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By ROBERT PRICE Californian staff writer Buck Owens still owns the Fender Telecaster he bought secondhand in 1951. That old off-white guitar rings as earnestly as ever, but the years have not been altogether kind.
One night at The Blackboard, the Bakersfield honky-tonk where he played for the better part of a decade, Owens propped his guitar unsteadily against an amp - and then heard it crash to the floor with an electric thud. When he picked it up again he saw that a portion of the ivory “nut” fret at the top of the neck had been chipped away, springing loose a string. Fiddle player Jelly Sanders stepped in and surveyed the damage. “He says, ‘You got a comb?’ ” Owens said, recalling that night in 1955 or ‘56. “And I said, ‘Yeah,’ ’cause in those days you carried a comb. And we took out a little piece (of comb-tooth) and stuck it back in there, and wet it with brandy so it would stick. I guess it’s been in there 40 years now.” A few weeks ago Owens showed the repair job to a guitar technician, who proceeded to volunteer his services: He could make the battered instrument as good as the day Owens bought it off Lewis Talley for half a week’s wages. Owens politely declined. You don’t trifle with tradition, whether it’s a song or a singer or a guitar. Owens understands that, but it hasn’t always been easy to convince the rest of the world he feels that way. Fortunately, throughout his recording career, Owens rarely cared what the rest of the world (especially Nashville) thought - and most of the time the rest of the world (eventually even Nashville) loved him for it. But Owens’ mug has turned up on a few Nashville dart boards over the years. Almost always it’s been because he saw enough “country” in a non-country song to make it a country song. That was the case with Chuck Berry’s rock ‘n’ roll standard, “Memphis,” which appeared on Owens’ “Tiger By the Tail” album in March 1965, the very same month Owens placed an advertisement in Nashville’s Music City News proclaiming “I Shall Make No Record That Is Not a Country Record.” And he meant what he said, though he was operating on his own definition of “country,” rather than Nashville’s.
In another life, Alvis Edgar “Buck” Owens might have been a master of the blues, or perhaps a rock ‘n’ roller of the first order. But he was born poor and white, and raised on the Texas-Oklahoma border in the middle of the Great Depression. If he was going to play music at all, it was going to be country music. Not that he didn’t gnaw on the fence a little. First, there were those old “Corky Jones” recordings - “Corky” being an Owens pseudonym intended to obscure his authorship of two rockabilly tracks recorded in 1956 for Pep Records. Owens’ country-music career, still embryonic, might not have been able to withstand a blackballing by the rockophobic country-music establishment. Elvis Presley changed the world in 1956, but by that time Owens, along with bandmates like Bill Woods, Henry Sharp, Oscar Whittington and Sanders, had been playing a loud, driving, danceable version of country music for a half-decade. So it shouldn’t have been a shock to Nashville or anyone else when, starting in 1965, Owens and his Buckaroos started cranking out rock and rock-pop songs such as “Memphis,” “Johnny B. Goode,” and even Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Owens brought in a rock drummer for 1964’s “My Heart Skips a Beat,” and a fan wrote to tell him he was going to stop buying Buckaroos records unless Owens starting cutting back on the beat. Buck used a fuzz-tone guitar-distortion device, popular among rock bands of the era, for 1968’s “Who’s Gonna Mow Your Grass,” and in the process started a similar revolt. “People would get upset if it wasn’t what they thought country was,” Owens said. “And there’s no latitude for deciding that. I’ve had different influences from time to time in my life, and I’m almost 70 years old, but as I look back, my biggest influences might have been (western swing fiddler) Bob Wills and Little Richard. What do you make of that combination? But that’s where I was coming from.” When Owens’ success came, it came fast and furious, like a Tulare dust storm. Starting in 1963, the No. 1 songs started piling up like junk mail after a two-week vacation. (Owens had 19 consecutive No. 1 hits from 1963 to 1967 alone.) He was making three albums a year and appearing on TV with Dick Clark or Ed Sullivan every other month, it seemed. As a result, Owens had increasing carte blanche with his style and song selection.
