Lucy Volpe turned 29-years-old, but it’s hard to imagine her taking time to celebrate. The Clearwater-born, New Port Richey resident is just one of the many busy, young faces making all sorts of music related things happen from within the walls of 666 Central Ave. — the headquarters of Daddy Kool Records and No Clubs Productions. Volpe is in St. Petersburg pretty much seven days a week, and when CL catches up with her, she’s running for tour rider requests in advance of a farewell show from New Jersey mathcore-legends Dillinger Escape Plan. Last weekend she was helping set up a concert for another Jersey guy — Jon Bon Jovi — who was at State Theatre playing a rally on behalf of Hillary Clinton.
Volpe cut her teeth at the nearly 100-year-old theatre for about five years before finding herself at No Clubs where she assists in many departments including marketing, PR and talent buying. This weekend, everything she’s learned gets put to the test when she takes to Fubar and The Local 662 for Destroyer Fest, a two-night music festival featuring over a dozen bands that represent the best from all strains of Floridian metal. This year, the lineup (including after parties at the Emerald Bar) features bands from Miami, Ft. Myers, Gainesville, DeLand, Fort Lauderdale and even one from Richmond, Virginia. Many of the lot, however, come from St. Petersburg and Tampa, which is no accident.
“A lot of times metal gets left out of local music festival lineups, and that’s a bummer. I wanted to bring attention back to the area,” Volpe told CL. “This was once the metal capital of America, but now I feel like it shifted more out West.” She was inspired by the success of 2012’s Scion Fest, a nationally-curated metal festival where 26 bands took over three Ybor City venues. Volpe worked the event, a soiree where the New York Times reported seeing “Metalheads of All Alloys, Swirling Into the Night.” Scion did not return (it only hits a city once, and never repeat bands), but there was another litmus test to witness two years later when Southern Darkness Festival corralled the experience of long-running local promoters into another event featuring over two dozen of metal’s best.
“It showed that there is a real desire for stoner, sludge, and all strains of metal, but Florida still got overlooked so many times” Volpe said. “Critics say that bands don’t make money when they come down, but that could be true no matter what the genre — we need more regional buzz so that national acts will come through.”
"I’m just a nerdy kid booking music that I wanna see. It’s kind of selfish in a way."
So Volpe took her cues from past experiences and booked 11 bands for the first Destroyer Fest on November 15, 2014. It wasn’t supposed to be a birthday party, but the timing worked out since it was a few weeks after Fest (a long running punk-rock bacchanal in Gainesville) and just before Thanksgiving. Volpe worried no one would come and that she’d lose money for these bands she was trying to do good by, but a couple hundred people walked up, giving credence to the idea that it really could work. Things looked sunny for the next one, but life got in the way. Volpe lost her mother before Destroyer Fest was even an idea, and as more life changes manifested themselves in 2015, the fact that Volpe never took care of herself after the loss finally caught up with her.
“I couldn’t do the festival. I wasn’t going to be able to pay attention to it,” Volpe said. “It was going to fail and I didn’t want to jeopardize the event and the bands.” She openly expressed doubts about wanting to do it at all anymore, and while bands encouraged her to never quit, Volpe opted for a head-clearing trip to California where a friend, Ryan Avery, was throwing his own festival, Midnight Communion. It was there, detached from the stress of planning her own festival, that she had a wake up moment.
“Being in the crowd there had an impact on me,” Volpe said. “It was like, ‘okay you got what you needed, and you’re in a better place — no more fucking around, don’t let not doing it for a year stop you altogether.”
So this weekend, it returns bigger than it’s ever been. Cough, that rising sludge outfit from Virginia, is on the bill, but so are Weltesser and Set and Setting (St. Pete bands who’ve been signed to national label Prosthetic Records). Shroud Eater and Cave of Swimmers (Miami bands who just played Psycho Fest Last Vegas) are back, and Breezy Boards, a local skateboard company has created two custom decks. Adrienne Rozzi, of Pittsburgh-based Poison Apple Printshop, crafted the poster, and Tampa Bay Brewing Company’s brewmaster Tim Ogden even whipped up “Annihilator”, an 8-percent ABV doppelbock. Even the tap handle has local flare thanks to St. Pete metal sculptor Frank Strunk.
“The idea of celebrating the often overlooked was honestly the big takeaway from our meetings about the beer,” Ogden, 39, told CL, “drawing attention to rad shit for no other reason than because it's rad. That's what community is to me.”
“This is all is a way to show appreciation since these bands work so hard,” Volpe added. She won’t admit that she’s also busting her ass, but she has overheard some positive feedback. “I was at a one off show booked under the Destroyer Fest name, and I heard a guy tell his friend, ‘the dude that puts on these shows is fucking awesome.’”
She didn’t say anything though, opting to just enjoy the band instead. “I’m just a nerdy kid booking music that I wanna see,” she said. “It’s kind of selfish in a way.”
Destroyer Fest happens this weekend on The 600 Block of downtown St. Petersburg. More information is available at local.cltampa.com and Facebook. Listen to the latest from Cough below.
This article appears in Nov 17-24, 2016.