When I sit down with booker and KEXP DJ Brian Foss at the Victory Lounge to chat about some exciting news, he’s sporting an enormous beard.
“About a year and a half ago, I made a drunken pledge to my friends and my wife that I was going to grow this beard out until I found a new place for the Funhouse,” Foss says. “I pledged that on reopening night, I’d shave it off onstage. I’m happy to say that there will soon be a beard-shaving party.”
Thanks to a new three-way partnership—Foss, his longtime Funhouse business partner Bobby Kuckelburg (who also owns Victory Lounge), and 10-year El Corazon owner Dana Sims—the Funhouse will reopen April 1 in El Corazon’s side lounge room. Foss will book both all-ages and 21-and-over shows in the new Funhouse, continuing its legacy as a refuge for fringe musical freaks.
“We’d been using the smaller room for shows more and more, and it seemed like all the shows that would’ve been at the Funhouse were coming to our lounge anyway,” Sims says. “I asked for a meeting with [Foss and Kuckelburg] about a year and a half ago, and I said, ‘Hey, we can turn the Funhouse into the lounge and bring it back and work together, and we can also do bigger shows at Corazon.’ And Bobby said, ‘Hey, that’s a great idea! But we just signed papers on a place where we are putting the new Funhouse!’ Literally, as we were talking, someone was delivering papers to him to sign. So I wished them luck and I went on my way again.”
As fate would have it, the deal—to take over Bogart’s on Airport Way, where Foss had been booking shows—fell through. “We basically had to reset because another buyer swooped in and the owner had to sell immediately,” Foss says.
Not long after, Sims read an article in this paper on Seattle’s changing music scene (“Sound Effects,” Oct. 8, 2014) and noticed a quote from Foss that got the gears going again. “I saw Brian saying something like, ‘Oh, I’ve been booking shows around town, but I really wish the Funhouse was around again,’ and I suddenly went, ‘Oh, wait! I guess the deal didn’t happen!’ ” Sims immediately called the duo, and they’ve been meeting regularly ever since to concoct their plan.
The trio say that not only will the Funhouse reopen in El Corazon, but Foss and Kuckelburg will join Sims as co-managers and co-owners of the El Corazon building as well, a role that makes the team their own landlords. That was key in Foss and Kuckelburg’s decision to join forces with Sims, having had front-row seats to one of the city’s most emblematic cases of gentrification.
As portrayed in Ryan Worsley’s 2014 documentary Razing the Bar, the Funhouse developed a storied legacy, stretching back to 2003, as a weirdo uptown punk refuge for freaky touring and local bands. In 2012 it was forced to close by developers to make way for condos.
“We had to close a very successful club, and we poured a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into it,” Foss says. “To have it ground into dust in front of me was nothing you want to live through again. It’s very nice to know this new arrangement will promise some longevity for us to do this thing we love.”
“Every day I drive into work in this neighborhood and there’s more and more cranes, more than you can count on your hand,” Sims says. “It’s just like, it’s nice to know the Boogeyman isn’t coming for this building.”
The new Funhouse won’t be exactly the same—the basketball court, for example, is not coming back. But the emphasis on booking outsiders and oddball acts while providing a space to develop local bands will remain its core philosophy. “You can’t replicate a thing like [the Funhouse],” Kuckelburg says, “but we aren’t trying to do the same thing again.”
“One of the new things that’s exciting,” Foss says, “is that bands I’ve worked with in the past that got too big for the Funhouse, like Black Lips or Thee Oh Sees—bands that have since gone on to play much bigger local rooms—I can book them now in El Corazon’s main room while still taking gambles on shows at the Funhouse in the smaller room.”
The April 1 date, which the owners assure us isn’t a joke, will mark the official metamorphosis of the El Corazon lounge into the Funhouse, but the owners say the transition won’t be immediate. “It will be a gradual evolution from the lounge into what will become Funhouse land,” Sims says.
While the date for the first official Funhouse reopening show/Brian Foss beard-shaving party is still undetermined, one thing is sure—the Funhouse’s infamous Spike the Clown mascot will show his top-hatted, toothy skeleton face once again.
“He’s been living in my yard this whole time,” Kuckelburg says. “Ask my neighbors if they’ll miss him. I’ll give you a hint: They aren’t going to miss him.”
ksears@seattleweekly.com
