The story of The End Lafayette starts with husband-and-wife team Kenny and Liz Vasko quitting their corporate jobs. Vasko, who was previously a tax accountant, started doing tax returns for friends and family as the couple contemplated their next move. In late 2018, when he’d built up enough clientele to open his own office, he accidentally stumbled upon Dog House Music Studios.“So I’m looking for office space and this ad comes up: ‘Building for sale, comes with music studio.’ Liz and I came to check it out, and we saw it and were like, ‘This is amazing, we can’t believe this exists!,’” he remembers. But their realtor informed them that the building had been bought by an out-of-state developer, and was slated for demolition in the near future. The Vaskos contacted the buyer, who flew out and quickly realized that the studio’s thick concrete walls would be difficult and costly to destroy. He agreed to sell it to the Vaskos if they could find a bank to back them: “So we were like, ‘What if we…went for it?’ Six months and like, eight banks later, we owned a building.” The End Lafayette, an intimate venue nestled inside Dog House Studios, isn’t just one of Lafayette Music Fest’s venues. It’s where the festival was born.
Let’s start at the beginning. Though the building was operating as a recording studio called Dog House Music Studios before it was bought by the Vaskos, it was nothing like the Dog House Music Studios we know and love today. Transforming the space wasn’t just a matter of renovating the building, but also finding the right people to fill it. “Our clientele now is very different than it was five years ago. Five years ago, it was mostly metal, and basically people who wanted to be loud but couldn’t be loud in their houses. It was a bit walled-off, there wasn’t much of a community, and people just came and went,” says Kenny. Over many coffees and beers, the Vaskos began to grow a network of musicians and music industry folks, who offered advice and spread the word about Dog House reopening. Even though they decided to keep the studio’s original name, it’s taken on a new meaning with Kenny, Liz, and their dog Babs at the helm. “It was called Dog House, but with a different connotation. The old owner was always ‘in the dog house’ with his significant other. But we made our dog the logo,” he explains. With Babs’s sweet face front and center, the “dog house” is redefined as a place you definitely want to be. Especially if Babs is there (as she often is).
Just like the Vaskos taking over Dog House, The End sort of came about by chance. What is now Dog House’s very own performance venue was once a glorified janitor’s closet, Kenny recalls: “That whole area was essentially a storage place for the old owner. It looked like a Guitar Center threw up in there. When we first toured the place, Dopapod [was] getting ready for tour, and they were practicing in between all the old owner’s gear. I was like, ‘This is so weird.’” Surely, the Vaskos could find something better to do with the extra square-footage. “We cleaned it up, we threw a couple of free shows before COVID, and we were like, ‘Oh this is cool, we should maybe think about doing this.’ The first show we had ticketed here was Ramakhandra. They did a single release here, and we sold it out. And we were like oh my gosh, this could be something!”
Unfortunately, that was in January 2020, so their momentum came to an abrupt halt with the onset of COVID. But they were not deterred! “The day of lockdown, we went around Best Buy and bought a bunch of cameras and cables and we did a live stream, and five thousand people were on the stream. So then we used the people we had been networking with to do live streams for the next year or so,” Kenny says. They took advantage of the time to upgrade Dog House, so that when they were able to finally reopen, they were ready for business as both a studio and venue: “That also gave us the chance to retrofit some of the areas for recording booths and the control room, things like that. We ran a literal mile of audio cable in between all the rooms. That’s what we did during COVID. We were all wearing masks anyway, so why not get covered in sheetrock? Then at the end of 2022, we got our liquor license and opened it up as a venue.”
Thanks to their renovations and networking legwork, Dog House is now a gathering place for Colorado musicians, complete with a seventy-five-person performance space called The End.
“It creates that cross-pollination, where other musicians will be walking the halls and they’re like, ‘Oh so what band are you in? What do you play?’ That’s how a number of our bands actually create their cards now. They’ll be like, ‘Are there any Dog House bands that are available to play for this gig?,’” says Kenny of the following Dog House has amassed. Plus, their clientele has diversified quite a bit since the early days of mostly metalheads: “We have a mix now that reflects the community a lot better. The death metal is still around, but so is the Norteña, and indie, and jazz, and Bruce Springsteen tribute bands, all the things.”
