Neil Fallon Of Clutch: Bona Fide Man Of Action

After stomping onto the scene in ‘91 with their crushing Pitchfork EP, Clutch has spent the past 17 years in a vicious touring and recording cycle, honing their sound to the slick, snarling beast of blues-infused stomp-rock it is today. They’re among a dying breed of bands that have somehow managed to keep all their original members for nearly two decades, and the sonic benefits of the relationships among them are evident in every song. Having risen from the heavy riff-rock sludge of their predecessors, Clutch’s unique brand of Zappa-meets-Sabbath-on-acid rock n’ roll has been honed to an almost eerie, jazz-like telepathy.

Fronted by vocalist and lyrical maestro Neil Fallon, the Clutch behemoth is rounded out by guitarist Tim Sult, Jean-Paul Gaster on drums and Dan Maines on bass. 

Despite possessing the throat of a giant, Fallon’s never been one to use overwrought emotion in his songs, relying instead on clever wordplay and metaphorical fits to captivate and titillate. Don’t take that to mean he doesn’t commit himself fully to his part in the machine, however. “If you don’t have a dark night of the soul, it probably means you’re not investing enough emotion into it,” he said in a recent interview. We couldn’t agree more.

The band’s first-ever live DVD, Full Fathom Five, is set for release on August 12 with a live companion CD to be released simultaneously. Recorded & filmed in late 2007 and early 2008 in New Jersey, Pittsburgh, Denver and Australia, the DVD features 20 songs and a batch of bonus features, while the accompanying CD contains 15 songs. Texan Book Of The Dead (from the band’s self-titled sophomore effort) is the first single and video to be released.

We sat down to talk to Neil about all things Clutch, including the band’s label philosophies, how they put a song together and their future plans, as well as some promising updates on side projects The Company Band and The Bakerton Group.

Antiquiet: We’ve been hearing about you guys doing a DVD for years and years now. What made it actually happen?

Neil Fallon: We hooked up with a guy by the name of Agent Ogden who kind of approached us and said look, you guys don’t have a DVD, let me make one for you. And the thing is with us, I think the band in general is just very camera-shy. I don’t know why, it’s just the way we are. So we never pursued it from our end, so it took an outsider to put fuel to that fire.

There’s a lot of things going on in the Clutch world. It was just a time when we were doing a lot of touring, and we figured if we don’t do it now, it’s probably gonna be another three years or so ’cause we’re gonna be busy doing records and whatnot. It was just written in the stars, really. There wasn’t really a master plan. It was more a matter of us feeling comfortable around Agent Ogden and his crew, cause there have been times where there’s guys with cameras constantly in your face, and that’s… that’s just a surefire way to piss us off. And he wasn’t like that, so it seemed like a good idea.

Antiquiet: What’s the story behind Weathermaker music?

Neil Fallon: We had released records on our own in the past, through River Road records, but that wasn’t really a “real” record label, it was just a name we put on the back of the records and sold ‘em on the internet. This is much more of a real thing. It’s still trying to get its legs and get some momentum, but we’re gonna be releasing our own material. We’ll just hire people to do the things that a record label would normally do. This day and age, it’s not as difficult as it would’ve been ten years ago. 

At the end of our releationship with DRT, it was pretty much apparent that they weren’t a record label, so it wasn’t as if we were stepping into unknown territory. It was like, we can do just as good of a job, or better, without the middleman.

Antiquiet:  Over the years you went through a lot of label changes, and you’re known for doing things your way. How do you feel about the state of the industry, now that you’ve got your own label? 

Neil Fallon: Well, if bands want to make a living playing music, what they’re gonna have to do is just work harder. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It means going to play shows. It doesn’t mean sitting around hoping that some knight in shining armor record label is gonna give you a shitload of money and you’re gonna be babied for years. Those days are gone. It’s probably for the best, too. Most bands are like us, I think- we don’t make money selling records. To do that on a label you’d have to sell platinum numbers. We make our money playing shows, and that’s what it’s always been about. Everybody’s kind of being forced to re-focus on that, and it’s made a lot of people nervous who don’t want to go out there and work for it.

I’ve had guys burn copies of CDs of bands, so I can’t really be critical of other people that do that with my band. The only downside to it all is that there’s just an embarrassment of riches. There’s just so much out there, it’s so easy to drown and lose sight of the good stuff cause there’s so much garbage as well.

Antiquiet: But it’s the first time ever that any kid in his room can access this incredible wealth of musical history, and have the opportunity to develop their own tastes and culture without having to rely on an industry focused on moving units, not inspiring and enlightening kids.

Neil Fallon: The music industry followed a model that they set up in the 1920s to rip off hillbillies and black artists. They never changed their model, they made their bed and now they’re lying in it. 

