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Over the last twenty years Maryland stalwarts Clutch have risen from successful band to icons. Through constant touring, a bevy of albums and a penchant for intelligent lyrics, Clutch has become synonymous with heavy music for the thinking man. While so many other rock outfits completely fell apart once “stonerrock” fell out of fashion, Clutch has managed to challenge both themselves and their audience to maintain a career few, if any, ever achieve.
As Clutch moves into their second decade, they show no signs of stopping. Their last album Strange Cousins From The West is only a year out of the gate and the band still managed to release a live DVD titled Clutch Live At The 9:30 Club as well as finishing up a new EP. Throaty and reserved frontman Neil Fallon has been Clutch’s point-person for the last twenty years and my recent conversation with him illuminated such things as fatherhood, touring, stripping down, the industry, artistic freedom and much more, including a nice compliment on one of my old music projects.
CRAVEONLINE: Not to get overly personal right off, but will your new baby put a kabosh on how much touring Clutch does?
NEIL FALLON: We hadn’t planned any touring regardless, baby or not. We’ve pulled back on our touring just because the older you get; it becomes a drag to just go on touring forever and ever. This two-month tour we’re about do (Berzerkus Tour w/Black Label Society & Children Of Bodom—I.R.) is about as long of a tour as we’re willing to do. (Click) Hey can you old on a second.
CRAVEONLINE: Sure man, no problem.
NEIL FALLON: Thanks. (Click. Thirty seconds. Click) Sorry about that, somebody was trying to sell me aluminum siding.
CRAVEONLINE: I got one of those earlier; they were trying to sell me a new cell phone plan.
NEIL FALLON: Just what you need.
CRAVEONLINE: Exactly. Anyway, so you guys are only willing to tour two months at a time?
NEIL FALLON: We’d actually only like to tour four weeks at a time. This one is an exception to the rule because it’s a support slot and you can’t really pick and choose how long you’re gonna play. We also knew that after this one we were really going to focus on writing the next record so they’re wouldn’t be a lot of touring.
CRAVEONLINE: A new record? The old one is only a year old. Clutch turns out records pretty fast.
NEIL FALLON: I think one of the things we were always very irritated about when we were on major labels was the quote, unquote “Record Cycle”, which was the lifespan of the record. Then you’re supposed to wait X amount of months or years before you put out the next one. That might be great if you’re looking at strictly selling a product but if you’re an artist it can lead to very dark roads. Now we don’t really deal with that so we can put them out as quickly as we like or as infrequently as we like. Even between the last record and this forth coming record, we recorded and EP that we hadn’t intended to but because we are the record label we can say ‘Hey let’s just do this EP solely because we want to.’ It was all very spontaneous.
CRAVEONLINE: I saw you guys when Passive Restraints had just come out and through it all Clutch has garnered very little band drama. How’d you manage that?
NEIL FALLON: The four of us are very different but we’re alike in one thing, we don’t really wear our dramas on our sleeve. Our dramas are pretty benign. The amount of touring we did early on, that’s a pretty good indication of if a band can stay together. A van tour will break up a band in a heartbeat. If you can stay friends, barring tragedy or unforeseen circumstances, you can do it for as long as you like. We also just love the music and there wasn’t any person that thought they didn’t really want to do this or it wasn’t satisfying their creative urge. We always kind of felt that we were lucky to be in the position we were in.
CRAVEONLINE: Has songwriting gotten more basic for the band? Is that why Strange Cousins From The West was so stripped down?
NEIL FALLON: Yeah, I think so. From Beale Street To Oblivion had a lot of organ and keyboard on it and a lot of second guitar from me. Brian, our guitar tech, played on a track, Eric Oblander from Five Horse Johnson played on a track and it all sounds fantastic but…well….JP (Jean Paul Gaster—Drums) puts it best, he says it’s almost like a sonic trampoline, that you can start getting lazy because you have so much backup. It’s easy to play with all that on stage, so you can start to lose where you’re going.
Then Mick (Schauer, Keyboards) left the picture and we were trying to figure out who would fill in on the organ. We decided to just go back. We’d been a band a long, long time before that entered the picture. We also decided no guest musicians on this, we just wanted to go back to four all the way through. It’s not some kind of manifesto or mission statement but just to realign our compass.
CRAVEONLINE: It’s like spring-cleaning.
NEIL FALLON: Yeah, you can liken it to that. Complexities are good but if you start forgetting the nuts and bolts of something, it’s like cooking. You can add all the nice garnishes on top of it but if your rue is not right.
