By Bill Ramsey
Texas Music Magazine | Spring 2005

To millions she was simply “Selena” — a superstar at 23 in her native Texas and throughout Mexico and Latin America, scoring hit after hit with steamy ballads such as “Amor Prohibido” and bouncy, Tex-Mex bubblegum synth-pop ditties such as “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom.” Squeezed into form-fitting spandex tights, topped with leather biker caps and revealing rhinestone-encrusted bustiers, the late singer’s slightly naughty sensuality mesmerized her worshipful legion of admirers at sold-out concerts while remaining a squeaky-clean role model to young Latina girls. But to country star Wynonna Judd, Selena was just a good cook.

Just weeks before her tragic death on March 31, 1995, at the hands of an unstable former employee, Selena was perched on the precipice of making the leap from “Tejana Madonna” to mainstream megastar. After a long-awaited series of meetings between EMI recording executives and her father and manager, Abraham Quintanilla, Selena selected from a batch of songs submitted for her approval to record for her upcoming album, “Dreaming of You.” Most appealing to her was the Keith Thomas composition, “I Could Fall in Love.”

“The song selection happened before she went [to Thomas’ Tennessee recording studio],” remembers Abraham Quintanilla, who continues to fan the flames of Selena’s memory and mentor upcoming Tejano artists cast in her mold. “We were looking for something [in a song] that would fit the [mainstream] market, and we felt that ‘I Could Fall in Love’ was a that song.”

“When she arrived, the airline had lost her luggage,” remembered songwriter Thomas, who owns Bennett House studios near Nashville and had previously crafted smooth pop and R&B hits beginning with Ronnie Millsap and later Whitney Houston and Amy Grant. “So where does she go to replace her wardrobe? Wal-Mart. She was so down to earth like that.”

After shopping, Selena craved Mexican food and picked up the ingredients for arroz con pollo, a popular Tex-Mex concoction of chicken and rice, and returned to the hideaway studio to prepare the food. At the same time, country singer Wynonna Judd had arrived at Bennett House, where she was also working with Thomas on a new album.

“Before Selena got there, Wynonna was talking to Keith about needing a new cook,” Abraham Quintanilla said. “Keith had the studio refurbished as a home for artists, and she went to the kitchen out and started cooking. Wynonna shows up, smells the food, and heads straight for the kitchen where she finds Selena, who she thinks is the studio cook. Selena never let on that she was there to record.”

These vignettes are etched in Thomas’ memory of Selena’s short visit and, he said, are indicative of her girl-next-door appeal. “She was just like that,” Thomas emphasized.

At first, Thomas didn’t know what to expect when EMI sent him a tape of Selena’s Spanish-language songs to gauge his reaction and inspire a suitable song to aid him in transforming the singer’s success in the Latin market to a larger mainstream audience. Thomas was a key element in EMI’s plans for Selena, whom the company had carefully nurtured in preparation for a crossover campaign. Although already an icon among her Latin music audience and peers, the vivacious young performer was little known beyond the U.S.-Mexico border regions, where she played to packed arenas and fairgrounds as her records routinely topped Latin charts. Thomas, coming off a stint guiding the reincarnation of Amy Grant from Christian artist to secular sensation on the strength of the duet “House of Love,” was an obvious choice.

“I thought from all that I heard that she was a star,” said Thomas. “Everything she had going on was working — there was no question: She was equal to anyone I had worked with.”

Thomas at first signed on to write and produce the entire “Dreaming of You” album, but an already full schedule forced him to focus on only the a few tracks. Selena liked “I Could Fall in Love,” and the song became the focal point for Thomas and Selena.

“I had the lyrics,” remembered Thomas, “which was backwards, because I normally write music first, and she just gravitated toward that song.”

Thomas did his homework, and had all but completed the backing accompaniment by the time Selena arrived in the spring of 1995 to add her vocals. Programming the punchy synthesizer and bass tracks himself, Thomas brought in session musicians Dann Huff, Mark Hammond and Tommy Sims to provide layers of guitar, drums and bass to create the tune’s sinuous melody. The session went exceedingly smooth, recalled Thomas, but when Selena suggested she add a spoken-word verse in Spanish near the song’s end, Thomas was intrigued but helpless.

“Here I was thinking this is a great idea, but I didn’t speak a word of Spanish,” he recalled with a laugh. “I still don’t know exactly what it is she says in the song.”

