I have also been constantly thinking about this. Apparently I ended up deleting my bit about the Roadhouse in my Initial Thoughts, which is just as well as now I will talk about it tons.
The Roadhouse-as-actual-music-venue works so well for me as a feature of the show, because to end every episode with a band performing a song – in-world – as the credits scroll over them is SO traditionalist and retro that it almost loops back around to the uncanny bizarrity that is the rest of Lynch’s screentime, stopping along the way in how something like The O.C. would often end episodes with a song*, and of course that prime time teen soap drama was always what half the characters on Twin Peaks were up to anyway.
*with a similar air of deliberate curation, designed to reflect a sensibility/aesthetic as much as featuring new artists (remember when The O.C. made Death Cab For Cutie a name) (incidentally, a band from another town in western Washington)
And The Roadhouse-as-actual-music-venue works so well for me as a feature of the TOWN, because the cool semi-secret remote rural venue is exactly the sort of weird Americana faerie ring shit that should happen in a place as obviously ~magical~ as Twin Peaks. Because like, these places happen. Lemme tell you about the summer I spent in Berkshire County in western Massachusetts, living with a dozen other arts management interns in a slowly revitalizing former mill town. One them was from the area originally, and one night when we were driving back together from some group cultural outing, she decided that we should take a detour to this restaurant/bar/music venue/magic place she once worked at. We drove for a while on these winding roads through the hills, and finally we reach this huge old house in the middle of the forest. It’s all lit up, there are people inside having dinner and drinks, there’s a live band playing, and outside on the lawn under some string lights is a slightly drunk man wearing a giant spangled donkey head leftover from some production of Midsummer Night’s Dream, which he is staging an impromptu revival of with a handful of other slightly drunk people, some of whom work there, some of whom are patrons. Turns out he owns the place, he’s my friend’s former boss, and when he gives me his card (which I still have on my dresser), his title is listed as ‘Sandman’. This is The Dream Away Lodge, and Bob Dylan and Joan Baez used to go there, and it is very real. Hipsters drive in from out of town (us!), and another man wearing a unicorn head mixed me a drink in a room where the ceiling was stars. Somehow David Lynch did not direct any of this.
(Curiously, the nearest thing a city can offer to this sort of place would probably be The Bell House out in Brooklyn — and not only is Gowanus basically the revitalized mill town of New York City, but the first time I was there I texted a picture of the space to a friend asking why she wasn’t at this Twin Peaks set with me.)
