The Heights Lounge in Portland offers music, food and a space for community

When musician Jermaine Malone set out to run an all ages venue in Portland, he wanted it to be a place for musicians and bands to perform and for fans young and old to come see them, sure. But he also wanted so much more. He wanted to provide good food and drinks of all kinds — and a space for open-mic nights, makers markets and even after school programs. The Heights Lounge and Events Space that opened in April is now exactly that. We sit down with Malone to talk more about his space, which he says is the only wholly Black-owned venue in the state.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. When musician Jermaine Malone set out to run an all-ages venue in Portland, he wanted it to be a place for musicians and bands to perform, and where fans, young and old, could see them. But that’s not all. He also envisioned a space for open-mic nights, makers markets and even afterschool programs. That vision is becoming a reality. The Heights Lounge and Events Space opened in April in the Foster-Powell neighborhood. Malone says it is the only wholly Black-owned venue in the state. He joins us now. Welcome to Think Out Loud.

Jermaine Malone: Ah, thank you. Great to be here.

Miller: You have been in Portland since 2008. That’s when you arrived. That’s the year I arrived.

Malone: Oh, nice.

Miller: What brought you here?

Malone: Honestly, I was in the Marines and my roommate – shout out, Tyler Walsh – my roommate was from Cornelius, Oregon.

Miller: Your roommate in the Marines?

Malone: I was in the Marines, yeah. I had done some recording and some music there, and he was like, “hey man, if you want to actually do music, you should move to Portland with me, there’s a big music scene there.” And I was like, it was kind of my time to start fresh and take my adult life to another place. So I ended up moving here. I’ve worked some odd jobs here and there, but essentially just started doing music.

Miller: What was it like to break into the music scene?

Malone: I feel like it was a little hard to start, just like finding the people, and essentially navigating and finding the right people to get in, where I fit in. And that kind of looks like, I started writing choruses for hip hop artists, for hip hop groups. Eventually, I started working with my friend Will Kinky. He brought me into his high school band, his band from high school, which was called Mångfald at the time – Swedish for diversity. And …

Miller: Wait, Mångfald means diversity in Swedish?

Malone: [Laughs] Correct, yeah.

Miller: Wow.

Malone: And then, time kind of went on and Mångfald sounds like a metal band. So we were like, we need a different name. And his brother was playing drums for us at the time …

Miller: I cannot think of a whiter way to say the word diversity than finding the Swedish way to say it. It’s amazing. [Laughter]

Malone: That’s what I thought, because I was the only minority in the band. [Laughs] But yeah, we ended up doing recordings. Will was going to PCC and they’re like, “well, what do you guys want to call yourself?” I’m like, “we don’t want to be called Mångfald.” I was like, “well, your brother plays in the band, why don’t we just call it The Kinky Brothers?” Their last name is Kinky. And that’s what we’ve been for 16, 17 years now.

Miller: I want to have a listen to one of your original songs. It’s actually one you submitted to the NPR “Tiny Desk” competition a couple years ago. It’s called “Run For Cover.” Anything we should know about this before we listen?

Malone: Kind of funny story about this. So I have a friend that was big on YouTube and she’s like, “I wanna use a song of yours.” I was like, oh man, I don’t have any songs that would be good. So, I recorded this song with my friend Matt Brewster, who produced the song … Matt Brewster and Evan Simko. I gave her that song. She put it on her YouTube channel. I was like, “this is actually a really good song, I want to submit it for ‘Tiny Desk.’” So then we submitted it for “Tiny Desk” and we got a nice little mention, but we didn’t make it any further than just kind of being on the site for a little bit.

Miller: Let’s listen. This is “Run For Cover.”

[“Run for Cover” by Jermaine Malone playing]

Miller: So this is your music making side, but you’ve also had a real career as a booker in recent years. How did you get into booking?

Malone: So kind of how it started – I had a friend of mine, back in … When was that? That was a long time ago. So some years ago I had a friend who was like, “I’m opening a bar with my dad.” I had a karaoke company at the time, so he’s like, “I want you to come and do karaoke, run our karaoke.” I was like, “great, I’ll do that.” So I did that for a little bit and after a while I was like, “we need to be doing some live music in here,” is really the big thing. And so then that’s when we just started doing live music and I started booking.

A lot of my friends in the music community and some of those people was like, [it] was their first shows, getting booked and paid shows for them. Then over time, it grew to working with wineries. I booked for Domaine Serene for a few years and a few other wineries out in the Valley. And then some venues. I did booking for Kells for a while and just kind of word of mouth. It was like, “oh, this is the guy you need to go to, this is the guy.” So that’s kind of how I got into the booking was just from that one space and it just kind of spread from there.

Miller: You’re one of the people who booked for the Portland Summer City sessions.

Malone: Yes.

Miller: Which happened, I think it was part of the pandemic response of the city. What was that like?

Malone: It was a little difficult because we were dealing with like COVID stuff and everything, but working with Meara, who’s with MusicPortland, was great. She had reached out to me and was like, “hey, PBOT reached out to me and they got an idea for these sessions,” and I’m like, “yeah, let’s do it.” So I went out and scoped out a lot of these spaces to use, and then built the original crew that were booking, which was Rainezra and David Pollack. We were coordinating a lot of shows on these squares. And then, I stepped away, and then Nalin took over and started doing some booking.

Miller: He is the man behind the glass right now, one of our engineers. When did you realize that you actually wanted to run your own space?

Malone: Running my own space has been something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time and just didn’t have the means to do that financially. And I didn’t really know a lot of people in that business. So obviously, as years went by, over the last few years we had looked at a few other spaces that didn’t quite work out. They weren’t quite the right fit and this place kind of fell in my lap. [Laughs]

Miller: When did you first hear about the space that became The Heights?

