Press >> Up Town 2000

Bocephus King and the Rigalattos are huge in Europe. As much as that sounds like the empty posturing of an act that can't make it in its home country, in the case of this Vancouver-based outfit, it's the truth. While the quintet, led by the charismatic Bocephus King, a.k.a. Jamie Perry, plays bars and festivals here in Canada, in Italy, they're playing theatres.

"I can't explain it," says Perry, his voice showing the effects of two late nights at Toronto's Horseshoe club. "The label (Austin's New West Records) doesn't even have to pay for advertising over there, we're covered in so many magazines." But the band isn't coasting on its overseas success. It's in the middle of a cross-Canada tour and played such diverse events as the Kingston Blues Festival, the North Country Fair and the Regina Folk Festival.

"We've been doing the festival circuit and I think it's the way to go for us in Canada, because we kind of fit in between genres," says Perry.

That mix-and-match philosophy is highlighted on the band's latest release, The Blue Sickness. Roots, R&B, Memphis soul and jazz rub shoulders in songs that are spun out in Perry's closing-time voice, a voice that sounds like he's been drinking bourbon and smoking Colts since well before Happy Hour.

Perry's voice may be dusted with a layer of grit, but his backing band, The Rigalattos, are as clean and pure as spring water. These stellar players drummer Dan Parry, bassist Darren Parris, pianist Doug Fujisawa and guitarist Paul Rigby -were handpicked by Perry from some the best players in Vancouver's jazz scene. Despite the band's pedigree and Perry's lyrical cabaret act, Bocephus King's last album, A Small Good Thing, was more lauded by the No Depression crowd than the jazz or blues crowds.

"It wasn't meant to be specifically country, but it got lumped into the alt-country category, which is something I want to stay as far away from as possible," says Perry of the album. "I think the genre can give a lot of freedom to someone like Steve Earle, but takes away freedom for someone like myself. I feel like I'm hawking something that's not mine." Perry knows whereof he speaks. As a 19-year-old aspiring songwriter, he moved to country capital Nashville to make his living cran~ing out tunes. It was a disheartening experience and a blow to his ego; the only good thirtg to come of the experience was a slightly derogatory moniker he could later proudly use as an alter ego.

"The people I worked with, they were very nice, but they hung a label on me," he recalls. "They kept telling me I wrote 'bocephus music,' by which they meant simple country tunes, kind of three-chord Hank Williams stuff."

Now that he's not hampered by the confines of what he mistakenly thought would sell as country music Perry writes far-from-simple songs, filled with complicated characters. If a quarter of the scenarios in The Blue Sickness are real, the well-travelled Perry has lived a dissipated life indeed.

"It's actually very accurate although the stories aren't always about me," he says with a laugh, before revealing his source of inspiration. "I grew up in a place called Point Roberts in Washington state. It's a weird little piece of America, like Alaska, that's only attached to Canada, but it's part of the States. It's got a population of 800 ...Four huge bars and 27,000 gas pumps, that's essentially the economy."

It was in this tiny enclave that Perry met a lot of the characters who people his songs -and a sorry bunch they are, although not without charm. Part of that charm is due to Perry's insightful, literate descriptions of them, which turn the foibles of junkies, hustlers and sad sacks into the stuff of, if not legend, than at least a Howard Hawks film or a Carver short story. He has a knack for finding unlikely beauty in the sordid and the seedy, even romanticizing the bored pill-popping era of his youth. "The blue sickness is a term I use to refer to not wanting to vomit up codeine pills because it hurts too much," he says ruefully. "So you just sit there in this terrible sickly haze."

While Perry's lyrics are clearly influenced by the writers he admires, he says he's content to capture his characters in the sepia-toned photographs of songs instead of actual stories.

"People like Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Raymond Carver, they can create this rich imaginative world and then they can also end every chapter with a bang and I would never be able to do that," he says. "Or people like Charles Bukowski -if you read some of his stuff, you can tell he's reworked an idea over and over. He's probably completely meticulous, but his style looks like it came off the top of his head ...I just don't have the work ethic to do that."

Bocephus King and the Rigalattos reign at the Pyramid Cabaret on Friday, September 1 with Murray Krawchuk, the Bad Apple Blues Band and Band Called Horse.