CRAVEONLINE: So is the next record gonna remain stripped down? (No answer.) Neil are you there? (No answer)
(I hang up and dutifully call Neil back again.)
NEIL FALLON: Hello?
CRAVEONLINE: Sorry man, I think we lost each other.
NEIL FALLON: Yeah there’s a storm coming through here.
CRAVEONLINE: Sorry about that
NEIL FALLON: Can’t do anything about the weather.
CRAVEONLINE: So is the next record going to go in the same stripped down direction?
NEIL FALLON: I don’t know, that’s the fun part about it. We just, last week, finished the rough tracks for the EP. We’d been invited to play an acoustic set at Bonneroo last summer and after playing those acoustic songs we decided to record them. We re-worked some old Clutch songs and wrote a couple of new ones. It’s not a completely acoustic record but it has, I don’t know, a small room sound, I guess that’s one way to describe it.
CRAVEONLINE: Intimate?
NEIL FALLON: That’d work. I’m not playing an acoustic guitar; it’s a semi-hollow body. I couldn’t go all the way. I don’t know if that’ll effect the next record or if it’ll be anti-acoustic, it’s always kind of a crapshoot.
CRAVEONLINE: Well you guys can pretty much do what you want to do.
NEIL FALLON: Yeah, it’s a pretty good spot. Being in the position we’re in with our record label (Weathermaker), if something goes wrong we can fix it because we’re the ones to blame. Artistically there’s nobody else involved. We’re not worried about anything but the four of us, and the two guys at the label, that’s it. It’s a really fortunate place to be in.
CRAVEONLINE: Was Weathermaker the best move you ever made?
NEIL FALLON: Business wise it’s been the best move we ever made by light years and leaps and bounds. We tried it in 1999-2000 with Rive Road Records but that was just an imprint we put on the back of a record and sold on the Internet. With Weathermaker we hire publicists and have distribution deals. It’s a real thing. We’re not particularly interested in signing other bands because we don’t want to be the bad guys and we’re pretty busy just with us. Being with DRT Entertainment, that was a real eye opener and maybe it was a blessing in disguise when they stopped paying us. It was like we didn’t have a label but we were signed to a label if that makes any sense.
We figured why only get some of the money coming in when we’re already doing everything ourselves and know everybody, so we went for it. It was a bit nightmarish at first because DRT tried to put the kabosh on Weathermaker and they lost, and now they’re a non-entity.
CRAVEONLINE: Good. It’s rare when the good guys win.
NEIL FALLON: It took a minute for me to realize it actually happened. I’m always looking for the trick or the Catch 22. I think over the past year things have really started cooking for the label.
CRAVEONLINE: With so much music under the Clutch belt, ever find yourself digging something you used to hate or vice versa?
NEIL FALLON: Last Christmas we did the self-titled record live, front to end. I hadn’t really listened to that record in close to ten years. Mostly because I can think of so many things I could’ve done better in hindsight. Listening back to it I was pleasantly surprised by a lot of it. Most of my criticism was about what I was doing singing wise. That and the seven-inch. I listened to the seven-inch a little while ago and it was as if I’d never listened to it.
CRAVEONLINE: So between the new EP and the next record why now for a live DVD?
NEIL FALLON: We wanted to do another DVD and the subject came up of doing the self-titled record just because we could. We’d only done that record live once before that show and then we did it that show and we haven’t done it since. I think for us it was really cool to do but you’re locked into forty-five minutes of non-spontaneity. As for the 9:30 Club, the stars just aligned for that and the club is a place near and dear to our hearts. Even before we started as a band, when we first started going to see shows, it was at the 9:30 Club.
CRAVEONLINE: It’s like CBGB for me. With twenty or more years of history behind the band, what’s the biggest change you’ve seen in the music industry?
NEIL FALLON: Well if you consider digital technology and the Internet as sort of Tweedledee and Tweedledumb, that introduction into the music industry has done tremendous good and tremendous harm. I think the fact that a kid can have a home studio on his laptop, and in it have things that fifteen years ago would’ve cost him fifty thousand dollars that he can now get for Christmas, is a great thing. It makes technology more accessible to a lot of people. The downside to that is now everybody’s a record producer. With digital trickery you can make anybody sound like a master, when in fact it’s not live music, it’s dead music.
Along with that the Internet, it’s a similar thing, it’s made a lot of bands accessible to a lot of people. I know just communicating with friends of mine that are into similar things, I’ve been turned onto bands from the past that I’ve never heard of and realized there’s so much out there that I don’t know. It’s a great resource but the flipside of that is you sometimes want your computer to be your own A&R rep and tell you everything out there sucks because there’s so much to hear, it’s like an embarrassment of riches.
