That Ol’ Owens Boy Has a Good Time : Country: Buck Owens, who plays the Crazy Horse in Santa Ana Monday and Tuesday nights, says he’s never been happier in his life.

Buck Owens has few concrete plans for the year unfolding, but he certainly knows his overall intentions.

“It’s doing less things that other people want me to do, and more things that I want to do,” the 61-year-old country legend said by phone from his Bakersfield offices this week. “At 61, if it isn’t fun, it isn’t worth doing. With whatever time the Good Lord is going to grant me to stay here, I’m going to try to have as much fun as possible, so when I’m gone, they’ll say, ‘That ol’ boy had a good time, di’n’t he?’ ”

Owens has an unusual perspective on his career: After a run, beginning in 1959, of 75 charting country singles (with 42 in the Top 10 and 20 going to No. 1), he stepped away from the music at the beginning of the ‘80s. The “crossover” style of the day didn’t suit him, he’d been overexposed by the demystifying blue glare of years on “Hee-Haw” (“If you got a double chin, too bad, it’ll be triple when it comes out on TV,” he says) and he was still hurting from the loss of his “right arm” and best friend, guitarist Don Rich, who died in a motorcycle accident in 1974 after 16 years in Owens’ band, the Buckaroos.

Owens spent most of the ‘80s overseeing his various business interests and playing golf and tennis. Then came the oft-told incident: Owens devotee Dwight Yoakam came to his office unexpectedly in 1987, imploring Owens to sing with him onstage at a Bakersfield concert. Owens assented; his surprise return was greeted with standing ovations; he and Yoakam went on to have a massive hit dueting on Owens’ oldie “The Streets of Bakersfield”; and Owens has been back on the twang gang ever since.

“I’ve never been happier in my life,” he said Tuesday, “but I don’t think I could have appreciated anything as much without having that time off. I think deep in their heart everybody would like to do that, step away from it and look at it from the sidelines. And then to have an opportunity to come back and be part of it again is the greatest thing that ever happened to me.

“When I think of some of my compadres with their tax troubles and all of the various troubles they have on a personal basis--I think of the Elvis catastrophe--I count myself pretty darn lucky.

“And when I would see these entertainer friends of mine, nearly all of them had one thing in common. It was the idea, ‘When I don’t have to tour anymore, I’m going to do so-and-so.’ So when I turned 50 years old--and at that time I couldn’t get arrested with a record--I thought, ‘Well, you know, OK, goodby , I’ve had enough of that. I got a lot of other things I can do.’ ”

Along with his revived musical career (he has just released his third post-comeback album), Owens still helms a modest empire of radio, TV and print media as well as a ranch and other interests. And even with about 200 people on the payroll, Buck Owens Enterprises is like a big family, according to Jim Shaw, who goes back with Owens more than two decades, having played keyboards with the Buckaroos as well as handling an assortment of corporate duties that require him to carry four different business cards.

Owens said he stays on top of his businesses but trusts his people to make their own decisions, leaving him with an enviable work schedule.

“When I’m around here, I work mornings, but I don’t do much in the afternoons,” he said. “I go get in the shade and get me a big old orange or something.”

Instead of taking on grueling tours, he’s doing select shows when and where he chooses, with one choice being Santa Ana’s Crazy Horse Steak House and Saloon this Monday and Tuesday (some of Owens’ performances there will be filmed for a PBS documentary).

“I never got over my liking for doing small, 300- or 400-seat places like the Crazy Horse,” Owens said. “It’s such a great place to perform. You can see nearly all the people eyeball to eyeball, and they can see you.”

Later this year, he will do short tours of Scandinavia and Switzerland, and he’s thinking about doing some recording with the Desert Rose Band (whose steel player J.D. Maness has played with Owens before), the Kentucky Headhunters and possibly Chuck Berry. He has piles of career memorabilia stored in an old movie house he once used as a recording studio, and someday he will “get a hard hat and an entourage and go campin’ in there,” with the aim of organizing it for a museum.

