Crowbar have played shows with some pretty brutal bands over the years: Morbid Angel, Napalm Death, EyeHateGod, Pantera at their gnarliest… But when it comes to witnessing utter carnage, nothing tops the time they played Philadelphia’s This Is Hardcore festival in July 2014.
“It looked like somebody had been sliced to bits with a fuckin’ chainsaw,” Crowbar vocalist, guitarist and founder Kirk Windstein recalls. “There was blood everywhere, all these guys lying around with broken noses, black eyes. Some guy broke his neck during our set! If you can win that crowd over, you’re good.”
That’s some achievement for a band whose general velocity is roughly the same as an arthritic tortoise stuck in tar. Especially given they were sharing the bill that day with the likes of Agnostic Front, Turnstile and Nails.
Article continues below“Naw,” counters Kirk. “We played all our faster, more hardcore songs over a 45-minute set and the crowd went apeshit for us.”
God knows what those mangled hardcore kids would make of the unexpected turn the band’s career has taken recently. Crowbar helped define New Orleans’ sludge metal scene in the early 1990s, alongside the likes of EyeHateGod, Soilent Green, Down and Acid Bath, with Kirk the sole remaining original member.
But recent months have seen them become an unlikely TikTok sensation, thanks to teens making videos to their songs, placing them in the unlikely company of Sleep Token and Deftones.
“I have no fucking idea how that happened,” he admits, chuckling like an airbag being squeezed to within an inch of its life.
I don’t know where the term 'sludge metal' came from, but I don’t really care for it
Kirk Windstein
The story of Crowbar began with a death. Mike Hatch was a guitarist and key figure in the 80s New Orleans underground scene, a fanatical record collector and one of the founding members of local hardcore punk crew Shell Shock.
“He was like a big brother to me,” recalls Kirk, who was actually born in Middlesex while his US airman dad was stationed in the UK, before moving to the Big Easy as an infant. “Mike introduced me to everything. He would come over and do things for my mom and dad, help around the house and they would cook for him, so we’d eat dinner together and then go listen to records in my room. He basically lived with us.”
It was Mike who gave Kirk – who had previously sung Metallica, Anthrax and Motörhead covers in a band called Victorian Blitz – one of his first proper breaks, offering him the job fronting Shell Shock. He played his first gig with them in July 1988, but just four months later, Mike Hatch took his own life.
“I was devastated,” Kirk says softly. “Mike was a part of my family, my best friend. I didn’t know what else to do.”
United in grief, Kirk and Shell Shock drummer Jimmy Bower decided to continue playing, albeit under a different name. Shelving the album they’d recorded with Mike, they christened themselves AfterShock, then Wrequiem and finally The Slugs, before settling on the name Crowbar. At the same time, their sound was evolving.
“We were really getting into the doom thing too – bands like Melvins and Cathedral,” he says. “We’d have [Peter Steele’s pre-Type O Negative band] Carnivore one side of a cassette tape and Trouble another.”
Kirk says the nascent Crowbar found their sound while they were working on the song Waiting In Silence. “The creation of Crowbar, I’d credit Jimmy Bower,” Kirk says. “We knew what we wanted to sound like and Jimmy just started hammering that drumbeat for Waiting In Silence. Somehow I instinctively came in with the guitars [makes slow, swampy, grinding noise]. You know the rest.”
Jimmy Bower had bailed by the time Crowbar released their first album, 1991’s Obedience Thru Suffering, his place taken by drummer Craig Nunenmacher, alongside guitarist Kevin Noonan and bassist Todd Strange (the band’s line-up has changed countless times over the years). Today, Kirk views it as more of a demo than a proper album, though the song Subversion got picked up by MTV’s Headbangers Ball show (“I remember watching myself on a proper TV with my mom and dad,” Kirk says proudly).
New Orleans in the early 90s was fast becoming a hotbed for underground metal, a scene that appeared to materialise out of the Louisiana swamps.
“Somewhere along the line the media picked up the term ‘sludge metal’,” Kirk says distastefully. “I don’t know where it came from, but I don’t really care for it. To me we’re just Crowbar. We just wanted to sound original.”
Phil Anselmo really wanted to sing for us.
Kirk Winstein
Original they may have been, but the NOLA scene was interconnected to the point of incestuousness. Other musicians regularly hopped between bands. Jimmy Bower went from Crowbar to EyeHateGod, before rejoining the former for a two-year stint in the mid-90s. Kirk points out that his band’s current drummer, Tommy Buckley, is actually married to the sister of early incumbent Craig Nunenmacher, while his own landlord is original Crowbar bassist Todd Strange.
“It’s a small town!” he laughs. “The vibe here is ‘Eat, drink and be merry.’ A lot of people are struggling, it’s very blue collar, but at the same time, the city has a mystique about it – there’s nowhere else like it in the United States.”
It was another NOLA fixture who produced the band’s second album, 1993’s self-titled Crowbar. Kirk had first met Phil Anselmo in 1985, shortly before the future Pantera frontman joined glam rock outfit Razor White.
“He came to see Victorian Blitz and said he really wanted to sing for us,” Kirk recalls. “He came and nailed it on one of our originals, but I was the singer at the time, so I basically was like, ‘I dunno man, he’s a bit young.’”
