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Clutch Interview with Jean-Paul Gaster: Doing Like the Fortune Tellers Do

Clutch have a new and recently reviewed DVD out called Live at the 9:30, which means I have two of my very favorite things in the world: a new Clutch release and an excuse to interview the band. This will be the third Clutch-related feature The Obelisk has done in its 15 months of existence counting the Bakerton Group chat with bassist Dan Maines last February, and though that might seem like a lot (it is), they keep kicking ass, so I feel fully justified.

On Live at the 9:30, which was filmed at the club of the same name in Washington D.C. as part of Clutch‘s New Years string of shows this past December, the venerable four-piece play their entire 1995 Clutch album, making it a treat for the fans beyond the normal gig. Encompassing that set, which also includes a few tracks from their latest, Strange Cousins from the West, and a couple closers, the DVD set also contains a second disc titled Fortune Tellers Make a Killing Nowadays that documents Clutch on the road in Fall 2009.

Especially after watching the scene in that documentary wherein he describes the ins and outs of his kit and how using different drums can affect the outcome of an entire song, I wanted to chat with drummer Jean-Paul Gaster (also of Scott “Wino” Weinrich‘s Wino solo band) about the shows and the opposition between looking back on everything Clutch has accomplished and looking forward to what’s still to come.

Incidentally, what’s to come includes an unsurprisingly hefty load of touring throughout the summer and autumn, followed by the recording of a new album. In June, Clutch perform an acoustic set at the Bonnaroo festival in Tennessee, and they’ve got reissues planned for the three albums released via DRT Records this past decade — Blast Tyrant, Robot Hive/Exodus and From Beale Street to Oblivion. So yeah, lots to look forward to.

Q&A with J.P. Gaster is after the jump. Please enjoy.

Was playing the whole self-titled album live something more for the fans than you guys? You play a lot of those songs live anyway.

I think so. I think a lot of it had to do with just the fact that we knew we were going to be filming those shows, and we wanted to do something special for that event, rather than just play a set of mostly new songs off the new album. It was definitely a challenge for us. We like that. We like to take ourselves out of our comfort zone, so listening back to a record that we did 12 years ago was challenging in a lot of ways. I played a lot differently back then, and it was an exercise. But it was a lot of fun too. Some of those songs I’d forgotten how much fun they are to play.

Will any of that stuff be added back into the mix for regular sets?

Actually, “Tight Like That” was a song we hadn’t really put in the set very much in the last five or eight years, and that has made a resurgence. We readdressed that song yet again. We’re gonna do Bonnarroo this year, and one of the events that we’re doing there is gonna be an acoustic set. We took a look at some of the older songs, the ones that were more blues-inflected, and we rearranged that, put some new parts in it. It’s still “Tight Like That” – you’ll recognize some of the parts and the lyrics – but there’s a few new things in it too. That was fun, too, just to take another look at that song.

So all the shows on that mini-tour were filmed?

On the documentary, that was the tour that we did on Strange Cousins, and that happened in September and October. That was not all the self-titled stuff. Those were regular sets. We usually switch sets every night. One of us will make the set list. For instance, on the first night, Dan makes the first setlist, I make the second one, Neil [Fallon, vocals/guitar] does the third and Tim [Sult, guitar] does the fourth, then we start over again. That was one of those tours where it was a different set every night.

I meant for the New Year’s shows. Were all those filmed, or was it just the 9:30?

All those shows were filmed.

Does that take some of the pressure off then?

Um… I guess in some ways it does. We really wanted to nail the 9:30. We hoped that would be the best show that we filmed, and it just worked out. Everything just fell in the right place. The energy was real good that night and, you know, it’s the 9:30 Club. It really is our hometown club. We have all our families that come out there. I feel like we captured that record and that night really well on the DVD.

Do you have material you’re especially sentimental about?

I don’t think so. We have a pretty large catalog of stuff to pull from these days, and each song represents a different thing. For me, as a drummer, every song’s got some kind of a concept to it, some kind of an idea I’m trying to get across. Some of those things are more relevant to what I’m playing now, and some of those things were just concepts or feels that I was once more comfortable with, say 12 or 15 years ago. They each have some kind of a sentimental quality to them, but more than anything, I identify it with a particular feel that I was trying to get after in each song.