The only requirement for fitting in at The End is that you really, really love music. “The biggest feedback we get from people that come to The End is that it is a true listening room. Pretty much anywhere else you might get distracted by the beer, or sitting down eating food, or other things happening. Here, this is for people who are usually really big fans of live music, and are there for the music,” explains Kenny. Homey touches like comfy sitting areas and Persian rugs blanketing the floors conjure an inviting and cozy atmosphere, but more than that, the Vaskos strive to make anyone and everyone feel welcome. “I think that the industry at large creates this air of exclusivity. And we want to turn that on its head. We want it to be a space for everyone. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve never played a guitar or sung before, or you haven’t picked one up in twenty years, or whether you’re selling out Red Rocks or dancing on top of a bar in Westminster.” It’s often the most unexpected clients that deliver the most moving performances, he adds: “There was a guy who was probably in his seventies and he has really bad kyphosis, and he was like, ‘I’ve never had a video of me playing guitar,’ and he got up there and shredded! It was amazing! To me, those are like the magic moments of, this truly can be a space for anyone.”
During their months of hustling to build their network, the Vaskos became acquainted with many of the players who would become instrumental in making Lafayette Music Fest a reality. “Part of building the network was talking to everyone who was already making a difference in the community. We got to talking, and were like, ‘There’s so much talent here.’ Ten percent of Lafayette identifies as creatives,” Kenny notes. “We met Pete and Clare who run The Muse, Marc Gitlin who runs Nissi’s, and then we met Melissa, the person who at the time was the director of The Arts Hub. We all got together, actually in this room, and were like why don’t we try and do something? Why not? That was June 2022. We had our first festival in October 2022.” In their second year, Lafayette Music Fest received a grant from the city of Lafayette, as well as funding from The District, which allowed them to add two free stages. This year, they’ve added a new venue, Bounce Empire, and one more free stage: “We went from five stages to seven stages to now nine. We started with twenty acts, and now it’s forty-two or forty-three. I think we’re pretty much at our max now.”
The End prides itself on offering “Small-batch performance[s] right from the source,” like the music industry version of a farm-to-table restaurant. Many of the musicians who perform there have previously written, rehearsed and recorded music at Dog House. Lafayette Music Fest 2024 will pretty much be a Dog House family reunion, since fourteen of the acts are Dog House alumni in some capacity: Jack Campbell Duo, Imagine! Nation, Cönaxx, Velvet Daydream, The Ephinjis, Jane and Matthews, Starlight and Pine, The Reminders, John Brewster, Los Cheesies, Big Dopes, Brandywine & the Mighty Fines, The Pretty Shabbies, and Card Catalog. First up at The End will be Soy Celeste at 2:30 p.m., followed by (my favorite Colorado band!!) May Be Fern at 3:45., Los Cheesies at 5, Five To Nine at 6 (I really feel like they should’ve been on at five), Big Dopes at 7, The Pretty Shabbies at 8:15, and finally Shwarma at 9:30. There are several artists on Kenny’s must-see list this year: “One of our favorite bands to have here is a band called The Ephinjis, and they’re like a high-energy piano rock band. Future Joy is always a party, they’ll be at Bounce Empire this year. Big Dopes used to be an artist in residence here, so it’s been a long time coming for them to be able to play at The End. Guerrilla Fanfare, we’re really excited to have them on board.”
Lafayette Music Fest, which is produced by Dog House’s nonprofit arm, Rock for the People, is all about bringing visibility to Lafayette’s robust music scene. Despite the fact that Dog House has been around since 2003, and has been under the Vaskos’ ownership for almost six years, people are still consistently surprised to find out that it even exists. “I would say once a week we get somebody walking or biking in the neighborhood like, ‘What is this place?’ I just want to shout it from the rooftops. Between all the venues here, we sell about 60,000 tickets a year. So for the people who do know about it, it’s a big deal.” Even those who are familiar with Lafayette may not realize how diverse its music community (and community as a whole) really is. “The mission is for equity and fair pay in the music industry,” Kenny says of Rock for the People. “I’m a white dude, someday I’ll be an old white dude, and my wife and I want there to be more of a balance. Something like twenty-five to thirty percent of downtown Lafayette is Hispanic. But you’d never know that if you were walking these halls five years ago. There’s so much more to the community than what typically gets seen. We want to shine a light on that.”
Kenny believes that a festival like LMF wouldn’t be possible anywhere else, because the symbiotic relationship between Lafayette’s venues is highly unusual. “If we were to try anything like this in any other town, it would be an unmitigated disaster. Because, we meet with the city council members regularly, or other nonprofits, like the Children’s Museum, or the coffee shops, and every time we talk we just come up with cool ideas for what we want to do. We really go out of our way to support each other, and it’s really inspiring,” he emphasizes. “Usually it’s a turf war, or a, ‘not in my backyard!’ sort of thing. The great thing is that everyone brings something different to the table. We are very much an indie space, a lot of rock and indie. The Muse is mostly jazz, blues, and bluegrass. Nissi’s is more like the party bands. We’re not in competition with each other. We all want people to be walking around the neighborhood.” Shout out to Kenny, Liz, and all of the participating venue owners for banding together to make something really cool for the community they love. Maybe you could teach Denver a thing or two next?
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