What was the Rockin’ Horse Saloon?
Scottsdale has always had cowboy bars. In 1991 it got a roadhouse that booked the roots and alt-country end of the dial.
Tucker Woodbury opened the Rockin’ Horse Saloon that year on Indian School Road, directly across from the Coach House, in a building that now sells rugs. He called it an “Austin-esque roadhouse,” and the description fits: 5,500 square feet, a stage, a dance floor, and a calendar that ran from country, Americana and rockabilly to roots-rock and alt-country. “It was a really cool venue,” Woodbury told New Times in 2013. “We did country on weekends and then programmed it with nationals.”
The nationals were the reason music people remember it. Son Volt, Wilco, Joe Ely and Michelle Shocked played the room, and Valley regulars like the Hoo Doo Kings, Flathead, Hans Olson, Kings of Pleasure, Steven Ashbrook and Chico Chism filled the nights between. In 1992 a young promoter named Charlie Levy booked Barenaked Ladies there and met Woodbury, a partnership that would eventually produce downtown Phoenix’s Crescent Ballroom.
The original room had an unlucky end. In June 1996 an exploding pressure cooker started a fire that destroyed it. Within days Woodbury had found a new home on Stetson Drive, and the Rockin’ Horse reopened there later that year. He left the business in 1998, and the trail of the Stetson Drive version goes cold after that. The original site is David E. Adler Fine Rugs.
Two kinds of night
The weekend was a honky-tonk. The weekends belonged to country bands and dancing, in a neighborhood that already had the Coach House across the street, pouring since 1959, and the Rusty Spur a few blocks away on Main Street.
Midweek was a listening room. The other nights went to touring acts from the roots and alt-country world: Son Volt, Wilco, the singer-songwriter Joe Ely and Michelle Shocked. Getting those acts into a 5,500-square-foot room in Scottsdale was the booking coup that made the place matter.
Locals were the backbone. The Hoo Doo Kings, Flathead, Hans Olson, Kings of Pleasure and Steven Ashbrook were on the bill often, and so was the blues drummer Chico Chism. In May 1996 the room hosted DJ Johnny D’s 50th birthday, with Buddy Long performing, a month before the fire.
Where to two-step now. The Rockin’ Horse is gone, but the country bars that outlived it are in our guide to country bars and line dancing.
A short life, and a long afterlife
The Rockin’ Horse’s own history is brief and thinly documented. What the record holds is mostly one retrospective in Phoenix New Times and Woodbury’s own memories: the 1991 opening, the bookings, the 1996 fire and the move to Stetson Drive, and Woodbury’s exit in 1998. We could not find when the Stetson Drive version closed or what replaced it, and if you know, the Old Town nightlife of the late 1990s is a story still missing pieces.
Its afterlife is better recorded, because the people outlasted the building. Woodbury went on to co-found Genuine Concepts, the group behind The Vig, The Little Woody and Night Owl, and in 2014 the group bought Mabel’s on Main and reopened it as The Beverly, named for his coastal Massachusetts hometown. Levy, the promoter who booked Barenaked Ladies there in 1992, became the Valley’s best-known independent promoter, and the two collaborated on Crescent Ballroom, Valley Bar and The Van Buren in downtown Phoenix decades later.
That is the Rockin’ Horse’s real legacy. Scottsdale in the 1990s was a town of cowboy bars and theme clubs, and this was a cowboy bar run by people who cared about the music. The model they learned there, a room built around the bands, ended up in Phoenix, not Scottsdale.
Honest assessment: the Rockin’ Horse lasted only about five years on its original corner and is mostly remembered by musicians and the people who followed them. But for anyone who saw Wilco or Son Volt in a Scottsdale honky-tonk the size of a ranch house, it was one of the best rooms the city ever had, and Old Town has not had a roadhouse like it since.