“You don’t get second chances all the time.”
by Rob Moura
“Bzzzzt!” The sharp squeal of a screw being driven into wood punctures the air, splitting our ears like amp feedback.
In a dusty backroom, Joel Myers is hard at work securing plywood sheets to a frame and tracing hand-drawn cartoon skeletons over them. After a few blasts of sound, Geoff Joynes pulls down his sawdust mask and calls out, “Hey! Pipe down, will ya?” He’s jesting, but Myers obliges and drops the drilling.
Though the noise is indeed disrupting the conversation, everyone in the room is anxious about the time crunch. It’s mid-October and those skeletons need to be propped outside by Halloween, when Re-Animated Music is scheduled to hold their soft opening. The shop, which will specialize in refurbished instrument retail and repair, is the collective brainchild of musicians who all worked as managers at the Trading Musician, which closed in May 2024 after serving Seattle’s musical community for over three decades. The team’s passion for reviving the old shop’s spirit is evident as they hustle to get the new store ready for business.
Joynes, who was bedridden with a respiratory illness two days prior, is already back to work; face shielded, he guides me around the guts of the old Cowen Park Grocery, whose owners leased the building to the gang in early January. Later, as we’re sitting, the group—Keegan Metcalf and Sam Smallidge alongside Joynes and Myers—lays out the myriad obstacles of starting up the new shop, and how much they’ve learned about why so few similar small businesses survive in Seattle.
Much of their effort has gone towards bringing the building up to a strict code that was only recently established. Where some businesses enjoy an expedited version of the process, Re-Animated was unlucky enough to be assigned a full review, forcing them to make granular revisions to the building’s plumbing, electrical, and egress, among others. They found only a scarce pool of resources available to help them, including some terrible loan offerings from the city’s Office of Economic Development.
“The City doesn’t make it easy for small businesses,” says Smallidge. “Everything in the city is facilitating their closure rather than helping them flourish.”
“It’s like they don’t want these places to exist,” says Joynes, “and it’s very obvious that the community wants these places to exist. But the cool thing is that every person we’ve involved has rallied around this place. They see it as a necessity for the city.”
Joynes is talking about the skilled family members and friends the Reanimated team recruited, many of them more than happy to assist. Most of their fathers flexed their contracting muscles, installing the necessary sheetrock and making the bathrooms ADA-compliant; the benevolent accountant of Capitol Hill’s Cha Cha Lounge is helping out with the books at a reduced rate. Re-Animated’s announcement was also accompanied by a GoFundMe page asking for $40,000 to help pay off the rest of the debt. Donations flooded in immediately; just nine days later, the group achieved half of their goal.
That groundswell of support shows the intense communal desire to fill the hole left by Trading Musician’s sudden closure last year, a decision that ultimately fell to owner Robin Bartlett-Smith. It wasn’t for lack of sales. Smith, who had started the Trading Musician with her ex-husband Marshall Smith in 1991, had found herself ready to retire after three decades of ownership. After failing to find a buyer interested in continuing the business, Smith decided to shutter its doors. Speaking to the Seattle Times, Smith acknowledged the loss her shop’s closure left on the city’s music community. “My hope is that maybe somebody will come along and open up a store like mine in the future,” she said.
Though her employees accepted her decision, the shuttering left them understandably frustrated. They collectively considered themselves the root source of the shop’s beloved spirit. Joynes, for example, had spent nearly half his life in Trading’s orbit, having originally met Metcalf, Myers, and Smallidge as a teen truant who would take the 48 from Ballard to play the guitars instead of attending school. Over a decade of loitering, manager John Herman approached him with four different job offers; eventually, Joynes obliged and became one of the shop’s most vocal champions.
Smith learned about Joynes’s history with the shop via the Seattle Times. “She was impressed,” he recalls. “She said, ‘You skipped school to come and hang out?’ I was like, ‘Yeah. That’s how much this place means to me. To a lot of people.’”
His story is a commonality among Re-Animated’s staff, all of whom were encouraged by Herman (and subsequently, as managers, encouraged others) to contribute to Trading Musician’s unique community-oriented environment. Plenty of music shops allow people to demo the instruments they sell, but Trading was a rarity; its full-throated insistence on putting the “musician” first had become baked into the shop’s ethos. “[Herman] would always say to customers, ‘Hey, I don’t care if you go and play every guitar in the store,’” recalls Joynes. “‘I get paid the same amount.’” Many of Re-Animated’s supporters had come to rely on Trading’s relatively affordable prices and its welcoming space. Those who came to Seattle a little too late are left with only its legend—until now.
The staff at Re-Animated aren’t just aiming to revive Trading’s model of music shop; they want to improve upon it. Their end goal is to run it like a co-op, owned and operated by its employees, as a way to counter what transpired at the previous shop. “Not a lot of us got to leave with that feeling of ownership over something that we felt like we took a lot of ownership of,” says Joynes. And for how effectively it fostered camaraderie among its patrons, the old shop carried some outdated values—it was still a relic of a time when guitar-based music, and musicianship in general, were prone to gatekeeping by purists (and prioritized a certain cisgender, masculine identity).
That’ll be gone, replaced instead by recurring events like guitar restringing clinics and audio interface classes, a dissemination of know-how from people who understand the value of accessible in-person tutelage. “We want to give that knowledge freely to anybody who wants it,” attests Joynes, “and give someone the same treatment regardless of who they are, and not make knowledge and instruments and parts any more scarce than they already are.”
Scarcity seems to be a motif. There are not enough resources; not enough places to commune without some barrier of entry; not enough elements of the Seattle that was once a petri dish of culture, rather than a vacuum for it. Re-Animated is hoping to bring all of that back, with interest.
“For all the talk of Seattle vanishing… I think that’s part of the reason why people are so excited about this,” sums up Smallidge. “For all the places that have gone by the wayside, there’s still so many people that live here that need these resources. There’s still so many musicians and artists that live in this city, and creative people need places like this.”
Metcalf adds, “You don’t get second chances all the time.”
Follow Re-Animated Music on Instagram at @reanimatedmusic.
