What was The Rogue Bar?
At the very bottom of Scottsdale Road, in a strip mall built in 1961 a few hundred feet from the Tempe line, there was for eighteen years a rock bar that the rest of Scottsdale pretended not to own. The Rogue Bar, at 423 N Scottsdale Rd, was the live-music dive of South Scottsdale: 80 people, a low stage, a stage door shingled in band stickers, and bathrooms whose graffiti was, in Phoenix New Times’ words, a local legend.
The space had a long record before the name. Over the decades it had been a neighborhood bar, a tiki bar, a pool hall, a biker bar, a gay bar and a punk joint called Sneaky Pete’s. In 2001 a local entrepreneur, Mark Maertens, converted Sneaky Pete’s into The Rogue. In 2006 he sold it to Manny Tripodis, who with Lindsay Tripodis ran it for the next twelve years and made it, by his own count, a room that hosted about 20 touring acts every month.
It was open daily from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m., which tells you it was a bar first. But its reputation was the stage. Local bands cut their teeth there, small national acts played it on the way through, and dance nights filled the gaps: William Reed’s Shake!, and Cupcake!, a monthly fetish night run by DJs Self.Destrukt and Betty Blackheart. New Times recognized it repeatedly in Best of Phoenix and, in 2024, called it “a beloved local music and nightlife institution for 19-plus years” and “a gloriously funky dive.”
It closed on May 1, 2019, after the landlord declined to renew the lease. Blue Buddha Collective occupies the room now. Our verdict: the best small stage Scottsdale ever had, in the part of Scottsdale that least resembles Scottsdale, which is exactly why it worked.
A night at the Rogue
Get there early, because it was small. Eighty people was the legal room, and on a good touring night that meant the bar was full by the opener. Cover was whatever the band cost. The drinks were dive-priced, and nobody ordered a cocktail with a name.
The bill changed every night. Tripodis booked locals and touring acts in roughly equal measure, and the indie, punk and garage bands of the Valley rotated through constantly. The Rogue was where bands built a crowd before graduating to Pub Rock on Roosevelt or, in Scottsdale’s brief big-room era, Livewire. Jared and the Mill played the Rogue before headlining Livewire’s opening in December 2014.
The dance nights were a scene of their own. Shake!, William Reed’s long-running party, ran there until it ended; Cupcake!, the monthly fetish night, gave the bar a crowd that no other room in Scottsdale would book. A 2012 stabbing after a 1:30 a.m. argument made the news, and the bar carried on.
By day it was a neighborhood bar. The 6 a.m. opening served the shift workers, retirees and students who live at the south end of the city, the same constituency the Coach House serves in Old Town. For the Valley’s current small stages see our guide to live music in Scottsdale, and for the surviving rooms of this kind, the dive bar guide.
Why South Scottsdale lost its rock bar
The Rogue sat on the one stretch of Scottsdale Road that the city spent the 2010s trying to change. South Scottsdale’s redevelopment, from the SkySong campus up to the Papago Plaza rebuild, came with beautification plans for the old commercial strips, and a 1961 mall with a dive bar in it was not what the renderings showed. The mall was renovated in 2018; the former convenience store next door became a fitness company. In December 2018 the landlord told Tripodis the lease would not be renewed.
He announced it on Facebook in January 2019, and his statement is the best epitaph the place could have. “My landlord informed me in December that they would not be renewing our lease,” he wrote, and on the neighborhood’s improvement plans: “we’re not in the mix because we’re ugly.” Then the pride: “I’m proud of the things we’ve accomplished over the last 12 years.” He kept the calendar, dozens of shows across the final three months, and played them all. The last show was April 30, 2019. He said he would look for a small multipurpose space for 80-to-120-capacity shows elsewhere in the Valley and that it would most likely not carry the old name: “The Rogue will be buried and stay buried in South Scottsdale.”
The Rogue belongs to a short Scottsdale lineage of rooms that booked bands rather than DJs. The Atomic Cafe and then Chasers on Roosevelt, which became Pub Rock; the Cajun House on Scottsdale Road; the Rockin’ Horse before them. Most were in the south end, where rents allowed noise. The Rogue outlived nearly all of them because it was cheap to run, open all day and owned by people who liked bands.
Honest assessment: it was ugly, as its owner said, and it was wonderful. Scottsdale has not replaced it, and probably will not; the south end’s new buildings are apartments with ground-floor coffee. The full roll of what the city has lost and kept is in our list of every bar and club in Scottsdale.