The Life and Times of Buck Owens

he was a maverick who bugged the system and created an independent country music empire and sound the life and times of buck owens next on cmt and that's probably what it was when buck's music took off it was that and it was a whirlwind buck's a whirlwind yeah they're going to make a big star out of me buck did come through cutting like a knife just like elvis did you know what i'm saying in his own way he established a great sound i mean i can't imagine anybody here in bucks records and not just being completely transported by it's just so confident it's just so there it's sort of like their perfect records buck owens the man with the honky tonk sound and the country smile owned the country music charts for most of the 1960s knocking out 18 number one hits between 1963 and 1969 but buck's success was more than a matter of record sales at a time when country music was going through an identity crisis buck kept it true to its honky-tonk roots and he did so as an outsider from bakersfield california buck owens from about you know 1958 to about 1968 or nine was was the quintessential of honky tonk music took it to its zenith country was going through a i would say almost cosmopolitan kind of a sound with strings and things were a lot more lush and buck came along and it was twangy electric guitars and and not a lot of bass and and a little bit of kick in it and uh it was it was really way way way ahead of his time i would say that at a time when you know country music was really trying to dress up and get itself accepted you know the nashville people were really trying to get past the hay bales old buck owens was out there in bakersfield just being cool being cool and working like a man possessed a ninth grade dropout from a dirt poor family buck's artistry was matched by his hunger to succeed and his business savvy and nerve along with the bakersfield sound he built a bakersfield empire that put him in complete control of his work and made him one of country music's wealthiest men i don't know that there's any other artist out there that understands the game of countries in the business of country music as well as he does buck took himself and made himself an industry this town's full of hundreds of guys with record deals all wanting to be in industry they're all trying to do what buck did you know my buck owen still hangs out in bakersfield or buckersfield as it is often called mostly at the crystal palace an upscale honky tonk he built last year with seven million of his own dollars the club is adorned with hundreds of photos of his life and career and a sports car designed for elvis inlay behind the bar it's a long way from buck's dust bowl roots in the farming town of sherman texas where he was born alves edgar owens on august 12th 1929. the son of aircroppers buck was working the fields with his parents by the time he could walk i remember the times were tough i remember being cold one thing i always said when i was a kid well when i grow up i ain't going to be cold and i ain't going to be hungry and i ain't going to be poor at the age of four young alves nicknamed himself buck in honor of the family mule four years later buck and his family joined the great wave of oakeys who left the dust bowl in search of work out west the family of ten squeezed into a ford sedan and made it as far as mesa arizona when their car and money gave out for the next few years they worked as fruit jetties chasing the crops in california is san joaquin valley every year you know we'd come out of school two weeks early uh my dad would and then we'd come over here from arizona we'd go through the potatoes and and the tomatoes and tracy and we would do uh the grapes and all these things the peaches up in modesto and then then we'd do some cotton and we'd start back to school two weeks late we stayed mostly in labor camps and uh there'd be some guy playing a guitar another guy coming down with a fiddle and that happened almost every evening you know there was guys around and they played i guess to relieve a little pressure i thought it was real good but um and i'd sit around and i'd watch what they did and how they did it and um it was it was a great environment for me when he was 13 buck dropped out of school to work full-time hauling fruit his parents gave him a mandolin for christmas that year and he spent all his spare time teaching himself to play by the time he was 15 he was playing in honky tonks around phoenix for three dollars a night it wasn't much but getting paid for playing music did wonders for his ambition and drive i want a big fight mama to tell my troubles too i want a big fat mama because a little skinny guy won't do i want a big five miles to tell my troubles too you know when i realized that i that that it was cool in there and i could make as much playing in one of those honky tonks as i could out there in that hot field all day i got to pick it harder buck picked his way into a group called max skillet lickers which played weekly radio concerts from a gas station bandstand and featured a singer named bonnie campbell buck and bonnie married on january 13 1948. three years later butt was a family man with two kids and a burning desire to put as big a distance as possible between himself and the poverty of his past he figured music was his best chance and that he'd have a better shot in a town that he picked cotton in as a kid a town packed with honky tonks and brimming with oakies a town called bakersfield the life and times of buck owens returns in a moment on cnt news on cnt i've spent a thousand miles i've worn blisters on my heels trying to find me something better on the street in 1951 the streets of bakersfield were full of people like buck owens dust bowl escapees who worked the oil fields and produce