Veteran busker D. B. Buxton comes in from the cold
You’ve probably seen D. B. Buxton outside the Commodore and other venues, pounding on a stomp board, slashing at a rectangular Gretsch “Big B” guitar, and belting out super-fried electric garage blues in a voice that he apparently pilfered from Captain Beefheart.
There’s always a crowd around him; Buxton is a totally possessed creature who looks a bit like Michael Gothard’s superhuman zombie from the trippy mod horror flickScream and Scream Again, but cuter. And weirder. You can’t tear your eyes or your ears off him. He raises the art of busking to high trash, he’s been doing it since he was 14 years old, and he’s actually making a living at it.
But that’s the day job, so to speak. After relocating to Vancouver from Edmonton last year—“I played through all those minus-30 winters,” the 29 year-old says with a grimace, “on the streets, getting frostbite, getting older. It wasn’t feeling so good anymore”—Buxton found himself opening for the Green Hour Band at the Fox Theatre in May of 2009.
A short courtship followed, and eventually Buxton had himself a rhythm section in the sartorially magnificent shape of the Green Hour Band’s Randy Kramer (who switched from guitar to bass) and freakbeat drummer Nick Eccleston.
Thus were the Orpheans born. In a month or so, depending on how quickly the pressing plant pulls its thumb out of its ass, the three-piece will release a 7-inch single on the extremely boutique Neptoon Records label. Check the band’s MySpace for a preview of what captivated Neptoon store owner Rob Frith so much that he coughed up the cash for their debut slab of hot wax: a three-minute mutant blues stomper called “Ellison’s Tomb” and the shape-shifting heartbreaker “Keep It Slow”, which balloons from a dark and muddy Spencer Davis Group vibe into a wickedly thrilling, orgiastic, out-of-phase freakout.
There’s also a totally demented video of Buxton covering the Troggs’ “I Can’t Control Myself” on the band’s blog. He attacks the song like a transmogrification of Reg Presley, Steve Marriott, and a hysterically aroused capuchin monkey after two weeks of astral-planing in a sensory-deprivation tank.
“I think the nature of great performance is to be pretty out-there, and to be outside of your skin,” Buxton tells the Straight as he plows into a panini at Our Town Café off Main Street.
It’s an impressive understatement from a man who counts Screamin’ Jay Hawkins as a “huge influence”, although Buxton’s broader tastes and activities reveal an obsessed, self-taught musicologist without boundaries. Prince is his “number one guy”, he says.
“One side of me is classic pop,” Buxton continues. “Motown, classic rock ’n’ roll. On the other side you have Blind Willie Johnson, Son House, Thelonious Monk, Coltrane, and early music like John Dowland and Johann Sebastian Bach. That was the kind of stuff I was immersing myself in, as well as stuff like Captain Beefheart.”
Buxton says he spent five years “woodshedding” after Edmonton’s indie-rock scene dried up in the late ’90s. Before that, having been kicked out of school, he pounded the pavement, worked the coffeehouses, and snuck into clubs as a sideman for various acts, encouraged by a dad who “loved music but couldn’t pursue it”. When the work dried up, he discovered his inner muso and learned to appreciate everything from Lenny Breau to Cyndi Lauper.
“I thought her singing was brilliant,” he says of Lauper, “and I’d never heard another singer before or since that can do what she can do, the way that she can twist her mouth and create harmonics that punch you in the face. I love that sort of thing. I studied throat singing, for instance. I was just into any instrumental or vocal technique, the more eccentric the better.”
Considering that Buxton was also producing hip-hop during this period, and that he’s about to release a dance album on the Dirty Whore label called D.B. Buxton’s Dirty Disco Party—“I’ve been told it sounds like a cross between Prince’s Black Album and Lou Reed’s Street Hassle,” he adds with a broad grin—you might think that the relatively straight-ahead nature of the Orpheans would be limiting. For his part, Buxton views it as another challenge.
“This band is blues- and soul-music-based, and I figured out early on that the simpler I made it, the better. And that there are certain things that I would avoid. Like when I play a minor ninth chord, I can just feel the discomfort in the air. Not necessarily coming from Randy and Nick, but from the entity. From the vibe itself.”
Most importantly, Buxton feels that he’s finally picking up speed on a long road littered with talented but unsung wreckage. And make no mistake, Buxton is monstrously talented. “It’s been this cliché for the last two years, everywhere I’ve been,” he says. “ ‘You’re gonna be doing so awesome, you’re on the verge, you’re so hot right now, someone’s just gonna scoop you any second.’ This has been the last two years of my life. But this moment in time is the first moment when I can kinda see that, yes, things are moving a little bit. And, as for the Orpheans, I love it.”
The Orpheans play the Biltmore Cabaret on Wednesday (March 10
