He had already said goodnight and walked to his car when a family from Oregon stopped him in the parking lot and changed the final night of his life. Buck Owens returned inside his beloved Crystal Palace, picked up his guitar and sang for a full hour, joking that anyone who disliked his rough voice could go home.
He was giving everything he had left
The house he refused to leave empty that night had opened on October 15, 1996 at 3223 Sillect Avenue in Bakersfield, California. Owens stood then on a custom stage inside a five hundred seat nightclub, dining hall and museum that had taken seven years and roughly seven million dollars of his own money to build.
For the next decade the pioneer of the Bakersfield Sound made the 43,000 square foot hall a Friday and Saturday ritual. He ate dinner in the restaurant and then played ninety minute sets with the Buckaroos for fans who traveled from across the country.
The building anchored a second life he built in California long after twenty-one Billboard number one country hits and a seventeen year run on Hee Haw. He had moved west from Texas to Mesa, Arizona as a child during the Great Depression before settling in Bakersfield in 1951 and he spent decades investing music earnings into radio stations, publishing catalogs and local real estate.
When he worked with architect Harley Ellis and local builder Jim Burke in the late 1980s to design the Crystal Palace, he insisted on joining a working dance hall with a living museum of Western music. Glass display cases held his red, white and blue acoustic guitars, Nudie Cohn rhinestone suits and gold records while a white 1972 Pontiac Grand Ville convertible was bolted straight to the wall above the dining room floor.
His resolve to perform there regularly held through serious medical setbacks. He survived radical surgery for throat cancer in 1993 and spent weeks hospitalized with severe pneumonia and lung complications in 1997 and the illness left his voice noticeably raspier in his seventies.
On Friday, March 24, 2006 the seventy-six year old singer arrived at the Crystal Palace and ate his regular pre show meal of spicy chicken-fried steak and baked potato soup. Drained after eating, he told keyboardist and bandleader Jim Shaw he did not feel able to perform and would drive to his ranch to rest.
Owens walked to his car while Shaw and the Buckaroos began their set expecting to play the whole night without their boss. Before he could pull away, customers stopped him by the car and told him they had driven down from Oregon specifically to hear him play.
Remembering the cost of gas and tickets for working families on the road, Owens locked his car, walked back inside and stepped onto the stage in the middle of the set. Longtime pedal steel guitarist Terry Christoffersen and Shaw watched in surprise as he picked up his guitar and took the microphone.
He stayed under the lights for a full hour and traded jokes with the dining room crowd before closing with Big in Vegas. He then drove to his ranch where he died in his sleep from a heart attack around four thirty on the morning of Saturday, March 25.
Hours later family spokesman Jim Shaw met reporters and fans gathering outside the Sillect Avenue venue and explained how close the band had come to playing that Friday night alone. Shaw said Owens had passed in his favorite place after doing what he loved most in the building he had spent years bringing to life.
Waitresses and longtime kitchen staff set a memorial table inside the lobby while callers flooded the phone lines at KUZZ, the Bakersfield country radio station Owens had owned since the 1960s. Later that Saturday evening the Buckaroos returned to the stage and played their scheduled show before a packed house as a tribute to their boss.
In Los Angeles lifelong admirer Dwight Yoakam paid tribute to the mentor who had reshaped California country music. Yoakam had revived Owens chart career in 1988 with their number one duet Streets of Bakersfield.
One week later on April 1 friends including Yoakam, Merle Haggard, Brad Paisley and Trace Adkins joined thousands of Bakersfield residents for a public funeral and memorial concert back inside the venue.
Even after the funeral crowds left, the red, white and blue guitars stayed in the display cases along the walls of the Crystal Palace and faced the stage where the Buckaroos kept playing the house schedule Owens had refused to miss.