By Patrick Robinson

This year marks the 35th year that Easy Street Records has been in business in West Seattle and the 25th year for their in-store cafe. The synergy between music, thick bacon, strong coffee, and the northwest all coalesced in that spot. Today it's a destination for people from all over the world who know its reputation and for locals who just want to have a good meal with great music. Matt Vaughan has been part of the Seattle music industry for nearly four decades and shared his memories of the cafe and only a few of his hundreds of amazing encounters with some of the best musicians of our time.

 

 

Westside Seattle

How did you come to build the cafe? Why did you build the cafe in the first place?

Matt

Well, I did it for selfish reasons.There wasn't a lot of places that you could go to in the mid to late 90s. Charlestown Café was great, but they were a little too far away from this junction and I was fortunate in that my roommate, Pat Tunison was a great friend of mine, but also a great chef, and he's the one that instilled the confidence in me to try and do a cafe.

Westside Seattle

But Easy Street was not in this full space at that time?

Matt

No, do you remember Joe's Grill?

They served up probably 50 pots of coffee every day, and maybe sold two hamburgers. It was blue haired. You know people would have their bridge meetings there.

That was the kind of place it was, great family, good people, but eventually they went out of business, and I had become good friends with them and they offered to sell. I think it was just the chairs and the tables. You know it was like 500 bucks, 1000 bucks total like, whoever wants the tables and chairs is going to get the business.

Westside Seattle

What year was that?

Matt

It would have been 96-97. And then I had it for about 2 years not knowing what I was going to do with it. I was considering maybe expanding the record shop, but you know, there was a full kitchen in there. It needed a lot of updating, but the big thing is that there was a hood that went through the building to the roof. Those are hard to come by. They're very expensive. So I never tore that out, but it has big high ceilings and I started doing “in-stores” there. The first real in-stores that Easy Street ever did, and really kind of the first ones that you you saw in Seattle with great sound and decent lighting where it felt more like a venue.

Westside Seattle

Who was the first one?

Matt

First one I believe was a group called Luna, here on Elektra Records, then we also had Rocket from the Crypt and then we had Mudhoney, which was of course spilling out into the street. That would have been 97-98. They had a record out called Tomorrow Hit Today and it was a street date in-store, but I was just throwing beers. Well, it was more like a party, but when we weren't doing in-stores in there it was just like a social club for me and my friends and you know, a few customers here and there. We had a basketball hoop. We had a turntable and boxing bags.

All we were missing was a pool table, but that was downstairs.

Westside Seattle

So you started and you didn't take it seriously as a cafe until when?

Matt

Every day I'm you know, trying to find a good cup of coffee. I'm trying to find a good breakfast. I just did it, again for selfish reasons and eventually I just kind of got pushed into it. I was paying rent. I had no choice, I had to do it.

Westside Seattle

So what year was it officially opened as a cafe?

Matt

1998, so this would be its 25th anniversary.

 

 

Westside Seattle

Do you have some special event planned for that to honor that?

Matt

This is it. Thanks for reminding us it's our 25th anniversary. I'm just putting it together right now.

Westside Seattle

There'll be no party? Will there be an anniversary cake?

Matt

Well, now that we can get people together again, sure. Let's try to do something.

Westside Seattle

We understand that it didn't start out well.

Matt

We were losing our ass. If it would have just started out as just a cafe and there was no record store attached to it we would have been out of business.

Westside Seattle

So at first the record store had to subsidize the cafe?

Matt

Right, yeah we were losing four to five grand a month for three years.

Westside Seattle

But you were serving beer?

Matt

Soon enough we were yeah, and we were doing pretty well with coffee. We had a good coffee bar down here and that was the majority of the business. It wasn't the food, so there I got Pat Tunison, who's a master chef just sitting there. He's going up and down the street trying to drum up business. I was too. It was just too weird, too eccentric for most people and then it clicked.

Westside Seattle

Did you start out with all of the clever names for the dishes with that design in mind right away?

Matt

Yeah it was The Johnny Cash Special, the Dolly Parton Stack. The Easy Rider. The Woody Guthrie Farmers Omelette, The Hank Williams Western Omelet James Browns, the Frances Farmer French Toast.

Westside Seattle

So right from the start it was designed. It was a musical themed cafe.

 

 

 

Matt

Yes, and some saw that as kind of corny or you know funny. The food was great though. Charlestown Cafe was still open. I think Webster's down the street had closed or morphed into something else. There really wasn't a stand alone diner in The Junction here.

Westside Seattle

From that early beginning it clicked in the early 2000s. Four or five years out.

Matt

Yeah, eventually we started getting the students and you know, almost kind of a beatnik kind of crowd. A musician crowd.

Westside Seattle

You mentioned that while it was under construction, Chris Cornell came up and spied what was going on. He came in and had a beer.

Matt

Yeah, he was the first person to sit at the coffee counter there. We just finished it, my friend Jeff and I, the horseshoe bar down there, and he was walking his daughter Lily up the street and the garage door was halfway open because we were trying to get the dust out and he peeks his head in and he'd become a great friend of the shop, and he shopped all the time. At that point, though, we were having to close the shop down for him. He'd just gotten so famous. It would have been after Super Unknown. So he walks in with his daughter Lily in the stroller and he sits down, he says. 'You got beers here?' So we got Rainier or Olympia. I just grab it and hand him an Olympia, he downs it, and he's just asking questions about the 45's that are embedded in the bar there and he thought that was a cool concept and I told him my friend John over at Cyclops is the one that kind of helped me come up with with this. He kind of gave me the tricks on how to do it right. And then we talked about Cyclops and the Belltown scene. He was a great friend of the store and I'm honored to have had him in here so many times.

 

 

Westside Seattle

When did you first meet him?

Matt

Oh gosh. That goes back to when maybe I was up the street. 87 or 88 I mean, I knew him from the Penny Lane Records days.