The attention span of kids out there has shortened because they don’t really invest the money that someone like you or I would, we’re approximately the same age. When you were at a record store with ten dollars you’d be agonizing over which record you were going to buy. Now kids download it, listen to it, throw it away and never listen to it again. There’s always good with bad.
CRAVEONLINE: With the way leakage is out there kids don’t even have to invest their money into anything, they just find the leaked record. That’s the thing I hate, being from the age of the record store.
NEIL FALLON: Unless you’re a new band and the exception to the rule and you get a big hit. Outside of that you have to be willing to go out there and play nightclubs and sell t-shirts, or there’s no money to be made. It’s like it used to be in a lot of ways. The other thing I’ve noticed is that rock n roll has become an incredibly trendy marketing visage. You see Cheerios commercials and mom is throwing up Devil Horns with the kids and it’s part of our common culture. It used to be very under the radar and a special thing and I lament that that’s gone.
CRAVEONLINE: It’s like Punk Rock, which is now the Hula Hoop or The Buckle Shoe. A right of passage as opposed to an actual rebellion.
NEIL FALLON: Exactly. I mean, there will always be a new band that nobody sees coming.
CRAVEONLINE: That’s even getting harder and harder.
NEIL FALLON: Yeah, it’s like so much noise you can’t differentiate stuff, or at leas that’s how I see it. It’s like collective schizophrenia. You never know who is telling the truth.
CRAVEONLINE: And you never know who is gonna suck live, which is the real test.
NEIL FALLON: I know. Sometimes we’ll get on these festivals with these bands and when they go onstage I can tell that fifty to seventy percent of what’s coming off the stage is from a computer or a DAT machine, or they’re plugged straight into a pod and there’s no amp even on stage. That more than anything else infuriates me.
CRAVEONLINE: Why?
NEIL FALLON: I think it’s disrespectful to the tradition. Of course now I sound like an old man.
CRAVEONLINE: Staying in the idea of the old. For a heavy band, Clutch has some really intelligent lyrics. As a lyricist you’ve managed to side step the angry at this or that clichés. How did that happen? Did you have a literary background?
NEIL FALLON: I went to school and got an English degree. It’s probably one of the few times a person put their English degree to good use. Otherwise I would’ve been a teacher or a writer and failed miserably at it. I think on the first record there’s a lot of anger but I was nineteen when it was written. I listen back to it and I think to myself ‘I’m really not that angry’ and it’s not a lot of fun to try and pick up false emotions on stage. You can tell a story a thousand times and it never gets old because you can make up a new movie in your head. That’s kind of where I’m coming from.
CRAVEONLINE: I hope you don’t take this as an insult, because I mean it as a compliment, but I see your creativity with lyrics almost as the same thing Morrissey does.
NEIL FALLON: Thank you, I take that as a compliment.
CRAVEONLINE: So completely off topic. How do you know Eric Oberlander from Five Horse Johnson?
NEIL FALLON: First time I met him he came to one of our shows in Toledo and I thought he was just a big monster that I’d never see again. Then he came out to some more shows and we did some gigs with Five Horse Johnson and did a European tour with them. We hit it off immediately with those guys.
CRAVEONLINE: They are the greatest guys. My old band Puny Human was on Small Stone Records with Five Horse Johnson.
NEIL FALLON: We just jammed with him on this new EP. Eric is having a baby in October. When were you in Puny Human?
CRAVEONLINE: I started the band, and I played drums on the first two records and then had a huge falling out with them.
NEIL FALLON: I have one of your albums. Great band.
CRAVEONLINE: Wow, thanks, that means a lot. The first was called Revenge Is Easy, the second one was Its Not The Heat It’s The Humanity.
NEIL FALLON: That’s the one I have, the second. The title of that album, I was going to use that in a lyric years ago and I saw the title of your record and thought Fuck!
CRAVEONLINE: I used to say that during summers in New York City.
CRAVEONLINE: Last question. With the new baby do you ever think about Clutch ending? What would happen that would cause you all to call it a day?
NEIL FALLON: No one knows what tomorrow is going to bring but I think philosophically when it cease being fun. We all just have to be able to adapt. We’re not going to go out for two months or try and get that brass ring of success. It’s about being able to maintain a level where this is all we do. If we can do that and still put food on the table, we’ll be happy, at least I will. The few times I’ve had to drive through commuter traffic I say, thank God I don’t have to do this and then sit inside a fucking cubicle for nine hours. I would lose my mind.
For more on Clutch check out
http://www.myspace.com/clutchband
