The Legendary Buck Owens’ Crystal Palace Closes Its Doors

The plight for legendary, mid-sized country music venues continues to worsen as the legendary Buck Owens’ Crystal Palace in Bakersfield, California has been forced to abruptly close, shutting their doors, and hoping to find a suitable buyer sooner than later to save the iconic business and property.

“We are extremely proud of the legacy of the Crystal Palace,” a statement posted on social media Monday (8/11) read. “For over 28 years we brought the best of local and national entertainment to Bakersfield, served great food, and hosted thousands of special occasions for thousands of special people and families. Although Buck left us in 2006, we continued to maintain the excellent that he expected, striving to carry out his dream.”

But just like the legendary Coupland Dancehall in Coupland, TX that Saving Country Music just reported is having to close down, the same fate has befallen Buck’s shrine to the Bakersfield Sound.

“A challenging business climate plus the wishes of the Owens family members to step back the responsibilities of management require finally shutting the doors. It is our hope that new owners will step forward to utilize this beautiful venue. Meanwhile, we will do our best to fulfill scheduled commitments we’ve made in the coming months.”

Jim Shaw is the legendary piano player for Buck Owens’ Buckaroos. He performed with Buck starting in 1970 all the way up to Buck’s death in 2006. He’s also a songwriter, publisher, and recording engineer. Shaw now acts as the managing director on the board of the Buck Owens Foundation, which owns The Crystal Palace. Shaw was there at the very beginning of the venue.

“I started in the Buckaroos when I was 23, in 1970. We opened up in 1996, and we’re coming up on 29 years, and the Owens family are in their ’70s, including myself on the board of directors,” Jim Shaw explains. “We listed it for sale a year ago. No bites, a lot of tire kicking. Nothing was happening, so they finally said, ‘Okay, we’re going to shut the doors, and hope somebody will step forward soon.’ It’s very sad.”

The inspiration for The Crystal Palace was all the mid-sized venues Buck Owens and The Buckaroos would play across the United States.

“We brainstormed about it for years when we traveled,” Shaw explains. “We had our favorite places to play, which were the intimate, exciting little places like Crazy Horse down south, The Birchmere back on the East Coast, Rockefellers in Houston, really neat places that were much more fun to play than the auditoriums, convention centers, and arenas.

“Buck said, ‘Someday, I’m going to build a place like that. We won’t have to travel, they can come to me.’ So we kicked it around, a lot of plans were drawn up, and he finally got serious. We started construction in 1994. It took it two years to build it because Buck kept changing stuff. The architecture, he really went crazy on it and it was a very expensive building to run and operate.”

For decades, playing the Crystal Palace was a rite of passage for country performers across the United States as they toured the West Coast, and acted as a hub for the Bakersfield country scene, and the country bands in nearby Los Angeles. It’s also like a Hall of Fame for the Buck Owens legacy, and the iconic “Bakersfield” arch that used to span Union Ave. was relocated to the property.

“It’s been amazing the stuff that’s happened there. We’re proud of how big it became, how famous it became, the various acts that have played,” says Shaw. “I wish it could go indefinitely but nothing does. We’d like to see somebody buy it and keep it something close to what it is, but that will be up to somebody that has the money.”

During COVID, the business received some grants to help keep it afloat. But according to Shaw, it didn’t come back like it had been before. If they opened up on a Tuesday or Wednesday, they would regularly lose about $3,000. So they limited the schedule to Thursday, Fridays, and Saturdays, but this couldn’t support the business overall. Also during COVID, a lot of their peer-sized venues on the West Coast closed permanently. That meant certain bands could no longer book a West Coast tour of the regular venues.

Similar to other mid-sized venues, finding talent willing to play a 600-capacity room these days is also a challenge.

“For the big acts, playing here doesn’t make sense for how much they can gross and make,” Jim Shaw explains. “However, just like Buck would play those smaller places knowing he wasn’t going to make as much money because it was fun, that’s exactly what happened with the Crystal Palace, especially when Buck was alive. Everybody came here. It was an honor to play Buck’s place. We had that advantage.”

And similar to The Coupland Dancehall and other recently-closed venues, even when people show up, they tend to spend less and drink less. “People just aren’t spending as much money,” Shaw explains. “Discretionary income isn’t there for people. There’s this nut you just have to make each day, and it pretty much became impossible for us. It’s not going to be cheap for us to be closed either. We have to pay the taxes, water and mow the lawn, and keep the place decent.”

The Crystal Palace almost shut down in 2024, but Jim Shaw talked the Owens family into listing it for sale to see if they could find a buyer. But despite lots of interest, nobody stepped forward. Shaw hopes that actually shutting the venue down will give the situation a sense of urgency, and hopefully inspire someone to step up and rescue the business.

The income for the Buck Owens foundation comes from all of Buck’s intellectual properties, including ownership of his master recordings and publishing, and songwriting royalties. But as money is coming into the foundation, more money was going out to keep the Crystal Palace going. “We’re all oldtimers, it just got to the point where we’d run the foundation out of money if we kept subsidizing it.”

If there is any silver lining, it’s that the shutting of the doors doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the Crystal Palace for good. Jim Shaw and the Buck Owens family hope that a smart investor, and a new young and energetic team can swoop in and start a new era for the legendary venue.

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