The Crystal Palace Keeps the Bakersfield Sound on Stage
Buck Owens' Crystal Palace, with its famous car over the bar, is part restaurant, part museum and part working music venue — a monument to the sound Bakersfield gave country music.
There is a Pontiac convertible mounted over the bar, and there is no other place it could be. Buck Owens' Crystal Palace, opened by Owens in 1996 on Buck Owens Boulevard, is simultaneously a steakhouse, a museum of Owens' career and a working music venue, built by the man whose name is inseparable from the Bakersfield Sound. For visitors, it is usually the first stop. For locals, it is where out-of-town guests get taken, and where the explanation of Bakersfield begins.
The Bakersfield Sound itself deserves the monument. In the 1950s and 1960s, Bakersfield's honky-tonks produced a leaner, sharper country music, electric and dance-driven, shaped by Dust Bowl migration, oil-field wages and singers like Owens and Merle Haggard who came out of this city's clubs. Nashville polished country music; Bakersfield plugged it in. The Crystal Palace tells that story with stage costumes, guitars, gold records and the bar-top car Owens made famous.
The venue still functions as a venue. Diners eat within sight of a stage that hosts live music, surrounded by memorabilia that would fill a museum, because it effectively is one, attached to a working restaurant. That combination, part shrine, part business, is pure Owens, a performer who understood show business as both words at once and built the Crystal Palace to keep his music on stage in his own city on his own terms.
Bakersfield's music heritage reaches beyond one building, to the clubs that once lined the city's honky-tonk strips and to the Kern County Museum's exhibits, but the Crystal Palace is its most concentrated expression. November visitors will find it in its element: dinner crowds, live sets and the sound that put this farm-and-oil city on the musical map still echoing off the walls.
Cities get to choose which of their stories to keep telling. Bakersfield keeps telling this one nightly, with a house band, a full dining room and a car over the bar that makes every first-time visitor ask the right question: what happened here? The answer takes about three chords.
