Review: New Buck biography nothing but a hatchet job
| Friday, Aug 06 2010 04:45 PM
Last Updated Friday, Aug 06 2010 04:45 PM
Reaction from the Crystal Palace
Jim Shaw, who was hired by Buck Owens to play keyboards for the Buckaroos 40 years ago, has read Eileen Sisk's biography of his old boss and isn't happy, to put it mildly.
"We are sad and depressed about this book. There are so many people she should have talked to -- and not (just) the angry people that she did talk to -- to put a little balance in it," said Shaw, who was Owens' right-hand man in the years before the singer's 2006 death. "Buck has done so much for his friends, family, employees and Bakersfield, and that's just ignored in this book."
One of the most troubling chapters for Shaw includes speculation that there was more to the friendship between Owens and Buckaroo Don Rich.
"Any innuendo about Buck and Don having a gay relationship is horrible. It's just so one-sided. We weren't looking for a book that painted him as a goody two-shoes with rainbows and unicorns -- just something fair and balanced."
Shaw said it's true that Owens could be difficult, but that the author harped on that point to the exlusion of any of his other qualities.
"Could Buck be a jerk? Absolutely. But he could make up for it. He was a type A, creative person who built this huge body of music and career and an empire of businesses, and you don't do that if you're a shrinking violet."
You've got to feel for Eileen Sisk, author of the recently released "Buck Owens: The Biography." Owens, who admired a book about honky-tonks Sisk had written, floated the idea that she try her hand at his biography. He flew the writer to the Crystal Palace, spent three years corresponding with her and then one day decides, out of nowhere, forget it. Not happening. No book. Sisk said Owens' right-hand man Jim Shaw informed her the boss would regard her project, which she had no intention of dropping, as an unauthorized biography.
Here she thought she had a tiger by the tail and then he up and gets away.
Add her name to the long list of folks the book painstakingly catalogs who were burned by the Texas-born singer. And I mean painstakingly catalogs. So many people, it seems, have been on the receiving end of a sour business deal, a public humiliation or an unfortunate love affair (unfortunate for the woman at least). In fact, the book could have had three chapters -- money, control and women -- and called it day, so exclusively does Sisk concentrate on those themes.
It's no surprise then that the portrait that emerges, supplied mostly by former work associates who say they bore the brunt of countless meltdowns, is that of a tight-fisted, cranky womanizer (or "old horn dog," as Sisk calls him).
The End.
Surely there was more to the man who influenced a generation of country artists and crafted a genre of music with nothing but a Telecaster guitar and his own grit. Where are the chapters on his music? What drove him to be so demanding, so relentless? How did his closest associates regard him?
We'll never know, or at least not from Sisk's book. There are no interviews with his sons, the last Mrs. Owens or the most famous Mrs. Owens -- Bonnie, who was alive when Sisk started her research. There's not a peep from those who knew him best at the time of his death in 2006. And because he outlived so many of those closest to him -- his mother, brother, sister Dorothy, wife Phyllis, musical soul mate Don Rich and former manager Jack McFadden -- we have few personal recollections to help balance the image of the cruel taskmaster.
What we do have are accounts by a few old flames, former Buckaroos and their wives and various other associates who talk about being kicked around by Buck over the years.
And underlying all this is the scathing contempt that Sisk shows for Owens throughout. Her hectoring sounds personal, and maybe it is. Whatever her motives, she lays into Owens from the beginning and never lets up -- even on subjects that don't amount to much, like the performer's oft-told story of growing up poor: He wasn't that poor, she sniffs; if a recollection by the singer doesn't square with someone else's version, it's because Buck was a liar -- and so on.
Doyle and Tom
The few bright spots come courtesy of master storytellers Doyle Holly and Tom Brumley, now-deceased Buckaroos from the band's heyday. Give or take a few years, they each spent about a decade with Buck during his dominance of the charts, an era when Bakersfield was the epicenter -- at least artistically -- of country music. Even decades later, their playful tales of the band's free-wheeling life on the road crackle with spirit and adventure.
Holly, especially, is a riot. He said he and guitarist Rich "liked to roar," so they shared a room, while young drummer Willie Cantu and Brumley, forever nursing a sour stomach, bunked together -- "Willie drinking Coke and Tom drinking Maalox."
Another amusing story illustrates just how cheap Buck could be. In one of Holly's many comings-and-goings ("Me and Buck had a love-hate relationship. He'd fire me a couple of times a month, and I'd quit a couple of times a month"), he suggested Wayne Wilson replace him on bass. Wilson could wear Holly's suit, but his feet were a size 10, too big for Holly's boots. Buck's response, according to Sisk: "Well, powder 'em!" He played the show, but the other guys had to help him off the stage.
