Buck Owens always gave fans his heart and soul

I loved Buck Owens’ music from the time I discovered it in the 1960s, led to him like so many of my contemporaries by the Beatles’ version of his 1963 hit “Act Naturally.” The crisp vocals, snappy Telecaster-driven arrangements and economy of emotional expression in his records were the work of a consistently inspired master craftsman.

If Merle Haggard represented the soul of California country music, Buck Owens was its great big heart.

But I didn’t fully grasp just what made Owens so successful on so many levels until I used one of his soap dispensers.

A couple of years after opening Buck Owens’ Crystal Palace nightclub and restaurant in Bakersfield, his longtime home, I visited for a chance to see the country music great and his band, the Buckaroos, play a hometown show.

It was no surprise that the $10-million facility was beautiful yet homey, that it had a snazzy mini-museum showcasing many of the dazzling outfits he wore in his heyday, or even that the blinged-out Buick he bought out from under Elvis in the ‘60s is mounted in all its longhorn-hooded glory over the bar opposite the stage.

The mind-blower was a visit to the restroom, where I found in-counter soap dispensers that actually worked. Countless times I’ve noted with amusement how often restrooms in all strata of restaurants, hotels and offices have built-in soap dispensers languishing idly next to the faucets while the liquid soap comes out of some added-on plastic job mounted to the counter above it.

Not at Buck’s place.

He wasn’t hustling customers in and out to turn a buck. This Texas sharecropper’s son said he always kept in mind how hard most people work for a dollar, and he wanted to make sure they got their money’s worth if they chose to spend it visiting him.

That’s the kind of integrity, scrupulous attention to the smallest detail and follow-through that infused every facet of Owens’ life. And it’s why he became a trusted father figure to a generation of young country musicians.

“There are very few places I could tell you about over my 44 years [of touring] where we were treated so well,” Chris Hillman, former member of the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, said Saturday, just eight days after he and Herb Pedersen had played Owens’ club. “At his last birthday party, I sang one of his songs, and as I walked back to my table, he grabbed my arm and said, ‘Chris -- man, you sing good!’ I wasn’t a good singer in the Byrds, and it took me years to learn to sing decently. But I told Herb, ‘It’s all just been validated for me -- 40 years.”

I interviewed Owens several times, saw him in concert whenever I could and called him periodically on stories that might benefit from his unique perspective as a respected musician, songwriter and businessman.

When a record called “Murder on Music Row” came out several years ago decrying how radio and the record companies were killing country music, I called him. I expected Owens to side with the song’s writer, since he was one of many veteran country acts who couldn’t get airtime anymore because country radio had become single-mindedly focused on young, pretty faces.

But Owens repeated one of the mantras that helped him build a fortune, at one time estimated at more than $100 million. “Radio isn’t the music business,” he said. “It’s the advertising business.” Even the country stations he owned in Bakersfield wouldn’t play his music if they didn’t believe it would appeal to their listeners.

Owens wouldn’t have it any other way, because he never lost sight of the importance of keeping the customer satisfied. And he did it foremost with his music, whether in the great songs he chose from other writers (Voni Morrison and John Russell’s “Act Naturally,” Harlan Howard’s “Above and Beyond,” Homer Joy’s “Streets of Bakersfield”) or his own.

There’s not a wasted or lazy word in “Crying Time,” a song he dashed off because he needed a B-side of his single “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail”:

Oh they say that absence makes

the heart grow fonder

And that tears are only rain to

make love grow

Well, my love for you could never

grow no stronger

If I lived to be a hundred years

old.

Owens was 24 years short of that mark when he died Saturday. Even if he’d made it, I think his fans’ love could grow no stronger.