It’s hard to get a word in once Ky Fields and Kai Holyoke start talking about Swamp Sister. They can easily pass 40 minutes discussing their DIY venture. They did just that on a recent December night at Holyoke’s Seminole Heights home.
The pair sat on the couch, riffing endlessly off each other about what’s next for them as local DIY show bookers. And since last month, the duo acts as managers of four local music acts.
One of the realizations they came to was how finally graduating from college changes up how much they can invest in Swamp Sister: the pair now has much more time on their hands.
“We’re at the point where I feel like right now because we just graduated and neither of us have an official, official job. Now is the time when we can really dive headfirst into [Swamp Sister] and really get it started,” Holyoke said.
The duo earned bachelor’s degrees from the University of South Florida last month, Holyoke’s in art history and Fields’ in mass communications.
“That was like a fever dream. I was literally about to fall asleep [at the graduation ceremony], it felt like nothing. I was so numb from being so tired,” Fields said.
They’re both 22 (born five days apart), women and trying to survive—and ultimately thrive—in a music industry dominated by men, locally and nationally.
And they’ve done well for themselves so far, pulling four local music acts in their orbit and becoming their bookers and managers including Indie bands Charles Irwin, Hello Joyce, Glaze and rap duo They Hate Change.
Bookers operate as the middlemen between musicians and music venues. For example, operations like Swamp Sister have a music act that wants to play a show and their goal is to find a venue that will agree to book the act. Bookers can also work in the opposite way, looking for acts to play the venue they are working for.
Essentially running on little to no money, DIY bookers, like Holyoke and Fields, leverage their connections to make shows happen. Once they get a show, they handle the advertising for it and find supporting acts if necessary.
Most of this is familiar to them since Fields and Holyoke have been fixtures in Tampa Bay’s DIY music scene since early 2018. That’s when they started their own venues.
For the two of them, the idea to start venues in their homes came after noticing that new musicians, often young ones, have a harder time finding places to play. Established venues in town usually take on artists with a following so the venue managers know it’s more likely they’ll draw a good-sized crowd.
Fields’ DIY venue, Shangri La Gardens, was based in the backyard of her south St. Petersburg home. She moved into the four-bedroom house in August 2017 but held her first Shangri La show in January 2018.
Although a friend helped her out in the early days, Fields soon took on the work of running it on her own. She was the doorman, crowd control and the general overseer.
Often when louder bands—usually punk ones—played Shangri La, Fields got some noise complaints from neighbors. But she said those calls to police totaled about five in a little over a year.
She had amassed such a reputation that she estimates about 150 people showed up to her backyard for Shangri La Fest, the final two shows she held at the venue last May. It was during that weekend of music that two of Swamp Sister’s current bands first came in full contact with Fields.
Megan Quiles, the singer and guitarist of Glaze, said the band played its first show at the festival, about a month after Glaze formed. By December 2019, they’d been together for eight months.
It was a long road for Hello Joyce to play at Shangri La.
“She (Fields) asked us to play multiple times and it never really lined up for us because we have so many schedules to work around [six of them],” said Cameron Grant, one of Hello Joyce’s singers and guitarists. “But luckily, we were able to hop on their very last show. That was the first real introduction to Kyla [for the band].”
Holyoke also had her venue, The Red Light, across the bay in Tampa. She hung a red light bulb in the ceiling of her home’s detached garage and made it into a performance space in early 2018.
Holyoke said the name inspiration was partly the red lights that illuminated the interior of Max’s Kansas City, a New York City nightclub and bar. Among others, the famed Andy Warhol regularly hung out in the back room.
Fields and Holyoke ran their venues during fairly the same time period and many of the bands would regularly play both. They Hate Change and Charles Irwin were among the ones to often cross the bay to appear at Shangri La and Red Light.
Inevitably, Holyoke said they learned about each other’s venues and started to coordinate and traded off show days so they wouldn’t overlap each other. That decision was made to support each other’s ventures.
