Buck Owens’ Crystal Palace, which has played host to nearly every country star and acts as the de facto headquarters of the Bakersfield sound., has closed its doors for good.

The 28-year-old restaurant, bar and club in Bakersfield, which occupied more than 21,000 square feet in a two-story Western Revival-style house at 2800 Buck Owens Blvd., played its last show Saturday, August 9.

“Two nights ago was the last night,” Jim Shaw, 78, the director of the Buck Owens Private Foundation, told SFGATE Monday. The foundation owns the business. 

For 13 months, the property has been for sale, asking $7.5 million. Shaw had to convince the Owens family, which owns the foundation, to keep the lights on at the Crystal Palace after it was listed. 

Shaw had a front-row seat to Buck Owens for more than three decades, as the keyboardist and leader of the Buckaroos, Owens’ band. 

For Owens, there was no place like home, and the Crystal Palace, from the mid-1990s until his death, was it. 

“We’d play Rockefeller’s in Houston, Crazy Horse [Steak House] down south, you couldn’t get your auditorium arena money, but you had a good time,” Shaw said. “That’s why everybody wanted to play the Palace.” 

And everybody did. “The Dixie Chicks, Taylor Swift, Garth Brooks, basically everybody came there,” he said. 

Brooks even proposed to his wife Trisha Yearwood at the Crystal Palace in May 2005. Yearwood famously covered her mouth and said, “Oh, here?”

“It was a great ride, and the first 10 years we were open, the Buckaroos played with Buck every Friday and Saturday night,” he said. “Those nights we had George Jones and Willie Nelson, they’d pop in on us, and we would jam.”

Owens himself played his final Friday show on March 24, 2006, the night before he died. 

The Crystal Palace, even as its lights have dimmed, is still for sale, Shaw said. And he hopes that a buyer who appreciates its history will still surface.

Courtesy SFGATE