Running a venue like the House of Blues in Anaheim requires more than just the skills of a typical general manager. Overseeing one of OC’s largest, most iconic venues means you have to be a music junkie, an expert planner and statistician, an innovator, a star wrangler, a night owl, and a people person. All this while maintaining a Blues Brothers level of cool. Above all, you have to be very, very flexible.
It’s a stressful job, but Stacy Butler sees this wall of tasks as a welcome challenge. “At the end of the day, it’s a people business,” she says while pecking at a steak salad. She’s seated at a booth inside the venue’s colorful, open dining hall, one of four areas that host shows within the 40,000-square-foot building. “Being able to mold yourself in the situation is a must. You also have to stay highly organized when you have four different businesses under one roof; you have to know what’s going on in your life three months down the road.”
She recently managed to slip in a long-awaited Hawaiian vacation, and her newfound tan is well-earned. When the 34-year-old was promoted to the general manager position in March, it felt like the culmination of a lifetime growing up in the club and venue industry. After graduating from USC and waiting tables at a restaurant-turned-nightclub in Santa Monica, the Seattle native got a shot from upper management at applying for a job in nightlife management. Despite having zero experience, her wealth of ambition landed her the gig. Being thrown into the sink-or-swim environment was insane, she recalls, but she soon got the hang of it. “It was a lot of learning on the fly and learning on my own, which was a little difficult, but sometimes that’s the best way to learn.”
It wasn’t until landing a job in music programming at the Viper Room a couple of years later that she realized her true calling. “I knew [working with bands] is where I belong,” Butler says. “Viper Room was what really got me to love seeing concerts every night.”
As her musical tastes are all over the map, she is definitely well-suited to run the Anaheim venue, which hosts artists varying from Big Sean to Billy Idol. She admits, however, that anything related to ’90s R&B will always be her jam. “I listen to every kind of music, anything that induces an emotion, whether it’s pain, or happiness or sadness, good or bad,” Butler says. “My playlist is always music ADD.”
She started working for Live Nation in 2012 and has since helped to operate or close out multiple House of Blues venues, including the former location at Downtown Disney before working underneath her predecessor, Tim Jorgensen, in the club’s new digs at GardenWalk.
Butler recalls the chaos of that first weekend in the new location, coordinating massive crowds for two nights of Social Distortion. “Everything was going on at once,” she says. “The building wasn’t fully done, and the show would come down, and then workers would come in, and the next day, they’d leave and clean up, and we’d have another show. But the relief of seeing a show go off and being officially open was pretty cool.”
Now that things at the venue have taken on a solid rhythm, even the crazy nights and misadventures of life in the business aren’t as daunting as they once were. But she always tries to focus on giving fans an experience that will leave their ears ringing and their hearts singing.
“You can see Wu-Tang Clan anywhere, but where can you go where you’re getting an amazing experience, dinner before, and an after-party in the Foundation Room?” she asks. “It’s our job to create those experiences where people want to come back and talk about us, too.”