How would you characterize the change in your playing over the years?

I think I’ve loosened up considerably. I listened back to that self-titled record, and it was eighth notes, all night long (laughs). And I know what that was too, that was me listening to a lot of Buddy Miles. I really liked the Band of Gypsies record and the stuff that he did with Electric Flag, and I was just really into that real funky eighth-note kind of feel where he’s not playing like James Brown grooves, these are real hard rock grooves, but he had a really nice way of just hammering those eighth notes, and he did it in a way that just barely swung, and I was attracted to that.

What do you put into your playing now that’s different?

I try to think a little more deeply about the rhythm. I like to listen to a lot of jazz and blues, and even reggae stuff, and so much of that, the idea of a clave is pretty central to all those musics. By that I mean either a 2/3 clave or a 3/2 clave, or a New Orleans 3 clave, and so more and more I find myself at least thinking about those things subconsciously. And hopefully it makes the drums a little more syncopated, it makes them a little bit more funky. There’s a little bit more give and take in the playing. I think we all play that way. I think we’re just better playing our instruments. We’ve been on the road for so long, been playing so many shows, I hope we’ve improved a little bit (laughs).

Did it feel strange for you during the documentary filming to be asked to look back instead of looking forward?

Yeah, definitely. We’re not really very good at doing the remember whens. Nothing’s worse than going to a party and seeing a guy that you haven’t seen or some friend you haven’t seen and all they want to talk about is 10 years ago and how drunk everybody got and what kind of party it was. For us, that’s not really a fun thing to do. We were really lucky that we had Agent Ogden putting this thing together, because he asked the right questions at the right time, and sometimes it’s kind of hard for us to really give answers to some of these questions, because we’ve been doing this thing for 20 years now. You’re right in the middle of it and it’s hard to be objective about, you know, what made you play 10 years ago or why did you make the setlist the way you did yesterday. It’s just what we do. It’s kind of difficult sometimes for us to talk about it.

The striking thing about the documentary – other than how every fan is like, “Clutch grooves. It’s great!”

(Laughs).

Yeah, there was a lot of that. But the crew respect and peer respect you got was pretty incredible. I mean, Wino called you his “guiding light.”

That’s pretty heavy (laughs). It was a blessing to play with him. He’s one of the folks who inspires me the most, and he’s definitely one of the finest musicians I’ve ever played with. Ever. Really a great combination. And a killer guy too. He’s a great guy. Just sit down and you can talk to him about anything and it’s always fun hanging out with Wino.

Looking ahead, I know you guys are touring, and Bonnaroo like you said. You’re doing some European festivals too, right?

Yeah. We’re doing some European stuff in July, and I suspect we’ll be playing in the Fall as well. We’ll be doing some kind of touring in the States, I’m not sure what it’ll be exactly. At the same time, we’re making new music now. This opportunity that we had to go play at Bonnaroo and do this short acoustic set has been a lot of fun for us, because in the last few weeks, like I said before, we’ve been experimenting with some of these songs. Some of them are old things and some are new ones. That’s kind of inspiring. We don’t like to do the same thing over and over, so anything we can do to get us out of our comfort zones usually ends up in something that’s kind of cool. I hope, anyway (laughs).

As far as playing acoustic, have you changed how you’re drumming in the songs?

I just keep the dynamics really, really low. I made a record with a friend of mine, Kelly Carmichael, and he’s sort of a country rag/blues-style acoustic player. I was able to play a lot of these same kind of grooves I’m doing now with Clutch. It’s more about the dynamics. Trying to keep everything nice and quiet. I have not resorted to brushes. There’s nothing worse than seeing a rock drummer get a pair of brushes and pretending to play brushes and all he’s doing is just beating the drums, except with brushes. Brushes. That’s an art form, man. You need to spend several years to get an idea across with any authority. I stuck with the sticks and I’m just trying to keep everything real quiet. Again, I’m thinking about the clave too in those songs.

Has any of that approach bled into the new Clutch material?