The love song was an immediate contender for the album’s debut single and Selena’s emotive embrace of the lyrics reveal her connection to the song. A torch ballad set to contemporary rhythms, Selena’s passionate vocals ooze with the aching of a woman on the verge of giving her heart to a new lover, even as she fears rejection but dreams of kissing and caressing the object of her desire. Although Thomas had no insights into Selena’s personal life, his song closely paralleled the relationship between the young singer and Chris Perez, the handsome rock guitar prodigy who had joined Selena’s band and — over the grudging objections of her protective father — became her lover and ultimately her husband.

With the recording complete, Selena returned to Texas while Thomas set about polishing the track for inclusion on the album, which was set for a late summer release in conjunction with a tour and media push to launch the record to mainstream Top 40 radio markets. To help bolster her effort, Thomas enlisted the backing vocals of Trey Lorenz, whose haunting falsetto was featured in a string of Carey’s hit singles. Selena was set to return to Nashville for post-production when news of her death reached the songwriter.

“I remember the day it happened,” Thomas said. “My production manager walked in an told me Selena had been shot. I had a pain in my heart. She was coming back to town in three days to finish up and then she was … gone.”

As the tributes flowed freely and Selena’s story ricocheted across the country, the fresh young star on the cusp of launching her breakthrough mainstream album had literally crossed over.

Almost overnight, Selena became a household word — and when People magazine rolled the dice, printing an entire tribute issue dedicated to her life the week following her death, more than one million copies were snapped up by fans and those lured by the young singer’s sultry appearance and the lurid headlines that surrounded the soap opera-style story.

In August 1995, EMI released “Dreaming of You.” Buoyed by the remarkable outpouring of grief even outside her native Texas and Latino fan base, the bilingual album stormed the Billboard 200, debuting at No. 1. The record, preceded by the single, “I Could Fall in Love,” was the first album recorded mostly in Spanish (albeit in collected form) to debut at the industry bible’s top spot.

Achieving her ultimate goal of crossover success only in death, Selena managed also in afterlife to lead a tidal wave of Latin artists into the mainstream. A year after her death, Jennifer Lopez was chosen to portray the singer in a biopic based on her short life. Released in 1997, the movie prompted a renewed of interest in Selena, and the soundtrack (including “I Could Fall in Love” and much of the “Dreaming of You” package) sailed again to the top of the charts.

A decade later, many still marvel at the aura of effervescence that surrounded the Lake Jackson-born singer, who grew up singing along with FM-radio staples of her era but embraced her Mexican heritage to become the voice of a cross-cultural phenomenon that continues to blossom.

“There’s something intoxicating about the mix of Latin and pop,” Thomas said. “We’re still searching for the next Selena.”

Tags: Selena, Music, Texas, Celebrities

By Bill Ramsey
Texas Music Magazine | Summer 2006

Buck Owens, suffering the diseases and scars that plague most old men, wore out on March 25 and died in his bed at the hard-lived age of 76. But not before taking the stage one more time on the streets of his beloved Bakersfield, the inland California city the native Texan made famous and called home for more than half a century.

Tired, Owens told his band there would be no show the night of March 24 — hardly the first time the Buckaroos had been told to cancel a performance at the Crystal Palace. The Palace is Owens' multi-million dollar over-sized honky tonk with good food, plenty of neon and not a thing any more interesting for a hundred miles around.

But when the legend learned several fans had driven all the way from Bend, Oregon, to see him perform that night, he reportedly sighed, “Aw, man,” indulged himself with his preferred meal of Texas-style chicken-fried steak and sang a round of some of his 19 one-time No. 1 hits.

“He had his favorite meal, played a show and died in his sleep,” Jim Shaw, his keyboardist for 35 years, would tell The Los Angeles Times. “We thought, ‘That's not too bad.’ ” Owens would have appreciated the simple epitaph.

For the next week, the town that Owens had adopted and put on the pop culture map with his hit song, “Streets of Bakersfield,” grieved at the passing of its most famous citizen. When he was alive, they’d named the street where he built his dinner club Buck Owens Boulevard. The city allowed him to purchase and relocate the massive “Bakersfield” city sign near his club's entrance and added the community's name to that of the half-dozen other cities claiming to be the birthplace of honky-tonk music. And Austin wasn't Nashville West, either, city residents would tell visiting writers; Bakersfield was.

His funeral on April 2 gave the city yet another round of national attention with a one-day showcase of country music featuring Dwight Yoakum, Garth Brooks and Brad Paisley at the Baptist service and later during a private wake at the Crystal Palace. Clint Black came on April 4 for the re-opening of the club. The youngest of the singers Owens would inspire, Paisley, played for free at the Palace on May 6.

