Crowbar and How I Came to Love the Doom

Heat rises off the pavement as the cicadas sing their song of want and mosquitos endlessly search to satiate their thirst. A copperhead slithers across the black top just before the crushing wheels of a tour bus rumbles by, taking its riders to yet another blasted city, another over heated club, another face-off with an exuberant crowd of bearded dudes in battle vests, head banging women who don’t take shit, loners who like their music slow, loud, and brutal, and general miscreants looking to get hammered with their tribe. 

The band Crowbar, hailing from New Orleans, Louisiana are seasoned road dogs with a discography of passionate, heavy music, that mixes hardcore punk and a brand of metal popularized by the originators of the genre, Black Sabbath and Los Angeles’ answer to Sabbath, Saint Vitus. They don’t play sludge metal; they are sludge metal. Every time founder/vocalist/guitarist Kirk Windstein opens his mouth to sing, he unleashes a flood of embattled emotions, backed by a thunderous band with a line-up that has changed frequently through the years, yet has never failed to deliver on the promise made with the band’s debut album back in 1990. 

 I was a metal head almost from the moment I heard my first power chord. Like a lot of pre-teen boys in the 1980s, I first got into the genre because of bands like KISS, Ratt, and Motley Crue, before getting into heavier stuff like Iron Maiden, Megadeth, and Pantera. And then, punk rock happened to me, and I completely abandoned metal for several years, but it was punk rock that would bring me back to metal. As some of my dear readers may know, I wrote a book about the music of Black Flag. They were the preeminent hardcore punk band that lead many other bands in a more metallic direction into the mid-80s. They slowed their tempos, lengthened the songs, and explored metal/jazz freakout solos and instrumental music. Many punk bands went metal in their wake, including Suicidal Tendencies, Corrosion of Conformity, Wasted Youth, and DRI. Where Black Flag had started out riding a wave created by the Ramones to play short and fast blasts of anger, their debut album, Damaged, closed with a Black Sabbath like dirge called “Damaged I” (previously recorded with third sing Dez Cadena). It was the follow up album, My War, where things really started to change. One of the main architects of hardcore punk recorded three long, slow tracks that take up the entire B side of the sophomore album. Critics and fans balked, but those three songs were ground zero for grunge, doom metal, stoner metal, sludge metal, and more-inspiring bands like Mudhoney, Soundgarden, The Melvins, and Crowbar. For me, there was something so alluring about those extended, crushing jams. They were more personally relatable than Sabbath and at the time, I didn’t know there were already several bands that played doom, sludge, and stoner metal, or that those genres were even a thing. I knew glam, speed, thrash, and death metal. 

 Collecting SST releases got me into Saint Vitus, having known nothing about the band prior to purchasing Heavier Than Thou. That cassette lived in my Sony Walkman many a night as I walked around Boston, broke and lonely. Vitus opened me up even more to slower, heavier music. I remembered Crowbar from a couple appearances on Beavis and Butthead and they were one of the first bands I went looking for, as they were the only other band besides Sabbath that I could think of that played a meaty, sludgy brand of music. Coincidentally, a few years earlier in 1995, Windstein had formed a doom super group with Phil Anselmo (and later Rex Brown from Pantera), Pepper Keenan from Corrosion of Conformity, Todd Strange from Crowbar and Jimmy Bower from EYEHATEGOD, called Down. They released a single called “Stone the Crow,” which honestly is one of my favorite songs recorded by any of the individual bands. Down was no one off either, as they released Down II: A Bustle in Your Hedgerow in 1999 and never stopped. If I had to name a favorite doom album, its Down II. Full of Southern Gothic imagery in the lyrics with music that sounds like a cross between Black Sabbath and Lynyrd Skynyrd on acid. The lead single, “Lysergik Funeral Procession,” was a live video featuring Anselmo sporting a Saint Vitus shirt. As both a horror fan and a fan of Southern Gothic literature, Down II remains a consistent favorite album and a go to writing soundtrack. Songs like “Stained Glass Cross,” “Ghosts Along the Mississippi,” and “New Orleans is a Dying Whore” have soundtracked several writing sessions, and the album in general helped inspire later drafts of my novel Summer’s Venomous Kiss. (And yes, I know, Mr. Anselmo has been known to say some dumb shit that’s cringeworthy or has flat out got him accused of being a racist. He’s apologized a few times for a particular incident, but the damage was done, and it’s still not cool in many circles to talk about the man, and it really comes down to the individual if they can separate art from the artist or toss it all in the trash. Art is subjective and there’s no right or wrong answer to how you engage with art.) 