“Each time I would release one of those things, the label would shudder: ‘Oh my God, all these weird things he’s doin’ ... Why don’t he just do what he does?’ But doin’ what you do makes you stagnant. ... I was always afraid, but never afraid enough not to try it.” His confidence peaked in 1967 when he released “Johnny B. Goode” as a single. It went to the top of the country charts, but Owens won some enemies in the process. “Man, there were guys burning me in effigy,” Owens said. “Guy from a radio station, WPLO in Atlanta, sent me pictures of a bonfire - this is the truth - with the explanation, ‘This is a bonfire we held last week, and we burned every Buck Owens record in the radio station.’ They were really upset with me. “But how could they say that song wasn’t country? ‘Way down in Louisiana, down by New Orleans ...’ Go on, listen to his lyrics. If that ain’t country, tell me what that is. My opinion was, and always has been, if Chuck Berry had been a white man, he’d-a been a country singer.” But the country music establishment wasn’t ruffled merely because of Owens’ electrified twang, or his tendency to push at the boundaries of the genre. It was the way he went at things in general, building his own mini-empire in California instead of buying a Nashville mansion like everyone else who was anybody. “My problem with Nashville was simple,” Owens said. “I don’t like the way they do talent, and I don’t like the way they cut records. ... I tried to record there two or three times and I never had any luck at it because I never had my band. I had a band that was good enough to make records, so I used ’em. The people in Nashville always wanted to pick the musicians themselves.” No one has much occasion to criticize Owens anymore. He hasn’t done any recording to speak of since the late 1980s, when he re-cut “Streets of Bakersfield” with Dwight Yoakam (even then, a DJ in Baltimore complained the song was too twangy) and “Act Naturally” with Ringo Starr. As much as Owens might have done for the up-tempo, electric side of country music, he probably did as much for the traditional camp with his 1969 venture into network television. But, depending on what day you ask him, he sometimes questions the value of that contribution. What is the lasting legacy of “Hee Haw”? Did the countrified “Laugh-In” TV program he co-emceed for a decade bring country music into homes that had never properly appreciated it? Or did it just force the show’s stars to make hillbilly caricatures of themselves? Perhaps Owens’ judgement on that question is colored a bit by all that money he made - $400,000 per year for 20 days of work, money that solidified his Bakersfield empire. He admits having given interviewers conflicting answers on his feelings as he looked back on the show. Maybe today’s Bakersfield-influenced musicians are answering for him. Owens is heartened when he hears about new artists making music clearly affected by his sound. And invariably, those up-and-coming Buck enthusiasts cite “Hee Haw” as a defining memory from their youth. Since his “Hee Haw” days, Owens has concentrated on his radio stations in Bakersfield and Phoenix as well as his other business ventures. (He recently announced plans to sell his Bakersfield television station.) But a new sideline has occupied a considerable amount of his time. Although there have been growing pains, Owens’ new nightclub-museum, the $6.7 million Crystal Palace, seems to have been worth the investment of money and effort. The concert hall, with its huge collection of photos and country-music artifacts, has put Bakersfield back on the music map. There are many challenges: The Palace seats only about 500, so bringing in high-dollar acts can be difficult if Owens hopes to keep tickets prices below $20; tour schedules that often have artists playing in Los Angeles one night and the San Francisco Bay area the next evening can make bookings difficult; and local competition among clubs is livelier than it’s been since the Blackboard ruled the roost, with Rockin’ Rodeo pulling in moderately big rock acts, and the renovated Fox Theater becoming a popular and attractive venue for all sorts of performers. But the club has done well nonetheless. Since its October 1996 opening, Yoakam, Marty Stuart and Big House have packed the building; other big names (some still unconfirmed) are on tap. But the club’s most important contribution to Owens’ continued well-being might be the opportunity it provides the host to do what he does best.
For all his skills as a businessman, for all his renowned independence and stubbornness, for all his importance to country-music history, the thing Owens still does best is sing and pick. And that’s what he does every Friday and Saturday night, the first string of regular performances for the entertainer since he and his Buckaroos did the Las Vegas-Reno circuit in five-week bursts throughout the early- to mid-1970s. Owens owns a whole fleet of Telecasters these days, so if some accident should befall the one he hauls up on stage one night, fear not. There are plenty of backups upstairs in the office. And even so, those backups may not be needed: Buck knows a little trick with a pocket-comb.
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