The Buckaroos came back, too, this time backing up Owens' son, Buddy, to occupy the space his father had on the Crystal Palace stage each Friday and Saturday for most of the past decade. “The first song we did was ‘Streets of Bakersfield,' ” Shaw says. “My wife said later I was visibly struggling to maintain my composure, but after we got through that song, things were fine.” The evening brought back memories of 1974, Shaw says, when longtime Buckaroo guitarist, Don Rich, died, and the band played on. “It was traumatic, but just as we approached that show at Red Rocks in Colorado after Don died — where Buck refused to replace Don so early — we just did it,” Shaw says.

When Owens had decided to perform the night before he died, he was suffering from an unspecified illness that had confined the signer to a Los Angeles hospital a month earlier. He suffered a stroke in 2004 after throat cancer surgery in 1993 and a bout of pneumonia in 1997. Still, even in his last years, Owens gave the Crystal Palace the feeling of a western Graceland, remembers Robert Price, a columnist for the city's newspaper, The Bakersfield Californian. But unlike Elvis, Owens' appeal to the common man was backed up by his common sense at business.

“They're Going To Make A Big Star Out of Me”
Even the Beatles were fans of the beyond-country appeal of Buck Owens, choosing to adapt his “Act Naturally” hit song into their own chart climbers, adding an English accent to the prophetic lyric, “They're going to make a big star out of me.” America made a big star of Buck Owens with 19 consecutive No. 1 hits during the 1960s for the singer, songwriter and musician. Those who didn't already know his music would recognize the name and plain, weathered face when he became the unlikely star of the long-running television variety show, “Hee Haw” from 1969 until 1986.

“He was proud of his contributions during the early years, when he was nothing more than a highly sought-after studio guitarist,” Price, the local newspaper columnist and his long-time chronicler, says. “He talked a lot about that special time between 1953 and 1957, when the dividing line between country and rock was sort of hazy. Country artists toured with rock artists, and individual performers swung back and forth between the two genres without even mussing their hair,” Price says.

Prior to his hit-making assault on the charts during the 1960s, Owens, like many artists of the day, attempted almost any tactic that would set him apart from the competition. “Corky Jones” was Owens’ rockabilly pseudonym, under which he recorded a brief output. The name was intended to disguise his identity from the country music establishment, which took a dim view at the time of country artists straying into the then-new form or rock. Owens as Jones recorded “Hot Dog,” backed with “Rhythm and Booze,” on the Pep label. But the “establishment” had little to worry about — the record went nowhere.

Owens was nonplussed at being judged up or down by the musical business or rock or country, Shaw remembers, preferring to stick to the basics that would continue to set him apart from the increasingly sophisticated gadgetry adopted by his contemporaries inside the recording studio. “I think it was his production values, the stripped-down thing,” Shaw says. “He was getting back to basics. I really think that was what set him apart. He insisted on doing things from the outside, recording his sound his own way.”

As a vocalist gifted with almost perfect pitch and a guitarist who merged his Tex-Mex roots with California's surfer-twang sound, he turned his everyday observations into popular catch phrases with his song writing. He was born the poor son of a sharecropper on August 12, 1929, in Sherman, Texas, 65 miles north of Dallas, and christened Alvis Edgar Owens. He dubbed himself “Buck” after the family mule. Although Owens is most closely identified with Bakersfield, the singer never dismissed his Texas roots. Years later, when Dwight Yoakum later approached Owens about the idea of re-recording his hit “Streets of Bakersfield,” incorporating the accordion music and polka-style back beat of Tejano legend Flaco Jimenez, the Texan in him would embrace the arrangement.

Owens learned to play the guitar when his family moved west to Arizona in 1937 in search of a better way to make a living. As a teenager, he performed behind a young female singer for a daily 15-minute radio show in Mesa, a suburb of Phoenix. In Arizona, he met and married Bonnie Campbell (who would also later marry Merle Haggard, another legend from the Bakersfield suburb of Oildale), and they had two sons. If Sherman, Texas, wasn’t booming, neither was Phoenix in those days. Owens picked oranges to pay the rent, and Bonnie went to live with Owens' aunt and uncle in Bakersfield, California, where picking crops also made up the local economy. Owens soon followed, and Bakersfield became his permanent home. Owens’ marriage didn’t last — the couple divorced in 1953 — but it was in Bakersfield where Owens met and fell in love with the newly created Fender Telecaster electric guitar.

Owens and his guitar found steady work at The Blackboard, a local honky tonk where he crossed paths with many of his mentors and contemporaries. Future stars such as George Jones, Merle Haggard and Roger Miller all played there in the 1950s. Owens briefly left to run radio station in Tacoma, Washington, but quickly returned to Bakersfield in the 1958. Upon his return, he met a fiddler-turned-guitarist named Don Rich, with whom he would record his first Top 10 record, “Under Your Spell Again.”

