McMenamins and the Rustic Charm of Band Of Horses

I never write about my hometown, partially because it’s trite, and partially because I’ve only recently begun to realize the things that make it unique. In the time since I moved away from Oregon in 2018, I’ve gained a new perspective on the place where I spent the first 25 years of my life. 

For starters, where my family lives in Portland is far enough out in the suburbs that it shouldn’t even legally be considered “Portland” on the postal code. My childhood home is about ten miles away from downtown Portland proper; too far for any sense of culture or nightlife, but just close enough to reap the benefits of Portlandia if you really wanted to make the effort.

I have plenty of favorite bars, restaurants, and attractions in Portland that I’d recommend to someone visiting from out of town, but I also have an equally long list of lowkey personal faves. When I get homesick for Portland, I’m typically missing my friends, family, and childhood home, but when I think about the creature comforts that lie 1,257 west of me, I often think specifically of McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern. 

For those not from the Pacific Northwest, McMenamins is a chain of local, family-owned brewpubs that are primarily located in rehabilitated historical properties. They own restaurants, music venues, hotels, theaters, and more. Each location is decked out in a distinct handpainted style that artists have dubbed "historical surrealism." They also brew their own beers, ciders, wines, and coffees. The food itself is good-to-great pub fare, but usually the experience itself is worth the price of admission. 

While some Mcmenamins are in highly populated downtown areas or attractions all their own, many are found in slightly off-the-beaten-path locations, and Rock Creek Tavern might be the best example of this. 

Described as a “secluded outpost” of the McMenamins chain, the Rock Creek location is hidden away in the countryside of Hillsboro. It initially used to be an old repurposed barn house, but that location burned down in 2002. A new building was erected years later in the image of its predecessor, even going so far as to use timber from two local barns in the rebuild (one of which dates all the way back to the late 1800s). 

The Mcmenamins’ website accurately describes this location as a “rustic lair,” and honestly, I’m having a hard time thinking of a better two-word descriptor for it. The building is creaky, dark, and has a deep smell of cedar. The outside is covered in moss and surrounded by local fauna for an authentic tucked-away-in-the-forest pub feel. There’s a pool table, shuffleboard, and even giant wooden mushrooms that glow softly for the perfect woodland ambiance. 

When I picture Rock Creek Tavern in my mind, it instantly conjures up a perplexing mixture of comfort and nostalgia, which is how I imagine lots of people feel about a random bar or restaurant from their hometown. The big difference is that Mcmenamins often feels cool enough to warrant those rose-tinted goggles. I visit almost every time I return home, and it always lives up to my memory. 

The kicker about this location, and what’s most pertinent to this site as a music blog, is that McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern also features live music performances every night around 8 PM. This means that sometimes you’d be wrapping up your dinner or just sitting down right as a group of dudes sauntered in, hunkered down, and started busting out instruments. It’s honestly very DIY, a modest setup with an amp or two tucked away in a corner near the entryway of the building. 

Music would flow through the place each night, and you never knew what you were going to get. Some evenings it would be a suitably-folksy banjo-led stompfest; other times, it would be a group of four dads laying down one seemingly never-ending twelve-bar blues lick. No matter the genre or arrangement, it was always an experience, and the live music is a real wild card benefit that came with dining there. 

This location is about 15 miles outside of downtown Portland, so it’s out of the way for most people but only a stone’s throw away for my family and me. The Grimes Clan would often venture to this location for a burger and a brew a handful of times each year for most of my young adulthood. It took us far enough out in the country that our phones didn’t work and (especially before the advent of smartphones) always felt like we were being transported into another world. 

If you’re curious what the place looks like, you can scroll back in my Instagram a few years to see a picture I snapped while looking down on the band’s setup from our table in the upper balcony. You can really tell the vibe, from the low-light stained glass to the two dudes in suede hats setting up instruments. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been there, but looking at that picture, I can practically taste the Cajun Tater Tot seasoning and dark, chocolaty Terminator Stout. 

This combination of senses isn’t something I’ve been able to replicate anywhere else. Rock Creek Tavern is a one-of-a-kind combination of sights, smells, flavors, and sounds that can only happen in a Mcmenamins. That’s why I get homesick for this specific restaurant; it’s a feeling I’ve spent a good chunk of my life fortifying, replicating, and memorizing. While I haven’t been able to visit McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern lately, one thing I have been able to do is listen to Band of Horses.

It’s not like I’ve seen Band of Horses play at ​​McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern (they’ve almost always been far too big of a band for that sort of gig), but the group’s first two albums are incredibly nostalgic and personal to me in the same way that ​​McMenamins is. Maybe it’s just a byproduct of when I uncovered their music (and how powerfully “The Funeral” has been used in countless movies and TV shows), but I would consider both Cease To Begin and Everything All The Time to be some of the best alternative records of the 2000s. On some level, this feels like a bold claim for a decade whose alternative music is primarily defined by groups like The Strokes and The White Stripes. Band of Horses came at the tail end of that era and just barely preceded the overbearing folk twee of groups like Mumford and Sons and Lumineers. 

I couldn’t stand that “Hey-Ho” bullshit, and not just because those songs so quickly became synonymous with Subaru commercials and the overall “hipster” movement of the 2010s, but because of how well Band of Horses perfected the same formula just years before. After all, why would you listen to a watered-down approximation when you had the real thing right there? 

