As founder and singer-guitarist of Crowbar, Kirk Windstein has been making art out of suffering for over 35 years. In Crowbar’s world, time heals nothing. But with time has come appreciation, thanks to a recent surge of interest in the band from younger listeners. Propelled by TikTok virality and Crowbar’s lugubrious yet resilient themes clicking with Gen-Z, the band’s monthly Spotify listener figure has quintupled in the last 18 months, to 1.4 million. Of this streaming audience, 75% are age 34 and under. And these new listeners are turning up to shows too. After years of hard graft, Crowbar tours are selling out everywhere.
“I’m trying to stay humble,” says Windstein from his couch at home in New Orleans. “But I think we deserve it, yeah, because of the 36 years of non-stop doing this for no money, and playing for really small crowds and whatnot. Just having a cult really, really underground following. By looking at the crowds and trying to analyse everything, whatever generation we have of these 15 to 35 year-olds, it's almost like a 20-year range of people coming out to the shows, buying the merchandise. They know the lyrics. They know the songs. They're into it. They're passionate. It reminds me of the way I was many, many moons ago, when I was young, and I'm still obviously passionate about music.”
Crowbar has always stood in a genre of one. The “sludge” tag they picked up early on underplayed their unique combination of hardcore ferocity, and the ultra-heavy, rich, harmony-driven element of their music. Over the course of the nineties they got more psychedelic and subtly experimental. With 2001’s Sonic Excess In Its Purest Form, they worked with Ugly Kid Joe guitarist-turned-producer Dave Fortman (before Fortman went on to produce Slipknot and Evanescence). He was able to elicit from them a resonant soulfulness on tracks like “The Lasting Dose” which still sounds crushing and otherworldly today.
It’s a quirk of the world of digital listening that a deep cut from that album, "Repulsive In Its Splendid Beauty," is now the band’s most streamed song. But where quality leads, listeners follow. I saw the band in 2001 at London’s Camden Underworld venue just before the release of Sonic Excess. Windstein introduced a new song called “To Build a Mountain”. It transformed an already violent mosh pit into complete pandaemonium. The song continues to do so a quarter of a century on, as one of the staples of Crowbar’s sets.
This week finds Crowbar enjoying this unusual rejuvenation at an unusual live event: Blood 4 Blood at the Ocean Center in Daytona, Florida. The first-ever hybrid event staging heavy metal bands and bare-knuckle fights, it is headlined by Slaughter to Prevail frontman, the “Russian Grizzly” Alex Terrible, taking on Cameron Delano. The latter comes from the world of professional bull riding and clearly spurns the quiet life.
Slaughter to Prevail are also playing a set at the event. They are first on the bill, giving Terrible a chance to recover before his headline bout. Better that than risk it the other way round. The bands are playing 20-25 minutes each between fights in what Windstein describes as a “throw-and-go” situation. With the ring set up in the middle of the arena, once a fight is over attention will switch to the arena stage for the performances. With fights scheduled for five two-minute rounds which could be over at any point, the bands need to be on their toes.
“I enjoy watching all of the combat sports, but as a casual guy,” says Windstein, not knowing what to expect. “I've never done martial arts or any kind of fighting stuff. But it looks like, just logically, these guys and girls are gonna be beating the fuck out of each other with their knuckles, so we’ll see!”
Also joined by Malevolence and Black Label Society on the bill, Crowbar are on a full-on band for a full-on event where anything could happen. It’s unorthodox territory for Windstein and tallies with how his band was received as an oddity in the early to mid-nineties. Crowbar featured twice on MTV’s Beavis and Butt-Head, as the animated duo sardonically commentated over videos for “All I Had (I Gave)” and “Existence Is Punishment”.
“Whoa, he said he gave his heart and soul to some chick,” Butt-Head said over the video of the latter.
“That must have been, like, at least 50 pounds of meat,” Beavis retorted.
