Down performed their first ever live show with Bobby Landgraf as their official guitarist at the recent Housecore Horror Film & Metal Festival in Austin, Texas. Fan-filmed footage of the event can be found below.
Landgarf, who originally served as Down’s guitar tech, was brought in to replace guitarist Kirk Windstein, who left the band earlier this month to focus on his family and main band Crowbar.
“I couldn’t feel more blessed,” Landgraf, commented in a recent interview. “Phil [Anselmo] could’ve gotten anyone to play guitar, but I’ve been jamming with them during soundchecks, so they know we can play together.”
He added: “It’s really a dream come true. It’s what you’re working for all those years.”
Windstein said in a recent interview with Devil Horns that he decided to quit Down because it was taking up too much of his schedule: “My life’s changed a lot in the last year. With being married, I wanna concentrate a lot more on my family first and foremost. And Down, with us getting older and Philip’s voice and now Down has to take a fairly amount of days off in order for Phil to rest his voice properly, which is totally, absolutely understandable and well respected.”
However, he explained that he preferred to be constantly playing while on the road: “… I like to go out 15 shows in a row and get it done. With Down, a lot of the [touring], especially internationally, is fly dates and things like that and there’s so many days off. And really, for me, to be blunt, on those off days, man… I mean, show days are great, I have a responsibility, of course I love every second being on stage, but on those off days, I have absolutely nothing to do and it just ends up turning into drinking too goddamn much and wanting to not be there… The guys could see I was kind of not really getting into it, they could see me on the off days hitting the sauce harder than I should have been — no doubt about it.”
Windstein added that the split was amicable and said that Landgraf would fill his shoes well: “…Bobby Landgraf from Honky, that’s taking my spot, is a very good friend of mine… he’s actually gonna come and me and him are gonna jam a little bit on some tunes. He’s got a few questions. He’s an amazing guitar player, but it’s hard to get every little lick down of somebody else’s stuff, so he asked me if I could pop by and jam with him a bit. I said, ‘Absolutely.’ Anything I could do to help out would be great.”
Down entered vocalist Phil Anselmo’s New Orleans studio, Nodferatu’s Lair, on October 7 to begin recording a new EP that is tentatively due in early 2014.