From yesterday's Bakersfield Californian

Robert Price column: Doing it his way until the end
By The Bakersfield Californian | Saturday, Mar 25 2006 10:25 PM
Last Updated: Saturday, Mar 25 2006 10:47 PM

It was a few minutes till showtime Friday night and Buck Owens was starting to have second thoughts.

He was tired. A touch of a cold, perhaps, or maybe just feeling the weight of his 76 years a bit more than usual.

Nope, he wouldn't go on. The Crystal Palace, his Bakersfield dinner club, had packed them in again, but some things just couldn't be helped.

Then he bumped into some people from Bend, Ore. -- fans who said they'd driven all the way down just to see him play.

"Aw, man," Buck said.

And the black-hatted hall-of-famer summoned up the will to go on. Those people had paid good money, invested a lot of time. They deserved a show. Some things just couldn't be helped.

It wasn't his best performance. His voice was thin, his stage presence a little weak, but he stayed up there for 90 minutes.

Then he went home for the last time.

Buck Owens, who died of heart failure early Saturday morning at his ranch north of Bakersfield, was both performer and businessman, and he took those roles seriously until the very end.

He didn't need to perform anymore -- those days had long since passed. But he pressed on because he loved the stage, because he figured his adopted hometown needed it, because deep down in his craw he believed Bakersfield still harbored sparks of the old magic that the world needed to appreciate.

He was a one-man propaganda machine for the city he loved. He built the Crystal Palace dinner club, which became far and away the city's most sought-out tourist attraction. He commissioned a re-creation near the Palace of the "Bakersfield" gateway arch that had spanned Union Avenue for decades.

One of the most telling indications of Buck's affection for Bakersfield was the Legends in Bronze collection of statues he unveiled last year -- 9-foot-tall renderings of 10 country music giants, including his Oildale-bred compatriot, Merle Haggard.

Buck commissioned those statues, he told me once, because he knew he wouldn't be around forever to command that stage. He wanted people to keep coming west in all those RVs with Oklahoma and Missouri plates. He wanted the mecca of rebel country to always be Bakersfield, whether he was here to personally see to it or not.

Because, though Buck was the consummate businessman, the consummate performer, he still fancied himself a rebel.

He liked to talk about his behavior at stoplights in the old days. He'd pull up to the red light in his Ford convertible, country twang blaring from his tinny AM radio. Then, sensing the disapproving glares of respectable folk in the car next to his, he'd reach over to the radio ... and turn it up full blast.

That rebelliousness, that willingness to take convention and turn it on its ear, is what made him who he was.

Why couldn't he use his own band in the studio? Why couldn't he turn up the treble? Why couldn't he record the songs of Chuck Berry if he wanted to? Why couldn't he use a fuzz-tone guitar like the rock bands were doing? Why couldn't he start his own music publishing company and keep more of the proceeds for himself? He could, and he did.

Most of the innovators have moved out of Bakersfield now, or otherwise moved on.

Somehow we hadn't really expected it of Buck, though. He'd always been here, solid and unchanging as Kern Canyon.