Ken Nelson with Buck Owens in Tokyo.

By ROBERT PRICE

Californian staff writer

Sometimes Ken Nelson just can’t help himself. His black and white cat, K.C., will saunter across the kitchen floor, and Nelson, an 86-year-old retired record producer, will reach down and gently grab a handful of fur. And then, self-consciously silly, he’ll belt out one of his favorite Buck Owens hits: “Ah ... got ... uh ... Tah-ger bah th’ tail, it’s plain t’ see ...”

For anyone else, singing that song at that moment might qualify as a mere jukebox flashback, a random but appropriate honky-tonk favorite wrapped in spontaneous whimsy. Not so for Nelson. “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail” - a song that transforms Nelson’s flat, Midwest vowels into an impish, exaggerated Oklahoma twang - is special.

preserving the raw edge those performers brought into the studio.

By 1965, with “Tiger” hitting No. 1 and Capitol artists Owens, Merle Haggard and Bonnie Owens pulling off a virtual Bakersfield sweep of the inaugural Academy of Country Music awards in Los Angeles, Nelson did indeed have a tiger by the tale.

The movie version of Nelson’s life is a musical, the soundtrack an up-tempo collection of fiddles, steel guitars and Fender Telecasters. But Nelson, Capitol Records’ country & western A&R man for nearly three decades, is as much a numbers man as a music man. He looks more like an accountant than a record producer, with his thick, black Buddy Holly spectacles and his preference for cardigans and sweater-vests. He certainly boasts the sort of numbers any businessman would be proud of: More than 170 artists have passed through his studios to record literally thousands of songs, including more than 100 No. 1 hits.

From his primary base in Hollywood, Nelson literally orchestrated the conversion of the Bakersfield Sound from regional honky-tonk phenomenon to its position, in the mid-1960s, on the crest of country music’s mainstream. Besides Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, his top artists included Glen Campbell, Tommy Collins, Rose Maddox, Ferlin Husky, Jean Shepard, Wanda Jackson, Wynn Stewart and Red Simpson - in short, almost every top artist to ever pass through the San Joaquin Valley.

Nelson, Minnesota-born and Chicago-bred, was an entertainer himself in the 1930s. He played banjo and sang in a trio called the Campus Kids, but eventually left to pursue a solo career. That ill-timed expedition led nowhere. In the meantime, the Campus Kids landed a regular gig on “Fibber McGee and Molly,” a long-running radio program of some renown.

Nelson’s singing career had gone flat, but he was far from finished in the entertainment business - he caught on as the host of a prominent classical music program on Chicago’s WAAF. He was efficient and professional, if prone to occasionally butcher pronunciations: Maybe Tchaikovsky would come out chai-KOW-ski instead of chai-KOFF-ski, or pianissimo would get emphasis on the wrong syllable. Finally, a listener, a woman of French extraction whose name now escapes Nelson, phoned the station to say she couldn’t take it anymore: Could he use a little pronunciation help in the booth? Nelson agreed he did, and she sat in with him for a month. The man who would later be closely associated with Buck soon became a credible advocate for Bach, and in short order he was Chicago’s top classical-program host.

After serving a year in the Army during World War II, Nelson returned to Chicago and resumed his old job. But one day in 1945 it all changed: Record producer Lee Gillette, Nelson’s old friend and singing partner from the Campus Kids, asked him to help out in Capitol Records’ recording studios, producing a bluegrass session with Uncle Henry’s Kentucky Mountaineers. A strike by the musicians’ union was imminent, and record companies everywhere were trying to cram as many sessions into as little time as possible to minimize the impact of the strike.

“I was scared to death, but I suppose it went all right,” Nelson said. More production work followed, including a session with the Dinning Sisters that resulted in Nelson’s first hit, “Buttons and Bows.” A new career was launched.

In 1948, Capitol Records created a country music department, independent of its pop music division, and Nelson, along with Cliffie Stone, became one of its most influential executives.

Nelson developed an uncanny knack for finding talent. In 1951, listening to Webb Pierce’s New Orleans-based radio program while riding in a car from Louisiana to Dallas, he heard an unfamiliar voice. At the end of the program, he listened for the singer’s name, but it was never given. So Nelson ordered his driver, another fledgling performer, to turn the car around, and they drove all the way back to New Orleans. Without tipping his hand, Nelson coaxed the singer’s name out of the on-duty disc jockey: It was Faron Young. Nelson located the golden-throated 19-year-old the next day and signed him on the spot. During his career, Young made more than 30 albums, became a movie actor, a Grand Ole Opry regular and, eventually, publisher of the Nashville-based trade publication, Music City News.

The Faron Young signing may have been a bit of a fluke, but it was not unusual for Nelson to travel the highways from Texas to Carolina in search of the right sound.

“I used to take buses through the South and listen to the jukeboxes to see what people were listening to,” said Nelson, who didn’t get a driver’s license until 1961, at age 50. “Most of the country records were selling in the South, and I wanted to see what they liked. I might be going from L.A. to Nashville, or Atlanta, or Cincinnati - I recorded in all those cities - and I knew I could get a good feel for things by stopping in the bus stops and the restaurants.”