farms by day and crammed the city's plentiful honky tonks by night buck quickly landed a job at the blackboard one of bakersfield's wilder clubs where he played guitar and sang for the house band bill woods and the orange blossom playboys but would play here seven nights a week for the next seven years honing his skills before a pent-up roughneck crowd that demanded music it could move to and feel spent a real good honky-tonk the dance floor stayed full and the real good ones like the wizards who could stand up there and keep all of that energy moving there were the they were the guys like george jones and buck owens that you know became honky tonk legends buck thrived in bakersfield he taught himself to play saxophone and drums commuted to los angeles for day jobs as a studio musician and moonlighted on guitar for tommy collins at the time bakersfield's biggest star it was with collins that buck made his first trip to the mecca of all aspiring country artists nashville it was a sweet experience for buck who had his picture taken with eddie arnold and shed atkins but it was also an eye-opener buck was stunned by nashville's heavy-handed ways the grand ole opry wouldn't let collins band use a full set of drums or control how loud they played that was quite strange for me especially they didn't allow you to have your own amplifier you you jacked it in the house system and they regulated it how they wanted to sound uh i'd never played anywhere where i didn't have the volume control or i didn't have the tone control but you know beside the point i had played now in the grand ole opry and so that was something good for me i i had no nashville and i was still in love in love but heading in different directions buck's ear was tuned to the rough vitality of bakersfield and he liked to play loud in 1954 he became one of the first country artists to swap his gibson electric for a solid body fender telecaster essential rock and roll guitar when elvis broke in 1956 buck identified with the revved up new when sound shared elvis and rock and rolls and all that exciting stuff out in california you know we were all aware of it just as soon as it happened and uh and we talked about it and buck feel he he liked that you know and i think he took some of that excitement inspired by elvis buck cut a rockabilly record in 1956 called hot dog but the hostility to rock by country purists was so great that he put it out under a pseudonym parker jones was a name i invented uh to try to do a rockabilly record and don't get thrown out of the country music establishment they thought of you as a traitor if you tried to cut a country record to where it might be played in the pop as well and so i even tried a different name carter jones but he didn't hide anything a year later capitol records signed buck to a record deal but they were afraid he sounded too country and made him put strings and a sugary wire on his first recordings it wasn't me you know and they said well you know uh we're gonna have something that folks are gonna like so we ended up with a group of people singing sort of the records bombed and when capital asked buck to record again he insisted on doing it his way well i'll give you love buck cut a series of up-tempo shuffles that featured fiddle and steel guitar they sounded unmistakably country but also modern and clean above and beyond second fiddle and under your spell again were all top 40 hits that kicked off buck's recording career inevitably as buck made a name for himself nashville beckoned buck appeared on farron young's country-style usa in 1960. look it's wonderful having you here on cut to style usa buddy well thank you very much it's a real pleasure to be here but the more buck saw of nashville the less he liked its musical direction or domineering style well the attitude was be a good boy and and bat you on the head and fidget cornbread and you won't be okay but you got to do things within the rules you know and of course you know i never was very good at that i always thought that they made soupy syrupy sweet uh music and and sweet love songs and and all that and aboard me and and i was far more edge to turn it on and play it and turn it up you know like i've often described as a locomotive sound just like a locomotive was going to come right through the building you know that's that's the way i felt it that's the way i wanted it buck decided to stay in bakersfield a seemingly crazy choice for someone as hungry as he was to succeed everyone said you couldn't cut a number one country record outside of nashville buck owens was determined to prove them wrong 60 buck owens was succeeding above and beyond everyone's expectations but his own one reason for his success was don rich a fiddle player and guitarist buck discovered while hosting a tv show in tacoma washington rich was only 16 years old at the time a high school sophomore but he could play and sing beautifully and buck immediately recognized a musical soul mate i was enthralled by by don rich who was buck's harmony singer and buck probably speak more uh reverently of of don rich than maybe any man that he's ever known i got to do a tv show with buck a few years ago and he says well do you want to sing i said just don's part that's all i want to do is just get to be dawn for a day and all of a sudden he had this buddy that was playing fiddle and good looking guy and singing that great harmony behind every now and don was pretty much i would say a star along with a star don rich i always thought got inside my mind and uh if you listen to some of the records people think it's me it's not me it's it's him uh i mean that's how good he was he uh he and i had to somewhere in another life have played music together somewhere another important change for buck came in 1962 when he decided to form