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With closure of Highway 99 Blues Club, a musical family dissipates

After nearly 15 years, the underground venue will close after New Year's Eve

Dan Ray December 23, 2018
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With closure of Highway 99 Blues Club, a musical family dissipates December 23, 2018

Raised by a single mother in the suburbs of Detroit, Dan discovered an early passion for singing, songwriting, and the arts as a whole. She got her BA in English and music at the University of Michigan, where she reported for the school’s paper, The Michigan Daily. She worked as a Senior News Reporter on the government beat, transitioned to arts writing, and eventually became the managing editor of the social media department. She moved to Seattle in 2017. After losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and discouraged about the lack of press surrounding Seattle’s music scene, Dan made the decision to turn Dan’s Tunes, a fully fledged music journalism website focused on showcasing the Seattle area’s musicians, into its own startup. There’s so much music happening in the city that spawned Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Jimi Hendrix — among others — and Dan’s Tunes is determined to find and expose those outstanding acts. The goal is to have satellites in every major US city, uplifting diverse and compelling voices and helping music communities thrive. In 2020, Dan was featured in the Seattle Times’s year-end music critic poll. Other than her musical endeavors (singing, playing ukulele, and auditioning for American Idol four times before the age of 24) Ray is passionate about food and education around the American food system, and she’s also a large proponent of eliminating the stigma around mental health. Ray loves cats, especially her own, who is named Macaulay Culkin (but she’s a lady).

Ben Smith on stage at Highway 99 Blues Club. // Photo courtesy of Courtney Prather and Ben Smith Music

At the beginning of December, The Seattle Times reported that Highway 99 Blues Club would be closing at the end of the year due to increasing rent prices. Owners Steve Sarkowsky and Ed Maloney first ran into trouble three years ago, when their landlord tried to increase their rent by $10,000 a month, according to the Times. They were able to strike a deal that prolonged the necessity of closure, but now, it seems, the inevitable has happened, and the club is closing due to an inability to reach a rental agreement with its landlord. Highway 99’s last show will take place on New Year’s Eve, with a performance from Too Slim and the Taildraggers, a blues-rock trio from Nashville.

This news follows a trend of venue closures throughout Seattle’s recent history, from RKCNDY — where a young Pearl Jam often played — which closed back in 1999, to the Showbox scare of this year. But, as opposed to the Showbox, Highway 99’s announcement didn’t shoot to the front of the news, and no giant protests were made. A quieter (and newer) venue than the Showbox, Highway 99 Blues Club was more of a hidden gem within the music scene; instead of pulling the hottest upcoming artists, the club focused more on giving already established Seattle musicians a place to explore their artistry.

Travis Bracht, a local rock musician most famous for fronting post-grunge group Second Coming throughout the 90s and 00s, first discovered Highway 99 in 2016. As a member of the heavy-rock scene, he had shied away from Highway 99 for fear that he wouldn’t fit in.

“I’d heard of Highway 99 Blues Club but never went there because it’s blues, and I’m not a blues guy, and [I thought] they’d probably kick me out just by the way I look,” said Bracht. “[But], that’s not the case. And it breaks my heart even more to know that I had the opportunity to add on 12, 13 years of the same last two years I’ve been having where it’s just absolutely brought me out of my shell. Honest to God, on a therapeutic level, that club saved my life.”

A self-described hermit, Bracht, in a way, felt trapped by the rock world. In a scene so mono-focused, he was unable to showcase his other talents, like his piano chops or knowledge of foreign-language tunes. But, at Highway 99, Maloney made sure to make everyone feel safe, welcome, and supported.

“[Highway 99] got me back on stage doing things I never thought I was gonna be doing. The sky was the limit; do whatever you want to do,” said Bracht. “I thought it was a blues club, and I was always confused, but Ed’s like ‘no man, do what you want.’ He was better than any manager I’ve ever had.

“When you walk in that place, you feel inspired. I played a show in September or October, and I walked in — and I hadn’t written a song because I fucking hate writing… — I walked in there and wrote my first song in five or six years in ten minutes. I was loading my gear in. I was in the backstage room and sat down and just whipped out paper, whipped out my guitar, and bam.”

Bracht and Maloney became fast friends, to the point that not only did Bracht begin to frequent Maloney’s home, but he also began to regularly drive the 35 miles to and from his own home to Highway 99.

