What was the Pussycat Lounge?
The corner of Saddlebag Trail and Indian Plaza has worn three names in twenty years, and the Pussycat Lounge was the first and longest.
It opened around 2003; nobody has published the exact year, but when Phoenix New Times wrote its obituary in June 2012 it said the club had served the stylish and the skinny for the better part of a decade, and the paper’s photographers were dropping in by 2008. The logo was a woman in a cowboy hat. The room was a danceteria in the plainest sense: a floor, two stripper poles on it, VIP sections around it and a crowd that used all three. In 2009 New Times’ Best of Phoenix gave it the award for the best place to see girls behaving badly on the dance floor, which the club presumably framed.
The owners mattered beyond the room. The team behind the Pussycat, led by longtime owner Ryan Jocque, launched Dirty Pretty, a rock bar on 6th Avenue, and in late 2008 American Junkie on 75th Street, which made them one of the busier operating groups of the 2000s district. In July 2009 they shut the Pussycat for a four-week redesign that moved the bar and put the DJ booth in the middle of the floor.
The end was a sale. In December 2011 Joe Fournier, a 29-year-old London club operator who had first visited Scottsdale in 2007 and kept coming back, bought the club; the Pussycat had been the first Scottsdale club he ever walked into. He ran it six more months, closed it on June 30, 2012, and rebuilt it as EPIQ, a mirrored, horse-themed club that opened in October 2012 and was gone by the summer of 2013. CAKE took the corner in January 2014 and has held it since. The honest verdict: the Pussycat was a cheerfully unsubtle club that outlasted every subtle one around it.
A floor, two poles and a DJ in the middle
The product was the dance floor. By the late 2000s most of Saddlebag Trail sold tables; the Pussycat sold the floor. New Times’ 2009 award described patrons dancing on it, working the two stripper poles inside the club, doing table dances for their friends and treating the VIP sections as semi-private rooms, and it noted that a recent complete renovation had added more room to dance. That renovation was the July 2009 four-week closure: a completely different design, the bar moved to another part of the space and the DJ booth relocated to the center of the floor. Moving the DJ into the crowd is a statement of priorities, and it was the right one for this room.
The logo was the brand. The woman in the cowboy hat on the sign was enough of a landmark that New Times wondered in 2009 whether the renovation would keep her. The club’s own site was pclaz.com, and regulars called it PCL.
It had a family. Dirty Pretty on 6th Avenue was the rock bar, American Junkie on 75th Street was the sports bar with a club’s night shift, and the Pussycat on Saddlebag was the one that just danced. The three rooms, from one team, covered three different nights in a district that in 2008 was still dominated by Evening Entertainment Group’s Axis-Radius, Suede and Myst a block away. The Crown Room on Indian Plaza, owned by Troy Shane, renovated the same month in 2009; New Times covered the two in one story.
Go late and expect a line. The Pussycat was a second or third stop, open to 2 a.m. with a door that, as a New Times photographer admitted in 2008, was sometimes surprised to let the press in. The Old Town nightlife guide explains the route; this corner, then and now, is near the end of it.
Pussycat, EPIQ, CAKE: one corner, three clubs
Start with the address, because the record argues with itself. New Times’ 2008 club listing and its Club Candids column both put the Pussycat Lounge at 4426 N Saddlebag Trail, an even number on the west side of the street that today belongs to Pretty Please Lounge. But New Times also reported, in October 2012 and again in February 2014, that EPIQ opened in the Saddlebag Trail property that formerly housed the Pussycat and that CAKE opened in the former home of EPIQ and the Pussycat, at the corner of Saddlebag and Indian Plaza, and CAKE’s address is 4405, on the east corner. Either the club’s number changed with its facade or an old listing carried a mailing address; we have not found the document that settles it, so we give 4405 as the better-supported answer and 4426 as the one in the 2000s press.
EPIQ was the most expensive thing ever built in the room. Fournier, whose London pedigree ran through The Rose Club and Whiskey Mist, hired designer Kelsey Elliott of KLB International and spent, by his own estimate, a couple million dollars on lighting and dance-club elements alone. The result, which soft-opened the weekend before October 19, 2012, was what New Times called a futuristic Vegas-style nightspot meets British polo club: mirrors covering the ceiling and all four walls, a crisscrossing lattice of more than 3,000 LED lights around the floor, three tiers of horseshoe-shaped VIP booths, checkered marble, fleur-de-lis everywhere, a thick oak bar, a Funktion One sound system and go-go dancers and servers dressed in jodhpurs or carrying riding crops. The facade was still unfinished at opening. It closed, in New Times’ words, rather unceremoniously, in the summer of 2013.
CAKE is the third life and the durable one. It opened in late January 2014 under Southern California’s EDL Management Group, stripped out the mirrors and the equestrian theme for a Baroque French chateau in dark wood and leather, and is now run by Riot Hospitality Group, which calls it the venue that launched the company. Twelve years on one corner, in a district where clubs turn over every three, is the longest run the address has had, and it began with the Pussycat’s lease.
Honest assessment: the Pussycat Lounge was never a critic’s club and never tried to be, and it is on every bar and club in Scottsdale because it held the busiest corner in the Entertainment District for nine years and spawned two more bars. EPIQ is the footnote: proof that a few million dollars of mirrors cannot buy a corner a reason to exist, and that CAKE’s quieter room, built a year later, could.