Rich Terfry might become the newest whipping post for long-time CBC Radio 2 listeners, starting next Tuesday, wondering what happened to Jurgen Goethe’s classically inclined Disc Drive. But any further backlash will pale in comparison to when the new afternoon Drive host had a gun pulled on him in the Dalhousie University studios of CKDU-FM. A wannabe gangsta rapper from Halifax, unsuccessful in badgering Terfry on the phone during his show, loaded a bullet or two into a .45-calibre special request line.

“I tried to tell him that there might be issues with the CRTC because of the language on the record,” says Terfry. “But that only agitated him even more.”

Succumbing to the hostility of the piece-pointer, Terfry gave the tune a spin — presumably, subsequent complaints regarding nasty language over the airwaves would have been dismissed on the grounds that the offending programmer wanted to stay alive.

Terfry, raised in rural Mount Uniacke, Nova Scotia, first clued into this newly licensed FM campus-community station circa 1985 — as a 13-year-old riding in the car with mom on a shopping trip to Halifax. “They were playing some African music or something,” he recalls, “and I thought, holy mackerel, what is going on here?

“But if I wanted to pick up CKDU at home, it meant finding the highest ground I could find. I would climb up a tree in order to access this great, strange world.”

With his own budding interest in hip-hop, Terfry figured he could do just as good a job as what he was hearing: “I had a bigger record collection than any of these guys.” Therefore, after finishing high school, he pursued a show of his own.

“You really had to prove your mettle,” he says. “I was expected to take the trash out and make coffee, and happen to be there at the right time to fill in when somebody else didn’t show up. I had a lot to prove as a white guy who wanted to do an underground rap show — and this was during the heyday of Vanilla Ice.”

However, with tastes shaped by Public Enemy and Schoolly D, any desire Terfry had to succeed in baseball was channeled into his pursuit of obscure hip-hop 12-inches. Radio was always integral to feeding the passion. “I was always trying to get my hands on cassettes of rap shows from New York,” he says, “and would listen to them constantly — even though the tape hiss was usually much louder than the music.”

By the time Vanilla Ice was forgotten, Terfry took a stab at his own rhyming act. Known as DJ Critical on CKDU, his early releases were under the name Stinkin’ Rich, earning attention as the token rapper on the Halifax grunge scene circa 1993. A couple years later, he chose a more atypical rap handle: Buck 65.

Prolific output and touring led to a record deal with Warner Music Canada by 2002 — right around the time such contracts had become more curse than blessing for an artist gaining accolades in one country, yet deemed unviable for a CD release in another. Terfry’s reaction was to relocate for a while to Europe.

Conveniently, that exile inspired the aesthetic he intends to bring to CBC Radio 2.

“Music means so much more in England,” says Terfry. “Look at the wheels that help that turn — you can’t compare what it means to get mentioned in MOJO compared to an article in Exclaim!, or the difference between a Brit Award and a Juno Award. And part of the problem starts right here.

“I’ve spent time in these countries where in a restaurant, a café or on the bus you’re more likely to hear people talking passionately about music. Why is that?

“Canada might still have this underdog status, and there are some artists who might even enjoy it, but it’s hard enough around here to make it on our own.”

Drive will feature a minimum 75 per cent Canadian Content, an aspiration Terfry has been thinking about ever since being offered the job in June — he was asked to audition after applying his campus radio-trained chops last year to guest shifts on the online and satellite-based CBC Radio 3. He deliberately took some of the sounds with him while renting a car last month to get to the Pemberton Music Festival in BC: “I spent the entire time thinking, ‘What kind of statement do we want to make?’” During recent trial runs of the program at CBC’s Toronto Broadcast Centre, claims “there hasn’t been a night when I haven’t gone home and bought something online that I was playing on the show earlier in the day.

“There was one bluegrass song that just knocked my socks off — it was something I would want to play for my teenage cousin, or my girlfriend’s mother.”

Based on a two-minute audio preview played at the media launch for the new Radio 2 programs last week, the shift will focus on the song as “Canada’s gift to the world.” The pluralist approach means pushing the implication that Hank Snow, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen were, in their way, the original rappers. Which allows CBC to justify juxtaposing them with actual rap. The heaviest rotation items, though, are signified by the likes of Kathleen Edwards and Jason Collett, with Vancouver-based West African guitarist Alpha YaYa Diallo for spice.

This would be a tougher sell without someone like Terfry at the helm. Obviously, the cultural collisions of his own career contributes to his authority as host — having once blurted out to UK metal bible Kerrrang! that his enthusiasm for hip-hop was waning, Buck 65’s recent concept album, Situation, was about the year 1957.

Terfry won’t divulge what the first song on his first show next Tuesday (Sept. 2) will be, but promises a selection that perfectly embodies the ambition of Drive.

“I’m taking over a time slot that’s been hosted by the same guy for 23 years,” he says. (Jurgen Goethe will explore semi-retirement on the new Sunday afternoon 5pm hour, Farrago.) “I know there’s a lot of apprehension that this will be a crass commercial thing, but I’m confident that any thoughts, concerns or worries will be alleviated. All it’s going to take is 10 or 15 minutes of someone’s time — or maybe it will take just 30 seconds — to grasp it’s not going to be that kind of radio at all.”

Fine, but Terfry was hired to nurture new listeners, rather than just placate old ones. Keep in mind that, at age 36, he actually represents the lower end of the demographic being targeted in Radio 2’s effort to reach a new generation of listeners.

Growing up in Nova Scotia, one show Terfry didn’t need to climb a tree to hear on the FM dial was CBC’s Brave New Waves — a seminal influence amongst enlightened Canadians of a certain age who fended off sleep with host Brent Bambury under their pillow between 1985 and 1995. And now Radio 2 wants the grown-up incarnation of that audience back. Bambury never really pretended to be fanatical about the anti-commercial music he was presenting, however — maybe his adventurous detachment actually helped to make BNW sound more youth-friendly?

“I think it was like touring through Egypt with someone who knew a bit of history but hadn’t necessarily been inside every tomb,” agrees Terfry. “You could trust the guy’s smarts. And it was like he was discovering the music along with you.”

A generation later, the performing credentials of the newest CBC Radio 2 daytime personalities — including mezzo-soprano Ottawa-based midday classical host Julie Nesrallah and local vocalist Molly Johnson on weekend mornings — are accentuated to give artistic credibility to the makeover.

Terfry is willing to admit that his campus radio-era self wouldn’t likely have been listening.

“I had my head so far up my ass back then that I wouldn’t listen to anything that wasn’t hip-hop,” he says. “If you tried fighting that fight with me I can assure you that you wouldn’t be able to win. But my girlfriend is 24, a punk rock fan with tattoos up and down her arms, and I’m surprised by what connects with her.

“I’m realistic about the context, though. Many people are listening in their cars, or in the background, so the music needs to assert itself to a certain degree. This show can’t be a snooze.

“Nor will it sound like a nightmare.”

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