The vocals tell you what to play…
Friday 16 December 2016 and Clutch are in the second city touring on the back of their fantastic album, Psychic Warfare. While they were in town, MR’s Jason Guest was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to interview drummer Jean-Paul Gaster and get a few insights into the band and their development these past 25 years, their music, writing, recording, touring and the challenges of running their own label as well as a history lesson on drumming and the drum kit…
Thank you very much for taking time out for this interview. I saw Clutch with Biohazard in 1993…
That is correct, sir…
…at a club in Dudley, JBs on King Street…
I remember it well…
So you remember Biohazard breaking the stage?
That sounds about right…
The band that I saw back then compared to the band now seems, not really different, but back then you leant more towards hardcore. Your band has always been comfortable with your identity, there’s a fluidity to it, in the sense that you’re quite at ease with it and you’re not trying to constantly return to your roots and on tour, your set list goes all the way back and includes tracks from your whole career. How much of the band today is the band of back then?
It’s the same four dudes, the same four guys playing the same instruments. When we started the band, we had no intention of trying to make a career out of this thing. We just wanted to play shows, play good shows, make good recordings, and that was sort of, that was the goal really. Fortunately we’ve been able to make this into a career and it’s been a very long road. We’ve been, y’know, through many changes as far as labels and organisations and stuff, but we’re still the same four guys we were back then playing good shows and making good recordings.
Over the years we’ve learned a lot about playing our instruments, a lot about playing shows, making records, writing songs, all these things. It’s been a group effort… and with each record that we make we learn something new and we apply that to the next. Sometimes we react to whatever we just did, sometimes it’s subconscious… I think we have a tendency to try new things because what we did before has already been said so let’s do something different. So anyway, to answer your question, it’s really the same four guys, y’know…
About your music, I saw you in 2006 with Corrosion of Conformity with Stinking Lizaveta supporting and then 2013 in Nottingham on the Earth Rocker tour. The Earth Rocker album is fantastic but when I saw you perform it live, you could hear the history of music in your music, you could hear the history of American music woven into the hard rock aspect of the band. As Clutch have progressed, is that something you’ve been exploring more and more?
Sure, y’know, for me, speaking as a drummer, it’s very important to study where the instrument came from. The drums is a unique instrument in that although people have been playing drums since the beginning of time, this idea of the drum kit – or trap kit – is brand new. That only happened in the last just over a hundred years. We have documentation of the evolution of the instrument from the very earliest guys, “Baby” Dodds and “Big Sid” Catlett… er, “Gene” Krupa through Buddy Rich, y’know… and then from there it splits off even more. You start to see Rock ‘n Roll, you start to see funk, you start to see reggae, you start to see all these other things that happen. But there’s an evolution there and I think that as a drummer, it’s important to know as much as you can about it, because it really, for me, it really makes playing the instrument easier.
I enjoy understanding what the roots were, there’s a reason why the bass drum sits the way it does, that the hi-hat sits the way it does, the snare drum sits in the middle… the more you know about it, the easier it is to play. For me, the easier it is to play, the easier it is to make music, and that’s what we’re trying to do. I’m not interested in getting up there and playing stuff that’s technically, y’know, chops oriented or blazing fast or even volume any more, I’m not impressed by volume either, y’know. For me, it’s about playing music…
I was reading an interview that’s maybe 1- or 2-years old and some of your influences are Elvin Jones, Jack DeJohnette who played on Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, Earl Hudson and Hendrix with Mitch Mitchell, bands like Cream with Ginger Baker, ZZ Top and Black Sabbath. Also, you said that you still have drum lessons, is that correct?
Sure, sure…
With what you learn from those lessons, do they have an impact on how you play your older material as well?
Absolutely. Certainly it does. That’s the point of it. I spend time with the instrument, thinking about new things, learning new things. When you spend time with a teacher, it doesn’t have to be a formal drum lesson. Some of the things I’ve taken away most from are having visits from my buddy Johnny Vidacovich in New Orleans, he’s an amazing drummer, probably the most musical person I’ve ever met, and so a drum lesson can just be going over to his house and having coffee, just hanging out with that guy, asking him questions, and more importantly listening to what he has to say.
