Clutch

Went to the Five and Dime, Bought Myself a Copy of Time: A Thing About a Band Called Clutch (Part Two)

/ Rev. Joel / Leave a comment

I’m finally here to write more about Clutch. There’s a pretty good chance I’ll go on about a few things only marginally related to Clutch, as well, but I don’t know where this is goin yet.

I’m gonna start on April 14, 1998. That was the day one of my most favorite bands in the world (Clutch)1 released their third full length album (and first since I’d started listening to them), The Elephant Riders. It’s still my favorite Clutch album most days. My homeboy Travis bought two copies and gave one to me, because it was also two days before my birthday (the big two one), and he was (and is) an awesome dude. That birthday week is definitely one of my Top Five Best Weeks Ever, and riding around in Travis’s big ol red F-150 while we blasted The Elephant Riders is one of the standout snapshots.

Here’s the copy Travis bought for me. Well, it’s a picture of the copy, anyway.
Here’s the backside/track list.

Here’s the opening track/title track.

Don’t be eatin all the hard tack, between we two there’s half a small sack. Still, we got miles to go.

It was released on Columbia Records, and the dinguses who made the decisions at Columbia had no idea what to do with a band like Clutch (which is to say, Clutch). They refused to release the first version of the album, instead forcing the band to record in both in a studio and with a producer of the label’s choosing. Anecdotally, those knuckleheads definitely didn’t market the final, released version worth a shit, but it’s been my experience that the people who get paid to make the decisions are usually the ones with the dumbest ideas,2 so it’s not really all that surprising that Decision Makers at one of the biggest record labels in the world (at the time) would fumble the ninth-inning slam dunk that is The Elephant Riders. I tried to work in a hockey reference there as well, but I couldn’t make it happen. I’m very torn up about it.

I would like to love you, I sure would treat you right. We could take the trash out every Thursday night.

This album continues the evolution of Clutch from the lean, mean, pissed off hardcore punk-adjacent heavy rock ‘n’ roll riff machine that tore its way out of Germantown, Maryland in 1991 to the weird and indefinable metal-adjacent jamming heavy rock ‘n’ roll riff machine they’ve become. I first saw them live on the tour for this album, at the Emerson Theater in Indianapolis, and, it was a stone groove, man. Every direction you looked, there were riffs. Front man Neil Fallon was already perfecting his fire-and-brimstone stage persona, and I almost fell down a few times dancing, on account of the floor of the Emerson Theater was sloped, on account of the Emerson Theater used to be an actual fancy theater instead of a shitty all ages music venue where the urinals were lined with stickers inside and out, and an almost certainly carcinogenic snow fell gently from the ceiling tiles when the bass drum hit loud enough.

The only specific thing I can remember about the performance is that they opened with album closer “The Dragonfly”, and it was sublime. A partial set list exists online, and while I can’t vouch for its accuracy or its completion, it looks like it was a great set3.

Big if true.

I saw some great bands/shows at the Emerson Theater (and missed a few, too), and I’ll prolly write about a lot of that at some point, but who knows whether you’ll get to see it. The internet just told me that the Emerson Theater still exists, and my eyesight and reading comprehension told me it has a terrible website, and the website told me that Municipal Waste is playing a headlining show there in May. I have to assume the venue has been spruced up since I was there last.

Pity the mate of Queen Mantis, so content but so headless, Katy did nothing but shiver and cry, as did the dragonfly

By the way, I acknowledge that it says “I WASN’T THERE” in that screenshot of the set list, but that’s not true. The screen read “I WAS THERE” before I logged in. The logic makes sense, but from a purely aesthetic point-of-view, as far as screen shots go, I don’t like it.

Excuse me, Mr. Horse. What are your feelings about that fall?

Anyway, a live Clutch show is one of the best things you could ever experience, and their fan base is one of the most devoted I’ve ever seen, comparable to The Mountain Goats and the long strange trip of the Grateful Dead (including all the Dead-adjacent and affiliate bands).45 People who’ve seen them 30, 75, 120 times or more. I’ve seen them 13 times now, and only one of the shows was disappointing to me in any way, but that was entirely my fault, and it happened fifteen years later, so I won’t get into it now.

I’m gonna share three more songs from The Elephant Riders and then we’ll move ahead. This three-song run makes up the middle of the album in a way, and in my studied opinion, it’s the best three-song run the band has done to date. I encourage you to check them out, but you really should just listen to the whole album. Especially if you like a groove and a swing with your fatass riffs, and can at least tolerate some gruff hollerin.