I think it probably will. It’s still new for us right now. This is something we just started tackling in the last two weeks, but inevitably I think it will probably rear its head somewhere in one way or another on the new stuff.

So if you’re touring in the Fall, when would you be recording?

I would bet over the winter. We’ve been making songs in batches. In between tours we get together over here at my place and just jam. I’ve got the mics up running all the time. Everything’s ready to go, the computer’s on, so if there’s a riff that happens, we record it immediately before it disappears into outer space. Because that can happen. That’s pretty great, being able to record everything that you do. So we’ve got a good batch of ideas happening there, and over the next few months, hopefully they’ll start to turn into songs, and they won’t be just jams.

So do you guys ever take a break? You’re on tour all the time, and you’re saying when you’re off tour, you’re rehearsing, recording, writing new stuff. You ever just sit down and hang out?

(Laughs) You know, we usually finish up a tour and we’ll take a week or two off, and then we’re back again, maybe three days a week over here jamming. We’re in a very good situation here. We’re at the point in our careers now where we own our own label. We have a very solid and loyal fanbase, and we don’t take that lightly. This is a blessing, and there’s a lot of people out there who would give their left arm to do what we do. I’m blessed to be able to play drums for a living. I try to practice every day. I think about drums all the time, I think about this band all the time. This is what we do, so it’s not a part-time gig for us. We are not the kind of band who wanted to get together just so we could make a bunch of money or have a stupid stage show or something like that. We wanted to make music, and to this day, we still enjoy doing that. We still enjoy getting together and coming up with some riffs, having a beer and being in a rock band. You can’t complain. This is the greatest job in the world.

That’s the main thing you take away from the documentary, that you guys are happy to be doing it.

Oh yeah, definitely. That’s what it is.

I thought one of the most interesting parts of the documentary was early on where you’re talking about your kit and using different drums for different songs, the sounds of old drums versus new drums. Not being a drummer, it’s not something I’d think of every day, how much thought there really is behind it.

There’s a lot of thought that goes into it, man (laughs). I appreciate those words. The sound of a snare drum can completely color or change the sound of a record. I’ve got a lot of cool drums that I love to record, so you find that the perfect voice hopefully for the perfect song, and that’s always gonna be a great complement. But it doesn’t always happen. Already I’ve gone back and I’ve listened to Strange Cousins and wished I had not used that snare drum on “Minotaur” (laughs). But you live and learn. I think it sounds real thin. I used a metal drum on that song, and I don’t think it was the right choice. I think I should have used a wood drum.

That’s it. Break it out. Do the redux.

(Laughs) We’ll do that when we re-release that one. I’ll go back in and redo the drums (laughs).

Is this going to be the new cycle for you guys – album, live album, album, live album – now that you have your own label and can do what you want with it?

I don’t think so. We’re planning to re-release all the albums we got back from DRT. That’s gonna happen this year. That’s gonna be great. A lot of those records have been out of print for a long time. So we’ll put those out. We’ll probably do a studio Clutch record after that, and after that, I don’t know. We also do The Bakerton Group. Inevitably a lot of these jams that we come up with, they’re not gonna really work in a standard song form, so you’re always left with that decision, is it something you abandon all together, or can you take another look at this and see if it’ll work in an instrumental setting? So maybe we’ll do a Bakerton Group record after the Clutch record.

And the Wino band is pretty much done, correct?

Well, Wino’s doing Saint Vitus stuff now, I’m really busy with Clutch stuff now, but I’ve known Wino for 15 years and I’m very confident we will play again and record again. He’s not one who likes to sit around too much either. He likes to stay busy, that guy. I wouldn’t be surprised if he calls me any day and says, “Hey man, I’d like to get together for a jam.” In which case, I will say, “Certainly, what day is good for you?” (laughs). Absolutely man. There is nothing better than that.

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2 Responses to “Clutch Interview with Jean-Paul Gaster: Doing Like the Fortune Tellers Do”

  1. Gaia says:

    Excellent interview. Makes me more excited about purchasing me a copy of this here DvD. I too have wandered how Clutch can tour so much. But with European shows on the horizon, I think I’ll head on over to a show and see if there’s a chance of buying them a drink. Clutch grooves!

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