That didn’t stop a friendship blossoming between the two men. In 1991, Kirk joined Phil in NOLA supergroup Down (aside from a six-year hiatus in the 2010s, he’s been a member ever since). By the time it came to writing and recording Crowbar, Pantera were flying high on the back of Cowboys From Hell and Vulgar Display Of Power. Kirk figured the singer’s studio experience would make him the perfect person to produce the album.
“He came to band rehearsals,” Kirk recalls. “I remember playing Existence Is Punishment to him and he gives us this look with his arms folded. It was like, ‘Oh shit, he’s not happy.’ He’s like, ‘The song’s got one good riff and the rest is shit.’ He taught me a lot about songwriting.”
Until the last couple of years, people would come up to us and be like, ‘I first heard your band through Beavis And Butt-Head!
Released on October 12, 1993, Crowbar was the first album Kirk feels properly represented the band. It also exposed them to an entirely new audience when the video for Existence Is Punishment was played on Beavis And Butt-Head.
“They made fat jokes about us, but we didn’t care,” says Kirk with a laugh. “They liked it, that was the important thing. That was the rule, if they threw the horns at some point, they thought it was cool. Until the last couple of years, people would come up to us and be like, ‘I first heard your band through Beavis And Butt-Head!’”
Despite the blessing of America’s most hard-to-please animated critics, Crowbar never crossed over into mainstream stardom. Instead, like Kirk’s heroes Motörhead, they followed a path of dropping new albums every few years and touring relentlessly on the back of them. And like Lemmy, they weren’t given to wild creative swings.
1995’s Time Heals Nothing was doomy and dirgey with punk outbursts. 1996’s Broken Glass was punky with doomy, dirgey dives. 2000’s Equilibrium was… you get the picture. That’s not to say they didn’t tweak the formula sometimes. 1998’s Odd Fellows Rest, a fan-favourite, saw their sound taking on a more soulful edge. But otherwise, Crowbar’s lot was releasing albums to fan acclaim, with no real shot at mainstream success.
“For years, we would literally go on tour to play music because we loved it, and we could get free beer,” Kirk admits. “We weren’t making any money – none. We’d get home and get a shitty part-time job or something. We’ve really tried to stay on tour as much as possible because at least that’s something fun to do.”
There were moments of glory amid the grind. In 1994, Crowbar opened for Pantera on the latter’s arena tour, at the precise moment Far Beyond Driven hit No.1 in the US.
“They were above Michael Jackson!” Kirk marvels. “People were literally tearing the seats up in the arena and destroying stuff. It was a wild tour.”
The dealer was watching me the whole time, thinking if I got a little taste I was gonna buy from him.
Kirk Windstein
But as Crowbar’s profile inched up, Kirk found himself becoming increasingly reliant on cocaine.
“I was 32 years old when I first properly did coke because before then I couldn’t afford it,” he admits. “It became a really bad thing for a long time – when I started making money with Down, it only got worse. Nowadays you have so much more reason not to fuck with it because of the fentanyl [mixed with the cocaine] and all that shit. But [to quit] all I had to do was erase my coke dealer’s numbers from my phone.”
Easy as that?
“Not quite,” he concedes. “I stopped going to the bars where I knew dealers were too. I remember one of the dealers came up to me when I was in a bar taking a piss and he hands me a bag of coke. I took out my key, did a bump each side, tied the bag back up and handed it back to him. He was watching me the whole time, thinking if I got a little taste I was gonna buy from him. I just smiled and went, ‘I’m good.’”
His relationship with alcohol is more complicated. In 2010, he pulled out of a planned tour with his doom side-project, Kingdom Of Sorrow, to enter an AA programme and “turn over a new leaf”. He still drinks, but strictly only beer.
“I can’t handle hard liquor anymore,” he says. “I can’t wait to taste a beer I like, but if it’s hard liquor it makes me wanna puke just thinking about it.”
For all the musical and non-musical diversions, Kirk has stayed true to Crowbar for well over 35 years. But having turned 60, he’s under no illusions about the strains that life in a band can take. He’s recently been suffering from back issues that turned out to be related to a synovial cyst pressing on his spine.
“I couldn’t really walk,” he says. “It was very, very painful and was mentally draining because I’m wondering, ‘Am I gonna be using a walker and sitting down to play for the rest of my career?’ A neurosurgeon talked me out of having any kind of surgery – the cyst can be drained – but he was like, ‘It’s not a very high-risk thing, but do you really wanna be that dude?’ I remember reading about [80s rocker] Don Dokken, he had bad surgery and said he can’t play guitar or even wipe his own ass now. Fuck that.”
Cysts aside, the future looks good for Kirk Windstein and Crowbar. Thanks in part to that unlikely TikTok success, their recent UK tour was a sell-out. They may not have made an album since 2022’s Zero And Below (their 12th), but these New Orleans warhorses are more popular than ever.
“Better late than never!” Kirk booms. “Thank God it’s happening. We’ve not changed anything, and all the songs and albums people are going crazy over are actually old. We have been busting our asses our whole lives playing music. But we are finally getting a pay-off from all the hard work and sacrifice.”
Crowbar play Damnation in November.