So a drum lesson can take that form, it can also take the form of when I went to see John Ramsay in Boston. He heads up the Berkeley School of Music percussion department, he studied with the very well-renowned drummer Alan Dawson, and that was a completely different kind of a lesson. Again, just as valuable. And it’s not as if you need to go and take ten lessons from these folks, just go there and spend some time listening to what they have to say and these days, for me, it’s maybe one concept, maybe two concepts, something I can chew on after for six, eight, ten months…
So it’s less about the technique and more about the feel behind it that contributes to the entire song?
Sure, it could be, or it could be a lesson about technique, very specific stuff about how to hold your hands and how to address the stick and how the stick sits in your hand. It can be very detail oriented as well. I think about all this stuff…
With your drum setup, it’s been pretty much the same all the way through. You never thought about expanding it, maybe a double kick drum… you never used a china cymbal, is that right?
I hate china cymbals [laughs]; I hate ‘em… The kit has stayed the same for me. It’s just a standard drum kit, one bass drum, one snare drum, one tom tom, one floor tom, 2 or 3 cymbals, and that, for me, that’s enough. It’s more important for me to get a lot of sounds out of a few things than it is to have 15 things in which I may only hit once or twice over the course of the evening. It’s about efficiency, and maybe about not carrying around so much stuff! [laughs]
Yeah, make life easy…
Yeah! [laughs]
So when you’re writing, how are you thinking about drumming along with the riffs and vocals?
I think for all of us now it’s more about the song. It’s about listening to the vocal and knowing what it’s going to do and how we best support that. The vocals tell you what to play. It’s really about listening, especially from a drummer’s perspective. When we’re writing, very often I’m just playing time, just listening to what these guys are doing, trying to figure out what part is going to be what and where the vocals are going to sit in this particular part… it’s really about listening more than it is playing at that point…
So how do you work with [bassist] Dan? You have your classic rhythm sections like Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones and John Bonham… do you two work closely together to figure it out or is it more natural to…?
…it’s very natural amongst the four of us, and often times when we’re writing, sometime a half hour will go by before anyone really says much of anything. We’re just listening to each other, and I’m usually the guy who records everything – “okay, let’s get that…” and I click record, or “put that down” or “stop, put that away”, y’know? And there’s not really a whole lot of conversation, it’s really about playing. And I think that’s because we’ve been together so long. We kind of know where each guys going to take whatever piece that we’re working on but at the same time there always surprises and those are the most exciting times.
Because you spend so much time with it, do you surprise yourself still on the drums? Clearly you find joy in it but do you find something new in there?
Sure, sure. And I find that happens when I think about it the least [chuckles]. When we played last night at the Roundhouse [London], it was just such a beautiful energy in the room and it was one of the gigs where, like, all I had to do was just show up. I just had to be present, in the moment, and that’s when the music just flows. The minute you start thinking about it, that’s when stuff goes pear-shaped. So there was a couple times when I started thinking about stuff and I was like, “no, no, don’t do that…”, y’know [chuckles]… My buddy Johnny Vidacovich, he always talks about when you play, you play from the neck down… Last night was real easy to do that.
Great! No doubt we’ll see that this evening. So I was reading about Psychic Warfare and Earth Rocker and some of the material on Psychic Warfare was written around the same time as Earth Rocker. Is that right?
We started writing Psychic Warfare pretty much on the heels of Earth Rocker. As soon as we finished that record we took some time off and started touring but within 4 or 5 months we were already writing, we had already started that process. So some of the material is sort of a distant cousin of Earth Rocker. As we got further into the process, I think we started to make some changes, experiment with different feels, and that’s what made Psychic Warfare what it was.
Will that continue…? I assume you’ll be writing and recording next year at some point…
That’s the plan. As soon as we wrap up touring this year, we’ll get in the studio and start writing…
Do you spend any time with your families?