“The Soapmakers” was the only single released from the album, and it ranks number 21 on Clutch’s most-played songs live, according to available data collected and aggregated by setlist.fm, and I gotta tell you, it really is somethin special. Like nearly every song from the band, this one kinda sounds like it’s being sung (sang?) by a sentient beard, and it’s a bit weird to see Neil all babyfaced and beardless in this video, especially considering he would go on to cultivate such a mighty beard.

As they stirred heaven and earth they combined to one, and everything was everyone and each one was all.

Aside from the memorable refrain, “The Yeti” didn’t really grab me until I was livin in Austin, which is when I started to write more, and on a more regular basis. One night I was in the office while my ex was at work, and I got righteously zooted and played The Elephant Riders through headphones while I wrote on the computer. “The Soapmakers” faded out with those weird, spooky sound effects, “The Yeti” rolled into my eardrums just like it had hundreds of times before, and suddenly the song came alive in my mind. I watched the story happen in real time, across the vast expanse of a seemingly endless snowscape, and the song worked some kind of magic on my brain, and now there’s an 89% chance that at any given moment, lyrics from “The Yeti” are in my head.

Sky is filled with starry scenes of heroes in their greatest deeds.

The last song of the three is also one of my favorite songs of all time. They’ve only played it live 18 times, according to available data collected and aggregated by setlist.fm, and do you wanna guess how many of those times I was in attendance for?

I’ll give you a hint: it rhymes with “hero”.

I even caught em on an anniversary tour of The Elephant Riders, and the only songs from the album they didn’t play are “Muchas Veces” and “Crackerjack”, but “Crackerjack” is an instrumental with a long trombone solo, so I wasn’t expecting that one anyway.

This seems like as good a time as any to mention that “Muchas Veces” also contains a trombone solo, and it’s fucking perfect. Both solos are played the hell out of by renowned tromboner6 Delfeayo Marsalis (of the renowned Marsalis Family). As I say, I wasn’t expecting to hear “Crackerjack”, but I thought surely they’d play “Muchas Veces” with some other type of solo(s) or extended jam in place of the trombone solo, because they do sometimes jam on songs live, but alas, they did not, and that’s almost certainly the best chance I’ll ever have of hearing it live.

Muchas veces I don’t know if I’m coming or I’m going, muchas veces I’m at a loss as what to do.

Okay, I’ve spent way too much time talking about the one album, so I’m gonna stop for now and pick things up in a post-The Elephant Riders world. Thanks for reading. Check back eventually for the next installment. Or, pop your digital digits into that box below so you can be among the first to know. And tell your friends, yeah?

  1. Duh. ↩︎
  2. And the thumbs farthest up the asses. ↩︎
  3. Duh. ↩︎
  4. A lot of Clutch fans refer to themselves as “Gearheads”, but I don’t feel like I know enough about the band to fall in with that lot. ↩︎
  5. I certainly could’ve included Phish and Dave Matthews Band in that company as well, but I can’t even with those two. ↩︎
  6. I mean no disrespect to Mr. Marsalis, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to include the word “tromboner” at least once. Well, twice now. ↩︎

We Yabba Dabba Doo All the Way to Shangri-La: A Thing About Self-Inflicted Burdens, and Also a Band Called Clutch

/ Rev. Joel / Leave a comment

I decided to take a break from writing wedding vows to try to unpack some boxes from the corners of my brain. Speaking of boxes: for as long as I can remember, I’ve had boxes of stuff. All kinds of stuff, most of it garbage. Regular readers of my nonsense/knowers of me personally are no doubt already aware of this, but I’ve always been a nostalgia junkie/pack rat/sentimental fool, and throwing things away just does not come easily to me. The number of boxes has fluctuated over time, but I’ve always had at least a few, and I’ve often had a lot. They’ve gone with me every time I’ve moved, out of one closet and into the next, sometimes under the bed, sometimes in the basement, one time in a pyramid in the middle of my bedroom that I had to walk around to get from one side of the room to the other (that was a very sad year for me).

