The Buck Stops Here--for the Last Time

For tonight’s final big-name concert at California’s most-honored country music club, the owners turned to the prime architect of California country music: Buck Owens.

While most people identify Owens as the co-host of the corny long-running variety series “Hee Haw,” country music lovers know him as the man who used Chuck Berry-like stinging guitar licks and driving rock ‘n’ roll bass and drums on his records. He provided a twangy, juiced-up alternative to the sweet, orchestra-heavy sounds favored by Nashville producers in the late 1950s and early ‘60s.

Owens, 70, also is the architect--figuratively at least--of one of the West Coast’s newest and splashiest country music venues, the Crystal Palace in Bakersfield. Owens and his band now hold court there every Friday night when they’re not on tour.

Before he opened the Crystal Palace three years ago, Owens usually cited the Crazy Horse as his favorite place to play, so not surprisingly he incorporated much of what he liked about the famous Santa Ana restaurant and concert club. He even hired Crazy Horse owner Fred Reiser as a consultant to help get the Crystal Palace off the ground.

Coincidentally, in moving to a new site in the Irvine Spectrum shopping center, the Crazy Horse’s owners will increase the capacity from 250 now to about 600 at the new site, which Owens said is “just about what I have at the Crystal Palace.”

“One of the worst things an entertainer has to face is playing in an old arena,” Owens said by phone from his Bakersfield office. “You can add to that a stage that rotates around. Even worse is the long basketball arena where they put you at one end of it and it seems like the audience is a quarter-mile away at the other end.

“To be able to be as close to the fans as you are at the Crazy Horse,” he said, “that’s every man’s dream.”

Owens made a classic-country fan’s dream come true with a 1994 concert at the Crazy Horse that people still talk about.

He’d recently had a cancerous growth removed from his tongue and was preparing to play at a big music festival in Switzerland.

Because his band, the Buckaroos, hadn’t played together in about two years before his surgery, Owens decided to pop into the Crazy Horse and play a few songs to shake the dust off. It was a last-minute add to the club’s schedule, so Owens and Reiser decided to make it a free show.

Instead of running through a small handful of songs and calling it an evening, Owens--who was 65 at the time--and his band went on to play for three hours, covering 53 songs, including most of the 47 Top 10 country hits he charted between 1959 and 1988.

“That’s the one where they played until 3 or 4 in the morning, right?” asked Crazy Horse president Jay Nuccio, who bought the club two years ago from Reiser and the remaining original investors.

Actually, the show ended around midnight, but word about the marathon performance carried far and wide.

“I swear the very next morning,” Owens said, “some guy called me from New York. He said they’d gotten a lot of phone calls [about the show], then he said, ‘They love you here in New York. Would you come and do one of those three-hour shows here?’ ”

Owens, now a multimillionaire who owns a string of radio and television stations around the country, said he only plays for fun now, and that’s how he thinks of the Crazy Horse.

“It’s always fun to get to do the Crazy Horse,” he said. “If you can get the entertainer turned on, then they’ll get the audience turned on.

“I’m glad they invited us to perform the last go-round.”

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Buck Owens & the Buckaroos, Crazy Horse Steak House, 1580 Brookhollow Drive, Santa Ana. 6:30 and 9:15 p.m. $60-$80. (714) 549-1512.