Though they mocked Windstein for singing like he was taking a dump, the duo’s observation that the band’s music was “slow and fat” – that it should be listened to by anyone skinny who wanted to put on weight – has been re-embraced as a meme of sorts online in the last year.
Now 61, Windstein is much more svelte than in his youth and laughs that he can’t listen to Crowbar’s music himself when he works out because it distracts him from the rhythm of working the gym equipment. As for the music piped into the gym itself, he can hardly hear it these days after years of aural punishment.
Windstein admits that Crowbar's overnight success, earned over 35 years, is better appreciated by him now than it would have been by his younger self. There were several occasions where, like his hero Lemmy with Motörhead, Windstein was the only member of Crowbar. He had to wade through the tough times to keep it going. Motörhead was a touchstone in another way, with Crowbar vowing never to play faster than that band’s top tempo, which Windstein refers to as “Motörhead speed”.
Back in the late eighties in New Orleans, the young Windstein was in a “punk-ish” band called Shell Shock with his friend Jimmy Bower on drums. After they changed its name to Aftershock and eventually disbanded, the pair resolved to keep jamming together.
“Jimmy would pick me up for rehearsal and all we’d listen to is the first Melvins album, all the old Trouble stuff, Sabbath, Carnivore, some Saint Vitus, shit like that,” says Windstein.
One day at the rehearsal space, Bower said to Windstein: “Let’s write a song.”
Bower started laying down a booming, stop-start Melvins-like beat and Windstein hit a massive, sustained sequence of low-end power-chords. And thus, “Waiting in Silence", the opening song on Crowbar’s 1991 debut album, Obedience thru Suffering, was born. They put a tape deck in the corner of the jam space and covered it with two pillows to help filter the enormous volume and distortion. The jam cassettes came out sounding pretty good and the duo felt confident they were going in the right direction, so they recorded a five-song demo in March 1990.
But Bower had to move to Atlanta to help his mother with her work, so Windstein recruited Craig Nunenmacher on drums and Kevin Noonan on guitar, who Windstein had once jammed with in a heavy-metal covers band called (most excellently) Victorian Blitz.
Windstein rated Noonan as a better guitar player than him who could help achieve the guitar harmonies that Windstein loved in Thin Lizzy and Wishbone Ash’s classic 1972 Argus album, which he says “should be put up on a pedestal – it’s an amazing record.”
Though they vowed not to play guitar solos because that was a hallmark of thrash, the soulful guitar harmonies melded to the weighted, down-tuned guitars gave Crowbar its heft. As did “Big” Todd Strange on bass, who completed this early lineup and with it the band’s heavy, imposing physical presence.
“I started recently re-listening to Obedience thru Suffering, and I was surprised how many great things there are in some of the songs,” says Windstein. “I don't think the songs are that great as songs, because I was still really inexperienced at writing songs and whatnot. But by the self-titled [second] album, all that kind of changed a bit. That's why the self-titled we just called Crowbar. I said, this is a better representation of what we want to do and where we're headed. So to me, that's our first real album.”
Bower, then finding underground success as guitarist of Eyehategod, returned on drums for 1996’s Broken Glass, which opens with the quintessential Crowbar song: “Conquering”.
“It’s a quick three-minute example of what Crowbar is about,” says Windstein. “The aggressive hardcore stuff into the slower chorus. The middle section has the beautiful harmony thing along with the vocals, and then back into a heavy ending. All of our influences are in there – the different elements we have in our music.”
With their core sound well established, Crowbar began to push against their own boundaries as the nineties progressed.
“Look, dude,” Windstein said to Bower. “It's time to just throw whatever Crowbar rule book we have out the fucking window. Just go for it.”
The pair holed up in a rehearsal space Monday to Friday and worked on new material every day. Sammy Pierre Duet had joined the band on second guitar. His main band, Acid Bath, had dissolved, and his other band, Goatwhore, was more of a side project. But the resultant album, 1998’s Odd Fellows Rest, was largely Windstein and Bower’s baby, where Windstein wrote and tracked most of the guitars and all of the bass. It features some of the band’s most gargantuan material in “... and Suffer as One” but also its most textured. “Planets Collide”, in particular, made Windstein nervous. But after a couple of beers one day, he threw caution to the wind and suggested opening the album with it. Both songs rank in the band’s top-five most streamed tracks and are setlist regulars.