“You know that feeling when you come home from school and walk in your bedroom when you’re a kid?” asked Bracht. “You’re like ‘oh yeah, there’s all my shit. You feel good; you’re taking your socks off, jumping on the bed, drop kicking your fucking Big Bird stuffed animal — whatever — that’s the way it feels when you walk in there.”

Jeff Rouse, a local musician best known for being the bassist in Duff McKagan’s Loaded, who also played Highway 99 on a semi-regular basis, noted that Maloney’s attitude towards musicians allowed performers to feel comfortable on and off stage at the venue, which allowed their work to shine.

“[Ed] treated everyone equally all the time, and he took such good care of people who were coming there to play,” said Rouse. “Even just simple things like, ‘are you hungry?’ He would come find everybody: ‘are you hungry; is there something you need?’ You play other clubs and see people running away like, ‘oh my god, if I don’t have to feed these people tonight that would be great; I’ll save some money.’ ”

And, of course, that’s the bottom line of this whole issue: money. In a city quickly becoming overridden with the tech industry, seemingly little room is left for music and art venues to thrive.

“My message about that club is it’s just a huge loss,” said Ben Smith, who is the drummer of Heart and a veteran performer at Highway 99. “Not only do I hope that our city can make it a little easier for venue owners to keep going so the venue owners can help the artists keep going — not only do I hope for that in their case — but I hope that generally people who want to do live music can continue to push to have a club.”

Smith added that while his direct financial situation will not be too affected by the closure, the detriment comes from the loss of that platform.

“To be in a great venue like that, then people see you in a great venue and go, ‘wow I really get what that guy does,’ ” said Smith. “And that’s the value to a musician, really. In that way, it definitely will affect my bottom line.”

Smith, Bracht, and Rouse all lamented the general trend of the loss of music venues throughout the city and commented that as in-city rents become too expensive for art and music venues, these once-hubs have needed to travel farther out to be able to survive.

“Cities are built around culture, and maybe I’m talking like I’m an old man or somebody who’s been here too long, but the culture is leaving. It’s gone,” said Rouse. “A city like this needs kids. When I was in my 20s, this was a place I could come to play shows and go to cool galleries and little ma-and-pa thrift stores and coffee shops and all this stuff, and that stuff is just going away. It’s not necessarily about me. It’s about the next generation of people. They don’t have places like Highway 99 to go to. Where are they gonna go?”

While we’ll need to wait to answer that question, all three musicians hope that Maloney and Sarkowsky will be able to open another venue a few years down the line with the same welcoming feel that has graced Highway 99 for years — largely due in part to the staff Maloney put together.

“They’re not just a staff. They’re family. And I know everybody says that, but these people are legit,” said Bracht. “I’ve had some of the most colorful, greatest conversations with Richard, who is one of the bartenders/servers there. He’s this kid. He’s a total left-wing fruitcake, but I love him so much because we have these respectable conversations. There’s all kinds of people from different walks of life in this family that helped keep this place open.”

And that’s the takeaway here. For as much as Highway 99’s closure has to do with the politics of our changing city, it has much more to do with the staff, the musicians, and the patrons that all came together to give Highway 99 its heart — the bartender who would take the time to have a meaningful conversation with you; the staffer who would notice if someone took your seat and bring you a new one; and Maloney, the big, Boston-Irish dude who would welcome you in, make you feel like family, and send you home with a box of jambalaya, just because he knew you’d get hungry on your drive home.

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Raised by a single mother in the suburbs of Detroit, Dan discovered an early passion for singing, songwriting, and the arts as a whole. She got her BA in English and music at the University of Michigan, where she reported for the school’s paper, The Michigan Daily. She worked as a Senior News Reporter on the government beat, transitioned to arts writing, and eventually became the managing editor of the social media department. She moved to Seattle in 2017. After losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and discouraged about the lack of press surrounding Seattle’s music scene, Dan made the decision to turn Dan’s Tunes, a fully fledged music journalism website focused on showcasing the Seattle area’s musicians, into its own startup. There’s so much music happening in the city that spawned Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Jimi Hendrix — among others — and Dan’s Tunes is determined to find and expose those outstanding acts. The goal is to have satellites in every major US city, uplifting diverse and compelling voices and helping music communities thrive. In 2020, Dan was featured in the Seattle Times’s year-end music critic poll. Other than her musical endeavors (singing, playing ukulele, and auditioning for American Idol four times before the age of 24) Ray is passionate about food and education around the American food system, and she’s also a large proponent of eliminating the stigma around mental health. Ray loves cats, especially her own, who is named Macaulay Culkin (but she’s a lady).