Owens said that recording his new “Kickin’ In” was the most fun he’s ever had making an album. He attributes that to the laid-back yet on-the-ball approach of producer Jimmy Bowen.

But it was also Owens’ first experience recording an album in Nashville, using studio musicians instead of his own band, and he admits to not being entirely at peace with that process.

“While those guys are wonderful pickers and wonderful musicians and all that, I don’t think that they were as much plugged in. It was a lot easier for me, because I just went in and sang my songs, and only if there was a certain thing I wanted a musician to do, I’d ask for it. But it wasn’t as personal a thing with me. It’s not that it was impersonal , but it wasn’t as personal for me as using my own group of people.

“I always liked the West Coast sound, and I still like it. But when you’re in Nashville, you do what the Nashvillians do.”

Owens not only likes the West Coast sound, he practically created it. The rock-quartet-plus-pedal-steel urgency of Owens’ early recordings opened the door for Merle Haggard and others to offer a harder-driving, more individualistic alternative to Nashville’s music factory.

Owens attributes the difference to the willingness of West Coast studios to let performers record with their own bands (“If I’d gone to Nashville to record instead, I just would have been another with the Nashville Sound,” he said) and to the nature of the gigs that West Coast bands played.

“One of the things where we differed, I think, was living out here in the western part of the United States there weren’t any Grand Ole Oprys or schoolhouse shows. Out here they had dances and honky-tonks, and if you couldn’t play music that people could dance to, you couldn’t get a job. So I was always accustomed to a lot of beat and driving-type music, because that’s what excited people and made them want to dance.

“I played in the same honky-tonk here in Bakersfield for seven years, and we’d play whatever was popular, the country of the day and Little Richard--I still know five or six of his songs, I betcha--Fats Domino and Chuck Berry. Out of all that came my music, country mixing with the early rock ‘n’ roll sound. It kind of got together with me, because I always wanted to hear music drive with a lot of beat. If I’d wanted to go to sleep, I’d have taken a nap.”

Owens was born in 1929 to a Texas sharecropping family that was poor, and still poor when they moved to Arizona seven years later.

“I’m one of what I call ‘dirt people’--you know, we came for the dirt,” he said. “There literally was times I remember when rooms in our home had dirt floors. And we worked in the dirt: I picked cotton, cut grapes, picked up potatoes. We moved a lot, always looking for better things. And when we moved into a town, I was a pin boy in a little old bowling alley, I packed groceries. That was when I was 10 or 11 years old. Back in those days, you could work as a kid.”

By the time he was in his early teens, Owens also was busy at night, getting thrown out of honky-tonks or hanging around the clubs’ backdoors, where he hoped to learn some new guitar licks from the musicians during their breaks. By the time he was 16, he was earning money playing music himself. In 1951, he moved to Bakersfield and became a staple of its music scene.

He also became a fixture in the L.A. studio community from 1953 to 1958, playing on hundreds of records, including some by Sonny James and Wanda Jackson, rockers Gene Vincent and Tommy Sands and musical satirist Stan Freberg. Those were wide-open times--he recalls being hired to whack a pillow with a stick for the rhythm on one recording--when a fellow with a bit of bravado could get a lot of work.

“When you get on a couple of hit records, your phone starts ringing with people you never heard of asking you to come on down. A guys calls to ask, ‘Can you play the ukulele?’ I say, ‘Can I play the ukulele?!’ and I’d never played it before, but I knew I could figure it out, went down to the store, got a $7 ukulele, and it was no problem.”

What was a problem was the long commute between Bakersfield and Los Angeles, which he had to make to keep his club gigs at night.

“You had to do that, because you’d work like hell for a couple of weeks, then there’d be two or three weeks of no studio work at all. And I had a family and couldn’t give up my job. You hated to get home at 6, have a bite, shave and go play in a honky-tonk for five hours, but it did enable me to learn my trade.”

