Live-music venues worth the trip in Tampa, Florida

Tampa’s downtown arena, home of the Tampa Bay Lightning and renamed from Amalie Arena, with lightning-throwing Tesla coils and an 11,000-square-foot Sky Deck, the city’s room for the biggest arena tours.

Live Nation’s outdoor shed at the Florida State Fairgrounds east of downtown Tampa, with reserved seats up front and a lawn out back for touring headliners.

A 10,500-seat arena on the University of South Florida campus that opened as the USF Sun Dome in 1980 with Alice Cooper as its first event and still hosts touring arena acts between Bulls basketball games.

A standing-room concert hall in Ybor City built in 1917 as the Rivoli Theatre, a silent movie house that became a playhouse and nightclub before reopening as the RITZ Ybor in 2008.

A smokehouse and oyster bar open since 1980, recognized nationally in 2001 with the Best Blues Club in America Award, whose backyard Skipperdome sits beneath hundred-year-old live oaks where Buddy Guy and John Mayall played.

A biergarten, bar, and Music Hall in Sulphur Springs that has presented local, regional, national, and international artists since 1995, with shows inside on a new L-Acoustics PA and outside on the Biergarten stage.

A club originally in historic Ybor City and now at home on Nebraska Avenue in North Tampa near the University of South Florida, still showcasing national and local live music.