Nineteen years ago, while packing up to move back home from Texas, I chose five boxes at random, taped all of them shut without opening any of them, and threw them into the dumpster at the apartment complex where I’d been living with my soon-to-be ex-wife. This was the absolute peak/nadir of my box-having life. I left at least eight more boxes (probably closer to twelve) in the walk-in closet, also without opening any of them. My reasons for doing so were threefold:

  1. I simply didn’t have room to bring everything back with me. Some of the boxes would have to stay behind, full stop.
  2. If I’d started looking through all the boxes to decide which ones were most important before loading up the truck, I’d still be there today, living with a new family and internally debating whether I should continue to hold on to my fourth grade report card, or my birthday cards from 1993, or my official Mason Shoe salesman certification that I signed up for as a joke in when I was 12 years old.1
  3. A teeny tiny part of me wanted to be a petty bitch and make my ex have to deal with some of my collected detritus and ephemera.2

I know I left some good stuff behind, and every now and then I’ll remember something specific, and I’ll get a lil sad, but by and large, it was all garbage, and should’ve been disposed of much sooner. I currently have the smallest number of boxes that I’ve had since I first left home in 1996, and it’s a nice feeling. There’s still plenty of stuff in those boxes that I do not need to hold onto (I’m looking at you, SAT results from 1994 and cheap acrylic paints from 2007), but some of the stuff is quite essential. For example, I have a shoe box full of letters my dad wrote to my mom when he was deployed in Vietnam in 1965-66. She kept every letter he sent to her, and I have all of them, and that’s pretty awesome.

Speaking of non sequiturs, I’m gonna see Clutch live this weekend, and I’m incredibly stoked for that. It’ll be my 13th time, and my first in nearly two years, which is pretty long time for me to go without seeing Clutch live these days. They’re touring on the 30th anniversary of their massive self-titled second album, and that just happens to be one of my favorite Clutch albums. They were originally talking about playing the album in its entirety, which would’ve been extremely cool, but they apparently decided to not do that, and have instead been favoring songs from the album on their setlists, which is still fine by me.

I have plans for the future, guess they’re futuristic plans.

They’ve opened with “Animal Farm” a couple of times on this tour, and I can’t begin to imagine how I’ll survive an entire show if they pull that insanity with us.

Well I’ve been appointed to inform you your days are numbered.

One of the cool things about seeing Clutch live is that you legitimately never know what they’re gonna play next. The four members take turns writing the setlists, so every stop on a given tour gets a unique set. They have some standards they almost always play, and large stable of songs that they often pick from, but they’ll drop a legitimate deep cut into the set surprisingly often.

I didn’t get to see em play “Rats” until my twelfth time, and it’s not even really that deepa cut.

In the doorway is a cutaway of flesh and bone.

They’re playing some casinos on this tour, which I’m pretty sure is a first for them, and the casino nearest us, which happens to be one of their stops, also happens to be the casino we visit most often, which happens to be pretty fuckin rad.3 We don’t go there terribly often, but we go often enough to get free or discounted rooms, free slot play, and free food when we do go. I know it’s not really “free” if we’re spending money every time, but we’re basically breaking even, and we’re having fun without hurting anyone, so as far as I’m concerned, everyone’s a winner.

I gotta wrap this up. As far as I can discern, enchiladas haven’t figured out how to make themselves yet, which is too bad. There’s some AI I could get behind. Thanks for reading. Sorry if you were expecting a nice tidy conclusion. That’s not really my thing. Before you go, dig this screenshot from the Wikipedia entry for “Yabba Dabba Doo”. It made me snort-laugh.

Ah yes, Froyd Flintstone, husband to Walmon, father to Pubblers.

If you enjoyed this, it’d be cool if you told a friend and/or subscribed (for free!) to receive more content like it, and occasionally some content that I actually put a modicum of thought into. Okay, that’s all.

  1. Undoubtedly, I would eventually decided “yes” to all three, and when I finally made it back to Bloomington, I would have to use those boxes to build a shelter, because there’s no way I could afford to live in this city if I wasn’t already established here. ↩︎
  2. A few months after I moved back, I saw a post on her Myspace wall asking if anyone was interested in a loose box of football cards from the 1970s, so I was at least mildly successful. That’ll teach her to cheat on me. ↩︎
  3. That sentence could’ve been much clearer, but here we are. ↩︎

The Skies Are Always Sunny in the Heart of Flavor Country: A Thing About a Band Called Clutch (Part One)

/ Rev. Joel / 3 Comments

On my drive to work yesterday I realized that, while I’ve mentioned them on these “esteemed” pages before, I’ve never actually written about Clutch, and that’s dumb, because they’ve been one of my favorite bands for almost 30 years now. I’ve written extensively about Iron Maiden, Testament, Helmet, Metallica, Anthrax, and especially Voivod, mostly on my old blog, but for some reason I just haven’t bothered to sit down and write anything substantial about one of the most consistent (and consistently excellent) bands making rock ‘n’ roll music today. I’m here today to remedy that.

