Buck Owens Bringing His Honky-Tonk to Crazy Horse

Talk about extreme musical alienation: For a long time, Buck Owens couldn’t stand listening to the stuff that his hometown country music station in Bakersfield was playing--and he owned the station.

Owens says he has always taken a hands-off, strictly business approach when it comes to deciding what music to play on the radio stations he owns in Bakersfield and Phoenix. So when all the market research and listener surveys in the late-’70s to mid-’80s kept saying that country fans were in the mood for slick, pop-sweetened crossover music that had little to do with the lean, straight, hard-edged honky-tonk sound Owens had helped define through the ‘60s and ‘70s, he just switched off the dial and kept his eye on the profit statements.

In fact, from 1979 to 1987, Owens, who plays Monday and Tuesday at the Crazy Horse Steak House, turned off his own musical switch. No more records, no more tours. After 33 years on stage, Owens wasn’t about to buck the country-pop crossover trend, and his profitable business investments gave him the wherewithal to hang up his guitar and his 10-gallon hat whenever he chose.

“When you’re as poor as I was (Owens grew up in a sharecropping family straight out of ‘The Grapes of Wrath’), and I got an opportunity to make something out of myself, I did it with a vengeance, and I didn’t let up,” Owens, 60, said of his years of making it with hit records, extensive touring and a weekly slot as co-host of the corn-pone television show, “Hee Haw.”

So at 49, with the country music industry tuned in to Kenny Rogers and the like rather than to the traditional stuff, Owens decided it was time for a more leisurely pace.

“I thought I’d never be involved in music again. I thought it was something that was gone into thin air,” the folksy, amiable country singer said over the phone recently from his office in Bakersfield. During his retirement from music, Owens said, “I always had the guitar around, but I seldom even touched it. I have a piano in my office, and I never even noodled around on the piano much.”

Through most of the ‘80s, Owens was far more likely to be hefting a golf club or a tennis racquet than a musical instrument. He got used to serving “love” instead of singing about it. He might yell “fore” after an errant swing, but nobody ever got to hear him counting in a swinging four-four beat.

But by the time singer Dwight Yoakam came calling in 1987 and asked Owens if he’d join him on stage, the old master was feeling itchy for music again. Yoakam and a wave of fellow “new traditionalists” such as Randy Travis and Steve Earle had re-established a mass audience for the old honky-tonk style--a development that helped get Owens’ musical juices flowing again, and his hand back on the radio dial.

“My radio stations play whatever the folks want to hear; it doesn’t necessarily have to please me. I can always put a tape in,” Owens said. “But the past two to three years I’ve been really happy. I can listen to all of it.”

In that more favorable musical climate, Owens worked his way back into the public eye playing with Travis in 1987 and 1988. A 1988 comeback album, “Hot Dog,” featured new treatments of some of his old songs. With the recent “Act Naturally,” Owens began blending reworkings of old material with some strong new originals done in traditional style.

Like everything else about his music, Owens feels that the process of writing a song should be direct, uncontrived and spontaneous.

“A lot of the songs of today, I’m speaking country-wise, there’s too much perspiration and not enough inspiration--and that gives me constipation, if you don’t mind the last line,” he said, a grin in his voice. Owens is no fan of the boiler-room approach to songwriting that is prevalent in Nashville, where crews of songwriting specialists report to a room each day, sit down, and start trying to craft hits.

“I can’t remember one time that I sat down and wrote a song where I said I was gonna do it,” Owens said. “They come on an airplane or in an automobile, or I wake up and a song is in my mind. It’s a craft you must learn, but it’s also something you’ve got to have in your soul.”

“Crying Time,” one of Owens’ best-known songs (his new album includes a duet remake of the song, featuring Emmylou Harris), came to him while he was rushing to catch a plane and it occurred to him that it would be crying time if he didn’t make it. Another biggie, “Together Again,” came to him after he saw an advertisement saying that country swing bandleader Bob Wills and his old singer, Tommy Duncan, were “together again” for a reunion album.

