Yesterday was a BAKERSFIELD day!
Emir had never been to Bakersfield, and he loves the Bakersfield-sound country stuff, so we hopped in the car and drove up for a few hours. We did a lot of stuff in those few hours!!
1. First, we stopped at Buck Owens’s grave just off the Panama Lane exit. Bonnie Owens is also buried here, in the Owens family crypt.
2. We met with Jim Shaw, keyboard player for the Buckaroos since 1970 and manager of Buck Owens Enterprises for many years. Jim is the guy I did the trade with a few years ago of Don Rich’s Mosrite guitar for Speedy West’s Bigsby pedal steel guitar (a very long story, but that’s for another day). If you want to open up another long story, Jim also owns the rights to the song “Goo Goo Muck,” recorded by Ronnie Cook and later The Cramps, which is now a huge internet sensation on TikTok getting millions of views. Another long story, but yeah, Jim owns the song “Goo Goo Muck!”
3. Jim took us to the Crystal Palace and let Emir wander around, looking at the museum displays—lots of cool guitars, stage outfits, and other memorabilia. While we were there, Terry Christofferson, who has been the Buckaroos’ lead guitarist since 1975, came in to switch out amplifiers for that evening’s performance at the Palace. I have to admit, it was a thrill watching these two members of Buck Owens band open a sliding door underneath the stage and watching them pull out a rack of Twin Reverb amplifiers with orange JBL D120F speakers in them—a truly authentic country-western experience! Terry also figures into the day’s story, because some time in the 1980s he and Buck drove out to a trash lot in Bakersfield to retrieve a steel guitar that someone told them about. This steel guitar that Terry and Buck dug out of the trash was none other than the 1948 Bigsby steel guitar made for Speedy West, which I now own. See how all these subplots are connected?
4. From there, we went to downtown Bakersfield. We went to Front Porch Music to look at all the Mosrites (and buy Mosrite guitar straps), bought some records at the local record store, and showed Emir the haunted Padre Hotel and also the great neon at Guthrie’s Alley Kat.
5. Then we drove around town to find where Buckaroos guitarist Don Rich and Merle Haggard’s guitarist Roy Nichols were buried, so we could pay our respects.
6. From there we went back to the Palace to meet my old buddy Brian Lonbeck. Now, many of you may remember Brian from playing all the Guitar Geek Festivals. Lately he has been going through some very serious health issues, so I was really glad to see him out and about! At one point a couple of years ago, a lot of us thought that we might lose him. So it was really great to see him looking like his old self again—and back playing gigs! We had dinner at the Palace and hung out with a group of the older Bakersfield musicians, who were playing at the Palace that night with a group called Stampede.
We weren’t in town very long, but we sure did a lot of things. I think Emir enjoyed it. I kept imagining how it must feel to be obsessed with this music from fifty or sixty years ago, coming from a foreign country to visit the places where it all happened. I think we gave him a good taste of the real, old Bakersfield. And it was fun to watch some of the old timers try to figure out why a young Italian guy would be interested in their music from decades ago.
Back in LA today, it’s time to get ready for the big Dave Stuckey Barn Dance Boogie at the Crown City Dance Hall in Pasadena! Should be a great time, I’ll be playing with the Whippersnappers around 7:30 pm, and Emir will be playing a few songs with us on steel guitar. Come on down!
