MCLA

The

Lax

Mag

Feb

ruar

y ‘0

9

64

. . .más Vamanos Vamanos

Neil Fallon of veteran rockers, Clutch, talks lacrosse, road trips and of course, facial hair.Ao: Are you ready for this thing?

nF: Yeah.

Ao: You need any preamble or instructions or are you just going to wing it?

nF: I’m just going to wing it, that’s when the magic happens.

Ao: All right, first question. You grew up in, and the whole band is from Maryland, which is a pretty big lacrosse hot spot. Did you ev-ery play and what do you know about the game?

nF: I played a bit in high school but not on a high school team. It was just playground lacrosse and other than that I know that you should always play with an athletic cup. That is kind of what got me out of the whole scene. Getting beamed once was enough to make me, ah, loose interest and pick up skating for the rest of summer.

Ao: Sticking with the sports theme. Athletes are inspired by music, pre-game, get pumped up music. Do you have any example of any athletes that are inspired by your music or use your music in that way?

nF: There is a pitcher of the Baltimore Ori-oles that walked out to the mound last year to our song “The Mob Goes Wild.” There was a basketball player for the Kings that was a big fan of the band, Scott Pollard. He played for the Celtics last year.

Ao: Is there anything that you do to get you ready for “game time”. Before a show, any rituals?

nF: I switch into my stage clothes which is not a sequin jacket, it’s just the stinky clothes from the night before that I don’t like to wear during the day. I try to do a couple vocal warm-

up exercises as far away from anyone that could possibly hear me, because it’s a little bit goofy. Then if I’m feeling tired I might do a couple jumping jacks, but it’s very half-assed. Because sometimes you feel like you aren’t really into it, but 9 times out of 10 when I go out on stage there is an immediate adrena-line rush when you realize there are a whole bunch of people staring at you waiting for you to impress them. That usually is the kick in the pants that one needs. As far as the band as a whole, since we all write a different set-list individually each night, 10-min before the show, sometimes we will get together and kinda do the pre-game heads up if there are any surprises on the set-list that we need to keep an eye out for. Dan and Tim spent a good deal of time playing their guitars warm-ing up. Jean-Paul, he plays the drums all day, so I think he is constantly in a state of being warmed up.

Ao: The time that I have spent with you guys, Jean-Paul is constant-ly hitting his pads back stage.

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nF: And that’s also first thing in the morning on the bus or in hotel and he’ll be in the room next to me and I’ll hear his metronome going. And he’ll do that in the morning and then set up the kit later on. I’ll do some stretching ex-ercises once in a while especially if the night before was a bit over-indulgent.

Ao: You mentioned the bus. A lot of teams in the MCLA travel by bus to away games. Do you have any tips for fighting boredom on the bus?

nF: I think we are pretty fortunate to be living in the age we are now with things likes ipods, iphones, PSPs, books, but nothing fights boredom better than sleep. It took me a while to work up the courage to do it, sometimes when I’m on a plane, the night shade eye patch and one of those little neck pillows and ear plugs look ridiculous but the sensory deprivation will put you right to sleep.

Ao: It seems like a lot of people know your music be-fore they know who you are. When I ask someone if they know Clutch, they usually say no. But if I ask if they know a particular song, they say ‘oh yea I know that song.’ Is that what you set out to do, music first, image second? Or did it just

happen like that?

nF: I think we’ve never really been too terribly concerned with image. When we were on big labels in the 90s they always pushed to have our photo in the record or what have you. Hind-sight, if I had to do it all over again, I would even make us more anonymous. I thought the way Pink Floyd and Tool played it was cool. Any of those dudes, well maybe not Pink Floyd anymore, but it would be easy for them to

walk down the street. Not that we suffer from the burden of super star-dom. Image, I think is much more cool in an artistic creative way as op-posed to what the band is physically supposed to represent, because I think that is pretty shallow and sub-ject to trends. Honestly, we’re too lazy

to give a damn.

Ao: So, I want to plug this DVD that we did together.

nF: Word. Word up.

Ao: Did you think I was a super fan boy when I cold called you guys to do this DVD?

nF: Ha. Did we think you were a super fan boy? No, not really. I think we were a bit jad-ed, because of one of the not so great things about the digital age is that everybody and his brother is either a video director or a record producer. We had some experiences in the past with a lot of talk and no follow up. So it took us a while to warm up to it, but then we realized you actually knew what you were talking about so we were cool with it.

Ao: So you were fooled.

nF: Yea. Ha.

Ao: Are you happy with it?

nF: Yea I’m stoked. Knowing that it was not always the best conditions and I’m sure that most videos you have to adapt on the fly to stuff, but I think it is a really honest repre-sentation of the band, where it was like the show. It was also a learning experience. I’m sure you noticed that we aren’t hams with the camera and it took us a real long time to get used to it. Everybody would be crackin’ up and as soon someone walked in with a cam-era all of a sudden it was like stock brokers talking about top secret financial situations. You were pretty good at carrying the camera like a purse or something.