his own band the butt gurus merle haggard who briefly played bass for buck suggested the name respected those guys that played with him it wasn't his backup band they were every bit as big a part of his sound as anything else not only was i a fan of buck owens the singer and the songwriter and the records he made songs i was a fan of don rich and i was a fan of willie cantu the drummer doyle holly the bass player almost like a rock band you know the way you get into individuals in a rock band sensing his chance buck pushed himself and the buckaroos he toured relentlessly playing over 300 cities a year and doing everything he could think of to build a national following but did work very hard probably i never thought of it like that but probably as hard as anybody i've ever known he enlisted his own family like his sister and his mom and everybody you know and uh to write to these dj's and to get that record played i mean to thank them an old buck owens really he exploited the fan club thing in country music first and the most by keeping in touch with these fan club presidents and every town we go to there'd be one you know buck would give her a hug you got to remember not many people were as poor as as we were i mean you know we were very very poor and so here's a here's an opportunity and you know i'm so afraid that i gotta get it right now all of it as quick as i can before somebody might reach out there and snatch it away they're gonna put me in the movies they're gonna make a big story out of me we'll make a film about a man that's sad and lonely and all i gotta do is act naturally in 1963 the years of intense work paid off act naturally became buck owens first number one record kicking off one of the great hot streaks in the history of country music 14 of the 15 records buck owens released between 1963 and 1967 went to number one love's gonna live here resided at the top for 16 weeks a throwaway called buckaroo became the first instrumental to top the country charts how hot was he you know how hot white heat is he was hot as white heat and all the years at the blackboard and all the years in the clubs and developing his own thing you know it was payday it's time to cash in and that's what happened to this day buck likes to talk about his chart milestones especially with up-and-coming country stars i remember when i was in his office he showed me a billboard chart he had two songs number one and number two the next week they were flip-flopped and the next week they flip-flopped again one and two and he showed it to me and he said look there boy that won't ever happen again but buck owens and the buckaroos were not just a group that could sell records they were also an electrifying live band and the image of buck and don playing twin telecasters was one of the most riveting of its time one time at the shawn auditorium in los angeles don and buck started playing twin electric fender guitars at the same time musicians other stars on the show ran to the back of the stage to to listen to it it was you know they talk about magic that's what it was you know i used to wonder sometimes what people must have thought what this guy's doing drifting along with the tone and tumbleweed nice and soft and and and all of a sudden here comes two guys out here with with two uh two telecasters with the things turned way up on the high end and and their faces just you know this right looks like them you know we're playing so loud and so fast it's hard to faces they're all kind of pulled back you know and i was often wondering what shot that must have been to some people sitting on the front row waiting for somebody to sing something double weeds as it turned out buck's telecaster driven sound was more successful than nashville's easy listening foray i was honest first and commercial second because every time i tried to be commercial and then honest it didn't work out buck owens crossed over by doing exactly what buck owens and the buckaroos did and that's just play hardcore honky tonk twanging music and you know the rest of the world found it the rest of the world including a group from liverpool the beatles were big buck owens fans they had capitol records rush them his albums as soon as they were pressed and they covered act naturally in 1965. but the fab four were a controversial group in some country circles and true country artists weren't supposed to like them buck liked them oh man i thought my landlord lord listen that's a beatles singing naturally i thought to have the beatles do it was was the ultimate you can't imagine that feeling you know i can't even tell you about that feeling it's a it's a feeling all unto itself and and probably only unto me you know i had all the beatles albums long from when they first came along i'd been a beatles fan don rich and i had beatles fans and i thought bill monroe was wonderful you know but also i thought the beatles were and and i think that was that that was kind of a little different than what could you really like bill monroe and like the beatles of course you could you weren't supposed to maybe sometime but oh it was great we had wigs although i didn't wear one the other four boys were wigs and then we'd have a lot of fun with it you know they'd throw the wigs down and don rich would shoot one of them with this big old cap and pistol doing that at carnegie hall was uh that's the only kind of guy said if you ever come back would you please leave the pistol we will the life and times of owens returns in a moment on cmt the buckaroo music i always think well i discovered buck owens when i was like uh seven years old that twang and telecaster sound it went right inside my heart immediately and lived there and it has ever since tiger by the tail was the first song i ever learned to play the first song i had