 The genesis of Crowbar goes back to the mid-80s, with the band Shellshock, which featured future Crowbar members Kirk Windstein and Jimmy Bower. Tragedy ended Shellshock, which set Windstein on a journey of switching band names and band members before finally releasing the band’s 1991 Obedience Through Suffering. The album didn’t set the world on fire, but the 1993 follow-up Crowbar, produced by Anselmo, had a couple of videos that got heavy play on MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball and found additional fans when “All I Had I Gave” was featured on Beavis and Butthead.

 The band came out swinging with the opening track, “High Rate Extinction,” which gives way to “All I Had I Gave” creating a one-two punch that’ll put you on your heels. “Will That Never Dies” and “Fixation” may not differentiate themselves in sonic dissonance from the first two tracks, but what they do is build on an avalanche of misanthropic aural violence. The perfect marriage of punk and metal. That leads us to track five, a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “No Quarter” I’m not a fan of Zeppelin’s version, in Crowbar’s hands, it’s one of my favorite songs. Windstein was born to sing this epic, and epic is the appropriate word, as Crowbar blows Zeppelin out of the water on this one. “Self Inflicted” hits like an ambush, with eight fists pummeling the fuck out of you, leaving the next three tracks, “Negative Pollution,” “Existence is Punishment,” and “Holding Nothing” to drag you to the ultimate downer ending, “I Have Failed.” The album puts you through the wringer, but its pure catharsis, not an exercise in wallowing in despair. 

 The album was out of step with the Nirvanas and Sonic Youths and Pearl Jams that were enjoying their time in the sun, but it set the stage for an enduring career, Windstein and company has seen the world and continues to release incredible albums and tour to this day.

 I was fortunate to finally see Crowbar live this past April, with local Syracuse bands Cactus Cathedral and Murder in the Rue Morgue. It was worth the wait. I was up front on the barrier, getting my skull kicked in by the sonic excess. The band chose a set list that pulled from everything going back to the early days and I only regret that I didn’t record the show. Windstein stepped away from Down for a few years but has returned to the fold recently. In the meantime, he has kept Crowbar going, releasing one classic sludge album after another. After Crowbar, my absolute favorites are Broken Glass, Odd Fellows Rest, and Sonic Excess in its Purest Form, but even the latest release, Zero and Below, only reaffirms Crowbar as the reigning kings of sludge. The lyrics are often naked, primal screams into the void about loss, regret, defeat, and perseverance. Often, Windstein’s lyrics have more in common with the confessional psychodrama of Black Flag or the Rollins Band than most metal bands that revel in drugs, drinks, sex, or Satan. I may not compare Crowbar songs with the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, but I do see a Southern literary quality in their songs. 

 “Behind this fear new life awaits 

In awe you stand to break the stone that's crushing you 

You taste it now I've seen you drown 

Thru the ashes I've watched you burn 

You hate that smell 

You love the high that it brings to you 

Now walk that line and learn the way to end it all 

your backbone is shaking 

the pounding and aching are real 

It drives you back down into the blackness 

The cold ugly blackness you feel it's all coming unglued” 

-“Through the Ashes (I’ve Watched You Burn)” 

 You can feel the heat and humidity of New Orleans coming off these albums. The vegetation, the oppressive air, the sense of danger in the streets-it’s all palpable. For me, Crowbar is as synonymous with New Orleans as Anne Rice and Mardi Gras. I look forward to Kirk and the boys coming up my way again. (Originally appeared in Stranger with Friction issue 6)