Far from Nashville, Owens was not impressed nor influenced by the Nashville Sound. “Buck's appeal to so many of today’s younger artists is based in the fact that he wouldn't knuckle under,” Shaw believes. “He was outspoken, he had a love for radio and he understood the sound he wanted. Some people called it the lowest common denominator, but it would always sound good. When you heard his records, you knew it was Buck.”

Neither would he fit himself into Nashville’s definition of country. From country to rock and gospel and blues, there was almost no genre of music Owens did not appreciate or adapt to what already was being called his “Bakersfield twang.” Price, the Bakersfield newspaperman who wrote Owens’ lengthy obituary, believes in another life Owens might just as easily have been a blues singer or a rock star. “But he was born poor and white, and raised on the Texas-Oklahoma border in the middle of the Great Depression. If he was going to play music at all, it was going to be country music,” Price says.

Alongside his string of original 1960s country hits such as “Tiger By The Tail” and “Together Again,” Owens and his Buckaroos would fill their albums with versions of such early rock classics such as “Johnny B. Goode” and “Memphis, Tennessee.” Nothing was further from the Nashville sound than the songs of The Beatles, and Owens became a fan who was thrilled when the Fab Four played his songs. Today, the odd marriage of Owens’ Bakersfield Sound and the pop sensibilities of The Beatles is reflected in the music of The Derailers, an Austin-based band led by guitarist and co-founder Brian Hoefeldt. “Just listen to The Beatles’ ‘I’ll Cry Instead,’ ” Hoefeldt says. “They incorporated Buck's sound.”

Owens didn’t mimic The Beatles, but he patterned one his songs, “Cryin' Time,” after the work of another of his heroes, Ray Charles, who scored a No. 6 Billboard chart hit with the tune. During the 1960s, Owens also established a record for a 45 single, alternating the top spot on the charts between the A-side “Together Again,” with “My Heart Skips a Beat” on the B-side. The Arizona orange picker would attract sold-out performances at Carnegie Hall and the London Palladium, and also play the White House at the invitation of fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson. The “picking and grinning” he did during his “Hee Haw” years wasn’t his favorite gig. “I just kind of prostituted myself for their money,” The Bakersfield Californian reported him telling one interviewer.

But back in Bakersfield, he already was learning how, like his music, to make money his own way. He created his own music publishing company, and he purchased radio and television stations in Bakersfield and Arizona that made him millions. He had so many business interests in Bakersfield, some jokingly dubbed the city “Buckersfield.” His family's country-themed radio station, KUZZ-FM, still often commands top spot in the ratings. After “Hee Haw” and the death of Don Rich, Owens’ interests in music faded until he was approached by rising young country star Dwight Yoakum in 1987, who had been crediting Buck Owens and the Buckaroos as his inspiration for songs like “Little Ways” to newer audiences unfamiliar with the Owens sound. Yoakum came to Bakersfield in 1987 and convinced Owens to join him on stage at the Kern County Fair to sing Owens' 1972 hit, “Streets of Bakersfield.” Owens and Yoakum re-recorded the song, and Owens had his first No. 1 hit single in almost two decades. This time, Nashville paid attention, and at last Owens was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

The re-release of “Streets of Bakersfield” made the city an attraction, too, and gave new fans a place to go when Owens completed construction of his $6.7 million Crystal Palace and began playing weekly at the combination nightclub, restaurant and museum to Owens’ unique brand of country. Now that he’s gone, “if it's marketed properly, it might start radiating a little Graceland-like Karma, although that's a tough comparison to life up to,” muses Price. “Hopefully, the Buckaroos will stick around for a few years, and I know Buck's son, Buddy Alan Owens, will be playing a few dates here and there.”

Buckaroos keyboardist Shaw says the Palace is a great venue, even without Buck, “and I know he wanted it to continue to be a living, active place, so the Buckaroos will continue.” The annual Buck Owens Birthday Bash will take place on August 12, and celebrity guests are expected, he says.

For the Owens legacy, the accolades did not end with the eulogies. On May 23, during the 41st Annual Academy of Country Music Awards in Las Vegas, an unlikely mix of musical genres was represented on stage during a salute to Owens. Country star Yoakum joined ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons, Brad Paisley, original Buckaroos steel guitarist Tom Brumley, Byrds legend Chris Hillman and drummer Travis Barker from Blink 182 to perform “Act Naturally” and, of course, “Streets of Bakersfield.” Owens, who spent his career refusing to confine himself or his music to any one genre, would have applauded.

Tags: Buck Owens, Music, Bakersfield, Celebrities