Malone: A friend of mine actually had went, looked at the space and was going to start a bar there. And they brought me in to do the booking for the music. Long story short, it didn’t quite work out for them. But I had already been working to open a venue, so I went to the landlord and I was like, “Hey, here’s my five-year plan. Here’s my investor deck if you want to invest. This is what I’m trying to do, work with the community and kind of do something a little bit different.” And at first, she was like, “I don’t know …”

Miller: You’ve never done this before. You were gonna be the booker, not the owner.

Malone: Exactly. So she’s like, “I don’t know,” but eventually we talked, we had a lot of long conversations. She’s like, “OK, I’ll take a chance with this, I want this to work.” So I started fundraising. And we raised about $60,000 with community support to get in the space, start making it our own and start getting off the ground.

Miller: Am I right [that] this was previously a strip club?

Malone: It was.

Miller: Did you have to do a lot to change the vibe, change the decor?

Malone: Yes. [Laughter] Yes, we did. So yeah, there was a lot of taking stuff out, a lot of trash. We took out all the poles. There’s two stages; we took out one stage. We added a window because it was so dark in there. We added a nice door and we took out all the private booths just to open up more space. And then where the dancers would change, we turned that into kind of like a green room, [a] control room, because we’re building a recording studio in there. So we kind of took everything out and just kind of made it our own.

Miller: Why did you want to make this an all ages venue?

Malone: Honestly, I feel like there used to be a lot of all ages venues here and for whatever reasons, those have gone by the wayside. And me, I have a son, I have a 2.5-year-old, and a lot of my friends have kids too. And that was kind of thing, like, “hey, come to my show.” They’re like, “oh, I don’t have a babysitter.” I was like, “Well, what if you could go to a place where you could have some drinks, have some food? It’s not necessarily a bar, but you can have some drinks and food, and bring the kids and kind of hang out. It’s a safe space.”

And that was kind of my idea behind all of that. I wanted a place where, if you’re a younger kid, there’s not a lot of places where you can go to catch a show. So I wanted to give the youth a little bit more of an opportunity to see some of the bands they like and maybe some new bands that they’ve never heard of before.

Miller: Right. That’s two different groups. I mean, there’s like the parents of young kids who want to still go out without paying for a babysitter, and then, say, a 17-year-old or a 20-year-old who wants to perform, or see friends or other people perform. What’s it been like dealing with the OLCC?

Malone: Difficult. Honestly, that was the biggest hurdle, dealing with the OLCC. A lot of it was because of the past of the strip club that was there. And before I took it over, it went from Shimmers, then it was a place called Trophy’s. And there were a lot of not great things that happened in that space, during that time. So what happened was when I was applying for my OLCC license, the OLCC was like, “well, we need to do an investigation on the space.” And I was like, “oh, that’s fine,” but I didn’t think anything of it.

But then they came back and they were like, “well, because of what has happened in this area before, we’re going to have to give you these restrictions.” And we’ve been working through it, but a lot of the restrictions have kind of hurt us monetarily, having as much security. And since we’ve been in there, there’s been no issues. Imagine that. You turn a place like that into an all-ages place and a space for the community, you don’t have any issues. So we’ve been dealing with that. That was honestly the hardest thing, and going back and forth with them, and then essentially we had to take on the restrictions.

Miller: In terms of where people could be, like which parts of ...

Malone: Not necessarily, it really just was like the amount of security we needed to have on show days. We didn’t get the discrepancy to be like, “Oh, there’s only going to be 20 people in here tonight. We don’t need two security guards.”

Miller: And you have to pay for that.

Malone: We have to pay for that, which is a big expense because it’s like $30-plus an hour per person.

Miller: How are you thinking about programming this? Over the course of, say, a week or two, what’s the variety of shows or events you want to see?

Malone: Yeah, I would like to see more kids playing. I would love to see more youth bands in the space. And then also on top of that, more artists that cater to the youth as well, because we want to get some kid dance parties in there. And just some community fun stuff, honestly, week to week. We do some open mics. We have karaoke on Sundays, which is all-ages until 10:00. And the program that we have now is, we’re still figuring it out, we’re still trying to figure out that sweet spot of kind of what everything would look like that works.

Miller: You mentioned the GoFundMe at the beginning. What’s it going to take for this to be self-sustaining?

Malone: As in …?

Miller: As in a business that just generates enough money that you can have this just keep going, as opposed to relying on the generosity of people to say, “I value this so I will just give you money,” as if it’s a nonprofit.

Malone: Yeah, like what our goal …

Miller: What’s it gonna take for it to be a sustainable business?

Malone: Oh yeah. So honestly, we’ve seen a lot of … Because we’ve only been open three months now, we’ve seen monthly growth, which is great. Where we need to be, for us to be in a comfortable position, we need to be making between 40 to 50 a month. So really it’s just getting the word out, press and just good programming, is what I think.

Miller: What’s your hope for what The Heights is going to be, say, five years from now?

Malone: Honestly, five years from now, I feel like in music venues, that’s like a long time from now. But five years from now, I hope to own the building. I hope to own the property, which I’ve talked to my landlord about. And I think in five years, we’ll be like a big hub for a lot of community events and people coming in from other states to do shows. That’s kind of what I’m seeing. And a place where people come in to record. Yeah.

Miller: Jermaine, thanks so much.

Malone: Yeah, thank you.

Miller: That’s Jermaine Malone. He is a musician and the owner and operator of The Heights Lounge and Events Space. It opened in the Foster-Powell neighborhood of Portland in April.

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