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Easy Street Records
SEATTLE, WA • 4559 California Ave SW, Seattle, WA 98116
Easy Street is one of our favorite places to buy records, because it’s the kind of place that proves ‘record store’ can also mean ‘neighborhood living room.’
The shop first opened in 1988, when founder Matt Vaughan talked the owners of two shops where he’d worked as a teenager into merging into one. It landed on its current corner in West Seattle’s Junction, in the historic Hamm Building, a year later. It’s still there, and it has a café and bar attached serving breakfast, lunch, coffee, beer, wine and cocktails, which are all high on our lists of favorite things, especially the coffee, beer, wine and cocktails.
Their in-store events are legend. Pearl Jam famously played a surprise invite-only set here in 2005 for a crowd of about 200, during a convention for the Coalition of Independent Music Stores and part of it came out as the ‘Live at Easy Street’ EP that got a vinyl reissue for Record Store Day 2019, but a look at what’s coming in the next few days makes me wish I was in Seattle RIGHT NOW.
THAO is playing an acoustic in-store set on 10/29, there’s a Motley Crue ‘Too Fast for Love’ Halloween Rager on the 30th, a Queens of the Stone Age listening party on Halloween and Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament and his brother discussing their new photography book on 11/2. And a every other week music quiz (with a late night kitchen!) every Monday.
I think we’ve met someone we’re still in touch with every time we’ve visited and that’s pretty special.
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