Country music mecca, Buck Owens’ Crystal Palace, closes in Bakersfield

The Crystal Palace, a music and dining joint in Bakersfield launched by Buck Owens — which hosted just about every country music star in America over the years — has abruptly shut its doors.

The closure of the temple of country music, an important piece of San Joaquin Valley history, prompted an outpouring of grief from fans across the country — along with desperate pleas to stars such as Dwight Yoakam, Garth Brooks and Taylor Swift, who all played there, to save the day by buying the place.

“This is so sad,” one person wrote on the Crystal Palace Instagram, tagging Dwight Yoakam and Garth Brooks and pleading with them to “keep the Crystal Palace open!”

Archival photo of Buck Owens Crystal Palace, located at 2800 Buck Owens Blvd.

(Eliza Green / The Bakersfield Californian)

Jim Shaw, director of the Buck Owens Private Foundation, which has owned the Crystal Palace since Owens’ death in 2006, said the closure, which was announced Monday, has “been coming for a while, and I’ve dreaded seeing it happen.”

Shaw said the pandemic, along with a slowing economy and the increasingly tight margins for the restaurant business, all combined to make it “a tough business.” Plus, he added, members of the Owens family involved in the business “are in their mid- to late 70s. We’ve done what we can.”

Shaw himself, who is a keyboard player and a former leader of Owen’s band the Buckaroos, is 78. He’s been with Owens since he left Fresno State to join the band in the 1970s.

By that point, Owens had already changed country music — and Bakersfield.

Patrons enjoy their dinner while Cody Gates, the night’s musical guest in this September 2022 image, performs on stage at Buck Owens’ Crystal Palace.

(Eliza Green / The Bakersfield Californian)

A child of the Dust Bowl, Owens was born in Texas and spent much of his childhood in Arizona before popping up in Bakersfield‘s nascent music club scene. He brought a twangy sound to country ballads, and by the 1950s and 1960s, that sound had turned his city into a western rival to Nashville. Some of his hits included “Together Again,” “Crying Time,” “Love’s Gonna Live Here,” “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail” and “Under Your Spell Again.”

It also included “Streets of Bakersfield,” which became a late-career hit with Yoakam and included these lyrics: “How many of you that sit and judged me ever walked the streets of Bakersfield?”

The “Bakersfield Sound” was further cemented by another one-time member of Owens’ band, Merle Haggard, who played with the Buckaroos briefly in the 1960s.

In 1996, Owens opened the Crystal Palace, an all-in-one restaurant, concert venue and museum of the star’s life, located at 2800 Buck Owens Blvd. Though it has fewer than 600 seats, famous country music stars made regular pilgrimages.

Shaw said he is trying to avoid heartbreak by focusing on “the fact that we had an incredible 28 years. Pretty much anybody in country music played here … Taylor Swift, and Garth Brooks, and Willie Nelson, Dwight Yoakam, Brad Paisley.”

Brooks, he noted, famously proposed to his wife Trisha Yearwood there in 2005.

Swift played the stage at the age of 16, he said, accompanied to Bakersfield by her mother.

Garth Brooks performed at Buck Owens Crystal Palace in Bakersfield as part of his 2005 Dive Bar Tour of small venues in the midst of his summer stadium tour.

(Randy Lewis/Los Angeles Times)

And Yoakam played the palace too many times to count. “I loved him,” Yoakam told The Times in 2007, shortly after Owens’ death, noting that their relationship was “part friend, part sibling, and a whole lot surrogate parent.”

The Buck Owens Foundation listed the building for sale last year. While there was plenty of “tire kickers,” Shaw noted, there have been no takers.

The website SavingCountryMusic.com noted that the Crystal Palace is joining other small country music venues that are struggling with the new economics of the music business, which favor large arenas. “The plight for legendary, midsized country music venues continues to worsen.”

Fans who are hoping that a music lover with deep pockets will swoop in and save the place can find both despair and inspiration in Owens’ lyrics.

He did, after all, warn in “The Heartaches Have Just Started” that “when you see the backdoor swinging, you’ll know I’ve run out of hope.”

But he also famously promised that “love’s gonna live here again.”