my first band when i was just a kid i mean like nine years old one of the set lists that i i found i gave it to buck it said tiger by the tail in parentheses i'd made myself a note act like buck owen buck recorded tiger by the tail in 1964 at the height of his popularity the song was a take off on a tiger in your tank ad campaign for so gas it became buck's biggest hit and signature song crossing over to the pop charts and giving him a second nickname curiously just as buck was breaking through on the pop charts he took out a full-page ad in a nashville paper pledging to record nothing but real country songs a lot of places he would go uh people say yeah buck you'll be playing that rock and roll next thing you know and uh he was trying to send a message to the fans to assure them that he was going to play country music i went and got a copy of that pledge and we nailed it in the front of that bus you know and we kind of lived by it we kind of thought it was a cool pledge to live by i will play no song that isn't a country song and then turn right around and play johnny'd be good i like that kind of pledge where i come from that's a country song what exactly did buck mean by a country song the same month that he took the pledge buck recorded memphis by rock and roll pioneer chuck berry later he scored a number one country hit with barry's rock anthem johnny b good we're down to louisiana back in new orleans you know they're talking about a little boy that plays a guitar and he waves to the locomotive guy his mama saying someday you're never going to be up in lights that's a country song to me if chuck berry recorded he's he's black so they say well it's rock and roll but but to me you know if he'd have been white he'd been a hillbilly he'd have been a country guy like me i wanted the american public to know i was country i am country i ain't never been anything but but it doesn't mean that i can't love other kinds of music by the mid-1960s buck owens was enjoying the fruits of his success well i spend a lot of time at my ranch i love cattle and i love horses and outside life a child of the dust bowl buck was now a gentleman rancher presiding over a large spread outside bakersfield with his second wife phyllis buck was also developing into an astute businessman he bought the first of several radio stations launched a music publishing company and built his own state-of-the-art recording studio single-handedly turning bakersfield into an independent country music capital hi everybody i'm buck owens and welcome to our show bach also threw himself into a new arena television producing and starring in a syndicated series called buck owens ranch you know when i was a kid we never missed the buck owen show i saw one of those episodes recently on some program and was just blown away by the accuracy of the singing she could have recorded those for an album what they did on his show and you know and and that's difficult to do buck showcased some early music videos on the ranch show including one he recorded in the streets of new york city if they gave me the whole thing talk about a bummer it's the biggest one around sodom and gomorrah staying to what i found i wouldn't live in new york city buck didn't mind visiting new york city however especially when he was asked to perform in the most prestigious honky-tonk of them all carnegie hall in 1968 buck played in a very different kind of concert hall for a very different kind of crowd i had an old poster that burned up in a fire a couple years ago sadly it was an original fillmore west show poster where buck owens and buckaroos buck the tiger owens that said would be appearing at the fillmore west i think probably 1967 like the height of the summer of love i mean you talk about juxtaposing culture i mean that was it but not really i was mystified and sometimes mortified you know i thought these guys wait a minute what are we doing here i felt like it was out of place at the time but the more we got into the evening um you know the better it was for us i thought yeah this ain't too bad it's these kids they they know what they like it's the first place i ever learned that they didn't want halfway stop don't apologize they wanted when they wanted country they wanted stone country and then i knew that's why they had me there to be myself many people thought buck stopped being himself when he decided to host another tv show this one a prime time network series that promised to make him a mainstream star hee haw was an enormous success but when buck traded in his nudie suit and telecaster for a pair of backward overalls and a hayseed smile he lost some of his truest fans i have to say openly when when buck joined up the hee-haw cast i was mad you know and in some ways i never got over it i thought oh he's sold out you know and because before he was that entity outside of it all and then he went and joined the mainstream you know they paid me 400 000 a year for 17 years and that makes some really nice people to me you know well the bad side of course was always how do you take a guy that wears overalls backwards up there on this show with all these pretty girls and and all these seemingly dumb guys um how do you take a guy serious when he come when he wants to sing a song like together again my tears have stopped falling long lonely nights are now sing songs like that i don't think they believed me after that the life and times of owens returns in a moment on cmt continues on cmt this guitar was given to me by buck owens to use um he said for my lifetime so that's about all i needed for really uh it belonged to don rich this is just a good guitar buck had one don had ones identical guitars this guitar played at buckaroo tiger by the tail uh sam's place act naturally love's going to live here you know all the hits