What was Livewire?
For two and a half years the Entertainment District had a concert hall, and it stood inside a nightclub’s bones.
Livewire was built in the Radius half of Axis-Radius, the double club at 7340 E Indian Plaza that Les and Diane Corieri had run for sixteen years until its Last Call on June 29, 2013. The plan, announced that week, was to modernize both halves: the Axis side became Bottled Blonde in January 2014, and the Radius side was to be a concert venue by spring. It took longer. Livewire opened on Saturday, December 27, 2014, with doors at 9 p.m., $10 tickets and the local indie-folk band Jared and the Mill, who had come up through the Rogue Bar and Pub Rock, as the first headliner.
The room was serious. LGE Design Build and AV3 Design gave the Corieris 11,000 square feet on two levels (the builder counted 14,000) with a capacity of 1,130: a stage that could be enlarged, backed by a 25-foot LED wall and framed by a proscenium arch; an Anya sound system of the kind used at Coachella; a main bar downstairs and a second upstairs; wrought iron, a crystal chandelier and a grand staircase; recessed VIP lounge seating looking down on the floor; a box office and a merchandise nook; and a second-floor balcony over Indian Plaza with TVs showing the stage. “Nobody’s doing this type of entertainment in Scottsdale at this level,” Les Corieri said. “The missing piece, for us, for this district is live music on a big scale.”
For a while it was. Jeff Bridges and The Abiders played on January 9, 2015, The English Beat the next night, Steve Aoki on February 19. Joe Jonas, Lil Wayne, Florida Georgia Line, Marshmello and Waka Flocka Flame followed, at a pace that at times reached two or three shows a week. Then on July 1, 2017 EEG announced it was closing; Bone Thugs-N-Harmony played the last show two nights later. The building was gutted that month for Casa Amigos and Skylanes. Our verdict: the most ambitious thing the district has built in this century, and the one that proved Old Town is not a concert town.
A show night on Indian Plaza
The bills were split three ways. Nashville’s Madison Entertainment booked most of the live music, Steve LeVine Entertainment handled the EDM nights, and the Corieris said they were open to local promoters like Lucky Man Concerts and Stateside Presents. The result was a calendar that swung from Americana (Bridges and The Abiders) to ska (The English Beat) to a Disco Donnie-promoted Aoki rave in its first eight weeks, with comedy promised too. Big Super Bowl week shows were planned for February 2015, when the game came to Glendale.
The all-ages nights were a district first. Joe Jonas on November 5, 2015, with doors at 9, ran all ages, something no club on the block had ever offered. The Jeff Bridges show was all ages as well. For a few years Livewire was the only reason a teenager had to be on Indian Plaza.
The seats to want were upstairs: the recessed VIP lounge over the floor for a set you wanted to watch, the balcony over the street for one you wanted to hear while watching the district fill. Standing room was the main floor. Opening night cost $10; the national names cost more.
It was also a hall for hire. The Scottsdale League for the Arts held the Arizona Culinary Hall of Fame awards there in March 2015, and Phoenix Fashion Week ran a white catwalk down the floor for its Emerging Designers Bootcamp in June 2016. On nights without a show it was dark, which in a district of rooms open until 2 a.m. was the problem.
Before and after were next door. Bottled Blonde shared the atrium for dinner and beer before doors, and the rest of the block, HiFi, El Hefe and Maya among them, took the crowd afterward. The Old Town nightlife guide covers what those rooms do now, and our live music guide covers where the bands went.
Why Old Town could not keep a concert hall
Livewire was the Corieris’ answer to a question they had raised themselves. When they closed Axis-Radius, Les Corieri said the pure nightclub, open four nights a week from 10 to 2 and bidding against Las Vegas for touring DJs, had run its course. Bottled Blonde was the seven-day answer: food, beer, games, late night. Livewire was the other bet, that the district’s missing piece was live music at scale, and that a 1,130-capacity hall could fill the gap between the 300-person clubs and the arenas.
The 2010s Valley had other ideas. The established music halls in Phoenix and, above all, the casinos were chasing the same mid-size acts, with bigger rooms or deeper pockets. “At the end of the day, we were getting some great acts in there and we were filling the venue,” EEG’s Jeff O’Neil said when the closing was announced, and that was the point: filling it was not enough. The company felt it “could do better with the space,” and the space was in the single most valuable nightlife block in Arizona.
What it did with it tells you what the district wanted. Renovation began in July 2017: $4 million, 16,238 square feet across two stories, LGE Design Build again, with construction finished around December 18. On the ground floor came Casa Amigos, a Mexican cantina designed by HGTV’s Alison Victoria that turns into a club at night; upstairs, on Livewire’s old balcony and mezzanine, came Skylanes, a 10,000-square-foot, six-lane bowling lounge with DJs, a full bar and bottle service, which kept the balcony patio. Both opened in January 2018. Les Corieri said the music hall’s closing “last summer” was what prompted them. Concerts had lasted two and a half years; bowling with bottle service is still there.
Honest assessment: Livewire was a good room, better built than it needed to be, and it lost to geography. The acts it wanted could play Phoenix or the casinos, and the district it sat in made more money from a dance floor than a stage. It is the missing chapter between Axis-Radius and Casa Amigos, and a reminder that Scottsdale’s big live-music moments have mostly happened elsewhere. The full roll of what the district has built and torn out is in our list of every bar and club in Scottsdale.