If you’ve read much of anything I’ve written here (or anywhere, really), you know that I can be quite long-winded when I get worked up about something (especially if I’m not being looked at while I go on about it), and if you think I don’t get worked up talkin about Clutch, then you’re fixin to learn a thing or two about me. In the spirit of making this more easily digestible, I’m gonna break it up into parts. I flew pretty close to the sun when I posted my guide on how to maximize your good times at Louder Than Life, and if you made it all the way through that sprawling beast, I salute you. I know attention spans are at an all-time low, and it was risky to post something that takes a full 30 minutes to read, but that piece needed to be its own thing.

I’m glad I get to exist in the same reality as David S. Pumpkins.

This thing can certainly be broken into parts. I figure there’ll be three of them. It could be more, and it’s also entirely possible that this’ll be the one and only installment, because sometimes not finishing things is what I do.

Like many of the bands and artists I got into in the mid-to-late 90’s, I first heard Clutch via my homeboy Travis. I grew up in a housing addition in a rural area (I called it the “ruburbs”, since it was like a suburb, but rural, and because I’m very clever) less than 200 yards from the county line, and cable TV wasn’t available there (I’m pretty sure it still isn’t, nor, as recently as late 2021 was any semblance of road treatment during a snow or ice event). It was pretty annoying for me as a kid, but I realize now that even if the cable company had put in the time and expense to bring their services to a small enclave of houses 20 miles from the nearest “city” (Bedford, population: less than 15,000), my parents most certainly wouldn’t have been willing to pay for it, and I couldn’t fault them for that even if I wanted to. We watched 60 Minutes and Hunter and Roseanne and Hoosier Millionaire for free, goddamnit, and we either liked it, or we lumped it.

This was also a few years before PrimeStar and DirecTV became available in my neighborhood. If you lived in the neighborhood of Airy Hills just north of Springville, Indiana in the early-to-mid 1990’s and wanted to watch anything other than the few channels you could pick up with an antenna, the only option was one of those big, old school C-band satellite dishes. Quick side note: it seems as though back in 1970, someone thought “Airy Hills” was a good name for a brand new, developing neighborhood, and no one bothered to tell them they were wrong, and so I grew up in a place called “Airy Hills”.

The future isn’t what it used to be.

Anyway, Travis lived up the road, and his parents had one of those C-band satellite dishes (which I just learned today was the name of those dishes), and one of the cool things he had access to was MuchMusic. At the time, the channel was more or less Canadian MTV, and like its American counterpart, it has since moved away from music programming (the name was changed to “Much” in 2013 to reflect this). The intersection of time when MuchMusic played music and Travis’s parents had their satellite dish also happened to contain the years 1991-1995, which is when the channel aired a show called Power 30. If MuchMusic was Canadian MTV, Power 30 was Canadian Headbanger’s Ball, although as the name suggests, Power 30 was only 30 minutes per episode, whereas HBB ran a full 3 hours at that point in time. Americans always have to do things bigger, eh?

Anyway, Travis taped two episodes of Power 30, and one summer day between high school and my first ill-conceived attempt at college, we watched that tape together. He was particularly excited for me to see the episode featuring some band called Clutch, as he figured it would be right up my alley, and as usual, he was correct. Travis has a near perfect record when it comes to music recommendations and me.

The episode kicked off with the video for a song called “A Shogun Named Marcus”, and less than halfway through its sub-three-minute run-time, I was hooked.

Hari Kari and combines, come dancin with me.

That fateful 30 minutes also included some live footage of the band and an interview clip, and the live footage was intense and the interview was funny, and I was already well on my way to adding a new favorite to my “all-timers” list. The next payday after watching that video, Travis and I went CD shopping, and I managed to score a used copy of their self-titled second album, which had been released no more than three months prior. (Thinking about that now, it occurs to me that someone probably bought it after seeing “A Shogun Named Marcus” on Beavis and Butthead, and found themselves less interested in the direction the band was taking. Whatever caused them to sell it, I’m still reaping all the benefits.)

Jon Lovitz is incredible.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Plus I don’t wanna get too much into my personal Clutch-related narrative yet, because I have to go grocery shopping before the price of everything goes up in a few days, so I’ll just knock out some basics about the band first, for anyone who might be unfamiliar with them.

Clutch formed in 1991 in Germantown, Maryland, and after a brief stint with another singer that I only just learned about earlier today, Neil Fallon joined guitarist Tim Sult, bassist Dan Maines, and drummer Jean-Paul Gaster, and outside of a relatively brief stretch of time in the mid-to-late aughts where they brought in a full-time keyboard player (Mick Schauer, RIP), the lineup has remained unchanged since. There’ll be more on the Mick years in a later installment.