I suggest to Windstein that it’s his emotional openness in Crowbar which is resonating with younger audiences. He’s not trying to be a tough guy, or even an angry guy; more an openly sorrowful guy.
“I think that it really obviously pushed a button in people,” says Windstein. “And the lyrics are really becoming an important part of the songs as well, which makes me feel good. I never thought much about them. People ask, ‘Well, what's it about?’ ‘It's about whatever you want it to be,’ I respond. I use a lot of metaphors. I just write down thoughts and make them rhyme. The album is usually recorded completely, and I will come back and do some extra stuff after. Then I just write [the vocals and lyrics for] a song a day from scratch. Go in the studio with an old-school notebook and a pen: scratch out shit, I’ve got arrows going on everywhere, and I change words, change lines. It's a hot mess, honestly. But it seems like the lyrics have really hit home, finally, to the audience that we have now, which, like I say, still consists of some of the original fans, just not so much at the shows. They’re younger and younger at the shows.”
Windstein is back working with Big Todd again, but this time in Sun Don’t Shine, who have just released their debut album, From Birth To Death. Featuring former Type O Negative members Johnny Kelly and Kenny Hickey, Windstein proudly notes that it sounds neither like Type O nor Crowbar. “Let’s do our own thing and not give them what they think,” they told each other. But fans of both bands will find familiar elements in the SDS sound, albeit through a grungy alternative-rock lens.
Drawing on the bands that influenced them all as kids, such as KISS and Judas Priest, Windstein marvels at Hickey’s singer-songwriter capabilities. Hickey writes a song on an acoustic with guitar and vocal melodies, as well as lyrics, all tackled at once. It contrasts with Windstein’s approach and also, he says, Phil Anselmo’s, when the Pantera frontman presents songs on guitar to the members of Down, Windstein’s other supergroup.
Down also includes longtime collaborator Bower and Pepper Keenan of Corrosion of Conformity who were recently interviewed by Knotfest for their new album, Good God / Baad Man. Down have also been jamming together since the early nineties, as a way to indulge Sabbath worship away from their main projects. Anselmo produced and contributed mumblecore backing vocals to Crowbar in 1993. Reports of an imminent new Down album have been circulating strongly as well.
“I heard a new mix today,” Windstein says. “So I'm keeping everything hush, but it's an amazing record. It really, really is. It's ten brand-new originals, and it's great. It sounds like old-school Down, just more mature. We started Down in 1991. We've all got 35 more years of experience in writing and touring and playing and whatnot. So the new Down is fucking really going to be a beast. It's a great record. So I can't wait for it to be done and for everyone to hear it.”
Kirk Windstein has taken the long road to success, but Crowbar has never been about selling records. It was about taking heaviness to new, emotionally truthful places, backed up by molten-core music rooted in rock’s classic bands.
A new deep cut of Crowbar’s is trending on digital platforms: “Embracing Emptiness” from 1995’s Time Heals Nothing, with its opening line, “Long been down but never been this low”. That the conditions in the world are such that a new generation has taken so strongly to a band expressing these sentiments might be a cause for concern – but who needs inner peace when you can have Crowbar instead?
-----
Crowbar performs at the first-ever Blood4Blood May 6th in Daytona Beach, FL. along with Slaughter to Prevail, Black Label Society and Malevolence. The kickoff for Welcome to Rockville weekend features the BKFC debut of Alex Terrible squaring off against Cameron Delano as well as full fight card and live performances. Check the livestream - HERE
Crowbar will take on a slate of European festival dates and circle back this fall as the featured support for Dying Fetus and Sanguisugabogg. A list of dates and cities can be found below. Get tickets to see Crowbar - HERE
