Pure Rock Fury : Clutch profile

There's a certain kind of bar, down the street from the gun and CB radio shop, where the rafters are exposed wood that someone long ago draped with metallic streamers, a half-hearted complement to the Christmas lights running along the ceiling, their glow gray-yellow in the cigarette haze. A vintage Centipede video game stands along the wall. The ceiling fans don't work, but no one minds once the band starts playing and the space in front of the stage becomes contested territory, everyone jockeying for position, sweat soaking their hair and underarms as the sound of breaking bottles comes from somewhere to the right, followed by a victorious cheer. This shatter-cheer pattern repeats the entire night, never seeming to grow stale. Even when the band plays, its amplifiers shaking limbs and eardrums of the two hundred or so people crowded into a low-ceilinged space the size of some suburban living rooms, the cheering bottle-breakers provide a curious, high-pitched counterpoint.

This is the kind of place Clutch plays, has been playing for over 14 years. The dressing rooms are often converted closets, with little or no backstage area. "Sometimes we just show up and see what happens," says Neil Fallon, Clutch's frontman, seated on folding chair inside a drywall-and-two-by-four installation that looks as though it must've sprung up moments before their arrival. This evening they're in Buffalo ; a Pittsburgh promoter went under at the last minute, forcing the band to schedule a new show 200 miles north. After getting lost in Cleveland for "three or four hours, looking for a bank that doesn't exist," Clutch -- Fallon and bandmates Dan Maines (Bass), Tim Sult (Guitar), and Jean-Paul Gaster (Drums) -- made the drive, welcomed by Buffalo's bitterly cold January weather. "This show's gonna suck," laughs Fallon.

They're used to it by now. Called "a perfect turn-of-the-century rock band: a four- or five-way intersection of aesthetic schools that never before had much to do with one another," by The New York Times , Clutch tours constantly, playing at least 100 shows a year. Fallon estimates they've played over 3000 shows in their career, most of them in smaller venues in front of a growing number of die-hard fans.

Their style has ranged as much as has their tours. Drawing elements of everything from Robert Johnson to hip-hop to country, Clutch's sound is constantly evolving and exploring new influences, an effect they describe as "sonic alchemy." Their most recent studio effort, 2004's Blast Tyrant found Clutch incorporating a new sonic ingredient: acoustic guitar on "The Regulator" and "Ghost" showcases another, blues-tinged facet of a group that prides itself on trying new directions. "Boredom is one of my biggest phobias," says Fallon. "Boredom becomes a problem if we're just running in circles, musically."

Lurking behind the opportunity for continual music experimentation are the often dull realities of constant touring, a necessity for a band with little radio support (though "Viva La Bam" star Bam Margera directed a video for Blast Tyrant's "The Mob Goes Wild," which received limited play on MTV2). "You do it for 13 years, and, not to sound jaded, but I've seen the same truck stops over and over again. It's hard to find joy in the amount of driving that we do," says Fallon. When not playing the game of "hurry up and wait" that's the between-show routine, Fallon listens to NPR and "horrible jazz," reads Philip K. Dick, and struggles with Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow . "I've started that book at least twelve times," he shrugs, rolling his eyes.

What about mainstream radio? All those hours on the road, have you found anything worth listening to? "No. I don't listen to the radio enough to know what's out there, but I don't think it's any worse than it's ever been," Fallon says. "It's not like we've fallen to a new low. It's always been crap." Fallon calls Jessica Simpson "tragic comedy at its best," explaining her role as cotton-candy consumer product: "She's not a singer. She's a personality who happens to sing." Clutch's approach to mainstream rock is not a faux-punk, adversarial pose, Fallon insists: "We don't pay too much attention to it. I'm just not interested in it, just like I'm not interested in NASCAR."

What interests Fallon is going into every club -- sometimes the third in a week -- and putting everything into the show. From the overcrowded, vaguely hostile environments where "'get up on stage and fuck with the band' became a sport" to "towns that don't get a lot of rock shows -- they're hungry and there's a gratitude," Fallon and Clutch make it their mission to give the best show possible -- a dedication that's earned them a reputation as an essential live concert experience. They give everything at each show, Fallon explains, because they never know what new fan may be in the crowd waiting to be influenced, a prospect Fallon calls, "as priceless and important a thing as an artist could ask for."

And of course there are less selfless reasons to endure the 7-hour drives, the dimly-lit clubs, the thrown beer bottles (and once, a pair of box cutters): "Getting up there on stage, playing music with the people you've known since childhood -- even on the worst days, there's nothing that compares to it."

Clutch's latest studio album, "Blast Tyrant," is available in stores and online. A new, double-cd live album, "Clutch: Live in Flint , Michigan ," is available directly from the band, at www.pro-rock.com. A new studio album, "Robot Hive / Exodus" will be released June 21. Clutch is, as always, now on tour.