Westside Seattle

Did you really?

Matt

He would come in to buy records oh yeah. He and his best friend, Eric Garcia. West Seattle guy and him. They were in quite often and so was Scott McCullum, who would later be in Skin Yard and Gruntruck So, West Seattle was as grungy as it gets. It really was you know.

Westside Seattle

Do you remember what kind of music he liked?

Matt

He supported most northwest artists, and most northwest bands. Oh everyone... we all piled on his back. He's the guy that carried the whole scene to be honest with you. You get me talking too much more. I'll start crying. He's the guy... he's the guy. And what I do recall, whenever Jeff Buckley's Grace came out, I'm thinking 93 to 94. So early 90s, Jeff Buckley...

Grace comes out and I recall Chris waxing poetic to myself and the entire staff for it seemed like 15 minutes about 'This might be one of the greatest records of all time. This is it.' He thought Jeff Buckley's lyrics and vocals were something that really spoke to him. I think what he was saying is he was someone who was on equal par with him without saying. I never sensed any kind of competition with any artist with him. When you're that confident or you're that good it's just there and it's art.

You know, here we got the Ramones playing right now and you know you go to New York with the Ramones and Television and the Heartbreakers and Blondie, and Talking Heads and New York Dolls. the Dictators, they were competitive. It was like gang warfare for a lot of them.

Westside Seattle

In that scene, yes.

Matt

Yeah, Seattle, not so much at all and a lot of that starts with Chris Cornell being the leader, not that way.

Westside Seattle

Do you think West Seattle as a place has an influence over that attitude? West Seattle doesn't seem like a place where people compete with each other necessarily.

Matt

It's a collective out here. A lot of that, I think comes from you know, you have a lot of unions out here and at the time Todd Shipyard workers and stevedores and the maritime industry, fishing industry, Boeing engineers. I mean, all these homes are post war built for Boeing engineers, close to the plant.

Westside Seattle

Also the geographic isolation because people don't come here necessarily. It's not a destination per se. It's West Seattle. It's a closed community because of our inability to get out. So the peninsula tends to keep people trapped....

Matt

Little accidental island, yeah.

Westside Seattle

You've had lots of in-stores. You know how many you've had?

Matt

Close to 2000.

Westside Seattle

2000 shows In 35 years?

Matt

That's a lot for a record store. That's not so much for the Crocodile or so many of our great venues around town. But yeah, for a record shop, that's pretty hot.

Westside Seattle

I'd say there are two other still standing well known venues here, The Paramount and The Crocodile.

Matt

Well, the Showbox. It's morphed many times but. We'll see if that sticks around.

Westside Seattle

In any case, let's go through some famous names that have been through here and give me your impressions about them and your sense of what kind of people they were in your experience with them. OK, go with Elvis Costello.

Matt

Elvis Costello... we had an in-store with him and he helped open my Queen Anne store, grand opening. Yeah, that was the first year that we were open. The record When I Was Cruel had come out, which I had gotten an advance of and I loved that record and it just happened that I was reading a New York Times article about how he had done an in-store somewhere... it might have been in London or whatever, but just the fact that he had done one ... I thought my God, for a legendary artist like that to even consider it regardless if it's his hometown that he's at or wherever, that's great. But yeah, I loved that record.

I felt that Seattle had always been a strong market for him from the very beginning. I sense that he really loved Seattle. Seattle was always on his tour stops. And he was starting the tour here and was rehearsing here so he had a studio for a few days prior to. And so the tour started in Seattle, which I thought OK well, he's got some time here in Seattle.

Westside Seattle

This is all your idea? They didn't reach out to you, you reached out to them?

 

 

Matt

Right, and so I reached out to my label rep. Label rep put puts me in touch with the manager. It's, you know it's still... It was a far cry, but hey, you're having the conversation. And his security team happened to be in town. The head of security, his name was Paddy. He comes in with two other blokes, they're all Irish, so this was like Millers Crossing walking into the place. Older guys with the paperboy caps, bigger guys, hooligans really... older hooligans from the 60s or 70's... it looked like, and Costello I believe is Irish, who was born in Ireland or had something to do with Ireland. I'm Irish American and so we had a little bit of rapport from the get go. Let's put it that way.

They walk around. They walk through every square inch of the shop, and said 'So where's the Green Room going to be?' I say 'The backroom here you know, the break room for my staff, but it will be yours,' and they're kind of laughing, OK? 'Uh, so you're going to put Elvis Costello in the employee break room?' I said  'I'll fix it up, don't worry.', So they're laughing through all of this and then I had these murals outside and I said 'I'll throw in a When I was Cruel mural.' I went on about Elvis Costello, talking about all of his records.  Clearly they knew I was a fan, they knew that. Seattle was the marketplace. The show was already sold out so I didn't have anything to compete with the promoter of the show at Paramount. And Paddy says 'We're going to need a barrier.' And my contractor was on standby right there. He came down. 'We'll have a fence built tomorrow.'

He says 'Well guys, I think this is going to happen' and Elvis shows up a couple of days later. It was a line around the block all the way I remember to Caffe Ladro around 1st and Roy, 1st and Mercer.  We had the store closed down and then one by one we let everybody in. He stuck around for four hours, signed every autograph.

Westside Seattle

So did you have a conversation with him?

Matt

Oh yeah, Oh yeah... quite a few yeah.

Westside Seattle

What was your impression of him?

Matt

He's still got that snotty kind of punk rock attitude. But you know he was all in.

This guy's a guy that has never stopped so he doesn't look back on the past all that much. Although that particular record he was. He doused himself in it a little bit. And I just recall him just being extremely kind to everybody and gave everyone as much time as they needed with him.

Westside Seattle

How was the show?

Matt

Oh great. He did it as a one man show, so he was playing all the pedals.

Westside Seattle

Didn't have his band with him?