So when they both shut down their venues last February (Holyoke) and May (Fields), it wasn’t far fetched for them to continue doing something DIY together.
Holyoke recounts meeting Fields at The Bends, a St. Petersburg bar, one April night and bringing up the idea of a booking company. She remembers Fields immediately saying yes.
In a phone interview, former local DIY booker Roxanne Gallo, who knows both Fields and Holyoke, described what goes into it.
“I genuinely enjoy DIY culture: having touring bands, giving them a place to play, hosting them and connecting them with local bands in hopes that they’ll do trade shows when the local band goes on a tour, ” Gallo said. “It was ‘get someone to design the posters, take the posters around, do the social media, be there (at the show), get the sound person, get the door person.’”
Gallo booked shows in the Tampa Bay for almost five years before landing a job in programming at the Straz Center for the Performing Arts. She booked her last show at Paper Crane last November and she can only think of two more female bookers who are active these days.
“I think we need more women in the scene, especially younger women,” Gallo said. “I love that they (Swamp Sister) were just like ‘Yep, we’re gonna do this’ and just made it happen. Because I had the same path and that’s just what you have to do.”
Swamp Sister booked their first show on June 14th at St. Pete Women’s Collective’s studio space Venus.
The next month, they sent Charles Irwin on a 15-date tour up the east coast through the Carolinas to Brooklyn, New York. Fields says she emailed nearly 200 venues along the coast to secure the dates for Swamp Sister’s first tour.
That was the result They Hate Change wanted to see before committing wholeheartedly to Swamp Sister, according to Vonne Harrison, one half of the duo.
“As far as booking shows, that was something that we have been handling on our own forever,” Harrison said.
They (Harrison asked CL to refer to them with they/them pronouns) said they and bandmate Dre (Andre Gainey) “tested the waters first” by letting Swamp Sister book the Charles Irwin tour. After they deemed the tour successful, Harrison and Dre were then convinced that Swamp Sister was a good choice for management.
In October, Holyoke and Fields booked the music acts for SHINE Mural Festival’s REVEAL: EMERGE event. It was the festival’s official opening event and a regular annual event held at Station House, yet Swamp Sister went unpaid.
But they both say that’s to be expected with anything DIY. Getting paid is somewhat of a luxury.
“It’s a money pit for right now. Like we’re barely staying afloat but we’re doing better than we used to,” Holyoke said.
In four years of booking, Roxanne Gallo said she made “give or take, maybe $1000 total.”
She called her Straz Center job “my dream job with support” because DIY booking was usually a solo venture for her financially.
“For me, what I was hoping it would do is (get me to) where I am now. And if it didn’t, that was fine,” Gallo said. “College wasn’t my thing so I feel like my four years of booking shows was me doing college and it actually paid off. That’s the way I look at it now. I was stupid lucky.”
Eventually, the ideal payoff for Holyoke and Fields is to bring all their bands out to South by Southwest, an annual, days-long music showcase in Austin, Texas.
But despite the financial hits they take to be DIY bookers, Fields, and Holyoke don’t seem bothered by them. They say ultimately they love what they do.
“Without having a space for DIY, there’s not gonna be anything new. If no one takes a risk on something that’s off the beaten path, it’s never gonna evolve, which I find, at least in art, a lot of the time is where we (artists in general) are stuck,” Holyoke said.
It’s just a good feeling doing things that other people aren’t doing,” Fields said. “Doing shows is the most instantly gratifying thing you can do because we can put on a good show and when we’re packing up, five people will come up to us and say ‘that was a great show’ or ‘thank you’.”
They have also come to understand their somewhat unique place in the grand scheme of Tampa Bay’s music scene.
“If you look around (in Tampa), who else is at our age booking shit? Kinda no one. And girls at that,” Fields said. “Time is what we have more of now and that’s all we really need.”
Editor’s Note: Kyla Fields was an intern at Creative Loafing, and is currently a part-time contributor, as well.
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This article appears in Jan 9-16, 2020.
