POP MUSIC REVIEW : Buck Owens Makes Old Ballads Sound New

The only obvious sign that Buck Owens’ “comeback” concert Sunday at El Camino College’s Marsee Auditorium really took place in 1988 and not 1968 was the Buckaroo band keyboard player, who aped fiddle, accordion and sax parts on a synthesizer . Ugh.

Oh yes, there was that handsome young guy named Dwight Yoakam who modestly strolled on stage mid-set to sing a couple of duets with his hero and who, as the calendar figures it, would have been wearing Size 3 Levi’s with holes in the knees back when Buck was in his prime.

Otherwise, Owens’ licorice-sweet voice, his whiskey-soaked barroom ballads and frisky honky-tonk tunes sounded much the same as they did when he helped pioneer “the Bakersfield sound” in country music more than 20 years ago.

That’s in keeping with the tone of his new “Hot Dog” album, rushed out to capitalize on renewed interest generated by his No. 1 country duet with Yoakam, “The Streets of Bakersfield.”

Instead of churning out a bunch of new songs for his first album in nine years, Owens simply re-recorded several of his earliest songs, plus a couple of ‘50s rock chestnuts.

But even with the predominantly oldies content of the show, it didn’t feel like an exercise in nostalgia because so many of his songs are timeless. His years on the corny “Hee Haw” show made it too easy to forget what an expressive, skillful vocalist Owens is when he isn’t clowning around for TV cameras.

His off-center phrasing always keeps his structurally simple songs of heartbreak and loss musically fresh.

Although Owens has kept himself busy during the ‘80s with various business concerns, seeing him back on a stage making music put an autobiographical spin on one line of his 1964 hit “Together Again”: “You’re back where you belong.”