Matt

He was doing all the percussion. Think he had a keyboard.

Westside Seattle

And that's what he did when he started out. Busking on the street.

Matt

Yeah, so he was used to that.

Westside Seattle

Very familiar. Let's move on to Lana Del Rey.

 

 

Matt

Lana Del Rey. She had a record out called Born to Die. It had just come out. It was doing well. People were wondering who she was and before I knew it she was on Saturday Night Live essentially as a nobody. I think maybe just a week or two after the record dropped.

And she's just, if you remember, she's just standing there. And I recall watching and I never thought anything other than she's beautiful and she's, you know, a diva or chanteuse really. She played a couple songs great but she got panned the next day. One of the worst performances on SNL. It broke her heart. You know the record label, her management everybody was in panic mode over it and the following day after Saturday Night Live or a day or two after I get a call from Universal Music. Would you be willing to have Lana Del Rey?

Westside Seattle

They reached out to you?

Matt

Well, yeah, I just I loved the record. I just saw her on SNL live... yeah well it didn't go over too well. I mean I thought she was great. And I said 'I also just had Mike McCready asking about her. He loves her,' I said 'the people love her up here.'

He says 'OK, well we need to get her back on the street level and we need a retail venue that can host her properly and get her to do that. We think she deserves somewhere where she can feel natural. She was maybe under a little bit too much pressure on Saturday Night Live being on network TV.'

I said, 'Well, absolutely yeah. It was, you know, sold out. 800 people there. Couldn't get anymore in. She comes on stage and before she even says a word... it's standing room only and everyone is just applauding her because she needed it. This was a young girl that just got panned nationally. Just for performing her two songs, and it's just that was her style. She was like a Julie London type. You know she was like a Dusty Springfield. She wasn't there to put on a big show on Saturday Night Live. She was just there to do her songs... and she almost dropped to her knees,' was in tears over the applause that she was getting. I recall her lip was quivering and she couldn't even say anything on the mic. She was really nervous and she was being over flooded with all this gratitude. She goes on to do her set there at the shop. She probably played for 40 minutes or so and she's getting an encore, which rarely happens at an in-store. You know? In-stores... They're playing their songs, they're selling their record. It's an animated book reading. And she goes into the backroom and I go back there with her. It's just her and I. She's sitting on the backstage area behind the curtain. And I opened the curtain just a little bit.  'Lana, look there' and she peeks out and they want another song. She stands up and all she says was 'I knew this was the right decision coming to Seattle and playing here.' And I'm hugging her again, her lips quivering and like I'm 'Lana, do you want to do another song?'  And she says, 'I want to do Heart-shaped Box by Nirvana. I was like whoa! She goes 'it's my favorite song and I'm in Seattle'... and she's like prepping herself and then she sits back down she's 'I don't know if I can do that here in this store or in this in this city, how about can you just play it really, really loud and then I'll come out and I'll sign autographs.' I said, 'Alright, alright let me go to the front, I'll crank it.' . That's what we did. We just cranked Heart Shaped Box and she walked past me and said  'Thank you so much.' She stayed to sign autographs for everybody. One reason I think, that to this day Seattle is one of her stronger markets is for what she did that particular day in 2008.

Westside Seattle

How about Dierks Bentley.

 

Matt

Dierks Bentley played at the Queen Anne shop. At the time, he was, and still is one of the young guns of country music from Arizona. And Kevin Larson, who works for me but was working for EMI Music at the time was always telling us about how great Dierks is. We were playing his records in the shop. Dierks was doing well for Easy Street and for a store like Easy Street or any Northwest store, country isn't necessarily one of your bigger genres, but for us Dierks sold very well.

Westside Seattle

He's a bit of a crossover.

Matt

Yeah and you know he was into The Rolling Stones and Gram Parsons and he had a little bit more muscle compared to just your typical country kid coming up. So we were we were starting to put together an in-store. And then again, Mike McCready comes in. I'd known him since I was in high school and before that he says to me  'I heard you might be having an in store with Dierks.' I said, 'How did you hear that? 'Well I was just on vacation in Hawaii and I bump into this guy. He looks familiar. I looked familiar to him. We started telling bad jokes and before you know it we're playing guitars and we're playing, you know, Byrds songs and Gram Parsons. And Crosby, Stills and Nash. Him and I hung out the rest of the week and I don't know what my wife was doing or his, but we were having a great time. We became really good friends and he says he's thinking about doing an in-store here. He said, could I slip in? Could I come get on board and maybe play a song or two.' I say absolutely, you do whatever you want. It's record store day. It's a free for all.'

Westside Seattle

Wow, did that really happen?

Matt

Yeah, Oh yeah, yeah fantastic.

Westside Seattle

And how was the show?

Matt

He also brought up brought up another person this girl Star Anna. She's from Seattle.  He brought her up, and they did some songs together too. Yeah, they did a Stones song. Something from Exile on Main Street, you know, but a great in-store. He's been a good friend of the shop ever since.

Westside Seattle

Did Nirvana ever play here?

Matt

Krist Novaselic did...

So there was a hip hop group called N.E.R.D. Made-up of the Neptunes who produced some of the greatest hip hop of the 2000s, but led by a young man by the name of Pharrell.

And we were all big fans of  Pharrell. Big fans of his group N.E.R.D. They're on Capitol Records.

 

They were on tour and again Kevin Larson comes forward and says, 'Hey Fly or Die is coming out. Let's do a street date in store. They just happen to be in town. They're opening up for the Gorillaz.  'Oh my God, that's what we love...we love Pharrell... we love NERD yes. What I recall before N.E.R.D. went on stage is that first of all, Pharrell was early. He was there surveying the whole place. Very kind, but also very alert, very aware and very proud of what he had just done, putting this record out. The other two guys weren't there yet. And they're at this point maybe 45 minutes late.

