‘The community owned it’ — Americana fans say a tough goodbye to the Utah venue they consider home

Getting inside the Garage on Beck is not easy. Some might even say it’s a pain. Just ask the patrons who circle the gravel parking lot out front, anxiously waiting for someone to pull out of one of the coveted spots.

But, that fits the vibe of the roadside venue that’s along U.S. 89.

The corrugated tin walls on the outside; the exposed wood; the iconic, illuminated, arrow-shaped marquee sign. Even the looming presence of the refinery in the background and the sound of traffic whirring by all make Garage on Beck what it is.

Owner Bob McCarthy remembers first seeing the venue and recognizing it for what it was: “a true road house.”

“I really thought this bar on the edge of town would have local musicians, blues, jazz. It’d be roots, Americana music — real music, not cover bands,” McCarthy said.

The kitchen would have homemade, or mostly made-from-scratch, cooking (menu staples include Mormon funeral potatoes and Golden Spike onion rings).

McCarthy’s dreams for the off-the-beaten path venue came to fruition. Since 2008, Garage on Beck has grown into an eclectic stop for locals. A place, McCarthy said, where there is a space for everyone: motorcycle club guys, the LGBTQ+ community and everyone in between.

“The community owned it,” he said.

At the end of this month, all of those things — the atmosphere, the food and, of course, the live music — will disappear. McCarthy said the lease was up and the refinery bought the building, so the Garage is officially set to close and be demolished.

For the past 17 years, McCarthy, who also owns Stoneground Italian Kitchen and Juniors Tavern, said he’s been running the venue on “borrowed time.”

After he learned of the Garage, McCarthy looked into the history of the building, which he says opened in 1947 as an industrial garage. Eventually it became the Rose’s Jimax Lounge. That’s when McCarthy picked it up.

Originally, he called it The Old Yellowstone Garage, since U.S. 89 connects to Yellowstone National Park. But nicknames ensued, like “old yeller” or “yellow garage.”

“It just really didn’t stick,” McCarthy said.

That’s when local blues musician, Brad Wheeler, suggested a name after the venue’s unique location. So Garage on Beck it became.

With a limited number of spots, parking at the venue is tricky. In the past, McCarthy said customers would park over the curb on the dirt strip next to the venue. In 2012, a fire in the junkyard behind the venue (a photo of that fire, taken by McCarthy, hangs on a wall inside) prompted a refinery to resurvey the land. Then, a fence got put in and they lost the dirt strip for a while.

“Things got very difficult. I had Ubers coming. I paid for people’s Ubers. I was gonna get a bus. I mean, we did everything we could,” he said. “Thank God [for] those little motorized things that people go around with. We barely paid the bills and we survived for a while.”

Ownership of the refinery changed, though, and customers began parking on the dirt strip again. In 2023, another fire broke out at Garage on Beck. Then, in January, came the final death knell. That’s when, according to a Building Salt Lake report, Axiom Properties sold the Garage to the Tesoro Refining and Marketing Company.

Despite the logistical troubles, Garage on Beck has become a home for many over the years.

“We nurtured our regulars to keep the realness,” McCarthy said.

A walk through the venue indicates as much. Exposed wood is everywhere. There’s a big inside bar and bathrooms to the right. A window display greets customers walking to the outside patio. Inside it, two skeletons are wearing “I’ll be in the Garage” T-shirts and fire hats.

On the outside patio, trees billow in the summer breeze on the last Thursday the venue will be open. The sound booth is a shack. There are road signs and string lights everywhere, and the acoustics are sublime.

All of it is authentic according to McCarthy, who said he’s designed the venue down to the smallest detail. He traveled the country to find the venue’s fireplace in California, the wood from the Amish back east and even old phones from an antique show in Texas.

McCarthy is also proud of how the Garage celebrated Americana music in Salt Lake City.

“It’s not a big moneymaker. It’s not your club scene. But there was a need for it, to have a home like that,” he said.

He was inspired by other local venue and vibes curators like John Paul Brophy Jr. — one of the owners of Dead Goat Saloon — and Otto Mileti, who owned The Zephyr Club.

McCarthy said owning Garage on Beck has been a “love affair.”

“People that could have been my brothers and sisters, could have been my family, and you felt it in the music when people played there,” McCarthy said.

Morgan Snow of Triggers & Slips, a local country-folk band, recognizes the uniqueness of the venue. Snow organized a three-day farewell festival, dubbed “The Last Dance” and will perform Saturday. Thirty acts will play over the three days at the Garage.

On Thursday, Mariana Madden’s acoustic set kicked off the festival, her voice echoing throughout the outside patio. She called Garage on Beck “a special place.” During Zach Bryson’s set, and later during Pompe N’ Honey’s, people got off their seats and took to the dance floor. As couples swayed, the venue began to fill to the brim.

“Where will all the cool people go with Garage on Beck gone?” asked Pompe N’ Honey’s Melissa Chilinski.

But, it’s Snow who claims he’s played the most at the venue over the past 15 years. His band released their first EP there and he worked with Duncan Phillips, son of famous Utah folk artist Bruce Duncan Phillips, to start the songwriter Sundays shows.

“It’s always been a hub for being able to go and play original music that’s also kind of a traditional road house honky-tonk music venue, bar,” Snow said, “which is not common at all in Utah.”

Garage on Beck, Snow said, fills in a gap in the Utah music scene — hosting artists that might not necessarily fit the bill at some of the other local venues. One of the things that sets it apart, he said, is the outdoor stage, which is hard to come by with noise ordinances.

“There’s not really a comparison in Utah that I can think of, “ Snow said. “It was kind of nice because it was a little bit smaller, so it felt more intimate, and it was kind of like the incubator for people to launch into the bigger venues.”

He’ll always remember a show Triggers & Slips played at Garage on Beck, back before an actual stage or sound system set-up existed.

“I remember distinctly that all of the bar staff took a break, and they came and danced for [the] whole song with us,” he said. “I remember in that moment just kind of being like, ‘This is a totally different thing to have this connection. … It was one of the few times that I was like … ‘Maybe I belong in this scene.’”

As the sun set Thursday and the sky darkened, the lights on the marquee sign turned on. Music poured out of the venue, from the front door where the J-Rad Cooley Band and Graveljaw Keaton performed, to the outside patio where Jim Bone and The Dig played.

People trickled outside to catch a breath. Others took their place in line, waiting to be one of the few more customers who will be able to visit the venue, which on this night is at max capacity. Many shared sentiments of pain at the upcoming loss of The Garage.

“There’s nothing else like it,” one man said, pulling out his phone to snap a photo of the unique front facade.

The facade and the rest of the structure will be gone soon. Yet those who come to Garage on Beck this weekend for “The Last Dance” will walk away with the red dust of the patio on the heels of their shoes and memories that will last beyond the lifetime of the building.

The Garage on Beck will host a “Garage sale” on June 6 from 3 to 7 p.m. and June 7 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. for people who want to buy a piece of the building before it goes down.