By the time they reach high school, most aspiring rappers are slinging mixtapes and, if they’re lucky, getting scouted by major label A&R reps. But for Richard Terfry, high school was a time for furtively laying down tracks in his bedroom and getting scouted… by the New York Yankees.
“His name was Stan Sanders,” Terfry says, remembering the major league scout who drove all the way out to rural Nova Scotia, all those years ago, to tell a young pitcher he had “superstar” potential. “His claim to fame is that he scouted Mike Schmidt, who’s one of the greatest players ever.”
But Rich Terfry was not to be baseball’s next great hurler. Shortly after he was scouted, Terfry blew out his shoulder—and eventually, worked up the nerve to start rhyming in venues beyond his bedroom, first under the name Stinkin’ Rich, then as Buck 65. Fast-forward to today, and Buck has been rapping successfully for, as his latest album title proudly declares, 20 Odd Years. And he’s been doing it on his terms—constantly reinventing himself, first as a darling of the backpacker underground, then as a blues-hop experimentalist, most recently as a crafter of Gorillaz-like pop/rock/rap pastiche. If he really was a big-league pitcher, he’d be Tim Wakefield, a wily knuckleballer whose stuff dances over the plate, always keeping you off-balance.
Before his latest U.S. tour (dates below), ChinaShop sat down with Buck for a rambling conversation about baseball, Twitter, experimental cinema and how he’s been developing stage chemistry with his tourmate, singer Marnie Herald.
I’ve read that Buck was your childhood nickname, because where you’re from, every second or third generation kid with the same name as his father or grandfather gets called Buck.
Buck 65: It seems to be the case where I come from. It might just be a rural thing. I remember, my cousin Adam, when his parents started calling him Buck, I was like, “What are you doing? You can’t call him Buck. I’m Buck!” And then all of a sudden, all my cousins were being referred to as Buck. I’m like, “What is this? What the hell? I thought I was special.”
So is the Buck 65 really because you figured out that there were roughly 65 kids called Buck in your town?
Buck 65: That’s one of the stories I’ve gone with: My dad just randomly said, “Okay, if he’s Buck 1 and he’s Buck 2, you’re probably Buck 65.” But to be honest with you, I’ve made up a lot of stories through the years… after a point, I think I kind of forgot what the origins of it really were. But I had to move recently, and I was going through boxes and trying to figure out what stuff I could throw away, and I came across this incredible old relic from when I was a kid, growing up as a beyond diehard baseball fan.
That’s right, a lot of your early records have baseball references in the titles.
Buck 65: Yeah. And I made a fake baseball card for myself when I was a kid… and I put “Buck, 65.” Which I guess was a uniform number from my first team, the Blackhawks, when I was a kid. I’m like, “Holy shit! Now it all makes sense.” It was just my old uniform number and my nickname that my dad gave me.
What position did you play?
Buck 65: I was a shortstop. But I could throw hard and at a certain point, my coaches started to make me pitch. When I was 16 or so, I was scouted by a guy that worked in the Yankees organization. But a couple of years after that, I blew out my knee and wrecked my shoulder. It’s still kind of a broken dream with a broken heart attached. I think about it pretty much every day still. Because I feel like, if there’s anything to that notion that you’re put on earth to do something specifically—for me, it was probably more that than music. Because that always came natural to me, but this never has.
I was actually just about to ask you: Did you not get into hip-hop until after you gave up baseball? Or had you always been a fan of the music and just never really thought about doing it yourself?
Buck 65: I was mostly a fan, but I had engaged in some top-secret dabbling in my bedroom. And I mean that quite literally when I say “top-secret” because…
Nobody knew about it?
Buck 65: I didn’t dare tell anybody. This is something that I’ve tried to explain to people and I don’t think I’ve ever been able to properly convey. But I was reminded of it in a harsh way a couple of weeks ago, when I encountered an old childhood friend at an airport lounge at Heathrow. Coming from this rural, kind of hardscrabble place… the idea of doing something artistic, arty, was not something… it would be looked down upon, really not understood, would be seen as, there’s something wrong with you. So it terrified me to let any of my friends know that this was what I did. And when I ran into this childhood friend, it came rushing back. He said, “Well, well, Rich Terfry.” And I was like, “Oh, hey man.” And instantly I felt really shy around him. And he’s like, “So you’ve done pretty well.” But in my head I’m imagining him saying, “So you did pretty okay for a weirdo fruitcake.”
You’re kind of a Twitter power user. I follow you on Twitter and you post regularly. Why have you gotten so into it?
Buck 65: I resisted it for a long time. I was one of those people like, “That is the stupidest thing I could ever imagine.” And then at a certain point, I got offered a job doing a radio show in Canada on the CBC—like a national radio show. And I was forced at the CBC to go to a Twitter…
Like a social media conference?
Buck 65: Yeah. And they had this Twitter expert. I went in so skeptical, like, “There’s no way! There’s no way this guy can turn me around.” And he fully did. I’m like, “Wait a minute, that makes a lot of sense to me.” So basically my philosophy with it is: I’m not gonna use it to spam people. I’ll just give people a glimpse into my mind. If someone’s interested in me, I can say, “Take a look at this, and if you pursue it, it might open up a doorway that might make something else that I’ve done make sense.”
Like, I think it was last week, I posted something. I said, “This is what I imagine dying looks like.” And then I put a link to a 36-second Stan Brakhage film, one of his negative experiments, where he’s painting negatives and stuff. And the connection there, which I couldn’t realistically expect most people to get, is that it happened to be his birthday that day and my wife’s father used to be Stan Brakhage’s lawyer—and my wife studies film in school, so I’m a Stan Brakhage fan. Plus there’s a genuine part of me, when I look at Stan Brakhage films… I’m synaesthetic, so I have these weird associations with visual things. And that would be a pretty typical tweet for me.
How has it been performing together, you and Marnie? You certainly seem to be having fun up there.
Buck 65: We performed in London a couple weeks back, and Marnie’s friends with Juliette Lewis who came out to the show. And we asked her to give us some feedback.
What was her advice?
Buck 65: I think there’s a very different energy between Marnie and I. And so I think part of it was how do we bring [our energies] together and make it work together, and bring out some things in Marnie—for her to stake out some space for herself on the stage, when I’m such a maniac up there.
Yeah, I can’t really imagine anyone else keeping up with your dance moves.
Buck 65: I remember seeing this really old clip—I think probably before the recorded era of hip-hop music—of Kurtis Blow performing. And he was doing the strangest dance I had ever seen. Which is what I do a lot of, which is just this kind of nonsensical, full-body convulsion kind of dance. So there’s a bit of a secret tribute to Kurtis Blow happening, which probably really dates me. But that’s actually fine by me.
Words by Andy Hermann. Photos by Lion Works Studios.
Buck 65 Tour Dates
August 9 - Albuquerque, NM @ Launchpad
August 10 - Scottsdale, AZ @ Chasers
August 11 - San Diego, CA @ Casbah
August 12 - Los Angeles, CA @ The Satellite
August 14 - San Francisco, CA @ Slim’s
August 16 - Portland, OR @ Doug Fir Lounge
August 17 - Seattle, WA @ Tractor Tavern