The hard times Owens lived through picking cotton and other crops helped give his music the varnish of true, country experience. And an up-and-down love life (Owens is now on his fourth marriage) helped qualify him to speak knowingly on his prime subject: the alternate ache and joy of love. Two of Owens’ new songs, the sorrowful “I Was There” and the affirmative “Rock Hard Love,” continue his rewarding examination of romance as a roller-coaster ride.

“You live and learn, and luckily I got out alive,” Owens said with a laugh when asked whether experiencing matrimonial hard knocks had been a prerequisite for singing convincingly about the vicissitudes of love.

It was a bad break--a case of rheumatic fever when he was 15--that Owens says first made him think of music as a possible career. “The doctor told me I was never going to be able to do the heavy manual labor that I did. He asked me what else I did. I said ‘play the guitar and the mandolin.’ ”

So, at 16, Owens played his first barroom, for whatever money the clientele were willing to put into a soup bowl that substituted for the usual busker’s hat or guitar case. At 21, he moved from Arizona, where he had grown up, to Bakersfield, and established himself playing six or seven nights a week with a band called the Schoolhouse Playboys. Owens became an in-demand session guitarist in Los Angeles, which led eventually to recording deals (first in 1955 as a rockabilly under the pseudonym Corky Jones, then in his own right).

By 1959, Owens was rolling with a steady series of hits. He and his Buckaroos were a crack band capable, as live recordings from the mid-’60s document, of going from ambling honky tonk to instrumental rave-ups that cut loose with a zest and rocking intensity that recall the early Beatles.

In 1969, Owens began a run on “Hee-Haw” that continued until 1986. He acknowledges that his long run on the country comedy television show may have overshadowed his serious musical credentials, especially with younger fans who might know him primarily from television.

“I knew going in that television was the quintessential culprit, the bare bones of the ruination of an artist,” Owens said. “Once you start to bloom on television, the mystique is gone. In the beginning, “Hee-Haw” still had a lot of music on it. It slowly but surely degenerated into all comedy, practically. When you prostitute yourself for their money, that’s what you do. They give you the money and you laugh when they say ‘laugh,’ and you grin when they say ‘grin,’ and you pick when they say ‘pick.’

“I don’t know if I have any regrets (about doing ‘Hee-Haw.’) I made a lot of money at that and I didn’t have to travel as much. I have mixed emotions about that. If I had it to do over again, maybe I’d say, ‘Maybe I’ll just sing my songs and play it all over the world.’ ”

Owens says the point of his comeback is to do things his own way, with an eye to keeping music-making fun.

“This time around I’ve enjoyed it a lot more than I did before,” he said. “I only do something now if it’s fun. I’m not going on any three month tours--no way.” Instead, Owens figures he will play about 50 shows this year, the same as 1989. He would like to do more special duets, like the ones he has recorded with Yoakam (“Streets of Bakersfield,”) Harris (“Crying Time,”) and Ringo Starr (a new version of “Act Naturally” that features some of the strongest singing Starr has ever done).

“I might go find somebody like Chuck Berry and do “Johnny B. Goode,” or do a duet with K.D. Lang. That’s the kind of thing I’m interested in doing. Fun things.” Owens said he also is having his old recordings readied for release on compact disc, including a four-disc boxed set of about 120 songs from the hard-core Buckaroos.

A comparison between those currently unavailable oldies and the two albums Owens has made since his comeback shows little, if any, loss of vocal power at age 60.

“I’ve never been a drinker and a drugger,” Owens said, by way of explanation. “I chased the girls something terrible, but that don’t do you in as much.”

Buck Owens plays Monday and Tuesday at 8:30 p.m. at the Crazy Horse Steak House, 1580 Brookhollow Drive, Santa Ana. Tickets: $30, with availability limited. Information: (714) 549-1512.