[Laughs] A few hours here and there [laughs]…
You’re working with Mark Morton from Lamb of God…
That’s correct.
Is that material complete or you still working on it or…?
That’s a project that my buddy Yanni (Papadopoulos, guitar) from Stinking Lizaveta actually put together. He’s amazing and I very much enjoy playing with him. Mark is an amazing guitarist as well, he has a lot of depth in his playing and so I’ve enjoyed playing with him as well. And Chris Brooks from Lionize is playing keyboards on that, and I’ve known Chris for many years and I do other gigs with him, blues gigs with him on the side. So it’s an amazing group of musicians and it’s very exciting when we get together and there’s always lots of ideas flying around so I expect that we’ll try and record something next year…
Clutch started their own label Weathermaker around 2008. Was that in response to the way the record industry has changed?
Yeah, y’know, we spent close to almost 20 years dealing with various labels, many of them major labels, other ones sort of wanting to be major labels and then some other independent labels. It was never an enjoyable experience, working for labels. I think that has to do with who the band is and who we are. It’s not a commercial venture, it’s not an easy sell, we don’t look cool, for many years people thought we didn’t sound cool either, y’know? Can you believe that? [chuckles]
So it was tough, and I don’t hold any personal grudge against these people from the labels because at the end of the day, they were just trying to do their job. But it just wasn’t a good fit, it wasn’t a good match, and so we started Weathermaker with the intention of just putting out Clutch music and we told ourselves if we do a terrible job running this label, it’s going to be better than working with whatever size label we were working with at the time, so we just sort of jumped in with both feet. Each release has been a learning experience. We get a little better at it and it’s exciting because we can release the music we want to release when we want to release it on our own terms and we’re getting pretty good at it.
So I suppose it’s been a learning curve in terms of the business side of things?
Business side of things, sure. Planning side of things, y’know, trying to get vinyl done on time, that’s a tough call these days…
Vinyl’s made quite the resurgence and become something special, not just for collectors… Are there limited numbers of vinyl producers out there?
That’s exactly correct. And that makes it tough. If people want to make some money, it’s probably a good idea to start your own vinyl pressing plant [laughs]…
In a recent interview with Exodus’ drummer, Tom Hunting, he said that his band have become “kind of, basically, traveling t-shirt salesmen”, with merchandise far outselling the music. Is that happening with your own music?
Well, y’know, the merchandise has always been a big part of keeping us on the road, especially in the early days and our guarantees were sometimes hardly anything at all. We do spend time thinking about merchandise; it’s an important part of the picture. I do not think that we are “traveling t-shirt salesmen” as he said. I saw that interview. I thought that was interesting. I will say that I saw Exodus summer before last and I thought they were awesome.
Yeah, they played in Birmingham recently (reviewd here) and the party kicked off as soon as they got on stage…
They were really, really good. It had been a while since I’d seen a proper thrash band play like that and it was good…
So to wrap up, what can we expect from this evening? I’ve been looking at your set list for the tour and you’re drawing on every era of the band… You have 100+ songs; do you rehearse every song?
We try to play a little bit of everything. We started this system many years ago where we take turns writing the set list. So tonight happens to be [bassist] Dan’s turn, I’ll do tomorrow night and Neil will do the last night and if we had another show after that, it would Tim’s turn. We do it in alphabetical order by first name [chuckles]… y’know, we’ve been doing that now for 20 years… and because of that we have a lot of songs to choose from because every guy wants to try something different, put a couple of new songs or maybe put something away that’s feeling like it’s played out…
Jamming any new ideas out?
No new stuff tonight. We do have Chris Brooks playing ‘10001110101’ with us and that’ll be great. I expect that as soon as the shows finish we’ll head home and start writing new stuff…
Great. So, again, thank you very much for your time. An absolute pleasure to meet and talk with you. Cheers.
Thank you.
Clutch links:
Our thanks to Kirsten at Cosa Nostra PR for setting up the interview
