A Mercantile, A Prohibition Bar, & Sixty Years of Country Music
The building on Montezuma Street has been a lot of things; Matt’s is the one that stuck.
1901
The D. Levy Building Goes UpWhiskey Row burned in 1900. The whole block. What went up in its place was built to last, and one of those buildings was the D. Levy Building; a mercantile, selling dry goods to a mining town that had just watched forty saloons turn to ash and immediately decided to rebuild every one of them.
1934
Prohibitions Ends, the Doors OpenThe country got its whiskey back in December of 1933. By 1934, the mercantile had become a saloon, and this building found its purpose. Ninety-plus years later, it’s still doing the same job.
Early 1960s
Matt'' 's arrives on the RowMatt’s Longhorn Saloon opened on Whiskey Row in the early sixties and went straight for country music. Not as a theme. As the entire business model. The 1,200-square-foot oak dance floor went in, the band went up in the balcony, and Matt’s stopped being a bar with music and started being a music venue with a bar. That distinction still defines the place.
Mid 1960s
Buck Owens,Waylon Jennings & Lee HazlewoodBefore Bakersfield was a sound and before Waylon was an outlaw, they were working musicians playing rooms like this one. Buck Owens played Matt’s. So did Waylon Jennings. So did Lee Hazlewood, who’d go on to write half of Nancy Sinatra’s catalog.
They played this venue because of the good dance floor, and a crowd that shows up is worth more to a working band than a marquee. That hasn’t changed either.
September 29, 1989
The Boss Stops for a BeerBruce Springsteen rode into Prescott on a motorcycle with a few friends, headed for the Grand Canyon, and stopped at Matt’s in the middle of the afternoon. He ordered a beer, turned to the local band, and asked to sit in.
He played “I’m on Fire” and a handful of old covers. The bar went from nearly empty to packed in about ten minutes. And what happened after he left turned an afternoon into a legend: the full story is on our Press page, and it’s better than you’re expecting.
2002
Two Bartenders Turned OwnersMatt Brassard and Marco Espitia were pulling drafts behind this bar in the early 2000s.
Matt was 22. Marco was 24; both were born entrepreneurs, and soon Matt’s Saloon itself came up for sale, and they bought the bar they’d been working at.
The bookings kept coming. Andy Griggs and Leland Martin both played Matt’s in 2003, keeping the room on the map for touring country acts working the Southwest.
2012
Whiskey Row Burns AgainA fire tore through Whiskey Row in 2012 and took businesses with it. Matt and Marco teamed up with Dave Michelson from The Palace, shut down the street, and threw a block party that raised roughly $86,000 for the businesses that got hit.
It was the first time they closed Montezuma Street to help their neighbors, but it would not be the last.
2013
Prescott StrongOn June 30, 2013, nineteen members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots died fighting the Yarnell Hill Fire. Prescott lost its firefighters, and Matt’s lost regulars.
The block party that followed was called Prescott Strong. It raised more than $202,000 for the families.
Today
Still the last true Honky TonkLive music every Friday and Saturday. Line dancing on Thursday. Karaoke twice a week. Horses running seven days. The same oak floor, the same balcony, the same walls covered in photographs of people who thought they were just having a Tuesday. Ninety years after the first pour, Matt’s is still doing exactly what this venue was built to do.