You’re very involved in music, as am I. And the company that we keep is the same in that we’re very in tune with it, which might lead us to believe that that’s the way everyone is. But it’s not. Most people treat music as a commodity, as background noise to drive to or to shop to or whatever, and there will always be that market for mediocre, non-threatening music which is perfect for marketing groups. You can’t market avant garde stuff that’s influencial to other musicians, you have to look for it. I think there will always be a place for record labels, it’s just that they’re not going to be calling the shots of people’s tastes as much as they have in the past.

Antiquiet: People’s bullshit detectors seem to have evolved with the advancement of technology.

Neil Fallon: Absolutely. But in the end, good music is good music, and it’ll always sell itself, no matter what.

Antiquiet: Right. Good music doesn’t need a street team to hold someone’s attention.

Neil Fallon: Exactly. 

Antiquiet: Speaking of attention spans, any official statement on Bush Americana?

Neil Fallon: I think any culture, regardless of time and geography, has a cyclical nature to it. If it goes to one extreme, it’s bound to swing back to the other eventually. Sometimes rapidly, through revolution, or sometimes slowly just because people get weary of it. To be honest, I don’t think there was any kind of golden age where we were more righteous than we are now. I think it’s just that we are able to examine it a lot more closely now, and also hear the rest of the world’s reactions to to way we behave both domestically and internationally, and it kind of throws a mirror in our faces.

Sometimes it’s good to be embarrassed, sometimes it’s good to make a mistake and say shit, maybe we’re not as righteous as we think. If you’re living in a bubble, thinking that you’re perfect, it’s only going to lead to a greater disaster down the road. I could go on and on about my dissatisfaction over the past eight years, but culturally, there’s so much to it that I wouldn’t even know where to begin. Sometimes you need something as ridiculous as the policies of these past eight years to force something fresh on the scene.

Antiquiet: It’s an exciting political climate now. Ten years ago, there may not have been the hunger for a tide shift that there seems to be now.

Neil Fallon: I’ve grown very weary of this kind of cult of militarism and wanting for a great paternal leader. I don’t want or need to be led by a grandfather. All we need is a good manager. That’s really all it is. 

Antiquiet: Blast Tyrant was the first record that you did one hundred percent digitally. But you’ve kind of circled back around to analog, except for some vocal work with Pro Tools for Beale Street. Where do you stand in the balance now?

Neil Fallon: The method that we used to do Beale Street was kind of ideal, because we’ve explored both of those approaches pretty thoroughly, and we know where the pros and cons of each are. I think I’d like to see the next record done where we write pretty much the entire record, we go out and do two weeks on the road playing the songs every night, and then just roll right into the studio and play them live. Vocal tracks, you can do the digital thing there. It’s a lot easier, cause a lot of the time the vocals are a combo of about five different takes. It’s a lot less time-consuming, because you don’t have to stop and rewind the tape. With tubes… this is probably more philosophical than it is technical, but I think when you have tubes you introduce an element of chance and chaos to the mix. That’s why there’s a warm sound on tape and tubes that… they’re getting pretty close in trying to emulate it, but I think that digital just can’t match it yet. 

Antiquiet: It’s interesting to see how different bands approach the writing and recording process. There were a couple Pearl Jam records where the band barely knew a few the songs when they went into the studio. One of ‘em wrote it and taught the pieces to the others right then and there, and three takes later the song was finished. What’s your philosophy behind writing and feeling the songs out live before recording?

Neil Fallon: I like to do it before recording, at least now I do, because there’s less chance of the shoulda-coulda-woulda. I listen to some tracks that we wrote in the studio, and listening to the way we play them now, I wish we’d recorded them that way. Because sometimes the song speeds up, it slows down… when you play it live, things are going to happen that don’t happen in the studio. It’s easy to get lazy in the studio. I think we’d constantly be changing the songs if we didn’t have the recordings though. I think a recording is just kind of a snapshot of a particular evolutionary stage.

Antiquiet: Any new Clutch material in the works?

Neil Fallon: Right now we’re busy writing the next Bakerton Group record. I’m actually going to practice this afternoon… well not practice, really just a writing session. We do that a couple times a week. We’re gonna record that in October, and then come January and February or so we’re gonna write the next Clutch record, and hopefully record that in March or April. So yeah, we’ll have a record out next year. 

Antiquiet: How does the writing process differ between the Bakerton Group and Clutch?

Neil Fallon: They’re really identical as far as the dynamic goes. The only other thing we have to constantly remind ourselves of is that when you’re the same group of guys in the same room, it’s easy to fall into convention and habit. So to differentiate the two, we really just have to err on the side of it being weird in order to be comfortable. 

Antiquiet: Speaking as a fan, I’ve always been curious to know what lyrical motivations you have or processes you go through to write.

