What is Pub Rock Live?
Scottsdale has one room where touring metal bands play to a few hundred people standing on parquet, and it is on a side street in the industrial south end of town, behind a door with no windows on either side of it. Pub Rock Live, at 8005 E Roosevelt Street east of Hayden, is the city’s punk and metal venue, its most durable live-music address, and, from September to February, the loudest Kansas City Chiefs bar in Arizona.
The building has hosted bands for more than twenty years under three names. In the 1990s it was The Atomic Cafe, an industrial, goth and hard-rock club owned by Randall Goodwin, known as DJ Randall, who opened a second Atomic Cafe in Austin in 1997, closed the Scottsdale one in 1998 and died the next year. The property went to Jason Olson, who made it Chasers, a heavy-metal and punk dive that over the next decade booked The Lawrence Arms, Cobra Skulls and Steve Ignorant of Crass. In 2012 two people from the concert side of the Valley bought it: Nancy Stevens, a longtime radio programmer who was then running the online station KUKQ, and Jeff Stotler, a concert and event producer. They put parquet tile over the sticky concrete, rebuilt the stage, upgraded the sound and lighting, cleaned the bathrooms, added a closet-size recording booth for live broadcasts and renamed the place for the 1970s English pub rock scene, when big bands played small rooms.
Phoenix New Times gave the result Best Reboot in 2013 and Best Rock Venue in 2018. The bar calls itself “Your Friendly Neighborhood Dive bar” and “Scottsdale’s Hub for Live music,” both fair. The honest verdict is that it is the only room in South Scottsdale where the music is the point rather than the background, and the live music guide ranks it accordingly.
Show nights, Sundays and the room
Read the calendar first. Pub Rock is not a bar that happens to have a stage; it is a stage with a bar. The events page lists touring punk, metal, hardcore and pop-punk bills, local showcases and the occasional tribute night, and the hours follow the bookings. Buy tickets in advance for the touring names, which have included Jello Biafra, Unwritten Law, Crowbar, Down, In This Moment, Polar Bear Club and Nerf Herder, and expect local openers from the scene the room has fed for a decade: Doll Skin, Fourbanger, The Beast of Bailey Downs and Ebinezer all cut their teeth here.
The room. No windows, no patio, one long floor and a 20-by-26-foot stage with an eight-foot ceiling above it, two drum risers and a house PA that the venue specs page lists down to the model numbers. New Times’ point in 2017 holds: the stage is visible from any spot in the room, so the bar at the back is as good a view as the rail. Drink prices are cheap by Scottsdale standards, and the staff are, in the paper’s phrase, welcoming. There is no kitchen; food trucks often park outside on show nights, and the late-night list has the rest.
Sundays in red. Every football season the bar becomes, in its own words, “the biggest Arizona fan base for the Kansas City Chiefs,” with a posted football schedule and a few hundred people in red for the big games. It also draws NFL, soccer and racing fans on other days. If you are not a Chiefs fan and a Chiefs game is on, pick another bar; if you are, this is the only bar.
Getting there. Roosevelt Street runs east off Hayden south of McDowell, in the warehouse blocks near Vista del Camino Park. Parking is free, which the 2018 citation counted as a perk. Duke’s at Miller and McDowell and Night Owl at Hayden and McDowell are the nearest rooms for a drink before or after.
Atomic Cafe, Chasers, Pub Rock: three decades of one stage
The south end of Scottsdale has always been where the city put the noise, and 8005 E Roosevelt is the clearest case. In the 1990s, when the clubs of Old Town were going upscale and velvet-roped, The Atomic Cafe was the Valley’s industrial and goth room, run by a DJ rather than a promoter. When Randall Goodwin closed it in 1998 the building became Chasers, which traded eyeliner for denim and kept the stage. The Chasers years were long and unglamorous, a punk and metal bar the touring hardcore circuit knew as the Scottsdale stop. By 2012 the concrete floor was sticky enough to be a story.
The 2012 purchase is what turned a dive with a stage into a venue. Nancy Stevens had programmed The Edge, worked at KUPD and ALT AZ, produced radio festivals including Warped Tour and That Damn Show dates, and briefly managed The Format, Fenix TX and Authority Zero; she knew every band and every booker in the state. She was also program director of the online station KUKQ, and within weeks of reopening she had it broadcasting from the bar: a “Q Family Gathering” in August 2012 with $1 shots, then weekly SkaPunk Thursdays from the new recording booth. The band stickers on the walls stayed, on purpose. The Best Reboot citation the next year listed Unwritten Law, Jello Biafra, Kris Roe of The Ataris and The Protomen as the proof.
Then the venue did the hard part, which is lasting. The 2018 Best Rock Venue award came for a steady diet of touring metal, pop-punk, garage rock and hardcore and for being the home room of a generation of local bands. In April 2020 New Times published a profile of Stevens under the heading “Nancy Stevens has done it all,” noting that the bar had, until a few weeks earlier, hosted bands every week and Chiefs crowds every Sunday; the pandemic closed the stage, and the bar came back on both fronts.
Where it sits in Scottsdale’s bar history is simple: it is the last of the line. The Rogue Bar, the other punk room on Scottsdale Road, closed in 2019; Rockbar in Old Town is a club with a rooftop. The Atomic Cafe’s building is still a music venue thirty years on, with the same purpose and a better PA. Honest assessment: Pub Rock is not pretty, and it is not meant to be. It is a working rock room with cheap drinks, a visible stage and an owner who books it like a fan. Scottsdale, which rarely keeps anything loud for long, has kept this one. It earns its place on the list of every bar and club in Scottsdale by being the only one of its kind.