Other people keep photo albums to jog their memories alive. Nelson still keeps a black binder with names, dates and places, the chronicle of an amazing career that included sessions with Roy Acuff, Sonny James, Ray Stevens, Tex Ritter, Speedy West, Jimmy Bryant, and Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. (“Dale was the boss - no question about it,” Nelson noted.)

The black binder reminds Nelson of a landmark date: Aug. 30, 1957, the day he signed Owens. He’d known Buck for some time before that, of course, from Owens’ guitar-playing sessions in Hollywood behind Collins, the Farmer Boys and others. Buck had tried long and hard to get himself a contract, but Nelson didn’t seem all that interested. “I was, you know, ‘Go away, boy, ya bother me,’ ” Nelson says, feigning mild irritation. Buck remembers it differently: He says he never personally asked Nelson about joining Capitol although others asked on his behalf.

In any case, with Columbia Records knocking on Owens’ door, Nelson changed his tune. Owens was a hot commodity, and continued indifference, genuine or not, would clearly prove costly. Nelson remains convinced Owens would have been a major star on any label.

Nelson can’t find the log-book entry, but he’ll never forget one memorable recording session on Sept. 12, 1963, a live concert at Bakersfield Civic Auditorium (now the Convention Center) honoring the 10-year anniversary of Cousin Herb Henson’s “Trading Post” TV show. It was at that concert, which resulted in the album “Country Music Hootenanny,” that Nelson first noticed a young singer-guitarist in Henson’s backup band. It was Merle Haggard.

“After we were done, I walked up to Merle and asked him if he’d like to sign with Capitol,” Nelson said. “He just said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Well, wh-wh-why?’ He said he had a contract with Tally Records. That was this little label he had with Fuzzy Owen. I’d never even heard of it at the time, but over the next few months I started to see it on the chart.”

Nelson eventually convinced Fuzzy Owen to sell Haggard’s Tally masters to Capitol, and Haggard joined the Capitol stable, an association that spanned 25 years and resulted in 38 No. 1 songs.

Some good ones got away. Nelson had an opportunity to grab Willie Nelson, whose records weren’t selling particularly well on the Victor label, but he elected to pass. Willie (no relation) eventually got himself a bandanna and a pony tail and went on to a big career, but Ken Nelson doesn’t feel bad about it. “He got big years later, many years later,” the producer said. “I’m not sure we would have waited, even if we’d known.”

As a producer, Nelson was laid-back to say the least. He would often sit back quietly in the booth, doodling on paper, his mind seemingly far away. But if he heard a sour note or a missed beat, he’d stop everything and they’d start again.

“But if it was good, Ken would say, ‘A joy to hear and a sight to behold,’ ” said Bonnie Owens, who sang backing vocals on most of Merle Haggard’s records from the mid-1960s through the mid-’70s. “If he said that, we all knew it was good. But he never tried to tell Merle how to sing. They made a good team.”

But for the most part, Nelson was a hands-off producer. He demanded that his artists be practiced, prepared and professional, but otherwise he let them be. Nashville producers might make demands about specific material, instruments or musicians, but Nelson was much less likely to try to call those shots. In that way, by preserving the musical fingerprints of his West Coast artists, he consigned to history a unique sound.

That fact is obvious enough to Haggard. In April 1966, Nelson was unavailable when Haggard was ready to record a follow-up to his hit, “Swinging Doors,” so Haggard and the Strangers went to Nashville and got themselves another producer. The results, according to author Daniel Cooper, “were simply beyond description, though the word abominable comes to mind.” Those tapes were buried, and Haggard - back in Hollywood, with Nelson and co-producer Fuzzy Owen in the booth - cut “The Bottle Let Me Down” with honky-tonk guitarists Glen Campbell and James Burton (later to bring his searing lead guitar to Elvis Presley’s band) playing alongside Roy Nichols.

Nelson, who retired in 1976, lives alone today in tiny Somis, a few miles east of Ventura, where he and his late wife built a house in 1972. His country-music record collection is sizable, but he prefers to listen to George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Rogers & Hammerstein - show tunes and piano pop-jazz. In another life, Nelson might have been a great lyricist: He still gets a lump in his throat from Kern’s “Oh! What a Beautiful Morning” (and, for that matter, Tommy Collins’ “If That’s the Fashion.”)

He’s now fulfilling a promise to himself by taking piano lessons.

“I play classical - Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Chopin and Bach,” he said. “The only reason I keep studying it is it keeps me mentally alert. I’m enjoying it, and getting a little better too, but I’m not going to rent Carnegie Hall.”

His Nashville-based contemporaries, Paul Cohen and Owen Bradley of Decca Records, Don Law of Columbia and Steve Sholes of RCA, have all been voted in to the Country Music Hall of Fame. Nelson has not, and the artists he worked with in California believe it’s a crime.

“It’s really a slap in the face at Ken Nelson,” said Shepard, whose 1953 duet on Capitol with Ferlin Husky, “A Dear John Letter,” was one of the first country songs by a Bakersfield-area artist to go to No. 1. “Ken helped start the Country Music Association. He’s been nominated a couple times. I don’t know if he didn’t fit their mold, or what, but it just breaks my heart. It’s just a crying shame.”

“I nominate him every year,” said Bonnie Owens. “Nobody deserves it more. Nobody.”