An Outlaw Faith Healer: Buck 65 (and Sage Francis) at Cat's Cradle

On Friday night, Keith, his partner-in-crime Joy, and I ventured into the wilds of Carrboro to once again visit the historic Cat's Cradle. We were there, first and foremost, to see Buck 65. Most of the rest of the large crowd was there to see Sage Francis. We arrived at the club just in time for the opening of the doors and in time to wait for the merchandise
table to die down a little bit. When Keith and I finally decided to take the plunge and hit the table, lo and behold, Buck was working the table himself and we were blessed with the opportunity to talk to the man himself for close to ten or fifteen minutes. What did we talk about? Many things, my children. We talked about his contract and distribution, the purity of old field recordings in the Allan Lomax vein and the glory that is Love's Forever Changes album. We talked about how the kids today don't know about Hip Hop's past and we told him about seeing Big Daddy Kane at the Cradle last Sunday. I awkwardly gave him the url for this blog, so be on your best behavior gentle and non-existent readers, because there's a small chance that the man himself is reading this too. And the man was kind enough to sign my copy of Talkin' Honky Blues, an album that you should all have purchased by now, expensive import price be damned- it's pricey to move product out of Canada into the United States and will be until we find that Northwest Passage.

The first act on the card, which amazingly started exactly on time, was the spoken word poet Buddy Wakefield. Wakefield's style of poetry stretches free verse past the point that his obvious inspiration, Ginsberg, went, at times verging onto the territory of the dramatic monologue. His work is good, and his delivery is captivating. The only shortcoming I saw came when his work verged from the implicitly political to the explicitly political, which differed little from the sort of basic leftist cant that leaves me weary (despite my own leftist bent). At the end of his act, he brought a local beatboxer onto stage, as well as a lovely young lady to vocalize for him, and the result was breathtaking.

Immediately upon Wakefield's departure, Alias took the stage. My familiarity with Alias is more or less limited to his work on the iconic Music For the Advancement of Hip Hop album, and a handful of guest appearances. His performance struck me as almost a paradigm of what I expect from Anticon, which is essentially a compliment, of course. It does cut the other way, however, when someone gives you exactly what you're expecting, it's often more of a let-down than you'd think it is. He's a fine rapper (and an able DJ) but lacked, at least on Friday night, something of that spark that separates the guys who you think of as guests on tracks from the guys who have guests on their tracks, if that makes any sense whatsoever to you.

After a brief interlude, which I spent being mistaken for someone with more talent than I actually have on the smoking patio, I made it back inside the club just as the banjos from "Indestructible Sam" began ringing out. I've thought, more or less since I first heard the downloaded Dirty Work EP that the moment where the banjos join the beat in "Sam" is the quintessential Buck 65 moment. Buck was, inexplicably, wearing a neck brace, and had a pocket full of miracles and confetti, both of which he flourished during his set.

After "Sam", Buck played "Centaur", a bittersweet mystery play off of Vertex, and "463", a haunting secret history from the Talkin' Honky Blues. During the instrumental portion of "463", between scratching, Buck spat the opening lines of "King of Rock". At most hip hop shows, the entire crowd would have screamed the lines in unison, but that didn't seem to happen here. An omen, perhaps.

He played The Floor", the dark family portrait at the center of his "Secret House Against the World" album, and "Kennedy Killed the Hat", from the same album. He played "Heather Nights", a fixture on mix tapes (actually cds, but I'm a classicist, or at least I pretend to be) that I've made for months now. When we were stealing a conversation with Buck, he told us that he had been doing covers on this tour, and he played "Fish-Heads" (He maintained on stage that he could tell the true hip hop heads in the crowd as being the ones who just stared at him while he did "Fish-Heads", but I'd wager most of them were just alternative kids without sense of humour there to see Sage. Then again, I'm a cynic.). He also performed The Jungle Brother's "I'm Gonna Do You", from their undisputed classic album "Straight Out the Jungle". Most of the Cats Cradle hip hop crowds would have been all about this, but like I implied, this crowd wasn't the usual Cradle hip hop crowd. (Whatever the hell that means, now that I think about it).



The headliner was Sage Francis, who has apparently become much bigger than I would ever have guessed. Apparently, signing with Epitaph was the right career move for Sage. I'm a fan of anyone who can place quotes from Dante and Donne next to references to Ice-T and De La Soul, but I'm curious about how many people in the crowd caught any of those things, but instead latched onto the sheer emotion of some of his tracks, tolerating the intellectual side that keeps the work from escaping him. At any rate, the crowd was his from the moment he took the stage with "Civil Obedience", off of his new "Human the Death Dance" album. Sage put on a fine show, playing tracks from all three of his albums, at least one song form his Non-Prophets collaboration, and a handful of tracks from his various EPs. His stage show is enthusiastic and shameless (in a basically good way). The crowd included at least one asshole who, while I was taking an inopportune piss, tried to climb onto stage. I'm not sure if it was the same guy who, sezing upon a off-hand reference to a
certain fast-food chain associated with a certain Colonel, began shouting "I love KFC", until Sage laid a verbal beat-down on him (more than once in the show, including here, "American Idol" was used as short-hand for most of the ills of the modern American culture). At any rate, I'm not convinced the crowd really appreciated the cleverness in Sage's lyrics, caught the various layers of references to the history of rock and rap, to literature and history. When he makes a Bukowski joke, how many of the skate kids there understood it. (This is, of course, my way of demonstrating just what an elitist and music snob I really am. But dammit, I was actually bothered by the collective idolatry for Sage and collective ignorance about Buck. I had to remind myself how much I really have listened to "A Healthy Distrust" and how much I really like the new album.) The highest praise I can think of for Sage was that, after his fans inadvertently made me quesiton my feelings about his work, his performance of songs like "Slow Down Gandhi", "Going Back to Rehab", "Jah Didn't Kill Johnny" and "Sea Lion" reminded me exactly why I am a fan of his, everything else be damned.

But he still wasn't as good as Buck...