What was Buzz: The Original Funbar?
Every Scottsdale club story but one is an Old Town story. Buzz is the exception: a 19,000-square-foot, two-level dance club at 10345 N Scottsdale Road, on the east side of the road just south of Shea Boulevard, in the strip-center stretch of the Shea Corridor where nobody has built a nightclub before or since.
It opened in 1997 (one Phoenix New Times piece puts it at 1996) as an upscale room, with a dance floor downstairs and a lounge upstairs. That is not what it became. Within a few years Buzz was, in New Times’ later phrase, a hotspot for 18-and-over party monsters, often open until 4 a.m., and it ran the Valley’s best-known underage programming: a Friday 18-plus night called Club Deez, and, every summer Wednesday, a teen night for ages 15 to 20 with no alcohol, a $10 cover and off-duty sheriff’s deputies at the door. A generation of Scottsdale teenagers had their first club night here, with a parent idling in the lot.
That niche is what killed it. When Old Town and East Valley clubs, Myst, Cherry Lounge and Afterlife among them, started 18-and-over nights of their own in the recession, Buzz lost its reason to exist. It shut down after a final Saturday in mid-September 2009; New Times said it had experienced the ultimate buzzkill. The building was still vacant when the paper surveyed Scottsdale’s lost clubs in 2023.
The honest verdict: Buzz was never a great club, but it was an important one, the room where the city’s under-21 crowd learned what a dance floor was.
The teen night, the 18-plus night, and the 4 a.m. close
Wednesday was the famous night. New Times sent a reporter inside in September 2003, by which point the summer teen night had run for about four years. The rules were strict and strange: aside from staff, nobody over 20 or under 15 was allowed inside, the room was smoke- and booze-free, the cover was $10, and bottled water sold at beer prices. Kids arrived around 10 p.m. and the party ended at midnight. The crowd came from Chaparral and Desert Mountain, from Xavier and Brophy, and from as far as Fountain Hills and Queen Creek. Security guards worked the building and three off-duty Maricopa County deputies worked the door and the parking lot, and when the reporter checked, Scottsdale police had logged no calls to the club on a Wednesday that summer. The room itself was a sleek club: glossy gray floor, lasers and colored beams, cafe tables, couples in the upstairs lounge.
Friday was the business. By 2004 the weekly draw was Club Deez, an 18-and-over night with a separate admission price for the 18-to-21 crowd, who could get in but not drink. That split, a wristband economy where the under-21s pay to dance and the over-21s pay to drink, is how Buzz ran as an adult club and a teen club in the same building, and why it could stay open until 4 a.m., long after the bars had stopped pouring.
What it was not. A Scottsdale resort crowd never came here; the Old Town nightlife district a few miles south had that. Buzz was a car-culture club on a six-lane road, with the parking lot as its front porch. If you are tracing the Shea Corridor today you will find restaurants and strip retail, and nothing that looks like a nightclub.
The calendar that mattered was the school calendar. Summer and school breaks filled the Wednesday night; the rest of the year ran on Fridays and Saturdays. No club in Old Town has ever depended that heavily on when Scottsdale Unified lets out.
The only big club north of Old Town
Who built Buzz is one of the gaps in Scottsdale’s bar record. The best clue we have found is a 1996 federal trademark filing for the marks Buzz and Funbar, covering restaurant and nightclub services, in the name of Chris Boileau; New Times, over a dozen years of coverage, refers only to management. The club’s name promised something broader than a dance club, and the two-level layout, a floor downstairs and a lounge upstairs, was the standard build of the late 1990s, the same era that produced Radius on Indian Plaza and Sanctuary on Shoeman Lane.
What made Buzz last twelve years was a market the Old Town clubs did not want. Through the 2000s the Entertainment District was a 21-and-over, bottle-service economy; the 18-to-21 crowd had nowhere to go, and Buzz took them. The arrangement held until the recession. When Myst in Old Town and East Valley rooms like Cherry Lounge and Afterlife started 18-and-over nights of their own around the recession, they took Buzz’s customers without having to drive to Shea, and a club whose whole model was being the only option stopped being one. New Times’ obituary on September 16, 2009 reported that the club had shut down the past weekend, with its last event on a Saturday.
The site has had no second act. Where most lost Scottsdale bars became another bar, Buzz became an empty building; New Times’ 2023 list of 25 legendary Scottsdale clubs marked 10345 N Scottsdale Road as vacant, and we have not confirmed a tenant since. That is partly the address. A 19,000-square-foot club box on a suburban arterial has few uses, and the corridor has filled in with the kind of businesses that close by nine.
Honest assessment: Buzz was a utility more than a destination, a safe room for the city’s teenagers and a late room for its 18-year-olds, and it did both well enough to run for twelve years. It ranks on every bar and club in Scottsdale as the one lost club that was not in Old Town, and as a reminder that the district’s dominance was never guaranteed; for a decade, the biggest underage dance floor in Arizona was a strip center near Shea.