“It’s the people, the personalities, the history. There really is no other place in the country like like it,” Tom DeGeorge tells CL as he sits in his office ticking off the many reasons he loves Ybor City.
The general manager of the neighborhood's storied live music venue Crowbar is surrounded by neat piles of paper and shelving stocked with promo paraphernalia. It smells like a mixture of AC and PBR just outside the doorway; a blinking streetlight flickers through the crinkled metal blinds.
It’s almost 9 p.m., and the 294-capacity venue is prepping doors before a solo set by Damien Jurado, one of the most underappreciated songwriters in indie-rock. In an hour, Crowbar will be filled with bespectacled young people dressed in their most stylish winter clothing. It’s one of winter's first chilly weekends, but DeGeorge — a Pennsylvania native who first landed here ten days before 9/11 — is business-as-usual in a T-shirt with cut-off sleeves. He’s a little worried about the show (Jurado hasn’t shown up for soundcheck) and is already thinking ahead to the end of the concert, when Crowbar will transition into Ol’ Dirty Sundays, a five-year-old weekly hip-hop, soul and reggae-centric tradition for which the outside courtyard morphs into what feels like a late-'80s NYC block party complete with smoking grills, world-class DJs and breakdancers. DeGeorge, 42, and his staff won’t get home until close to 5 a.m.
With just two weeks left until the bar (which he co-owns with Bonnie Plumtree and Devin Norton) celebrates ten years in historic Ybor, the bearded, burly patron saint of 17th Street is subdued and ready to reflect on what a decade of survival means.
“They say the first five years are the toughest, then it evens out, but it’s still hard,” DeGeorge says, mentioning that events like Pre-Fest and WMNF's now-suspended Tropical Heatwave help him stay near the black. “I still rarely ever feel like we’re not flying by the seat of our pants.”
That freewheeling nature, however, has led to some of the bar’s most memorable moments. In 2011, rapper Talib Kweli was scheduled to do a DJ set after Black Star performed an already rare set at the Straz Center just two miles away. Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def) decided to tag along, and the duo — one of the most revered in hip-hop history — worked through selections from their iconic 1998 LP while a couple hundred fans got the show of a lifetime. Just this year, Tampa post-hardcore stars Underoath — who sold out theaters worldwide during a recent reunion tour — put on a secret "no-barricade" show for fans. All the sweat from those crowds eventually evaporated into the ether, but countless other moments like those are forever embedded into the venue walls.
“We’ve definitely done some nutty things, but those are what give you a shot in the arm,” DeGeorge says, “that’s when you know that you want to be involved in the business for the rest of your life.” Crowbar’s patrons and staff, for their parts, are kind of like lifers, too. Most of the staff have been there for the majority of Crowbar’s existence, sticking out leaner times while DeGeorge and his partners figured things out. Admittedly, DeGeorge says the bar might not have made it had co-owner Bonnie Plumtree not bought in about a year and a half after the doors opened.
“I was looking for another business. I chose Devin and Tom because they were honest guys and that’s very important,” Plumtree, 65, wrote to CL in a message. “I could see the potential in Crowbar and it has been a great fit — [it’s been] a good feeling to watch [it] grow.”
“She definitely shouldered a lot of the burden of debt we’d built,” DeGeorge says. So how does a bar that depends on its live music calendar truly endure in an age when the world makes it easy to stay in and watch Netflix? The answer is as obvious as you’d think.
“When we opened we wanted to host all kinds of music and not just be a metal bar, or a hip-hop bar, country bar,” DeGeorge says as Jurado’s fans start queuing up outside. “Today, on any given night we can do a 180 to comedy, rap, whatever, and nobody blinks an eye.”
Throughout the conversation, DeGeorge keeps referencing that diversity, and the people who walk into the bar night in and night out whether they’re clocking in or not. He says this latest anniversary bill reflects that diversity, and he’s right. Americana, instrumental rock, hip-hop, ska, fusion and southern rock are all represented. And at the end of the day, the Crowbar collective is doing exactly what it set out to do when it adopted that corner spot ten years ago.
“We all knew that nobody was getting rich off of this. We make enough to cover the bills and then a little to eat,” DeGeorge says before scurrying off to make sure everything is all set for the night. “At the end of the day our job is to not take ourselves too seriously while making sure that the people that come here have the best possible concert experience — simple as that.”
The Crowbar 10-year anniversary happens on Saturday, December 3. There is no cover and doors are at 5 p.m. More information is available via local.cltampa.com.
This article appears in Dec 1-8, 2016.