "I was feeling a bit nostalgic and homesick and otherwise inspired by Paris and I guess that's what happened."

But there were also surprising similarities between one of the world's cosmopolitan jewels and rural eastern Canada.

"The album is partly about home and the country but it's also about returning to older, simpler times, and you still get that sense in Paris," he says. "It still kind of operates in an old fashioned kind of way.

"I found places that kind of reminded me of home a lot, like every Sunday night I used to hang out at this little bar called Old Navy. And it was just a little hole in the wall, and it was all kind of salty, washed up old seaworthy types, with lots of fishing paraphernalia adorning the walls and fanciful pictures of old steam ships and it had a pretty 'maritime' feel to it. So yeah, I channelled a lot of that and tried to conjure a spirit of old romantic Paris a little bit."

Paris is calling him back; he's intent on buying property there. In the immediate months to come, however, he'll be on the road, going from town to town with a towering pile of books. He's currently reading three different Bukowski works, John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces , Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold , several books of poetry, Hemingway's A Moveable Feast (again), and a summer/fall 1962 issue of the Paris Review.

One bad thing about touring, he notes, is it keeps him away from his passion of hosting college radio, a large part of what made his name in Halifax.

That he still even thinks about college radio is one of the reasons his credibility remains intact with high standard bearing indie-music aficionados, even after signing with industry giant Warner Music for Talkin' Honky Blues. But for Buck, it's a non-issue, a matter of sticking to your proverbial guns.

"I still wave all the same flags that I always have," he says, I still support college radio as strongly as I possibly can and I haven't let go of anything I believe in."

And unlike other independents with similar sensibilities who may feel daunted by the music industry, he refuses to get stuck in a negative groove.

"There's two kinds of people in the world," he says. "There's those that kind of sit back and spectate and complain about everything, and then there's those who get pushed to the point where they say, 'alright, I'm going in. I gotta change some of this shit or I'm gonna puke!'

"I guess I'm one of those people."

Buck 65 brings his Talkin' Honky Blues to the GLC this Wednesday. Tickets $15. Call 604-905-2220 for information.