Holly and Brumley go on at length (so much of the material is repetitive) over the various ways they were shorted by Owens, and they make a pretty convincing case they didn't get their share of money or credit for the part they played in creating one of the most distinctive sounds in modern music. Even at that, gratitude for having had their shot seems to win out over bitterness.
"They say that hindsight is 20/20," Sisk quotes Holly as saying. "Looking back, I know that Buck was responsible for getting me away from the oil fields of Bakersfield and putting me onstage full time. And back in the '60s, money was not my concern. It was just eight years of a long party. Because if it was about money, I would've quit the first month I worked for him." Brumley had this to say: "I just have some really good memories of Buck being really super-nice in a lot of ways. I hear people say what he did to them and everything, but I could say he never did it to me."
The 'feral tomcat'
But it's a different kind of hijinks on the road that gets much of Sisk's attention: the catting around by Holly, Rich and especially Owens. She says Buck bedded at least a thousand women.
"He had behaved like a feral tomcat prowling for pussycats in heat," Sisk writes of Owens, one of the few PG-13 descriptions in an otherwise prurient accounting of his exploits -- or "sextracurricular" activities, as she inelegantly puts it. Readers will learn far more about Buck's life between the sheets than they probably ever wanted to know, and in crude detail. If he was even half the Lothario Sisk makes him out to be, it's amazing he found the time to get anything else done.
The most bizarre romantic escapade the writer recounts came in the late 1970s, a dark period for Owens, still in anguish over Rich's 1974 death in a motorcycle accident. While juggling two romantic partners -- his future wife Jennifer and radio employee Kris Black -- he embarked on a highly public pursuit of a fiddle player he eventually married named Jana Jae. Some thought he'd come unhinged, but Black and Jae both attribute his erratic behavior to undiagnosed manic depression. In fact, Black told Sisk of a business meeting during which Buck "changed personalities no less than eighteen times."
Sisk turns again and again to Black, whose simplistic armchair analyses of the darker forces at work in Owens' psyche indicate that maybe she's read one self-help book too many. She offers several overheated insights, like this howler: "Buck had emotional incest with his mother, possibly because he'd seen his dad hit his mother and he took over as her protector."
There are a couple of mini-bombshells: Buck's sister, Dorothy, who helped build his financial empire, was an out-of-the-closet lesbian, rare at that time. Associates called her Uncle Dorothy. Sisk also provides detail, some of it emotionally wrenching, on Rich's tragic death at age 32. His widow recalls trying to shield the eyes of their two sons as they passed the crash site near Morro Bay, where he died only hours before.
But much of the material in the book, especially Buck's dictatorial approach to artists signed to his publishing and management companies, is documented elsewhere, including in the pages of The Californian, which Sisk cites extensively as a source. There's the story about how Owens conned Merle Haggard out of half the rights to his eventual classic "Sing Me Back Home" because Haggard needed $15,000, and fast. What Haggard didn't know -- and Owens neglected to mention -- was that the song had already earned the young singer $35,000.
Low blows
But beyond the mounds of dirt that hatchet jobs like this one are essentially duty-bound to uncover and which, to be fair, the reader usually expects (even demands), there is an appalling lack of responsibility in Sisk's reporting and writing. No passage more clearly reflects Sisk's recklessness with a man's reputation than her unconscionable decision to give a discarded groupie the opportunity to intimate that there was a romantic relationship between Owens and Rich. The claim seems born of spite and malice and there's not one shred of evidence offered to support it.
Sisk also says Owens beat his wife Phyllis, the mother of his son Johnny. Owens and Phyllis, described as a gentle, quiet woman, were married in the 1960s and '70s, when Buck was at the top of his game. Sisk writes: "Once, Buck even whacked Phyllis in the face with a golf club and broke her jaw because he thought she was having an affair with one of the Buckaroos, which her friends say was untrue."
And then there's the strange case of Dennis Payne, a Bakersfield native who eked out a low-flying country-music career in the 1970s.
He tells a very elaborate, impossible-to-confirm tale about being blackballed by Owens and, frankly, comes off as a crackpot. The only thing weirder than Payne's preposterous story is Sisk's decision to include it, which leads the reader to question the credibility of the entire book.
In the end, the stream of anecdotes -- telling, funny and juicy though many of them are -- cannot satisfy anyone looking for the real Buck Owens, who comes off as a remote, impenetrable figure. But that seems fitting. It's as if Buck, who never wanted the book written in the first place, has won this final grudge match.
Surely even Sisk would admit he was way too wily a guy to get pinned down by anyone he didn't want to get pinned down by.