While Owens was busy driving a groove between the two cities, a couple of developments in Orange County became instrumental to his sound. One, he said, was the influence of the late guitar great Jimmy Bryant, who was based in Orange County. “He was an absolutely terrific guitar player, just one of the greatest I’ve ever seen,” Owens recalls. “He was my hero back in those days. Every time I’d hear him play something, I would try to emulate it, though I could never get it right.”

The other aid from Orange County was Leo Fender’s Telecaster. Made in Fullerton, the electric guitar was practically the official guitar of country music.

“The Telecaster was a major part of the sound,” Owens said. “I think the Telecaster has a lot more to do with a lot of people’s music and careers than a lot of people know about. Because you absolutely could not in those days duplicate it with other guitars.”

Today in concerts Owens plays the ‘60s silver metalflake Telecaster that Don Rich used in the Buckaroos; it’s one way of keeping a bit of Rich with him onstage. Though hardly a household name, Rich was a respected and influential guitarist among his peers. In the current issue of Musician magazine, even odd-couple interviewees Jerry Garcia and Elvis Costello wax rhapsodic about Rich’s playing. To Owens, he was far, far more than a great musician.

“He seemed to be inside my head, inside my mind, and probably me inside his. He sang like I sang and played like I played, and I played like he played and sang like he sang. He was like a son and like a brother. And I sincerely believe that Don Rich had more to do with my success than anything, any factor or any person. He was it.

“I’ll never get over missing Don. I went into a big depression right after he was killed in ‘74, and I don’t think that helped my continuation of music through the ‘70s. I kind of think of myself in those days as almost having a nervous breakdown, though without actually breaking down. I was extremely depressed throughout those years without knowing why. I’ve come to look at it now like, ‘What a great opportunity I had to know a great human being like that.’ ”

While Owens isn’t averse to changes in country music (how could he be, considering what a revolution he created with the Bakersfield Sound?), he does think those changes should come from the heart.

He wasn’t trying to do anything novel, he said.

“I just tried to be honest and straightforward, and I think that’s what it takes,” he said. “Being able to do my kind of music is very important to me. The thing of the day back in the late ‘70s became going into the studio and saying: ‘Let’s see if we can cut a crossover record.’ Well , bull hockey! I never was on one of those. Crossing over may make some good sense, but to me it’s kind of like saying, ‘If we take out salt and we put in pepper. . . .’ ”

Though country radio has opened up a bit recently, Owens still thinks most stations--including his own--are in a formatting straitjacket.

“Oh boy, it is terrible,” he said. “It’s awful. And it’s awful for a reason.”

The reason, he said, is demographics, stations following statistics--preferably large ones in the 18-to-34 age bracket--instead of instincts.

“If other guys are going to do it, then you have to do it too to be competitive,” he said. “And I’m as guilty of it with my radio as anybody else, if not more so. I’m just being honest, you know. There ain’t nothing like a little honesty in today’s conversations. I’m not going to bull you. If you wanted to hear that you could have talked to one of my PR people.”

In the ‘60s, Owens took to playing a red, white and blue acoustic guitar as a pro-America statement, to counter the anti-U.S. sentiment he saw then in demonstrations. In music, though, he left the message songs to Merle Haggard.

“I didn’t set out particularly to try to communicate anything to anybody. I just set out to sing my songs, do my music, and do it the very best I could the way I liked it. I was saying, ‘Here’s who I am and here’s what I am, and I’m hopin’ to hell that you liked it, and if you do, hooray for me, and if you don’t, stay tuned--maybe I’ll do something you’ll like better on the next one.’

“That’s been my attitude, and I think it’s been important for me. I’ve tried to stay away from social messages. I could tell you some mysterious story about the meaning of some song, but it wouldn’t be true. All I was trying to do was to stay the hell out of the cotton patch.”

* Buck Owens sings Monday and Tuesday at 8:30 p.m. at the Crazy Horse Steak House, 1580 Brookhollow Drive, Santa Ana. Tickets: $30. Information: (714) 549-1512.