Oregon Music News

Clutch at the Roseland Theater. Photos by Jon T. Cruz.

Oregon Music News caught up with Clutch singer Neil Fallon prior to their sold-out, February 5th performance at the Roseland supporting Motörhead. The band has been touring for months behind their latest effort, Strange Cousins from the West, and there seems to be no end in sight. Check out this candid interview with Neil as he talks about the state of the music business, touring, and how Clutch keeps their set list fresh. Photography for the interview was provided by Jon T. Cruz.

On the bus with Neil Fallon.

You wrapped up a tour last fall with Black Label Society and now you’ve hooked up with Mot√∂rhead for this string of dates. It seems like Clutch is constantly touring.

That’s what bands are supposed to do. I love to play music, granted the older you get, the harder it becomes to leave home. I’ll be honest with you, even if we were multi-platinum, we’d tour just as much as we do. To me records are second to live shows.

You guys can head out on your own and sell out places outright, what’s the appeal of going out as a package?

The reason that we’ve been able to sell out a lot of those venues that you mentioned, is that we’ve been opening for some pretty good bands. That has helped get our name out there and we’ve picked up a number of fans that way. I like getting out of my comfort zone. As an opening act, if you look at the front row you’ve got to deal with a lot of middle fingers. I don’t mind it because for every one of those there’s ten that will get turned on to the band. I can certainly understand the frustration for the Clutch fan that wants to see us play for an hour and a half. We will be back to play at a later time for that hour and half because of tours like this.

You guys created a huge buzz with the album From Beale Street to Oblivion. The track “Electric Worry” was all over MTV2, plus I saw it on a couple of different television shows and it was used in the video game Left 4 Dead. How important was that song in getting your name back out there? Clutch has never gone away but some people might not have been aware you were still around.

These days are there are so many outlets other than radio for a band to get heard. Honestly, since around 2003 our shows have been getting bigger, bigger and bigger. Elephant Riders and Pure Rock Fury were our last major label albums. I hear what you’re saying because there might have been some visibility in the press that we might have dropped off. We’ve always been here. Like I said there have always been people coming to our shows. As far, as “Electric Worry” is concerned, if there is anything that resembles a hit for us that is probably it. That song turned some people onto the band, but to be honest I didn’t see anything change overnight.

Watch Clutch’s “Electric Worry”:

Your label, DRT, went belly up after releasing that album.

They stopped paying us. We sued them. We won. They didn’t have the money to pay us what we were due. In lieu of that we got our masters back for the albums they released on the label. We’re currently in the process of re-releasing them on our own label. Blast Tyrant is an album that hasn’t been in stores for years. It just goes to show that just because you get signed to an independent label doesn’t mean you’re going to get a good deal. These days if you’re a band and you have the ability to get your albums directly to your fans, you’d be a fool not to do it.

I’ve seen the track listing to some of these re-issues you’re talking about. They all seem to have bonus content, is that correct?

Yeah, it’s to give people an incentive to buy it when they see it on the store shelves. Let’s be honest here, it’s hard to sell CDs these days because they wind up on the floor of people’s cars when they become mp3s. I think that Clutch fans like to know that they are buying the music directly from us.

You guys have a loyal following that resembles The Grateful Dead–they are that dedicated.

Well, it’s a result of playing live year in year out. I think there are different levels of music fandom. There are people who are fans of one song. There are bands that have packed an arena based on one song–the attention span for a band like that lasts a summer. A perfect example is a band like Staind. I remember the summer that they were hitting big with that song (“It’s Been A While”) and they supposedly saved rock ‘n’ roll?

Neil Fallon prior to Clutch's performance in Portland.

You know what he’s doing these days, right? Their singer Aaron Lewis?

What?

He’s playing country music.

Oh, no shit?! Well, good for him! [Laughs] There’s other bands that didn’t have that level of success but toured their asses off and they have a different level of fan. These fans breathe and live music, they read about it, they drive hours to see shows. You can draw some comparisons but The Grateful Dead didn’t have many hits. I’d put Slayer in the same category. You don’t hear their music on the radio and they tour their asses off. Hell, let’s throw Mot√∂rhead in there too. Sure they have “Ace of Spades,” which was a hit for them, but you don’t hear them on the radio and their tours always do well.

When does the touring cycle behind Strange Cousins from the West wrap up?

We don’t think of touring in terms of touring cycles. Granted when an album comes out you go on tour to promote it. We won’t stop touring because we feel that we’ve completed some kind of cycle. It just seems that we just stop touring to make an album, rather than the other way around.

Will we be hearing new Clutch music in 2011 then?

Not this year. We’re just finishing up the Blast Tyrant reissue that includes a bonus disc with some new material on it. These are old songs that we recorded acoustically. I would guess that the new studio LP will be released around this time next year. That it could change. If we get offered another kick ass tour, we’ll take it. We’ll be in the studio September of this year.

You do something out of the box with the set each night. Each band member draws up the set for the night?

That’s correct. Playing the same set night after night would drive us completely insane. When you tour as much as we do, we have to mix it up and this works great. If we were like a lot of bands that toured five-six weeks out of the year, one set would be okay. That’s not us. I like that it eliminates the bickering that can take place when you’re trying to figure out what we are playing that night. If you’re a little bit scared because you don’t know a particular song as well as you think you do, it’s a good thing. I’m a believer that if you become too comfortable with things that’s when the mistakes happen.

Any surprises in the set list tonight?

I don’t know… [laughs]

Read the concert review of Clutch, Motörhead, and Valient Thorr at the Roseland Theater.