you play it and you go that's it that's why i learned to play the guitar that's the sound on july 17 1974 don rich was killed when he crashed his motorcycle on california's curving coastal highway don's death brought buck owens charmed musical ride to an end and put buck in a tailspin that lasted for years after i lost on you know it was tough after that i never really got it together it's like part of you died part of you died are you ever going to be able to get that part going again and i always hoped i would but i never did wasn't possible which i didn't know at that time if you knew the two of them you saw them together you would understand they had a bond you know a soulmate and so you know going out and singing the same 20 songs every night and they hand you a big check or a handful of money after you're already a millionaire and you know and you got every all the toys in the world you wanted and everything and you but you've lost your buddy and man here comes the harmony part somebody else is singing and i'm i can just make a lot of sad country songs out of that situation buck's depression was later diagnosed as an extended nervous breakdown he continued to perform and record throughout the 70s but with an emptiness that finally prompted him to retire in 1980 at the age of 50. for the next six years hee haw was buck owens only calling card and his cornball persona made it hard to remember what a fierce and influential artist he had been dwight joachim had not forgotten and in 1987 he paid a surprise visit to a man he regarded as his mentor i was bored i was lethargic i i played all the tennis and all the golf and all the things i could so dwight says my band and i know a bunch of your songs once you sing uh let's won't you sing something with me tonight on the stage i thought about it about this long and then i said dwight i'd love to do that you don't know ever walk the streets figures buck and dwight decided to record together and they cut an old buck song one loaded with personal meaning streets of bakersfield shot to number one the 21st chart topper of buck's career couldn't tell you how much i owe dwight i or do i love but dwight was the guy that gave me another brief moment in the sun and uh and it's been a wonderful moment it i couldn't tell you i couldn't put in words what that did for me with dwight shining the spotlight buck returned to the stage he performed in nashville in 1988 playing don rich's silver telecaster and healing old wounds eight years later nashville gave buck a much deserved award on behalf of the cma buck congratulations on being inducted as the newest member of the hall of fame but was really quite blown away i think when he when he got in the country music hall of fame a year or two ago and uh he didn't think that would ever happen in his lifetime you know i think that nashville thought that this guy will go away he'll shoot himself in the foot he keeps on talking and he'll shoot himself in the head and then we'll be rid of him and and i really think that's what they thought but eventually eventually when they put me in the hall of fame i i was very honored and i'm very honored today but probably not as moved as when a young woman approached him in bakersfield that same year she looked at me and she said i know you just in a soft kind of horse and she had a little boy walking along in front of her and all of a sudden she reached over put her arm around my neck and kissed me on the cheek and she said and and i love you and walks on out and and i think that means yes she understands what i said she understood so danny boy the pipes the pipes are calling from glenda glenn and down to mountain side summer's gone and all the roses falling it's usu must go and i'm a i killed to be able to sing like him uh he's like a song machine he's like this jukebox you can drop any kind of song in and it comes out sounding wonderful together again these days buck does most of his singing at the crystal palace the dinner club honky tonk he recently built in bakersfield the crystal palace is no more than uh buck's living room it's a place where he can go be buck owens when he wants to be it's a part of his empire and you know buckersfield as i caught it out there when it opened in 1996 buck not only played and sang he hit the dance floor with his third wife jennifer whom he married in 1978 kindling memories of bakersfield's honky-tonk glory years but buck's own memories dance to life when he sits back and noodles on his guitar it's just a simple little guitar pretty soon you look around you say well what time is it and that's the first time you're an hour and a half's past and it still works that way for me sometimes as it did when buck first picked up a guitar as a dust bowl kid in texas all he wanted to do was get out of the cold but along the way buck owens forged a crucial link in country's honky tonk tradition and he did so by standing up to nashville's easy listening ambitions and standing up for his own bakersfield sound he came up with something really unique and different his own style i would think that anybody that does that has to have a sense of independence about them they're not going to be influenced by um record companies or or trying to get a hit ultimately you you have to do it your own way i stand the same place i always do and that's if you if it's in your head and in your heart i think you need to go ahead and do it what you feel like you should be doing do that that's the way i do do good pieces

Channel: TJamesBell

Views: 15,174

Rating: 4.877193 out of 5

Keywords: Buck Owens, Buckaroos, Bakersfield CA, Don Rich, Harlan Howard, Act Naturally, Under Your Spell Again, Bakersfield, Dwight Yoakam

Id: xzs-RHBbNP0

Length: 43min 32sec (2612 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 08 2020