 

All the fans are there waiting around. I'm going to guess 400 to 500 people. They're in the in the shop and my office was directly across from the Green Room or the break room. He's in there with the other two guys from N.E.R.D. laying into them about it.  He must know that I'm behind the door and I can hear everything, but it was him going on about the power of retail and bringing music to the people, this is a street date. 'All of the work that we put in the studio, our time together all these years. And here we are putting this record out and you're coming in late?'

In essence, you can kind of see the beginning of the end of that group. You know. I mean, Pharrell was ready to go on his own. But he was just so proud of what he had just done and that there were so many people there.

Westside Seattle

He's a pro.

Matt

Yeah, and he just wasn't having it. They did the show... amazing... signed autographs outside, taking photos with everybody, but during the show. Mick Jones and Paul Simonon from The Clash walk through the door. Now Paul Simonon from the Clash is the coolest bass player of all time.

Westside Seattle

What about Sir Paul McCartney?

Matt

I said coolest. They were playing bass and guitar as session guys on the Gorillaz tour. So they were part of the tour. So they came to see N.E.R.D.  Simonon had the big rimmed hat and looked great. Mick Jones had some camouflage suit on. And before I know it, the show's over and Mick Jones is buying tons of records. As soon as Simonen walked in he knew immediately, 'I got to go. Everyone knows who I am and I can't stick around.'

So he bounced and then Mick Jones wanted to see the back room. He wanted to talk about a car that was in the parking lot, There was a couple of Hot Rods or American style carsOne of them was mine, a 68 Ford pickup and there was like a GTO or some Mopar or something out there and he wanted to look under the hood. He was just really enthusiastic about American cars and I got so rattled trying to ring him up. I just gave them all the records! I was just going to give them an employee discount. Or you know friends and family and then I just couldn't even control myself. I just boxed it up and gave it all to him and then they gave us tickets to the show that was that night!

Westside Seattle

Your other story about the Clash?

Matt

Joe Strummer.  He'd gone solo. He couldn't find a record deal. He was on a small label called Hellcat Records which was getting distributed by Epitaph, which is a punk rock label out of Southern California and it was great. Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros. It was fantastic, blew everybody away. But he was on like a radio tour. He was trying to promote the record and he was just doing this solo. There's some footage of him in some documentaries of him going around all over the world, just him with his guitar. Trying to get people to come to his shows, telling people about his record. You know, making fun of himself, in a way, it's sad, you know when you think about it, I mean, Joe Strummer. Greatest punk rock warlord of all time. But he's going to be doing an interview at The Mountain KMTT, which seems kind of weird because that's not the kind of station you would expect him to be on.

Westside Seattle

Well not exactly 'Rock the Casbah.'

Matt

Right, and so I heard about it and I had a friend at the Mountain. I said 'You guys got Joe Strummer coming in there?, so 'Yeah, he's going to do a couple of songs and an interview.'

'Alright, and I got to get in there.' I said, 'I'll be swinging by because....' 'No, no no it's not open to the public!' I'm like 'No, no, no. I'm going to be coming by. I'm going to hit the buzzer and you're going to let me in.' I got a friend with me, my friend, Ben Hattrup. We grew up as Clash fanatics. And he says, 'No, no man, I can't do that.'

And sure enough, my friend Ben and I show up and they buzz us up.

We get out of the elevator and my friend's just got his head down and he's just pointing 'Go down there' We don't know where we're going in that radio station. Finally, we find ourselves behind one way glass like, 'Well, this must be it. We're the only ones back there. We look... boom! All of a sudden Joe Strummer walks in. We're behind the one way glass. He doesn't know that we're there. And he's tuning his guitar and we're here. No one even knows we're here. DJ walks in. And they start, you know, doing some pre questions and Joe's not having it. You know he just wants to be off the fly. A couple of other people come in behind the one way glass now, but they think we're you know invited guests they don't know who we are. The interview starts and he's just one Clash question after the other. You can see Joe would like to talk about something else. This punk rock brew is festering through his skin right? And at one point the DJ says 'So, what was it like playing with Paul Simon?' OK, well as I just mentioned how Simonon is the bassist for Clash, the coolest bass player of all time. Yeah, and no one is watching this. It's not being videoed, Joe spits on the DJ's shoes and looks up without missing a beat and says. 'Was lot of fun playing with him in Central Park'. He's just eyeing the guy down.

Without missing a beat.  Not even going to get Paul Simonon's name right? I mean, give me the respect. So then you hear Joe say 'Something tells me there's only going to be janitors in this show tonight' because he was playing at the Showbox. So he's not feeling it, right?, And now we're embarrassed. This is our hometown and this guy... This DJ's spinning it all up for all of us. And we know it's a sold out show. It's been sold out for weeks. Joe hasn't performed solo ever in Seattle that I know. And Joe packed up his guitar. I think he had a song, another song or two to do and he just packed up walks out.

Interview over... terrible interview. You would have never done anything like this. And he walks out. We run around through the maze. Finally, find him. He's about ready to get in the elevator. We squeeze in the elevator with him and it's just Joe and his guitar. And Ben on one side and me on the other side, and we're pulling on Joe like he's Mean Joe Greene, right? We're just. Like 'Joe, Joe.' And the elevator's going down and within the 30 second elevator ride we've convinced him that this was the wrong radio station.

'This is a sold out show. This is your town. These are your people. This is going to be an amazing show and we are all very excited.' and I listed off a couple of the tracks off the new record. He was surprised by that, you know, and Ben rattled off a lyric or two,

So we get on the street and we're on the street and he says' Is there a place I can get a cup of tea?'  

'Sure but you're gonna have to follow us.' we say.

He said 'Well we're a gang. We're walking together, yeah, have a cup of tea with me.'