Ao: I snuck up on Dan one time and I thought he was going to go through the ceil-ing. He was headed to the super market for some kind of Odwalla super Juice and I had been following him with the camera. When I rolled up beside him in the market he took a jump back and started laughing. So you have this other band, who is really the same band, the same four guys but under the name The Bakerton Group. How and why did that come about, and how do you keep the Clutch sound different from The Bakerton Group sound?

nF: There is no cut and dry answer, be-cause it’s all very nebulous. The Bakerton

Group songs are more jammy and maybe not as restricted to the traditional rock-n-roll arrangement. Sonically it’s not as distorted, Tim’s guitar sound is cleaner. We are getting in the process of writing the next Clutch re-cord and I’m going through some riffs that I set aside that I knew would be Clutch riffs, because they have that vocal friendly sound to it. I really don’t know until I write the words for it. It’s a good way to exercise ourselves in two different ways. We know how to write a rock song but it’s also fun to do other things, but we don’t want to completely dilute the two approaches by trying to kill two birds with one stone.

Ao: You guys have been around for around 16-17 years now, and the Clutch sound has been very dynamic, you started out with a little hard-core, metal, punk sound to it, and then a little 90s metal, some southern rock, and then some blues mixed in. I like that you change it up. Do you start out planning to make it a new record sound a certain way or do you wing it?

nF: We completely wing it. I think that is the fun part of writing music. You don’t know what to expect. Personally, I don’t say I’m going to write a certain type of riff or write a certain type of lyric. Over 17 years people change, and we are collective and that is going to change because of the people. I can’t image trying to do the same thing year after year af-ter year; I think it would be depressing. If that means some people get bummed out, that’s fine, but I’d rather do that and be honest about what we are doing than do something that we know is already proven.

Ao: All the time I’ve spent with you guys you have always seem very friendly with each oth-er, very democratic. There are so many bands that dismember because of ego or creative control, how do you guys keep that stuff in check? Do you really like each other?

nF: [Laughing] Yea we really like each other. It’s a lot like brothers, we all really like each other like a family, sure we fight and sure there might be a stretch of time when somebody isn’t getting along with another guy, but we all know that’s going to be water under the bridge down the road. We’ve got a good thing going and it would be foolish to poison the well, be-cause of something trivial. We all have a good sense of humor about it and I also think since we were friends first that helped out a lot. We knew what we were getting into.

Ao: Kind of along those lines, during a con-versation we had, you said that you really didn’t figure out that you were going to make a career out of music until about the year 2000. I thought that was a little hard to believe since you had been doing it already for close to ten years. Is that the way it was?

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nF: It’s true. It’s not that I didn’t take it seri-ously, it’s just that there was always this as-sumption or brainwash from childhood that this wasn’t a real job and this was something you do while you are young and then you get a real job. You enjoy it while it lasts. Then I had an epiphany and I said ‘what the hell is a real job, a job is a job.’ Sometimes this can hardly be described as job as it as much of it is a vacation. So why look a gift horse in the mouth. Take it for all it’s worth and make it last as long as possible. I think once I kinda realized that and got over my hang-ups it got a lot more fun for me.

Ao: Do you see an end or do you just keep on rollin’?

nF: We just keep on rollin’. It’s all a matter of adaptation, people change and their situations change and you have to adapt to that. This is a four-man operation. But we will keep mov-ing if we can, there is no point in not doing it.

Ao: As a connoisseur of facial hair, who do you think has the better mustache, Robert Redford in The Electric Horseman or Tom Selleck in Magnum PI or none of the above.

nF: Michelangelo and Divinci. Wow. I’m going to have to say Selleck, just for sheer creepiness.

Ao: Last month I talked to Les Claypool and he recommended that Barack Obama grow some mutton chops to bring back some facial hair to the presidency.

nF: [Laughing] Change is his moniker. He totally should, like straight up burn-sides. I gotta admit that the day be-fore yesterday I just hacked the whole thing off. It’s as clean as a baby’s bot-tom right now. Complete impulse. Of course I had to play the little game in the process where you first do the chin and look like a civil war reenactor. Then just leave the mustache,

but it just looked so wrong on many different levels. I shave every two years.

Ao: Over the course of history, a lot of pow-erful men have worn beards, Zeus, Moses, Socrates, Marx, Papa Smurf, Abe Lincoln. You think there is a connection?

nF: [Laughing] Papa Smurf. All those dudes had weak chins and wanted to look tough. Maybe it’s some kind of patriarchal, wise man hang up. I can’t really speak of beards of the past, but today if you have one it’s easy to scare small children and you get more respect at the hardware store. When you have one as long as I did and you get rid of it you kinda feel like a turtle out of the shell.

Ao: The section of the magazine that this interview will appear is called Vamanos Va-manos, which I conveniently stole from the Clutch song “Electric Worry”. How did that lyric come to be?

nF: It came from Tim. This could be com-pletely wrong but this is what I remember. We did a tour in Japan and we were talking about the bizarre “English” they use in commercial advertising in Japan and Tim said off the top of his head, “Vamanos Bang Bang” as if it were a Japanese ad slogan. Years later I was thinking about that and it crept into the song. A lot of stuff creeps into song like that.

Ao: We do you draw influence other than other music?

nF: Reading books. I read a lot of science fiction and some out there stuff. Every once in a while an image will kinda stick out. I read a lot of Clive Barker Books of Blood and there were a couple of stories that are pretty gnarly. You can get an image from a story and it can find its way into a song in a very round about way.

Ao: Are you a secret Trekkie?

NF: No. The show I do like is Firefly when it was on. This is an interview that is turning into a confessional. It was a little campy but it was pretty good. I always had a hang up with Star Trek for some reason. I grew up on Battlestar Galactica.

Ao: I love Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers.

nF: Oh yea, Buck Rogers. Erin Gray was all right.

Ao: Thanks a lot Neil.

nF: No problem, let me know if you need anything else.

photo: Stephen Phillips