On: March 10 at 09:33 AM
(EDITOR'S NOTE: This story also appears in the March edition of the 209Vibe newspaper. To find out where you can pick up a copy, click here.)
When I called Joe Buck for an interview in late January, I interrupted him while he was surfing the Web in between some recording sessions at his home.
I then came to understand why the MySpace message I’d written him a few days earlier was answered by his publicist and not by Buck himself. This was the first time he’d ever surfed the Web.
It’s not that he wasn’t aware that the technology was there. “It’s kind of like technology came up and bit the music industry in the ass,” he said. “It used to be that you didn’t play ball, you didn’t get to see the light of day; now you can tell them to f--k off.”
If that sort of language offends you, stop reading this article now and don’t bother to go see Hank Williams III’s enigmatic sideman when be brings his “one man band,” Joe Buck Yourself, to Hero’s in Modesto on March 13 and the Blackwater Café in Stockton on March 14. 209Vibe is sponsoring the shows.
The story of how Joe Buck came to be a solo artist armed with a guitar and kick drum goes back to his days as guitarist of Th’ Legendary Shack Shakers. That story ended poorly.
“I got kicked out of a band I’d been working my brains out for. I was never so pissed off in my life,” Buck said of his rift with singer J.D. Wilkes. “I was never going to be in a band ever again. I would do it all myself.”
The spat inspired Buck to write one of his signature country punk tunes, “Devil Is On His Way.”
“I couldn’t go kill him; that’s against the law,” he said. “But there’s no crime against wanting someone dead, so I did the best I could. I used the music to try and exorcise this rage. That’s why the s--t works; it’s real.”
Thus was born “Joe Buck Yourself,” a record filled with Buck’s teeth-baring tunes that could serve as the soundtrack to a whiskey-swilling plains drifter and an enraged punk rocker pummeling each other on Saturday night at Fight Club.
But here’s the thing about Joe Buck: While it may be easy to dismiss him as a vicious, fire-spitting hate monger who’s more about tearing down than building up, that could not be further from the truth. Although hard-edged, this complex character is intensely passionate, both about his own work and his work with Hank Williams III.
Wilkes “was jealous of me playing with Hank. I didn’t know whether to put my guitar down and beat his ass, or what,” Buck said.
“I drew an allegiance about whose side I was on. What J.D. took from me, Hank III has only given to me. Because of that, I will never leave him. “Hank taught me how to rock,” Buck said forthrightly. “I learned how to not give a f--k what anybody thought. It was all about playing as hard as you f--king can. That s--t’s real man; it’s real energy. He taught me to rock instead of playing notes and playing music.”