We're going up Denny across over I-5 and coming up over Olive Way, and I want to take him to B&O Espresso. As we're walking up there, this is a good half mile walk, with Joe Strummer. No one bothers him. No one knows. You know. It's just three guys. Walking, walking through the city. It was like a midweek morning. Like 10 or 11 and he says 'You wouldn't happen to know a record shop? Yeah, right. And there was a store called Fallout Records that was on the way. Great store, punk rock store. And you know 100 yards later. Yeah Joe, here's Fallout Records. We all walk in and the girl at the counter, she's like dumbfounded. She knew exactly who he was. In a way, it's why their store was even there.

And he sees a Billy Childish record. And he looks at it. He's like, 'Oh, it's my kind of store' and he says 'Boys, I'm going to be here awhile. You do your thing. I gotta do my thing. I've got some things I got to write down.' We point to where he can get his tea so alright, 'I'll be up there, but can you be my bodyguards tonight?' I ask 'Yeah, what's that entail?'

'Just meet me at the ShowBox at 7:00 o'clock.'

Well, we're gonna be at the show anyways, So Ben and I go on a day drinking, hustling pool trip up and down Capitol Hill for the next 8 to 10 hours, right? Couldn't believe that we had just walked 1/2 mile with Joe Strummer and we had a conversation with him and showed him Fallout Records.

All of this, and then now we're going to be his bodyguards! So we kind of we get ourselves straight, you know before we head down to the ShowBox.

We're knocking on the back door in the alley. Guy opens the door. 'Who are you guys?'  'Joe Strummer told us to be here' and he starts to shut the door, and we hear Joe say, 'Those guys are with me.' Joe, let's us in.

'You guys want to see sound check?'

We said, 'Heck yeah!'

So now we're watching soundcheck. Ben and I are trying not to be, you know, dumb high fiving white guys, right? We're just trying to take it all in. Then he hops off the stage, he says 'Alright, let me show you what you're going to be doing tonight. Gonna need you on one side of the stage and you on the other side.'  I'm like, 'Oh this is for real,' and then he shows us and draws out a map and he keeps looking behind him, right?

'OK so I have a stash of beer from Ireland. It's my favorite beer', and it has no label on it, like Grolsch style where you pop the bottle cap. He had a good sized band. Six or seven members or so. He says 'I just don't want my crew to see where I got my beer, you know?'

Oh OK,  'I just got all this today. And says 'So this is where it's at. And whenever you get a head nod from me or one of my mates on stage. Grab a beer.'

Oh, so that's what we're doing. We're not really doing security. Not so much, I'm not too worried about that. Maybe after the show. But for now. You're just hustling beers. Wow, but we were busy that night. I mean they were serious beer drinkers. I mean it was every minute there was another beer.

Westside Seattle

That's hilarious.

Matt

And the Mescaleros knew who we were. It's almost like 'Are there two guys like us that do this every night throughout the tour?'

Westside Seattle

That's hilarious, wow.

Matt

Oh, I'm not finished. We haven't even gotten to the really good part yet, my God. .

We go through almost all the beers... Encore... Encore... place is going crazy. Everyone's in love with them. Lights come on and security is kicking everybody out. And we're like, oh, no we're Joe's security, we're with him. OK guys, we seem like Seattle guys but OK and then sure enough Joe comes by and says 'You guys, you want to come back with us?'

We're just listening to some music OK? And sure enough, he had like a boom box like the on the back cover of Combat Rock, big boom box, and he's playing some Moroccan music I remember asking him what it was and some Moroccan psychedelic music from I don't know what era, but it was very cool and he had it turned up to 11.

It was all, you know, staticky, and had the reverb to it, And he's kind of dancing around and says, 'Oh, I just remembered I have a Meet and Greet to do so, I'm going to need you boys for that,' right?'

OK. We go out into the lobby of the Showbox and there's probably 150 people in line ...contest winners or something, but they get to meet Joe Strummer, sign autographs. And Joe says to us, 'These usually go pretty alright, but you never know. Just stay on one side of me, right?' Alright, OK, you got it, Joe.' And so we're you know, taking photos. Letting people meet Joe. We'd be taking photos for the people, getting their camera, Joe's,  needs another pen. We're doing all that kind of thing, and certainly. I was used to that already but all's going well, but there's these two guys in the very back that are causing a ruckus. They're wasted. They got a stack of Clash records and 45's, a little older than Ben and I. These guys went back in time. They lived through the 1976 punk era. They're the last ones. They're the caboose of the whole line. They get up to Joe and Joe kind of noticed a few seconds, maybe a minute beforehand that there were these guys in the back there, causing a little bit of a problem. Not anything Joe couldn't handle on his own, but we happen to be there. And one of the guys says. 'Joe, man you're in Seattle, you're in Jimi Hendrix country who is the greatest guitar player of all time, right?

OK, well Joe's a pretty nationalistic guy. As for him, he loves his England right? And he lists off 'Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Richard Thompson.'  I mean, the list goes on. He lists every great guitar player that has ever lived from the UK and then spits on the guy's shoes. And says. 'I don't give a fuck. The greatest guitar players come from the UK.'

We're like, 'Oh shit!'

Things are getting a little hot and the guy didn't take to it very well. This is his hero, right and Joe doesn't want him around. The other guy was just as bad. He was on the side of his friend... Going on about Jimi Hendrix and I'm all about Jimi Hendrix. My favorite guitar player of all time. But I'm with Joe Strummer. You got to stick and I'm going to respect where he's at and what his opinion is. He gives us the head nod. These guys got to go.

So I take the one guy out and then Ben takes the other guy out. That was that and we come back. Joe says, 'Was that the guy from R.E.M.? I say "I believe so. The other guy with him, I think was John Wesley Harding great songwriter. I mean Peter Buck, and Harding are fantastic musicians. I haven't told that story in its entirety, ever. And I don't know if everyone will remember it that way, but that's how Ben and I remember it.

