Rudy Parris spent a decade of his career on stage at one of country music’s most iconic venues.
He played in the house band at Buck Owens’ Crystal Palace in Bakersfield from the time it opened in 1996 until Owens death in 2006 and got to revisit the space as a featured artist in 2019.
“The place was monumental in my life,” say Parris, a Visalia native and self-proclaimed torch-bearer for the Bakersfield Sound. (He also had a more-than-decent showing on Season 3 of NBC singing competition “The Voice.”)
The restaurant/music venue/museum was were he met and got to perform with Owens, but also a number of up-start country artists who went on to become stars — guys like Keith Urban and Kenny Chesney.
“All these things happened because of Buck Owens and the Crystal Palace.”
Bakersfield landmark closes
The venue closed abruptly last week.
In post on its website and social media, it cited “a challenging business climate” and the wishes of Owens’ family members to step away “from the responsibility of management” of the facility.
“It is our hope that new owners will step forward to utilize this beautiful venue,” it wrote.
On the news of the closure, fans appealed to country stars like Dwight Yoakam or Garth Brooks to step in and buy the music hall, which had been on the market since last year for $6.5 million, according to a listing on Loopnet.com.
Both artist were fans of Owens and the Crystal Palace.
Yoakam is widely considered responsible for a resurgence of interest in Bakersfield’s country music scene with his 1988 duet of “Streets of Bakersfield.” Brooks, meanwhile, proposed to wife Trisha Yearwood during a stop at the venue 2005. He was being honored with a bronze statue that would go on display for guests. It was unveiled with the engagement ring on its finger.
But the closure seems to have stuck.
On Tuesday, the venue hosted a last chance sale on Crystal Palace T-shirts and other souvenirs, like a red, white and blue telecaster guitar, that same kind Owens played on stage. Folks lined up out the door, according to TV station KGET.
Preserving the Bakersfield Sound
Parris hopes that ultimately someone will take over Crystal Palace and carry on the tradition it set, not only as an amazing music venue, but as a reminder of this “iconic thing that happened there in Bakersfield.”
He’s talking about the Bakersfield Sound.
That’s the name given to the music that came out of the area in the late 1960s, played, most famously by Owens and Merle Haggard. The music was a working-class counterpoint to ultra-produced sounds coming out of Nashville at the time and was direct-inspiration for the movement of outlaw country music that would follow decades later.
“I’ve always been flying that torch because I was invited into the family back in the day,” Parris says.
“To be part of that to me, is such an honor.”
At the very least, he hopes that the memorbilia inside the Crystal Palace, including the full-sized white Cadillac up behind the venue’s bar, gets preserved on display somewhere, as per Owens’ wishes. Perhaps it could be gifted to the Kern County Museum, which already has the converted boxcar where Haggard lived as a child.
“They have a great country music display already.”