Monday, September 20th 2010

Interviews:  Clutch

1,500 Unstoppable Words

By Skwerl

Clutch is in the process of releasing a series of expanded reissues on their own independent label Weathermaker Music, hot on the heels of a new double-disc DVD set combining a live set from Washington, DC’s 9:30 Club with a tour documentary entitled Fortune Tellers Make A Killing Nowadays.

It’s no secret that we’re huge fans of their professional-grade and industrial strength rock and roll fury, so of course we jumped at the opportunity to sit down with frontman Neil Fallon and have a conversation about doing it yourself, the rumored death of the album, and why their DRT albums are already getting the deluxe reissue treatment.

You guys are on this constant cycle of touring and recording and touring and recording… Do you… try to take breaks and fail, or do you not even try to take breaks?

Hmm, that’s a good question. I mean we don’t tour as much as we did… You know, we’ve been a band for almost 20 years, and when you’re 19 or 20 it’s very easy to basically live in a van. Then you get older and married and have kids and it gets tougher to leave home for extended periods of time.

But we’re in a position now where we kinda know what we’re going to do more or less 12 months in advance. So I know for example, when we finish this two-month tour with Black Label Society, with the exception of a week and Christmas, I’m pretty much going to have three or four months off at home… But we’ll spend that time writing the next record.

I think music is like… anything else, it’s like a muscle. The more you use it, the easier it gets. And the more fun it becomes… Take a break from it? I don’t know, I guess I never feel compelled to do that.

The Strange Cousins packaging was pretty elaborate. Was that something you just wanted to do, or did you feel there was maybe a responsibility to kind of deliver something worth paying for in the age of MP3s?

Yeah, there’s that. I guess there’s a couple of reasons. One, just as you said, you know, there’s not much of an incentive to buy a record when most people, if they do buy it, they’re just going to put it in a digital format. I think a lot of people, especially at our age lament the days where you had all those square inches of a vinyl record where you could do all sorts of cool stuff. So there was that, and it was pretty much our first Weathermaker major studio release, and we wanted to make a first impression.

There are people out there talking about this idea that albums are a dead format, that people are just buying singles. I personally feel it’s kind of ignorant to think there’s what “people” are doing as if we have this 90s MTV monoculture as opposed to today’s niches, where you can say Clutch fans do buy albums.

If the internet and file sharing didn’t exist, we’d be selling a lot more records. But I don’t think that would equate to more people coming to our shows, if that makes any sense. Because, like you said… There’s different levels of music fan. I think the album is a dead format for the majority of people, but those people treat music as a commodity. I’m talking about the people who just can’t get enough of the latest Katy Perry, or you know whatever’s in the top 40 mindset, the stuff that they hear at work. They’re not… music is like… is an afterthought.

Whereas someone like yourself, you write about it, you know a lot about it, you’re consumed by it, you’re going to still buy records because that’s part of your personality profile.

I buy a lot of stuff on iTunes these days… But I find myself going back and buying a lot of vinyl to kind of… balance out the sort of physical collector instinct.

Well I think there’s something about… There’s almost like an artifact aspect to a record, especially an old one, where you feel like it’s tangibly old, and it’s a tangible link to when it was new, and you hold it in your hands as opposed to a file that’s never new or old, it’s just information.

When we last talked to you a couple of years ago this was a hot topic, and I forget if it was you or another artist that said when a technological advance comes along, it’s just kind of like a flat tax, it just affects everyone across the board at the same percentage, and so you can’t really get too bent out of shape as an artist when everyone else is in that same boat with you.

It does piss me off when I hear people lamenting the fact that, oh now bands have to go out and play music to make a living. Like fuck off! That’s the whole point. I mean records… If you consider the entire history of culture and then music, records are still a brand new technology. Live music has been around for tens of thousands of years. And that should be the joy of it, performing your music for other people. And to act as if this is your cross to bear because of file sharing is, I think, reprehensible.

So we’ve been kind of insulated by that, because we’ve always been a touring band, and it’s not as if we saw our ticket sales plummet when Napster came along.

Did you see it go the other way? Did ticket sales increase?

I think so. It opened… It made it easy for people to find out about the band. If we had been a platinum selling band I’m sure it would have affected us terribly but we’re, like many bands, we’re only going to appeal to so many people. It used to be that the independent record shop was your only oracle for that kind of stuff. And now you can have your independent record shop right there on your desk.

I’ve been hearing Clutch on TV here and there, in video game commercials and in Sons Of Anarchy… Are those kinds of opportunities big deals for the band financially, or is it just something cool to do? How do you come at those opportunities?

They come through ICG/Evergreen… We own our publishing, but they administer it for us, and they seek those kinds of opportunities for their clients, and we’re one of them. It’s not a lot of money. I think people… when they hear a band, kind of like a lesser known band [on TV], they go ‘wow, they must have just had a huge payday.’

It’s a couple thousand dollars, you take some percentages off, and then you divide it up between everybody, it’s like, well… It’ll take care of half of your Christmas presents. And that’s a one time thing.

It does have a kind of longer term benefit though, like you said with video games, that’s how a lot of kids find out about bands. And maybe they come to the show and buy t-shirts.

Was there any specific reasons for the new DRT reissues besides wanting to get the bonus tracks out there?

Long story short, DRT stopped paying us, so we sued them. And they couldn’t pay us so in a judgment in New York court, we were awarded the masters back for those records. So it was a blessing in disguise. Those records have been in storage for years. So we wanted to get them out, and also to put the Weathermaker logo on those records as just kind of a final fuck you to DRT.

So it’s like that.

DRT was in such terrible shape, it was already like not having a record label. We were already doing everything ourselves, so it wasn’t too much of a shock to the system to come up with a name for our new record label and move forward.

Were there any record business nitty gritties that surprised you, where you said ‘oh, I didn’t realize we’d have to do this now?’

If anything, it’s just that you’ve got to be able to divorce your artistic side from your business side. There’s really not a whole lot of ugliness to it because we’re not signing other bands. We can get pissed off at ourselves and resolve our issues ourselves, but I don’t think any of us really want to be the guys on the other side of the desk.

I heard your interview on the Alex Jones show, and you were talking about how scaring or shocking people is kind of an easy thing to do, and a lot of artists and talking heads have built their careers on it… And you were also talking about poking fun at paranoia with songs like 50,000 Unstoppable Watts and Burning Beard and so forth. Do you feel a responsibility to sort of bring a mad planet back to earth with that kind of satire?

As far as lyrically, I always take complete license to assume a different personality. I’m not talking like Ziggy Stardust, but I don’t feel obligated to keep it in the voice of Neil Fallon. And sometimes it’s like, well if I’m feeling paranoid then I’ll just exaggerate it because that makes for good inspiration. But a lot of people out there read into everything, and look to artists as if artists are privy to some kind of superior knowledge base, where that’s usually the opposite of the case (laughs).

Clutch kicks off their tour with Black Label Society and 2 Cents in Vancouver on Wednesday.

The Clutch: Live At The 9:30 2-disc DVD set is in stores now, as is the first DRT reissue, From Beale Street To Oblivion. The second, Robot Hive / Exodus, is due out next Tuesday, September 28th. Blast Tyrant will follow after. All three are among the band’s finest of many fine albums.

For tour dates, as well as full details and track listings for all of the new releases, head to Clutch’s official site at pro-rock.com.