Westside Seattle

Tell me about your in-stores with Brandi Carlile. You've done six of them now and I'm sure the second one was easier than the first. You told me about the first one, but I'm interested in your relationship now with her. If you just call her up and say 'Hey, I want to do another in store.' Does she have your phone number to call you and ask?

 

Matt

It doesn't work like that. I mean I know her record label. I know her manager. I know the people that handle her wine company and I'm good friends with Tim and Phil Hanseroth.

But yeah, we have each other's number and there's been lots of times where we reached out to each other. She was just here and reached out to me. Recently where she did a PBS special and she needed a place that she could feel comfortable and walk around and be with the host and talk about Seattle and her roots in Seattle and how she got her start and things. And she did that here. So we talked about all that yeah.

Westside Seattle

That's beautiful. So her most recent in store... when was that?

Matt

That was that was for By The Way, I Forgive You, which is the one that she went on to win I don't know how many damn Grammys you know and it made her a Superstar.

 

Westside Seattle

Amazing record, yeah, but she hasn't hasn't done one for In These Silent Days?

Matt

No, and that's up for a Grammy again this year...

EDITORS NOTE: Brandi Carlile won three Grammy's at the recent ceremony

we've done some events around that.  But no, we didn't do an in-store, but we'll have them, you know. Part of the reason is and I'll put this on record right now for the very first time,  we had an in store ready to go. When she put out A Rooster Says, which was a Record Store Day EP, her doing Soundgarden songs and it was her fronting Soundgarden with Kim Thayil, Matt Cameron and Ben Shepherd and the Hanseroth's with her as Chris Cornell, as the lead vocalist.

And that was clearly going to be our biggest selling Record Store Day piece. Maybe of all time, which I think it did go on to be... along with the Pearl Jam Live at Easy Street but that was 2020. We started talking about just the possibility of doing an event around that. Well, the more we talked about it, the more excited we got. Can you believe doing that in Chris Cornell's neighborhood in West Seattle with the Chris Cornell mural outside? In the junction... in the middle of the junction. In the Crosswalk Allways.

I reached out to Chris Swenson and some other city officials to block off the street. We had an idea how much it was going to cost and did they want any money for it. All that Brandi had said was 'As long as I can be playing Black Hole Sun at sunset this might be the greatest performance I ever do.' We were all set, ready to go. We had the date and it was going to be announced the day before. I don't know. I can't recall the date off the top of my head, but somewhere in 2020 I'm going to say of March 2020. And what happened in March 2020? COVID, yeah, everything got cancelled.

People don't know that that was going to happen. So as we kind of came out of that. So hey, 'you guys do what you need to do. That was fun to even consider.'

Westside Seattle

Tell me about the Pearl Jam live record and how that came about.

Matt

Well, I've known the band, some of them individually since I was a kid.  Stone (Gossard) and I went to school together. He's a couple of years older than me, he lived up the street from me on Capitol Hill. At one point we shared the same girlfriend, but that's neither here nor there, and it's probably why I wasn't a big supporter of Green River or Mother Love Bone because I would find these mix tapes that my girlfriend had that were from Stone. So I don't know what time that was but later I talked to him about it and he didn't recall who it was. Mike McCready was really good friends with my sister because my sister's best friend was his girlfriend, Mike's girlfriend all through high school in the early days of Pearl Jam.  We were all friends. All going to the same parties... all going to the same keggers part of the whole Seattle Metro League, and school system.

Yeah, so we saw Mike around quite a bit and. Jeff Ament was a great customer of the Queen Anne shop. He lived on Queen Anne and went to Sonics games so we'd become friendly. And of course, Eddie, you know he was bringing Easy Streeters to his house to play basketball. He just didn't know a lot of people when he got here from San Diego, you know. And when he got his house he just mixed it up with us as his Easy Street family, as friends.

Westside Seattle

When did you meet?

Matt

The first time I met him actually was at the Moore Show, which was the big coming out for Pearl Jam. The big Pearl Jam show. Yeah 1991, I believe that show was In early 90s.

Westside Seattle

And did he know you owned a record store at that time?

Matt

No, no, I was tour managing my friend's band GrunTruck who were the openers. And I had a little something to do with production of that show, at least for GrunTruck.

We had a small crew, but we were honored to be the opening act and the only opening act on that particular night. None of us, at least, the Gruntruck guys, myself, we didn't know what to expect.  We had heard about Pearl Jam or say Mookie Blaylock at the time. I mean can you really top what Andy Wood and Mother Love Bone were doing or even Green River for that matter?

Could Stone and Jeff pull this off again, you know? We weren't even thinking about the singer, so good luck.

You know the whole city was filled with sorrow over losing Andy Wood, he was one of the greatest showmen that this city has ever seen. So Eddie, he was an afterthought...Gruntruck does their show.

Westside Seattle

And you've never heard Pearl Jam before?

Matt

Yeah, I'd heard them on the radio. Yeah that was great, but I wasn't putting a lot of stock into it. Gruntruck show's over... Eddie comes up to us. We're all sitting on or standing on a wall. A couple of us crouched down. Eddie comes over, kind of skulking over. He's got two cases of Rainier, sets them down and goes 'Guys, great show. So honored you're here. Could have either been us opening for you or you for us.'

Just really humble, right? And everyone's meeting him for the first time, right? I turned to Tommy Niemeyer and I'm like 'Dude, he's going to get eaten alive. Way too nice.'

Well, so I'm standing side stage with the Gruntruck guys and just a few other people. There weren't a lot of people backstage when the program goes on for that show. And I recall standing next to another West Seattle dude, Kevin Schuss. At one point him and I are the only people back there, and maybe a guitar tech watching from backstage. Gruntruck, they went to the dressing room. I mean I'm sure they were watching the rest of the show.

But that was the day that the music turned for Seattle, as far as I'm concerned.

