Ybor City music venue Crowbar may hold just 300 or so people, but it’s also hosted some of the biggest artists out there.
Some, like Chappell Roan, worked the room years ago on their way up to festival stages and household name status. Other artists, like Doechii, have picked Crowbar as a secret retreat after making it to the top, sneaking inside to play intimate shows in between arena tour stops.
“We’re getting a bunch of those, and the calendar is super full leading up to the end,” said Crowbar owner Tom DeGeorge. “Every band that we’ve ever had wants to try to play here again.”
As Crowbar prepares to close after 20 years in Ybor City, let’s take a look back at some of the highlights.
The “Pink Pony Club” provocateur played a relatively intimate, very sold-out show at Jannus Live in May 2024, right as she was exploding into superstardom. But six years before that, she played an even tinier gig at Crowbar, opening for British singer-songwriter Declan McKenna.
Isbell is known as a songwriter’s songwriter, but before he broke through to bigger crowds, he played a few shows at Crowbar between 2007 and 2009. Around one of those times, or perhaps during an earlier gig with the Drive-By Truckers, he may have been inspired to write “Traveling Alone,” a song about struggling with addiction and being “damn near strangled by my appetite / in Ybor City on a Friday night.”
Yes, this really happened. A few days before the country A-lister headlined Raymond James Stadium in 2022, his opening act Old Dominion announced a surprise pop-up gig at Crowbar. That was crazy enough. But midway through the show, Chesney himself popped in to perform his song “Save It For a Rainy Day.”
Countless local acts have played Crowbar over the years. But it’s not every day they do so right after receiving four Grammy nominations. That was the case with Tampa rapper Doechii, a Blake High alum who booked a November 2024 show at Crowbar as her mixtape “Alligator Bites Never Heal” was taking off. Three months later, she stole the show at the Grammys with an electric performance and acceptance speech that shouted out Tampa. A few months after that, she was headlining the Yuengling Center.
A few years after their videos for “A Million Ways” and “Here It Goes Again” went viral on a burgeoning little platform called YouTube, the Chicago pop-rock outfit brought their whimsical stage show to Crowbar in 2010. For the time, it was technically innovative; the band even sold bootlegs of the show on flash drives at the merch table afterward. But it was also charmingly lo-fi: When a technical glitch caused a brief delay, singer Damian Kulash and bassist Tim Nordwind performed an a cappella number from “Les Miserables.”
Years before megahit “Feel It Still” came out of nowhere to become a pop sensation, Portugal. The Man was just a popular group of alternative oddballs out of Wasilla, Alaska. In 2010, they played a show at Crowbar. A decade later, they co-headlined the Gasparilla Music Festival.
After a 2011 headlining performance as Black Star at the Straz Center for the Performing Arts, rap legends Mos Def (now Yasiin Bey) and Talib Kweli dropped by Crowbar’s long-running hip-hop DJ night Ol’ Dirty Sundays for an intimate aftershow, where they spun records for two hours to a rapturous crowd.
DJs have always been welcome at Crowbar, and not just at Ol’ Dirty Sundays. Electronic artists like Tycho, Pretty Lights and A-Trak went on to become festival headliners — as did Odesza, an electronic duo who played Crowbar in 2014 and a decade later sold out three nights at Madison Square Garden.
Well, sort of. After their long-awaited first Tampa concert at what is now the Yuengling Center in 2017, half of the Grammy-winning indie superstars came to Crowbar for a much more intimate aftershow. Violinist Sarah Neufeld and drummer Jerermy Gara performed, singer Win Butler played a DJ set, and multi-instrumentalist Will Butler hosted, spoke about voting rights and chatted with fans.
Bands who have taken the Crowbar stage include a who’s who of 2000s and 2010s indie rockers — Dr. Dog, Deer Tick, Mountain Goats, Explosions in the Sky, Japandroids, Little Dragon, Cloud Nothings, Matt and Kim and so on. We’ll highlight Irish alt-pop group Two Door Cinema Club here, because 15 years after playing Crowbar, they just announced a nostalgia-fueled headline gig at Madison Square Garden.
Boygenius was already a successful supergroup when Dacus headlined Crowbar in 2019. But while she, Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker were accomplished singer-songwriters in their own right, as a trio, they hadn’t yet evolved into the Grammy-winning, arena-headlining, ‘SNL’-playing powerhouse they’d become just a few years later.
Christian metalcore group Underoath wasn’t quite a household name when they broke up in 2013, but with Grammy nominations, hit albums and legions of diehard fans under their belts, they still had a claim to being one of Tampa Bay’s biggest bands ever. They reunited in 2016, and just before taking the stage for a comeback concert at Jannus Live, Underoath played a secret warmup show at Crowbar. They’ve played several more secret shows there since.
