Press >> Calgary Sun

The sound of a two-year-old squealing in the background tells part of the story of the absence of the mighty Bocephus King these past several years.

But only a small part of it.

Four years ago, the West Coast Canadian musician seemed ready to run the world, thanks to his 2000 release Blue Sickness and a live show that converted a great many people over to his home-stilled, 100-proof roots rock.

His audience in Canada was growing steadily while Europe was even more enraptured and seemingly intent on helping his star ascend.

And then ... nothing.

"It all fell in on itself," says the man born Jamie Perry, by way of explanation. "Success, if you don't know what you're doing with that, it just gets out of control very fast ...

"I'd never really set up a system for success — it was never a plan. So when it started to happen, everything came to bits.

It didn't help that some of his old habits took hold — a diet of "many, many" chemicals, he says — and his relatively unseasoned band, The Rigalattos, who were an important part of that success, followed suit.

A second overseas jaunt wound up being their undoing.

"By the end of that (tour), everything was just a mess," he says. "Those guys hadn't really toured before and that tour ended up being two years long — we just kept playing and playing.

"Their lives weren't really designed for that so everything fell apart and everyone started to partake a little too much.

"So after years of messiness I got engulfed in the mess and that's why it took so long to make this record — I had to get it together and straighten myself out. A little bit."

So after "crash landing" his life and career — partially due to the realization a daughter was on the way — he set forth building it back up again.

His recently released All Children Believe In Heaven should go a long way towards that — it finds him, as a songwriter and especially as a Bukowski-an lyricist, at the top of his game.

It's a remarkable, panoramic soundtrack to broken dreams and deflated souls, which uses Hollywood of the '40s and '50s and its characters as a metaphor for his own pilgrimage to Nashville many years ago, where, he admits, he was "crushed and eaten up."

"Hollywood is to most people as Nashville was to me — a big light that draws you like flies," says King, who performs at the Ironwood tonight with his new band.

"And it draws so many people and there are so many people just sitting there waiting to eat up your dreams and whore you — it's incredible, it's absolutely true and it's absolutely happening every day.

"People are getting off the bus to go explore their dreams and someone's sitting there waiting to harvest them. It's a cycle."

Hopefully the cycle for Bocephus King will continue on its positive path, skipping over the section where it all falls apart.

Then again, knowing his attraction to the darker side of the street and the people who populate it — an attraction that's neither shtick nor a philosophy — it would be a tough bet to make.

"I don't go looking for trouble," he says, "trouble often finds me."