What was Axis-Radius?
Every district has a first bar, and Scottsdale’s Entertainment District has a first club. It was Axis-Radius, two nightclubs under one roof on Indian Plaza, and it lasted sixteen years in a part of town where most clubs are lucky to see three.
It began as a relocation. In the mid-1990s Les Corieri and developer Mark Drinkwater had the two hottest rooms in Arizona, Jetz and Stixx, in the aging Camelback Mall, and the plan for the Scottsdale Waterfront was about to flatten it. In 1996 they bought land on Indian Plaza west of Saddlebag Trail for about $300,000, by Drinkwater’s later account. The block was offices, a few restaurants, the Swedish consulate and a lot of plywood.
Axis opened in August 1997 as an upscale cigar and martini bar: mahogany, terrazzo, black granite, oversized booths and a menu of appetizers to go with the cigars. It was busy until eleven and dead after. Once a resident DJ started playing Friday nights, Corieri said, the numbers at least doubled. So in November 1998 the partners opened Radius on the dirt lot next door, a two-level nightclub with no kitchen at all, joined to Axis by an atrium downstairs and a skywalk upstairs.
The rest of the block followed. Sanctuary opened in 1999, SIX Lounge and the Corieris’ own Suede in 2001, and the city slowly relaxed. By the mid-2000s Indian Plaza, Saddlebag Trail and Stetson Drive were the center of Scottsdale nightlife, and Axis-Radius was the elder statesman of a scene it had started.
It closed on June 29, 2013, after a party called Last Call. The building did not go dark. The Axis half became Bottled Blonde and the Radius half, after a few years as a concert hall, became Casa Amigos. Both still belong to the Corieris.
How the two halves worked
Axis was the lounge, Radius was the club. Axis kept its cigar-bar bones long after the cigars went: booths, a bar, a “teeny” dance floor added in June 1998, and a DJ who could read a room that had come in for martinis. Radius was built the other way round, as what Corieri called the perfect nightclub, two levels and nothing to eat. The connection was the point. If you didn’t like what was happening on one side, you walked across.
The Amber Room was the money. A 1999 renovation, about half a million dollars, turned the upstairs of Radius from a waiting area into a VIP lounge with mohair curtains and a 40-foot resin bar by the Arizona jewelry designer Russ Twiford. It took about twenty men to carry the bar in, and from then on the room was where the bottle-service tables went.
The guest list made the reputation. Staff and DJs remember Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Tiger Woods, Larry Fitzgerald, Prince after a concert, George Clooney and Ashley Judd dancing on the platform in front of the DJ booth. Dennis Quaid played the Axis side with his band in February 2002. Super Bowl XLII in 2008 brought three nights of street parties, with P. Diddy, Snoop Dogg and Kid Rock outside on Indian Plaza.
The music followed the decade. The early years were house and big beat. The mid-2000s lull in electronic music pushed it toward hip-hop and Top 40, and the EDM boom of the early 2010s pulled it back: Kaskade, Benny Benassi, Above & Beyond, Calvin Harris, Ferry Corsten, Steve Aoki. LMFAO, the promoter Steve LeVine said, used the room about once a month to sharpen their set before they broke. DJs also remember the original Radius booth, which was reached by a ladder, and a 2008 night when a VIP guest blew a fireball at a sprinkler head and put three inches of water on the dance floor.
If you are here because you met your wife there, or had your twenty-first birthday there, you are in good company. That was the sentence the staff heard most.
The club that made a district, and why it stopped being a club
It is easy to forget how empty Indian Plaza was. Before 1997, the blocks around Indian Plaza had Martini Ranch on Stetson from 1994 and not much else after dark, and the Valley’s dance clubs lived wherever their owners could find cheap space, which for the Corieris meant a strip center on Camelback Road. The Corieris had been doing that since 1985, when Les bought a Tempe bar called Clancey’s and turned it into a nightclub, and through Trocadero’s, Ten Downing Street, Jetz and Stixx. Axis was the first time they built from the ground up on land they owned. When they bought it, Corieri said later, people thought they were crazy.
They were right that a club could anchor a neighborhood. Within two years Shawn Yari’s Sanctuary had opened a few doors away, and Les Corieri’s view of the order of events is blunt: SIX opened after us, Sanctuary opened after us, and Axis-Radius was the reason. The 1990s ended with Indian Plaza as a nightlife address, and the 2000s built the Entertainment District on top of it as the city, which had been hard to deal with about opening clubs, relaxed its stance. The Corieris bought Sanctuary and renamed it Myst, opened Suede across the street, and by the 2010s had a half-dozen venues around the Valley.
By 2013 the model had aged. Z-Trip, who played some of its last nights, said the place needed a face-lift or someone would come to town and take its role, and someone did: Maya, the pool club built on the Myst and Suede block across the street, opened in April 2013 and filled immediately. Corieri’s own explanation was arithmetic. A pure nightclub opened four nights a week from ten to two. The DJs who drew crowds, Oakenfold and Calvin Harris among them, now had Las Vegas bidding for their dates. A building on the best block in Old Town ought to be selling lunch, happy hour, football and late night.
So the owners split it. Radius kept its tiered shape and balcony and became Livewire, a concert hall for about a thousand people; Axis became a beer garden with a wood-fired oven. Bottled Blonde worked from the start. Livewire was a harder sell in a district built for DJ nights, and in 2018 it gave way to Casa Amigos and Sky Lanes. Both halves have since drifted back toward what Axis-Radius was, late nights and bottle service, because on Indian Plaza that is what pays.
Honest assessment: Axis-Radius was not the best-designed club Scottsdale ever had, and by the end it was rough around the edges. But it was the first, it outlasted almost every club that copied it, and the district you walk through on a Saturday night is laid out around the bet two partners made on a block of plywood in 1996. For the rest of that story, read the guides to Old Town nightlife and the Entertainment District.