The legend of Hot Buttered Rum is pretty accurate.

Have you heard about the Sierra Nevada backpacking trip with a group of Marin County musicians drinking hot buttered rum?

No?

Well, add a warm-up to your drink, gather by the lantern and listen to the tale by Erik Yates, who was there that night. We’d have a campfire, but those are illegal in the backcountry.

“Any good piece of history needs some embellishments,” said Yates, who sings and plays banjo, flute, resophonic guitar and just about anything else. “There were a couple of different bands going during our college years. A few of the members of each group went into the backcountry and the important idea was, ‘What would mountain music sound like if it came from the Sierra instead of the Appalachians?’ — because that’s where bluegrass music came from.

“We’re not from North Carolina or Kentucky or Georgia or any of these places where they have it. A lot of my Southern friends, they just grew up with bluegrass. It’s part of their day to day. (But) what if Californians had invented mountain music and what if we did it in the early 2000s instead of the 1930s and ’40s? What if we take what we have to offer as musicians with varying degrees of musical knowledge and training and put it through the lens of this kind of rugged outdoor feel?
“It’s just so bad-ass up in the Sierra, you can’t help but feel you want to write some of the best songs of your life. It demands a lot of you creatively. OK, you made it here, now do something about it. A lot of the early songs came out of that experience.”
So the four-piece band began to write. Then it took its songs on the road on a vegetable-oil fueled bus for nearly 200 shows a year. Hot Buttered Rum grew legions of fans across the country. It released three albums from 2002 to 2005— “Live at the Freight and Salvage,” “In These Parts” and “Well-Oiled Machine.”
But times change. Yates is 32 years old now, and bass player Bryan Horne’s wife will soon have a baby. The bus now runs on biodiesel and isn’t used as often.
“We’re just going to tour closer to home for a little while,” Yates said. “We are touring smart and finding the markets like Tahoe that are sold on Hot Buttered Rum. If you live in Portland, Maine you may not see us as often. If you live in Portland, Ore., you are going to see us plenty.”
Moreover, the music changed when drummer Matt Butler joined the band.
“We were an acoustic band that was sort of like a rock ‘n’ roll band,” Horne recently told the Marin Independent Journal. “And now we’re a rock ‘n’ roll band than’s more like an acoustic band.”
“It feels like a natural progression,” Yates said.
Hot Buttered Rum’s new sound was laid down in a studio album, “Limbs Akimbo,” which is featured on jam band stations more out of reputation than style. It was produced by Tim Bluhm, best known for his group Mother Hips and his partnership with Jackie Greene in Skinny Singers. Greene also plays keyboards on the record.
“We call (Bluhm) the butcher,” Yates said. “He would come in and basically take a song that was long and convoluted and just simplify it until we just had the core of the song there. He’s got a good ear for what is important and what’s not.”
Hot Buttered Rum’s sound is still its own, and one that feels authentic and regional with touches of Grateful Dead. Yates’s Mount Tamalpais drama teacher was David Grisman’s daughter, and Greene is a member of Phil Lesh and Friends. Bluhm is producing Greene’s next album, a full-frontal homage to the Dead.
“We’d like to be the Crosby Stills and Nash and Young of the jam band world and the Grateful Dead of the songwriter world — no, scratch that line,” Yates said, adjusting his words. “The Grateful Dead is a bit of a third rail. Everybody compares everybody to the Grateful Dead and it doesn’t mean anything anymore. I think we like to be an instrumentally oriented songwriting band and a songwriting oriented instrumental band, too.
“You let the art lead and the ideas about the art follow.”