Neil Fallon: I don’t really ever walk down the street and say ‘I need to write a song about this or that-’ a lot of times I just listen to a song without the words and just kind of hope it evokes some kind of emotion, and I keep digging away at that. I’m really slow at doing it, but sometimes it’s just a matter of finding that one line or that rhyming couplet and scratching everything else and building it off that. For me there’s two modes- one’s just kind of narrative, where it’s more of a story, even though it may be vague in some points, while the other’s just kind of more lyrically driven, where it sounds more irrational, but the sounds of the words are more important.

Antiquiet: There aren’t too many other singers out there dropping Occam’s Razor and making double-entendres out of Biblical passages. Is there an intentional cerebral nature to what you’re writing?

Neil Fallon: When I look at the song, when I write it down on a piece of paper and I’m not listening to the music, I like to be able to look at the lines and say it’s interesting on it’s own. I’ve always shied away from the emotional approach to lyrics. I’ve led a pretty fortunate life where I don’t need to manufacture false angst to write a song. I see it more as escapism.

Antiquiet: The blues seem to be an ever-increasing element in what you’re doing now. Is that a conscious direction you’re taking the Clutch sound in?

Neil Fallon: I think it’s just kind of been a slow leak into our vocabulary. We’ve always listened to it, and I take lessons to try and learn it, cause that’s what I enjoy playing in guitar in my own free time. But there’s not a conscious effort to say well, in ten years we’re going to be a ZZ Top tribute band. Who knows? The next Clutch record could be entirely absent of that. It probably won’t, but I think that’s the fun part of being in a band like this. You don’t really know what’s going to happen, and that’s the adventure.

Antiquiet: Any bands nowadays that you take cues from?

Neil Fallon: Sure, from the more rock or metal genre, two of my favorite bands are from Sweden. One is this band called Kamchatka, which we’ve toured with recently, they’re kind of more of a blues outfit, then there’s Witchcraft, which I think are great. Then also, on the non-rock side, I’ve been listening to a lot of the stuff from the Dap King Crew- that stuff is great, just sheer production value on there. There’s so many, but that’s been most of it recently. I’ve been listening to a lot of old hip-hop as well.

Antiquiet: Like what?

Neil Fallon: EPMD, Afrika Bambaataa, Eric B & Rakim. A lot of stuff that I used to listen to, when it was new, and I’m kind of rediscovering. I just kinda trip out on the fact that if you listen to any Euro dance music, or any of this trip hop or techno, or any of that, that entire enormous genre batch all points to these couple people in that one stretch of time between the late 70s and early 80s that basically created a whole new appendage in the music world.

Antiquiet: What’s up with the Company Band?

Neil Fallon: Actually right before you called I was working on a tune. We’ve got nine rough drafts of songs that they’re patiently waiting for me to write lyrics to. We’re gonna try to get a full-length together which I’d imagine we’ll get recorded hopefully before the end of the year. The Company Band is something fun for everybody to do. Everybody else is in other bands, so there’ll probably be only a handful of shows throughout the year, but we’re looking to get an album out as soon as we can. 

The only other news I have on that front is that now we have Brad Davis from Fu Manchu playing bass. 

Antiquiet: Excellent, can’t wait to hear more from that project. 

Neil Fallon: Yeah, I’m pretty stoked on this material. It’s straight up rock n’ roll, and it’s really fun to write lyrics to. I’m looking forward to getting this thing out there.

Antiquiet: Do you try to approach things differently when writing for Company Band than with Clutch?

Neil Fallon: I try to, but I don’t think I’m doing a very good job. I’ve realized now, and this is one of the good things about working with other people, cause you can sort of triangulate your position to reference what you do better. But I never really thought there was any kind of mission statement for Clutch, and there really never was for Company Band. It’s just an extension of everybody’s personalities. So I think there will be a lot of blatant lyrical similarities, but I think I can take some liberties that I probably would’ve dismissed because of Clutch. I think both bands can benefit from that.

Antiquiet: What do you say to a kid who’s trying to write his first song, but doesn’t really know how?

Neil Fallon: There’s no wrong way to do it. If you do anything with enough confidence, people will believe you. It’s art, it’s not a math problem. And once you get that, the only other hurdle is to do it front of a bunch of strangers, which can be terrifying the first couple times. But rock n’ roll and really any type of music is meant to be played live. We’ve been doing that for 10,000 years. And records and videos and MySpace is all peripheral stuff to live performance. So write a song, do it with balls, and keep your head up.

Enjoy a hearty taste of Clutch:

The Mob Goes Wild (Blast Tyrant)

Never Be Moved (Robot Hive/Exodus)

Fore more, head to Pro-Rock.com