Buck 'Em!: The Autobiography of Buck Owens by Randy Poe & Buck Owens

Author:Randy Poe & Buck Owens [Poe, Randy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: autobiography, music, musician, country, biography
Publisher: Backbeat Books
Published: 2013-11-01T04:30:00+00:00

Part IV

Hee Haw

Chapter Ninety-Three

By the time I got to Nashville in early May, what was originally going to be a pilot had turned into an actual special that was scheduled to air on CBS the following month. And then, before we even finished taping the special, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour got cancelled. All of a sudden CBS was calling for a dozen more shows to be taped right away so they’d have something to replace the Smothers Brothers.

Tom and Dick Smothers were great comedians and a couple of pretty good folk singers, too, but they’d gotten way too controversial for the executives at CBS. In 1969, the whole Vietnam thing was still going on, and the Brothers had been using their comedy act as a way of protesting the war. A few years later, just about everybody realized that the Vietnam War was unwinnable and that the best thing to do was to just get the hell out of there. But in ’69, people who protested the war were considered downright un-American. CBS kept getting more and more complaints about the kinds of things the Smothers Brothers were saying and doing on their show, so the network finally took ’em off the air.

So, thanks to the Smother Brothers being cancelled, I ended up staying in Nashville for several weeks, taping show after show so we’d have enough to fill up the rest of the summer.

Unfortunately, when I’d agreed to get involved with John and Frank’s TV project, I’d made the same mistake I’d made back when I agreed to be in that movie, From Nashville with Music—I’d forgotten to ask ’em what the name of the damn thing was going to be.

John and Frank had a guy who worked with ’em named Bernie Brillstein. Bernie was a New Yorker who hated country music. It was bad enough that he had no appreciation for the music the show was going to be featuring. He was also the one who came up with show’s title—Hee Haw. Here I’d spent more than a decade doing everything I could to present the kind of music I was singing and playing in a professional, dignified manner, and now I was going to be starring in a show with a title that sounded like it was making fun of country music and the whole rural way of life.

As much as I hated the name, I still thought the idea of having a weekly network TV show that featured country music was a great idea. So, I decided to live with the show’s title, and I was more than happy to live with the show’s money. John and Frank had agreed to pay me tens of thousands of dollars per episode, and they said that if the show lasted past the summer, they’d pay me $400,000 a year. Remember, this was 1969. Four hundred thousand dollars in 1969 money would be the equivalent of millions now—and that kind of money meant I wouldn’t have to tour nearly as much as I had in the past.

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