The day after it was a whole new world for the Seattle music scene because of that particular performance. They were phenomenal and still are one of the top five shows for me in my lifetime.

Westside Seattle

Did he do crowd surfing?

Matt

Yeah, It was the night that they filmed the Even flow video so yeah. People called it the coming out party that night. They were no longer Mookie Blaylock, and they were headlining. They weren't opening for Alice In Chains, they weren't opening for Red Hot Chili Peppers. This was their show and it was in their town on their turf, Belltown. I mean, Jeff had worked at Raison D'etre just one block away. Stone and Mike taking the the bus back and forth in front of the Moore countless times.

Westside Seattle

Did you talk to any of anybody in the band after the show?

Matt

Oh, I think we were shell shocked.The whole audience was 'oh wow.' This is when he jumped off the second floor balcony. Yeah I hadn't seen anything like it . Yeah, and then I started seeing him come in the store and I was like 'hey man, I was there that night.'

Westside Seattle

Did he come in to buy records?

Matt

Like oh God, yeah... still.

Westside Seattle

Is he a record collector?

Matt

Oh yeah.  Great, great, system that Definitive Audio put together for him.

He's a caring person, very, I mean he is the one that has turned our scene into a positive uplifting scene. Seeing if we look back on it, so much of the death and darkness and drug abuse and all of that... you don't think of that as much when you talk about any of that or we even consider Pearl Jam, that's the opposite, It's 'I'm alive. I love living my life. I love my friends. I love my brothers. I love my sisters.'

Westside Seattle

Look at all of his contemporaries from Chris to Layne to all of the people that are gone.

Matt

Yeah, we don't need to go down the list.

Westside Seattle

And he's not only survived, but thrived and stood as a pillar. How do we evolve as a musician? And as an artist. So I'm not sure how he managed to do that. What's in him that made him stay away from all the darkness? What do you think it is?

Matt

Well, he had a bit of a rough childhood, you know? He thought he knew who his father was and then came to find out it wasn't who he thought it was. And then as he dives further his father is no longer even around.

Westside Seattle

He drew empathy through that for others?

Matt

He was the kind of guy that was drinking milk out of the frozen orange containers... There was no silver spoon in this kid's mouth at all and he bounced around all over the country. You know, San Diego, Chicago and and didn't have a father figure other than Joe Strummer and Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty and Jagger and Richards and Ian Mackaye, and I mean those were his father figures those were his mentors, yeah.

Westside Seattle

Wow, that's interesting.

Matt

But you know, I also think that he likes to, you know, dance on the edge of the cliff. He likes to take chances. He likes to jump from the balconies and ride big waves and throw axes and take things to the limit, but you know I think part of why he was swinging from the rafters and jumping off the balconies back then was simply because he didn't think that, that was going to last. This was it, you know that first tour or second tour, those first big shows. That was it. We're not going to have this opportunity again. I don't think he foresaw it ever becoming what it became, you know, 30 years later?

Westside Seattle

But it has.

Matt

Yeah, and so after a while I was like, well, we're going to maintain this. I gotta take care of my earthling.

Westside Seattle

And he's still producing vital, relevant music today.

Matt

It's our staff pick of the year, it's fantastic.

Westside Seattle

What about the live record that was recorded here?

Matt

I was at the the Queen Anne shop, just straightening up some bins and McCready was shopping and now we start talking for a minute and this was Winter 2005 and Mike says to me, 'Man. What is going on in the record industry? I'm so worried about you and I got questions for our own business, our own band, you know, with Napster and and the big box retailers and where's all the record shops going? You know, have you seen The U district these days and and what's happened downtown and and there's no great record shops anymore.'

I said, 'Well, just so happens I'm going to be hosting a convention here in two months and we're going to be talking about all that. How are we going to survive? What's happening right now?'

And Amazon was no longer doing just books. They were in the music game. We had to as a Seattle store in a way you kind of felt like you had to support Amazon because your aunts, uncles, cousins, everyone's working there and everyone's got stock in it. And at the same time I'm not going to fault a guy, Jeff Bezos, who wrote his idea on the back of an envelope, just like I have.... so good for him.

So how am I going to compete? How am I going to do this? So I tell I tell Mike  'We're putting something together. I got 125 retailers coming into town and we're going to be here for four days and I'm scheduling all the events and scheduling all the dinners. We're going to be at the hotel for four days.' And he says, 'I would love to meet everybody. I'd love to say hi. He says 'As a matter of fact, I know a couple of other guys in the band would too.' And then I jokingly say, 'Well. If you're gonna do that you might as well just play.'

And with a Eddie Haskell grin, he kind of looks up gives me a wink and says, 'Wouldn't that be amazing?'

Let's think about it because you got my number. OK, 'just throw me a proposal,' he says. 'As a matter of fact. I'll talk to the guys, but throw a proposal together and send it to Kelly Curtis, our manager. You know we're a democratic band. He's going to have to show us the letter or talk about it, you know whatever you know, every week we got to talk about stuff that's come up so. he's going to hopefully bring it up. And I'll in the meantime, I'll see what I can do'. 

Sure enough, I wrote up this proposal to Kelly. He received it so yeah, thank you very much. I hear from Mike he said,  'Did you get the news ? Yeah Kelly brought up that you had sent this letter and before he could finish reading it we all jumped up and down and said, 'yeah. Let's do it! And Kelly was like, 'what are you guys talking about? You really want to do this?'

