I've never understood the mindset that forces people to try to seek out a "crossover success." Obviously its all about adding to one's already overstuffed coffers of cash that convinces a musician that they should act or vice versa and pushes a musician to do something like try to appeal to a completely new audience.

If history has proven anything, it's that experiments like this - with few exceptions -usually result with the person in question sounding or looking absolutely ridiculous and out of place. This is especially true of country music stars. All I have to do is say the two words "Chris Gaines" and for most of you, a cold chill should run up your spine at the thought of Brooks playacting as a tortured rock star.

Now, Buck Owens doesn't go quite that far on this 1971 album, but his attempts to appeal to the "Summer of Love" crowd here come off like an ill-fitting suit in spite of all his attempts to tailor it to his frame with the brooding cover art and quotes on the back cover like, "Take Bridge Over Troubled Water. It's got real nice, simple, meaningful words."

I can't help but think that his management or the executives at Capitol Records pushed this idea on him as a way to boost his profile even further. Owens wasn't hurting for publicity at this point in his career.

He'd already had a ridiculous string of #1 singles and albums on the country chart and was a bona fide TV star thanks to co-hosting Hee Haw, which had started up two years before this album hit the shelves. So, someone must have fed him a "strike while the iron's hot" line and told him to do some stuff the kids want to hear, which meant picking a bunch of hippie tunes to put his drawl to.

Owens even tried to speak to the kids with a song of his own here, "San Francisco Town", which hits all the popular reference points – dropping out of an upper class lifestyle, moving to Haight-Ashbury and bumming for change to eat – but through his own Bakersfield aesthetic. The song, like the album as a whole, is not particularly awful, but it feels like a bit of a blight on his otherwise work up to this point.