Goodbye, Buck.

It's a sad day in Bakersfield, California. Buck Owens died yesterday at the age of 76. (Read more about him here.)

I pretty much grew up in Bakersfield, but it wasn't until much later that I learned about "The Bakersfield Sound" that Buck pretty much invented with Don Rich in the 1950's and 60's.

Instead, my early (y)ears were filled with Styx, Steely Dan, and The Police (all thanks to my brother), and Duran Duran (which I blame on no one but myself). It was the early 80's, and Buck Owens was just a sequined country singer on a TV show called Hee Haw.

Even so, the Country side of Bakersfield was there throughout my childhood, close enough that I didn't have a name for it. My friend Beth competed in rodeo and spent her weekends out at the stables; many of my classmates were ranching kids who would show prize-winning cattle at the Kern County Fair. While the rich kids were skiing in Tahoe, the local kids were castrating sheep with the 4H Club.

By middle school, my male friends were using chewing tobacco just like their brothers and fathers were, giving plenty of product placement to Copenhagen and Skoal. They'd hold court in the back of the school bus holding small brass spitoons, cussing, laughing and posturing. When we had fog delays*, it was not unusual for the posse to crawl onto the bus having shared a flask of Jack Daniels or Southern Comfort. As impressive as they were in their giant belt buckles and boot-cut Wrangler jeans, they were still fairly new to drinking, and the results were not pretty.

(*If you've never spent a winter in the San Joaquin Valley, it's difficult to appreciate the central role that Fog plays in daily life, both as cause of terrible car accidents and, alternatively, boredom. From November to March, schools are routinely affected by 3-hour "fog delays" and all-day "fog cancellations".)

When enough of us were old enough to drive, a bigger Bakersfield was revealed: one whose main pasttime involved cruising down Chester Avenue, driving out into the fields (cotton, oranges, almonds-- take your pick), and drinking.

A typical Saturday night started with the cruising, and here, I was all set: my boyfriend, Dickie, had a '56 Chevy pickup truck with all the original parts. Primered in white, the Chevy was a perpetual work in progress; Dickie would save up money from his job at the garage to get "the next piece" chromed: the front bumper, the back bumper, the grill. (Our relationship lasted until the rear-view mirror, at which point the brake lights came on.)

Still in the front-bumper stage of our courtship, though, we found cruising a perfect way to while away the earlier part of the night. See and be seen. Drive slowly, check out your friends and foes in each oncoming vehicle, all the while tuned in to KUZZ. Listen to Merle Haggard, Hank Williams Jr., the Charlie Daniels Band, Dwight Yoakam. I suppose Buck was in the mix as well (knowing as I do now that he owned KUZZ), but his sound was nothing I was specifically aware of.

After cruising, we'd head to The Couch.

Now in any other city, The Couch might be a seedy lounge or a bohemian nightclub, but in Bakersfield, it was... a couch. In the middle of nowhere. In a field.

The older kids had inherited a partying routine that entailed buying beer in town, grabbing two or three old tires, and driving out to the Couch. Pop open a beer, set fire to the tires, take a seat, and there you have it: instant fireplace, long-burning, no clean-up required. (Mom and Dad, take heart: all told, I went out to The Couch only once or twice; chalk it up to the stench of burning rubber and the unspecified fear that something terrible was likely to happen out there.)

Enter the rear-view mirror: at the age of 16, I left Bakersfield to attend school in New Mexico., where I discovered Pink Floyd, the Dire Straits, and Bob Marley. Meanwhile, back in Bakersfield, Dwight Yoakam was busy convincing Buck Owens to join him on a remake of "Streets of Bakersfield," a move that launched Buck Owens back into country music stardom and appropriately rewrote his Hee Haw years as a mere footnote of his musical career.

Buck opened the Crystal Palace in 1996, the same year he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. With a new generation of Buckaroos to back him, he took to playing two shows every Friday and Saturday night at the Crystal Palace, a pace he maintained almost until the end of his life.

In 1997, I stopped through Bako on my way home from Namibia. My friend Michelle and I wandered through the museum and took turns posing in front of a bigger-than-life Buck, all bronze and magnificence. For us, it was a just wacky little excursion, but it was also my first real introduction to the music of Buck Owens.

Since then, his music has come to mean something very special to me, for reasons I've largely failed to describe here. Suffice it to say that I'm sad at the passing of Buck Owens.

It's a quiet and mercifully cool Sunday afternoon, and I've got Buck singing "Above and Beyond," turned up real high, so that he can be heard by a good number of my neighbors here in Merida. I'm singing the harmonies, taking pleasure in the almost visual brilliance of his music. That's the best I can do for now.