So Kelly and I met a few times. He brought some techs with him, brought some security with him. We met at the Queen Anne shop. And then he says to me, 'This is so exposed here. 1st and Mercer underneath the Space Needle sales center. I don't know. I don't know about this,' and the security team's like 'Yeah, I don't think so. I don't think so. This is a good idea but. It's not going to happen.' Couple days later, Kelly calls me and says, 'You know what? Let's at least do something' and so now we're back to talking about doing a dinner or whatever, and all right, great and they're going to pay for a dinner and meet everybody and talk about the way of the industry. And so we meet here, right downstairs, Kelly and I are talking and he's letting me down easy and then he says. 'You know, we could do Anthonys. We could do Ray's Boathouse and he starts listing them off including Salty's. And with that, as he's gone down the list, Eddie Vedder walks through the front door. I see him in the corner of my eye. Doesn't come over say hi to us or anything. He's standing over by the Sonic Youth section. He's playing air guitar. There's people in the store. What's he doing? He's jumping up and down and swinging around.

Kelly sees him and 'Oh God, Oh no. Oh no, no, no, no. No, no, no.' And I'm looking at Eddie. I'm looking at Kelly. I'm like 'What is going on?' And you see Eddie. He's playing guitar, he looks over at Kelly saying. 'This will be fine. This will do. This will do,' and walks out.

I look at Kelly. Kelly's head drops and he goes, 'Well, now you know who the real Boss is. I guess we're going to figure out a way to do the show here.'

Westside Seattle

So he had to imagine himself doing it? To see himself in the space, wow.

Matt

Yeah and so then Eddie comes by and starts laughing.

He's like 'Can you believe this? We're going to do this here, and because, like you know, work with our team.  We've never done a show this small before, so I don't know if you're ready for this, but I mean, we're bringing it all. We're bringing everything.' I said, 'Well, maybe this is the time that I clear the shop out and we get new bins,' and he said  'Yeah, you're probably going to need a semi truck.'  'I said, well, we'll most definitely.  I gotta clear all this out.' And he's like, 'You know what? You can park it at my house,' which we did.

The entire store went into a semi truck and was at Eddie's house, overnight anyhow. So now we're looking at, you know, a month and 1/2 or so before the show's set to happen. I was sworn to secrecy, couldn't tell anybody working here.  'I'm going to need their help,' Kelly said, if they say anything, this is not happening. We cannot have this leak. This is going to be a surprise performance. We're going to be recording it because we record everything. We don't want any hassles. We don't want any security issues. We've been through that before,' which they have.

So leading up to the show that particular day everyone had gotten the schedule a few days in advance, and everything they were doing scheduled events for the four days, and on the last day it says, on April 29, 2005, 'Party at original store West Seattle. Free beer. Live entertainment.'

That's what it said. So 3 to 4 buses come out and drop everybody off. And that's exactly what's going on. We got the place cleared out now and there were sheets over all the equipment.

The cafe kind of acted as the lounge lobby area for all the guests.

Westside Seattle

But even then, nobody knew who it was gonna be?

Matt Vaughan

Nobody knew. And everyone's asking me. What is it? Pearl Jam? ha ha. Yeah, I wish. At some point and I don't remember where this guy was from, but he lifts up a sheet and he sees the stickman logo on one of the cabinets and he starts whispering to another friend and another friend and all of a sudden and I see this, and like I go up to him. 'It's not Pearl Jam.' He says "It's their logo on this. Look at all this equipment!'  'No, no no no.' I tell him, 'They just sold it. They sell all their equipment to local bands. That's just the old stuff.'  But he wasn't buying it.

So I run up the stairs where the band was hiding and they were up here for two hours, their girlfriends and family. I recall Mike McCready had a headlamp on because I had all the lights off. He's gone through all the records for hours. So he had his own private shopping experience and everyone's just, you know, drinking their Rainiers and it might as well have been a show from 1989, you know. And everyone's got smiles on their faces. But I say to them, "Guys, I think they're onto it. We got to get the show on the road and I go off to a corner right over here. And I'm writing out the speech real quick and Ed comes over. He's looking over my shoulders. I'm writing this. He grabs a red pen and says 'let me see that.' and he starts crossing everything off.

All I've got left is 'Will you please welcome Stone, Jeff, Mike, Matt and Eddie.'  I'm like, 'Come on man, I got 3 to 4 paragraphs going on about what you guys mean to the store and to the city and to independent retail ... 'No, no, no, no, no, no, you're not doing that.' he said, 'We'll do that.'

Oh OK.

'Are you ready to go?' He said, 'Yeah we're ready. Born ready, ready to go whenever' so I go down. 'Will you please welcome Stone, Jeff, Mike, Matt and Eddie' and it seems like it takes them 5 minutes to get down the stairs. One by one,  and everyone in attendance is like you gotta be kidding me! This really is Pearl Jam! Eddie gets to the mic and says, 'Oh sorry it took us so long to get down here, we thought Matt had a.little bit more to say.' He just winks.

Westside Seattle

That's funny.

 

Matt 

Well, yes, it was recorded and thank God it was because it has turned out to be one of the more more legendary shows that they've ever done. The sound was fantastic. Matt Cameron was the first to hear the recording and said 'We have to put this out. We have to release this. My drums never sounded better.'

 

And then we did, the following year. It was released into independent retail exclusively and for a band of that size to do something like that. You know, that just doesn't happen.

Westside Seattle

it's a classic record of this date and you can't get it for under 100 bucks.

Matt 

And then they end up doing their studio record the one with the Avocado. And they release it exclusively independent retail as well, so it was a one- two punch and I've said this before. I don't think that you would have Record Store Day as we know it today had it not been for that event and for a band of that size. Pearl Jam is internationally recognized and arguably one of the if not the greatest rock bands of the last 30-40 years, right so? For them to prop us up like they did. Not just Easy Street but independent retail as a whole. That gave us the confidence to push forward. Gave us the confidence that we will survive this. This era that we're in. And no surprise that a year later, we were forming coalitions and a year after that, we started Record Store Day. It has a lot to do with the love that Pearl Jam showed to independent retail.

Editors Note: This story contains links to Wikipedia pages that are intended solely as informational links and introductions to the subjects mentioned. We cannot attest to their complete accuracy

 

 

 

 

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