Bo Cody: The Soundtrack of The Mountain Community

By Gary Randall, For The Mountain Times

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, weekends on the mountain had a rhythm of their own. As the work week ended, parking lots filled outside taverns and night spots. Music drifted through the cool evening mountain air. Inside, dance floors stayed crowded long after midnight.

Bo Cody was the mountain’s local band. The group played all over the Mount Hood area, but many people remember them most from nights at the Inn Between. The old tavern became one of the social centers of mountain life during those years. People came up from Portland and elsewhere to hear the music, but the band belonged to our local mountain communities. 

In October 1980, The Mountain newspaper described Bo Cody with a line longtime residents still remember today: “The Beatles were to Liverpool what Bo Cody is to Mount Hood.” It may have sounded exaggerated at the time, but for those who packed the Inn Between and other local venues, it probably felt accurate.

Bo Cody grew out of the casual, close-knit atmosphere that once defined life on The Mountain. According to the 1980 article, Rusty O’Regan had been sitting in the Whistle Stop playing a handful of John Prine songs when the owner asked him to return the following night and perform. “I told him I knew 15 songs,” O’Regan recalled. “He told me to play them and then repeat them — and he’d pay me 20 bucks.”

Not long afterward, O’Regan met Joe D. Lake at the Zigzag Store and convinced him to join in. What started almost by accident quickly became one of the mountain’s best-known bands.

Their sound was difficult to categorize. Lake described it simply as “good-hearted music,” blending country swing, rock-and-roll, and old fifties influences. Band member Tim McCarthy, a Welches School music teacher with formal musical training, referred to part of their style as “off-the-wall country.” Whatever it was, it worked. When Bo Cody played, people showed up.

The Barlow Trail Inn and the Inn Between were often packed when the band took the stage. Employees from The Inn Between recall being “swamped many a night” while Bo Cody performed. It was a time of dancing, weddings, cassette tapes, and nights when it felt like life on The Mountain would go on that way forever.

For younger residents who grew up on Mount Hood during that era, Bo Cody became part of the background of their childhood. Even though they were too young to enter the bars, they recall listening to the band play at events and backyard gatherings around The Mountain. As adults, they remember those times fondly. 

The group eventually grew beyond the local tavern circuit. Over the years, other musicians became part of Bo Cody as well, including Tony Glassman, Jesse Rogers, Neal Granstaff, and Jeff Minnick.

By 1984, a lineup that included O’Regan (Bo Cody), Glassman, Rogers, and Granstaff traveled to Nashville to compete in a national country-western competition at Opryland. The contest offered a substantial cash prize, the possibility of a recording contract, and a new Dodge van. For a band that had started almost accidentally in a small mountain tavern, it was a remarkable step. 

Today, many of the places connected to those memories have changed or disappeared altogether. The crowds are different. The Mountain is no longer the same as it was on those Friday nights. 

Today, memories of Bo Cody live on mostly among longtime mountain residents. But when they begin talking about the music scene that once existed on Mount Hood, the same memories surface again and again. Crowded parking lots. Packed dance floors. Good friends. Long nights at the Inn Between. And somewhere in the middle of it all was Bo Cody, providing the soundtrack.