WEEKEND REVIEWS : Pop : Together Again and Acting Naturally

Tailors across Bakersfield should have their hands full this week reattaching all the civic buttons that bust Friday over the first joint concert in decades by two of the city’s favorite sons, Buck Owens and Merle Haggard.

The heart and soul of West Coast country music, Owens (who still resides in Bakersfield) and Haggard (now living in Mt. Shasta) gave the hometown crowd a show for the country-music history books--one with more than enough rewards to overshadow the long evening’s deflated ending.

Following sets by L.A. duo the Lonesome Strangers and Bakersfield’s own Wichitas, Owens came on stage at the Kern County Fairgrounds--having brushed himself off from the fall he took in the wings--to a hero’s welcome.

He and the Buckaroos began as if it was any other night in any other town, playing “Act Naturally.” Next, though, came the theme song of the evening: “Together Again.” For the next hour, he led a tour through his imposing repertoire, encompassing many of the most skillfully written songs in all of country.

Several took on special significance in the local surroundings. The spoken middle verse of his 1969 hit, “Big in Vegas,” can come off melodramatic. But here, when he talked of his father looking down and being “happy seeing all you folks having such a good time,” it was utterly heartfelt.

Another particularly touching manifestation of the one-big-family tone of the evening came when his ex-wife, singer Bonnie Owens (a longtime member of the Strangers who also happens to be Merle’s ex), walked out to sing harmony on “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail.”

It was, however, an off night vocally for Buck, who frequently stretched for notes and complained, albeit good-naturedly, about the strain. He may still be feeling the effects of vocal surgery he had a couple of years ago, compounded by what reportedly was a long sound check earlier in the day.

If Owens’ songs show the craft of country songwriting at its best, Haggard’s embody the songwriter’s art .

Even more than Owens’ set, Haggard’s seemed custom-made for the night and for the town. He moved from richly detailed songs espousing the virtues of small-town living and honest work to numbers about the fates that sometimes befall people whose actions come up short of their ideals.

The juxtaposition of his 1982 social commentary “Are the Good Times Really Over (I Wish a Buck Was Still Silver)” with its spiritual flip side, 1969’s “Okie From Muskogee,” provided a sobering meditation on a country that has too many times come up short of its noble intentions.

“I came back to this old town because my home is here,” he sang at the beginning of “They’re Tearing the Labor Camps Down,” another song inseparable from the Bakersfield-Central Valley environs that inspired it.

Haggard is one of the gifted few who can draw universal truths out of specific situations and places. What was immediately clear is that such truths ring all the more forcefully in the heart of those places.

The emotional high point was his reading of Iris DeMent’s “No Time to Cry,” the tale of an entertainer too caught up in his career to mourn the death of his father. With complete vocal mastery of the lyric, he demonstrated anew how far all the Haggard clones on the country charts today have to go to catch up to the original.

Through most of the set, the Strangers played like the best band in country, with detailed arrangements and often unexpected rhythms that kept even the most familiar tunes sounding fresh.

The much-anticipated Haggard-Owens collaboration that was to culminate the show instead brought the steadily building impact to a grinding halt because of video considerations.

Technical perfectionism won out over emotion of the moment during shooting of a live video of a new song Haggard wrote for the occasion, “Beer Can Hill.” Owens, Haggard and guest Dwight Yoakam ultimately ran through the song a numbing six times before the director was satisfied.

They got the show somewhat back on track after the fifth run-through when Hag snapped: “Let’s do something else. I’m about to wear out on that [S.O.B.].” Yoakam responded with an appropriately straightforward reading of “Today I Started Loving You Again.”

Then, after making it a full six-pack worth of “Beer Can Hill,” they closed with a welcome all-star performance of the song everyone had been waiting for. Owens’ “Streets of Bakersfield” was spruced up with an extra verse Owens wrote for the event.

If only the process of capturing history in the making didn’t tend to intrude on that actual making of history.