There’s an underlying earnestness to those first two Band of Horses albums that makes them feel like something more than just standard “alt-country” fare. Sure they jangled, had some twang, and were known to use a banjo here and there, but that by no means should put them on the same playlists as groups like Of Monsters and Men. And no slight to any of those bands, if you like em, you like em, but I simply object to the fact that Band of Horses often gets unfairly lumped into the same category retroactively. 

In the time since their newest single, “Crutch,” I’ve found myself revising the Band of Horses Discography. I’ve found a renewed love for the grungy Why Are You OK, I’ve reveled in the warm shores of Cease To Begin, but most of all, I’ve found myself gravitating towards the band’s debut album Everything All The Time. 

The group’s first LP is a modest ten-track collection of songs released on Sub Pop Records in 2006. This was the first and last album to feature three of the band’s founding members and saw the group recording new versions of five songs off their Tour EP from the year prior. To this day, Everything All The Time is a downright stunning debut. It suffers from a bit of “Mario 64 Syndrome” in that it came first and contains what’s far-and-away the band’s most popular song, but that doesn’t mean the deeper cuts are worthless, in fact, far from it. 

What’s most impressive about this album is how well it acts as an introduction to this band and their world. It isn’t front-loaded, and it isn’t over-produced; it’s just 36 minutes of beautiful, rustic, folk-flavored indie rock. 

“The First Song” kicks the record off with a beautiful sway and ascendant melody that warms the body and soul. The lyrics are Christmas-adjacent (a huge plus for someone like me) and counter this sense of seasonal wonder with a more profound melancholy that often comes part and parcel with the holidays. This leads directly into the snappy one-two-punch “Wicked Gil” and “Our Swords,” the former of which is a vibrant drum-led track and the latter of which possesses a bouncy bassline that is counterbalanced by violent imagery.

At a certain point, these first three songs all feel like an onramp to the main attraction of Side A: breakaway single “The Funeral.” As mentioned above, this track has been used in everything from skateboarding video games to the 2012 Rihanna vehicle Battleship. You’ve probably heard this song at least a dozen times without even seeking it out. To this day, it’s still the group’s biggest hit, racking up about 200 million more plays than their second-most-popular song on Spotify. “The Funeral” may be a little tired, but does that make it any less impactful? Absolutely not. The song begins with a downright iconic guitar riff and solitary vocal delivery. It then beautifully layers elements on until the entire thing becomes a pressure cooker of remorse and sorrow. The track explodes into an outpouring of catharsis with the first chorus as the full band joins in, masterfully turning the intensity up and down as the song calls for it. It’s undoubtedly the band’s masterpiece; my only dig against this song is that it’s most people’s sole experience with the band. “The Funeral” is a certified hit; it’s Band of Horses’ “Fade Into You,” the exact kind of big alt-pop crossover that groups like this needs to achieve success and name recognition early on.

After the grandiose pinnacle that is “The Funeral,” the group winds down the first half of the record with “Part One,” and here is where Everything All The Time gets truly fascinating to me. “Part One” is a gorgeous and aching love song featuring velveteen guitar and some of the most gentle drumming on the entire record. It’s precious, confessional, and reserved, especially coming in the wake of a big swing like “The Funeral.”

Flip the record over, and you’re immediately greeted with a stomping barnburner in “The Great Salt Lake,” an ode to the largest inland body of saltwater in the Western Hemisphere. This leads to a downright hootenanny on “Weed Party,” a bluegrass banger that’s about exactly what you would expect from the song title. Kicking off with a titular declaration of “Weed party!” followed by a hearty “YEE-HAW,” it’s hard not to instantly absorb the infectious enthusiasm of what could easily be the album’s most high-energy cut.

The final three tracks are something of a depressive comedown that’s guaranteed to follow in the wake of staying up late the night before spending all your endorphins having a good ol’ fashioned barn hang with all your buddies. While this run of songs is a little slower and sadder, I love it for the pensive contrast that it provides to everything that came before.

Specifically, “I Go To The Barn Because I Like The” is one of my favorite songs on the record, second only to “The Funeral” or “The First Song,” depending on the day. This cut begins with the same reserved acoustic guitar found in “Part One” and finds lead singer Ben Bridwell accompanied by whisper-quiet harmonies courtesy of guitarist Mat Brooke. As the narrator brokenheartedly explains, “Well I'd like to think I'm the mess you'd wear with pride” the track begins to sprawl outward with a gorgeous pedal steel twang by the second verse. The narrator eventually concedes “you were right” over a bed of lonesome hums. The drums, bass, and second guitar all jump in for the hook where single words and phrases are uttered with patience, weaving together a story of forgiveness and redemption.

Outside
By your doorstep
In a worn out
Suit and tie
I'll wait
For you to come down
Where you'll find me
Where we'll shine

It should be clear now that I love this song quite a bit. “I Go To The Barn Because I Like The” really feels like it’s a hidden gem tucked away in the back half of the tracklist, much like McMenamins Rock Creek Taven. In fact, this song has always strongly evoked that sense of place in my head whenever I listen to it. The fact that it’s so beautifully written and deploys one of my favorite instruments of all time is just a bonus.

From here, the band crafts a five-minute banjo-led slow build in “Monsters” and wraps things up with a minimalist campfire tune on “St. Augustine.” Just like that, a mere 36 minutes and seven seconds later, you find yourself on the other side of Everything All The Time. You’ve journeyed from the estranged holiday season of “The First Song,” been swept up in grief on “The Funeral,” eased your mind with the natural wonder of “The Great Salt Lake,” and gotten stoned in the countryside with “Weed Party.” You hit the comedown and found some sense of inner peace with the final three tracks and now find yourself rolling back to civilization… at least until you start it all over again from the top.