They released their first EP, Pitchfork, that same year on 7″ and 12″ vinyl. It was a feral beast, completely betraying the band’s love of 80’s hardcore punk and boiling over with youthful anger and vitriol. It’s very good, but it sounds nothing like the grooving, swinging, juggernaut the band has become over the past 34 years.

See what I did there?

I didn’t hear Pitchfork until sometime in 2005 (sweet baby jeebus, has it really been twenty years?!), as it went out of print long before I even knew it existed, so I won’t spend any more time on it here, but it will come back into play later. I’m sure you simply cannot fucking wait.

Clutch released their second EP, Passive Restraints, in 1992, and it is sonically very similar to Pitchfork, but careful listeners will note some changes already taking place in the sound. To my ears, the songs on Pitchfork are more amorphous and interchangeable, whereas the songs on Passive Restraints sound more distinct from one another. It’s also a bit more polished, sonically speaking.

Can you dig it?

It’s a real tight, badass collection of songs, and I can’t recommend it enough. You should also watch this video, which is Clutch performing “Passive Restraints” in 2020, with Randy Blythe from Lamb of God doin up some guest vocals. It’ll get the blood flowin.

Efficiency is beautiful, efficiency is art.

As mentioned above, Clutch released their full-length debut, Transnational Speedway League: Anthems, Anecdotes, and Undeniable Truths, the next year. The extra run-time inherent in the format shows significant growth in the overall sound of the band. This is also where Neil’s penchant for oddball, often hilarious lyrics started to really take form. It’s not my favorite Clutch album, but it’s also not my least favorite Clutch album (more on that in a later installment). I listen to it at least a few times a year.

Highlights include the aforementioned “A Shogun Named Marcus”, “12 Ounce Epilogue”, “Walking in the Great Shining Path of Monster Trucks”, and one of my personal Top Ten Favorite Clutch Songs, “Rats”. I actually wrote a little bit about “Rats” in my last post for this blog, and you can read that here if you want. “Rats” also happens to be one of the songs in the live footage on that episode of Power 30. I suspect that tiny clip is at least part of what made me fall in love with the song.

I finally got to hear “Rats” live for the first time two years ago, which was my twelfth time seeing Clutch live, and which, sadly, is also the last time I’ve been able to see them live. I’m really hoping they’ll get added to Louder Than Life again this year, since their day was cancelled last year.

And God was certainly a genius to expose this human weakness.

1995 saw the release of the band’s self-titled second full-length album. In a lot of ways, Clutch (the album) marks the proper beginning of the modern sound of Clutch (the band). This album took the riffs, the hooks, the aggression, and the sense of humor that the band were already perfecting, and injected the whole mess with a groove and swing that absolutely cannot be denied.

One notable change on this album (one that really came to fruition a bit later down the road for our stalwart DC sound attackers) is a developing tendency toward somewhat psychedelic freakouts, including on one of the band’s best-known songs, “Spacegrass”.

We’ll find us some spacegrass, lay low and watch the universe expand.

The album ends with a 10+ minute jam (technically two songs, but really they’re one), beginning with the almost meditative “7 Jam”, which finds Neil spitting lyrics like a fire and brimstone preacher giving testimony at a tent revival. “7 Jam” flows directly into the instrumental closer “Tim Sult vs the Greys”, which revisits and reimagines the riff and groove from “7 Jam” in a wonderfully understated way. It also features some pretty dope keyboard work courtesy of Richard Morel. If I didn’t already know it was the same band responsible for “Binge and Purge”, I wouldn’t believe it.

I stood up, and everything was alright.

Clutch’s ongoing artistic development led to the band sometimes being categorized as “stoner rock”, which bugs me, even if it isn’t the least bit important. To me, the term “stoner rock” carries with it an implication that one must be stoned to truly enjoy it, and while I’ll freely admit that mellowing out and listening to Clutch is an auditory treat that can’t be beat, the fact of the matter is that I loved Clutch for fully 5 years before I ever even thought about getting high for the first time.

Yo, I don’t know, B!

I know I’m overthinking it, and I also know it really, truly does not matter at all. I thoroughly enjoy a lot of bands that have the “stoner rock” label applied to them, so whatever. The important thing here is that in the year of our gourd 1995, Clutch started to groove like a moose, and they never looked back, and the world is a better place for it.

That seems like as good a place to stop as any. This nap ain’t gonna take itself. If you’d like to learn more about Clutch, and the impact they’ve had on my life for pretty much the entirety of my adulthood, check back for more soon. Maybe not too soon, though.

Until then, thanks for reading. And remember, beebopalloobopawopshamboo, and domo arigato if you got to.