Highway 99 Blues Club: Seattle’s Last Dedicated Blues Room

There was a red door on Alaskan Way. You walked down a flight of stairs and ended up somewhere that felt like the real Seattle — the one underneath the polished version, the one with a capital B in blues.

Highway 99 Blues Club was never pretty. The ceiling was low, the room was cramped, and if you’d told someone from the street that one of the best music venues in the Pacific Northwest was hidden in a basement beneath the Alaskan Way Viaduct, they would’ve believed you.

That was the whole point.

The Place

It opened in 2004, founded by Steve Sarkowsky and Ed Maloney. For nearly fifteen years, it occupied that strange liminal space under the viaduct — technically downtown, but so close to the water that you could smell it on a rainy night. The address was 125. The actual experience was impossible to describe to someone who’d never been there.

There was no VIP section, really. Just a raised bench near the stage where Fred Pepper held court most nights. Fred was in his sixties when I knew him, with a white beard and the energy of someone who had finally found the one place in the city where everyone knew his name. He got more hugs there than anywhere else in Seattle, he said. That seemed right.

What the Reviews Got Right

Yelp called it a “quintessential Seattle experience.” Travel blogs wrote about it as a hidden gem. The Seattle Times called it “Seattle’s home of the blues” — the only dedicated blues club in the city.

All of that was true. The reviews just couldn’t fully capture what it felt like to stand in that room when a band was cooking — the bass vibrating in your chest, the way the walls seemed to shake when they pushed the volume. You’d show up not knowing who was playing that night, and more often than not, you’d leave wondering why you’d ever gone anywhere else.

The Headliners

The club drew real talent. Too Slim and the Taildraggers — from Spokane — played the very first show when the club opened in 2004 and came back for the last one on New Year’s Eve, 2018. That’s as close to a full-circle story as you get.

Over the years the room hosted performers who knew what to do with a small, dark space built for dancing:

• Too Slim and the Taildraggers — the club’s house band in a sense, and closing night headliners
• Christone “Kingfish” Ingram — before he was nationally known, he was packing this basement
• Popa Chubby — New York-born blues-rock veteran who always brought the house down
• Maria Muldaur — folk and blues legend who drifted through Seattle and made sure to stop here
• Selwyn Birchwood — rising star of modern blues, early Pacific Northwest appearances were at this club
• Jimmy Thackery & The Drivers — former Nitro Groove member who found his element in smaller rooms
• Walter Trout — journeyman blues guitarist who could fill a festival stage but preferred this floor
• Southern Avenue — Memphis-born soul-blues band that brought a different kind of energy to the space
• Seth Walker — North Carolina-born guitarist who played the room multiple times and always left the crowd wanting more

The club’s calendar on Concert Archives lists 125 shows over the years — and that’s only the ones that got documented.

The End

By 2015, the club was nearly done. Their landlord tried to raise the rent by an astonishing $10,000 a month. Sarkowsky and Maloney spent years negotiating, scouting for new locations, trying to find anything in their price range that made sense. They got extensions, stayed alive on borrowed time, kept playing.

But the Alaskan Way Viaduct was going to be demolished anyway. The waterfront was about to be torn up for the tunnel project. The calculus of staying no longer worked.

They closed on December 31, 2018. The Spokane-born Too Slim and the Taildraggers — regulars since the very first night — played closing night.

“For us to stay, we would have to have a deal crafted way different,” Sarkowsky said at the time. “Which meant we don’t want to pay what we’re paying now, because we’re worried about what’s going to happen.”

What We Miss

The room is gone now. The viaduct is gone. The waterfront looks different than it did in 2004, when the club opened, or 2018, when it closed.

But the people who were there remember it specifically. Not vaguely — specifically. Which song was playing the first time you walked in. Which night a drummer from a famous band sat in unannounced. The way the floor would shake on a good night.

That’s the thing about a place like Highway 99. It wasn’t trying to be historic. It was just trying to stay open long enough to play the next show.

It almost made it fifteen years.

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Sources: Seattle Times — “Highway 99 Blues Club, Seattle’s home of the blues, closing at end of year”, published December 6, 2018. Concert Archives — Highway 99 Blues Club venue page, listing 125 concerts including Too Slim and the Taildraggers, Popa Chubby, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, Maria Muldaur, Selwyn Birchwood, Jimmy Thackery, Walter Trout, Southern Avenue, Seth Walker, and others.