Garth Brooks Rocks Buck Owens’ Place On Second Dive Bar Stop

8 Ten, Inc. – Garth Brooks
Garth Brooks brings his “Dive Bar Tour” to Buck Owens

The Crystal Palace in Bakersfield, Calif., is hardly a dive bar – not with a silver-dollar and longhorn-studded Cadillac mounted on the wall behind the bar – but the club founded by Buck Owens and its stage, where Garth Brooks proposed to his now-wife Trisha Yearwood, was a rockin’ second stop on Garth Brooks’ “Dive Bar” tour Aug. 15. 

The joint was jammed, with some 600 reported in attendance despite the official capacity listed at 500. But hey, it’s Bakersfield. Maybe more importantly, it was Garth Brooks paying homage. We don’t need no stinkin’ rules here. 

The show was the second of what are to be seven club-level stops on Brooks’ “Dive Bar” tour, and, in this case, the gig paid homage to Buck Owens and the Bakersfield Sound, at the 500-capacity Crystal Palace. The tour’s first stop was at Chicago’s Joe’s on Weed Street in July. The next is yet to be announced.

Local country radio station KUZZ, part of Owens’ onetime radio empire, hosted the event. Tickets were available only to contest winners. 

Why is this a big deal? Because Brooks doesn’t need to do club shows – not when he’s doing stadiums and arenas for multiple nights. Over the last three years, Brooks has on average sold 71,277 tickets and grossed $4.59 million per stand, according to Pollstar Boxoffice reports.

But Brooks clearly enjoyed himself in Bakersfield, a city of about 400,000 now, but around 50,000 when Owens and Bakersfield Sound stalwarts like Merle Haggard and Billy Mize where in their heyday. 

Brooks received Pollstar’s first Legends of Live award in 2018 after coming out of semi-retirement and picking up where he left off, blowing up attendance numbers by running multiple-date stands in lots of secondary markets. In January 2015, Brooks sold 121,832 tickets over seven gigs at BOK Center in Tulsa, Okla., grossing $7.40 million; in September 2017, he sold 98,482 tickets over nine gigs at Denny Sanford Premier Center in far-flung Sioux Falls, S.D., raking in $6.57 million.