TAMPA, Fla. — On a windy March morning in downtown Tampa, David Cox and Ty Rodriguez pace a long, L-shaped field and paint a picture of how Gasparilla Music Festival will fit in.

They point out where the main stage will go and where another will sit in the shadow of the former Dixie Lily Milling Company silos. There’s the corridor for food and beers from Coppertail Brewing Co., made just two miles down the road. There are spaces for live oyster shucking on Sunday and misting tents for when the weather gets steamy. Adjacent to Water Street, which borders the field and will host street entertainers, sits Sparkman Wharf, where local bands will serenade passersby on another stage free of charge.

Back on the grass, though, Rodriguez points to an empty patch that will soon host the VIP zone.

“All of this was a freaking jungle,” said Rodriguez, a Tampa restauranteur and the festival’s food and beverage director. The retention pond on the property? That was filled with 40-foot long cattails before they came along.

Welcome to Meridian Fields, Tampa’s newest music venue.

“It’s not a city park, so we’re dealing with different things. Everything in here, we’re bringing in: power, water,” said Cox, executive director of the Gasparilla Music Foundation. “We’ve been through 1,000 different scenarios for everything. ... I’ve probably been here, since May, about 500 times.”

The roughly 11.5-acre property at 101 S. Meridian Ave. sits between the Water Street, the Channel District and Ybor City. It’s owned by the Tampa Hillsborough Expressway Authority.

Gasparilla Music Festival organizers, with the support of Water Street, hope that it can hold events for years to come.

About 8,000 fans a day are expected to christen the space on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, clamoring for the chance to see over 50 musical acts across four stages. Headliners include jam band Gov’t Mule, indie rockers Mt. Joy and DJ duo Two Friends. Shakey Graves, Drive-By Truckers and Jai Wolf will also join.

Gasparilla Music Festival is about to embark on its 14th year. Event organizers took off 2025 following a string of weather disasters, location changes and financial strife.

Here’s how Gasparilla Music Festival plans to get its groove back.

A party for Tampa

Cox founded the Gasparilla Music Foundation, a 501 c(3) nonprofit, with friends Phil Benito and Jeff Hunt in 2011. The music festival debuted at Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park the following year. Complete with the University of Tampa’s minarets looming in the background, the festival was deigned to be a love letter to the people of Tampa.

Cox drew inspiration from the waterfront location and unique lineups of Rhode Island’s Newport Jazz Festival. He also loved the focus on local cuisine at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, “just the experience of eating Crawfish Monica and having different opportunities to hear gospel music and old-time blues.”

Sean O’Brien, a concert promoter who helped with the early days of the festival, attributed its early success to the unique focus on Tampa details.

“Most festivals we went to in Tampa were selling like, lemonade and meatballs, and we were like, ‘No, we are going to use real restaurants from around Tampa,’” he said. “We wanted vendors like Microgroove Records.”

Proceeds benefited the Gasparilla Music Foundation’s Recycled Tunes program, which places donated instruments in the hands of Hillsborough’s Title 1 students.

Onstage, about half of the artists would hail from around Florida. Alumni include Fernandina Beach’s Flipturn, who have now played Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo, and Tampa’s Aidan Bissett, who popped off on TikTok and got signed to Capitol Records during his senior year at Jesuit High.

Then there were the national headliners, from The Flaming Lips and Father John Misty to Erykah Badu and Gary Clark Jr. Phoebe Bridgers played on a small stage in front of just 150 people, Cox said, and Billy Strings swung through before he got big enough to sell out arenas.

“People were so excited that this was their city,” Cox said.

Growing pains

The 2020 Gasparilla Music Festival was just barely spared from COVID-19 shutdowns that would cancel other local shows for months. Brandi Carlile, Portugal. The Man and De La Soul performed in early March as scheduled, though Cox remembers the chaos of running around to source extra hand-washing trailers and gallons of sanitizer.

The real trouble came soon after.

“The next year, 2021, we couldn’t really plan it, because we didn’t know the events were coming back,” Cox said.

By the time the city gave the green light to return, it was too late to put on an event for spring 2022. Gasparilla Music Festival resumed in October of that year instead.

Another festival was planned for April 2023, but water damage at Kiley Garden, a portion of Curtis Hixon that sits atop a parking garage, made a huge part of the venue unusable.

That year’s two-day event, with headliners Joe Russo’s Almost Dead and Run the Jewels, had to be stretched across the safe part of Curtis Hixon, the Straz Center and Sparkman Wharf. The first day was canceled due to lightning, heavy winds and a tornado watch.

In 2024, the festival switched to Julian B. Lane Riverfront Park. The weekend featured two days of “torrential rain” — then Sunday’s headliner, Lake Street Dive, pulled out due to illness.

The February 2025 festival, which was supposed to take place at Julian B. Lane, was canceled a month out. Organizers never even shared a lineup.

“We had two pretty financially disastrous years,” Cox said. “It was like, well, we can keep pushing ... or let’s stop, lick our wounds, reassess.”

The comeback

Cox wasn’t sure where the next festival would be.

The vibe at Julian B. Lane had felt different, he said, and scheduling a date around city events and other Gasparilla-season activities became a challenge.

“They plan a lot of weddings there, like two years out,” he said. “We were just kind of getting squeezed out.”

Then last year, he climbed to the top of a parking garage in Water Street to think. When he looked out, he saw a patch of green.

He whipped out his phone and searched the property appraiser’s website to find out who owned the land.

“To be honest, I’d driven by it 1,000 times,” he said. “I know it as the mill and the railway yard.”

The foundation has two full-time employees, including Cox. About 350 volunteers will work to put on this weekend’s festivities.

“There’s this perception that we’re Live Nation and there’s like, 50 people working there,” Cox said.

How will the “urban luxury” vibe of Water Street mesh with a festival that has scrappy, artsy roots?

“Water Street does have this feel of big money. I’m kind of torn on how I feel about it,” said Brian Schanck, bassist of local band Soft Cuff. “If the right event gets me, I’m going to go — it just has to be something specific that’s bringing me there.”

Schanck attended several early years of Gasparilla Music Festival and played with another band during the year the Flaming Lips headlined.

“It was fantastic. I think the talent has changed over the years of who they’ve chosen to play, which has been a little hit or miss for me in recent years,” he said.

His band will play the Sparkman Wharf stage Friday afternoon.

“I’m excited to see what the setup would be, and I’m glad (Sparkman Wharf) is free for the public,” he said. “It’s a big deal for Tampa to have this type of festival that has been so successful for a long time.”

Michelle Gutenstein Hinz, a publicist for the festival, said the event has always been at the forefront of change in Tampa.

“Curtis Hixon was just starting its renaissance, and we were there,” she said. “And then Julian B. Lane emerged and we helped put that on the map.”

Could Meridian Fields will be the same?

“It already feels like a different world, like a new city there,” said Cox. “In five years, GasWorx comes online. The Channel District’s almost fully built out. Water Street’s gonna keep building. There’s 35,000 people today that are in very close walking distance to this site. For us, this is the next wave of energy that we see, and we want to be a part of it.”

If you go: Gasparilla Music Festival

Gasparilla Music Festival takes place from 3-11 p.m. on Friday, Saturday and Sunday at Meridian Fields in Tampa (101 S. Meridian Ave.).

Weekend passes start at $125. General admission single-day tickets start at $65, with single-day VIP starting at $160. Proceeds benefit the Gasparilla Music Foundation’s Recycled Tunes program, which brings instruments to Title 1 students across Hillsborough County. Tickets are available at gmftickets.com.

To view the full lineup, visit gasparillamusic.com.

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