Clutch/ The Bakerton Group/ Lionize/ Never Got Caught, Sat. June 19, doors 7 p.m., Crocodile Rock Cafe (520 W. Hamilton Street, Allentown). Tickets: $20 advance, $23 day of show, all ages. Info: www.pro-rock.com, www.crocodilerockcafe.com
For more than 20 years, fans around the world have been magnetically drawn to the aggressive, rhythmically angular heavy rock of Clutch. It’s a journey that’s taken the Maryland band from newcomer status to major-label success to independence.
The way bassist Dan Maines sees it, the days of commercial success came with their pros and cons.
“It was as much of a positive as it was a negative on us,” Maines says before a recent Clutch show in Oklahoma City. “We put out a 4-song EP in 1991 on a friend’s label, and it was less than a year and a half after that that we ended up getting signed to Atlantic Records and having this budget available to us that allowed us to fly — well, drive a crappy van — out to San Francisco to spend a couple weeks at a recording studio that we had known about through listening to records that we liked at the time. And that experience wouldn’t have been possible without the support of a label like Atlantic for us at that time.
“There are opportunities that are given to you, and there are also opportunities that are taken away from you. Nowadays, the business is changing almost on a weekly basis of what’s possible and what is available to a band.”
Clutch’s last album for Atlantic was 2001’s “Pure Rock Fury.” Since then, the band has released its material on independent labels, including its own Weathermaker Records, which it formed in 2008.
Despite the importance of Clutch’s albums, it’s the live show which has had the greatest impact, especially since the group went independent. On Saturday, June 19, Clutch will perform at Crocodile Rock in Allentown. Before that, it has three coveted performances at Bonnaroo on Friday, June 11. Clutch will play three sets. Well, technically two, because one set will be performed by Clutch’s instrumental rock alter ego The Bakerton Group.
“I’m very excited about it,” Maines says. “I’m excited that they asked us to come back and excited not just be playing two Clutch sets but we’re gonna do a full Clutch set and a full Bakerton Group set, and then we’re going to be doing a stripped-down set of Clutch songs.”
For the stripped-down set, Maines says Tim Sult will be playing an acoustic guitar, and “Neil (Fallon) and I will just be playing smaller gear to make the overall volume lower.”
“The exciting thing for us is the way the dynamic changed,” Maines says of preparations for the acoustic set, “it made it apparent we would have to rearrange the songs. We had to rework the songs a bit.”
Clutch took songs that “either lyrically or musically had aspects older songs within them” in order to incorporate some “blues-standard” aspects, Maines says. That approach dovetails with the band’s recent penchant for blues music in its studio recordings.
The quintet recently released a 2-DVD set: “Live at the 9:30,” which captures a 2009 show at the Washington, D.C. club, and “Fortune Tellers Make A Killing Nowadays,” a road-film documentary about the band, its fans and its influence. In a trailer for “Fortunetellers,” System Of A Down guitarist Daron Malakian is seen saying, “I swear to God, Clutch is my favorite band in the world.”
Maines, who says he’s been listening to “lots of Kool Keith,” a Stevie Wonder live album he “pulled from some music blog” and is on the lookout for Curtis Mayfield’s self-titled record on vinyl, notes that Clutch’s cult following has changed a bit over the years.
“We have seen them age along with us,” says Maines. “At least from what I can tell, you still have people showing up that you saw in the crowds 10, 25, 20 years ago next to the new fan who’s only been listening to your music for six months or two years. The diversity and age is something that really stands out to me.
“It’s not a trend. It’s something that seems like people that have become a fan of the band have a tendency to stick with and not just kind of grow out of it.”
On July 20, Weathermaker will re-release Clutch’s 2007 studio album “From Beale Street to Oblivion”; a week earlier, it will be available in digital formats. The 22-track re-release will include video content, songs recorded in London’s BBC studios in 2006 and four live songs from 2007, including previously unavailable covers of Cream’s “Politician” and Howling Wolf’s “You Gonna Wreck My Life.”
It might seem odd to reissue an album originally released only three years ago, but Maines explains that “distribution was always an issue we were unhappy with” and this will help give the record a second life. He says to expect more reissues from Clutch, which recently acquired the rights to the masters of previous albums. w
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