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For casual fans familiar with Joe Buck the performer -- that snarling, sneering, whooping-and-hollering hillbilly from hell who growls and howls through a one-man show with 10 times the intensity of a stage filled with players -- the everyday life of his alter-ego, Jim Finkley, might be something of a shock.

Buck -- who performs as the one-man band Joe Buck Yourself, scheduled to rattle the rafters on Tuesday night, Dec. 1 at 4620 Reinvented in Knoxville -- comes across like a case of old dynamite, damp with nitroglycerine sweat and primed to blow at the slightest provocation. Whether he's railing about his carnivorous ways on the song "Animals, Eat 'Em" ("So you don't have to feed 'em!" he laughs) or contorting his face into a tortured scowl, long hair flinging drops of sweat to his feet ... well, Joe Buck is a force of nature.

Finkley, on the other hand, is about as laid back a guy as you might ever meet.

"I'm married, I have a beautiful wife and I've just been working in my barn this morning, singing and thinking about this record we're doing in January," Finkley/Buck told The Daily Times this week. "This is what I do. I love sitting in my little barn out here in the woods, with my mom living next door. I'm blessed, man.

"But when I get up there on stage ... I play every note and every word with all my heart, and it's easy to get up there and do it when you don't have to fake it. You've just got to mean anything, and you've got to make the (stuff) rock and play it as hard as you can and sing as hard as you can. You've got nothing to lean on except yourself, and that probably intensifies the hole thing.

"To sound like there's not something missing, you've got to be doing a lot," he added.

That energy has made Buck a prized sideman in the alt-country world. Originally from Murray, Ky., he catapulted into the spotlight as the guitarist for Th' Legendary Shack Shakers, a swamp-rock band whose frontman, Col. J.D. Wilkes, rivaled Buck's ferocity in the live setting.

The combination of their personalities may have led to Buck's ouster from the Shack Shakers; not that he's the kind of guy to drown his sorrows. He found work as the bass player for Hank III, as the bassist for the Damn Band (the latter's country/hellbilly backing group) and as a member of Assjack, Hank's punk/metal project as well.

But it's as a solo musician that he's come into his own, a rockabilly tornado who's figured out a way to wrap his philosophy and world views in a blanket of rebellion and bad attitude.

"My little songs are about something to me," he said. "They have to be about something, or they're about nothing. Some of my new stuff, for example -- 'When it all goes down, when all is said and done, go get your gun, don't trust anyone.' It's like apocalyptic whatever. I don't want (things) to happen, but maybe I realize how delicate situations could become when certain things could happen.

"These days, everything has gone awry. We have a large mass of people who are very detached from the environment, and I don't mean the green stuff. We've stopped digging in the earth and slaughtering cows and pigs and chickens and understanding how things work. We don't stop to think about a tree, how magnificent the thing is.

"We're just blindly detached, and very arrogant at the same time," he added. "It's like there's this arrogance in humans, and that's scary stuff to me."

Despite his dour outlook of human nature and the nihilistic method of expression he employs on stage, Buck is clear on his role as the hellfire-and-brimstone preacher of those rock 'n' roll come-to-Jesus meetings that he oversees. His primal fury is contagious, and more often than not, the sound and the fury overshadow any philosophical ponderings that may be gathered from his lyrics. But that's OK -- because it's rock 'n' roll, he acknowledges, and the kind he plays feeds more on the red-faced fan pressed up against the stage, throwing up a pair of devil horns and screaming so loud the tendons stand out in his neck.

"I'm not gonna get up there and preach to them," Buck said. "I have my motives, and I know why I'm writing the (stuff) that I'm saying, but it's rock 'n' roll, and when they scream and yell, right on. It should be that. As long as it's about an energy with me, that's all I have to worry about. If my motives are pure on why I'm stirring it up, then I can do or say whatever comes out, because the energy itself is what they're really getting.

"I have kids every night who have an epiphany at the show, and usually it's unsuspecting. Maybe his buddy brought him to a show or something, and he sees me and thinks, 'If that guy can do it, then maybe I can do what I want to do,' and it's as simple as that. If he wants to be a plumber, that's awesome -- just go out and do it. Go out and find out what you want to do and lose that fear of what you think you're supposed to do."