Introduce yourself.
My name is Jean-Paul Gaster and I play drums.
I play drums too!
Yeah?
Yeah!
Alright! Drums are the best.
I’m not good at it, but I still play drums. So how has the tour
been so far?
The tour’s been great. We’re very much fans of Mastodon so having
this co-headlining tour come together was really great. Awesome band, great
guys, and it’s been really fun touring with them.
Any updates on a new album that you can tell me?
The records gonna be called Psychic Warfare and we’ve been putting
a few songs into the set and I think it is a departure from our previous album
Earth Rocker in several ways. For me, the most obvious thing is that there’s a
lot of different sort of feels on the album. Earth Rocker had more of a linear
approach to it. We were just trying to play fast and heavy on that one and I
think we were successful, but we always sort of react to whatever we just did
whether we do it consciously or not and that’s what we ended up with. It’s a
little bluesier, a little funkier.
How have fans responded to the new songs?
They love the new songs, it’s been great.
How was your set today?
It was hot. [laughs]
[Laughs] I heard Neil say something about the elements of the sun
or something like that and I thought it was hilarious.
I think he might have said something about how mother nature is a
global lighting director.
Yeah, that’s what is was! That was perfect. Anyway, I’ve noticed
that y'all and Mastodon are like the only two metal bands here which I
think is really interesting. I’ve noticed on XM radio that y'all are
played on Alt Nation which is like this kinda music and y'all are played
on Octane which is hard rock and then Liquid Metal which is at a heavier than
Mastodon level. Would you consider Clutch to be like a crossover band?
I think Clutch is a rock and roll band and so for me, rock and
roll is all those great musics that we grew up listening to whether we’re
talking about the Bad Brains or Jimi Hendrix or Fats Domino. It’s all rock and
roll so to try to pigeonhole into one kind of thing or another I think is
probably inaccurate. But it’s funny that you mention that we’re being played on
such a wide variety of stations and I think that just goes to show that over
the years we’ve played with a lot of different kinds of bands so there was a
time when people didn’t know where to put us and so now maybe they’re trying to
put us everywhere and I’m okay with that.
What do you think about on a broad range the current state of
music, but more specifically the current state of metal?
Well I don’t really consider myself a metalhead, so for me to
comment on the state of metal, I wouldn’t exactly know what to say. I will say
that the music industry and the music scene has changed 180 degrees from when
we started. We first got signed to Eastwest in 1992.
That’s before I was born!
My goodness [laughs] no shit!
Does that make you feel old?
I feel experienced.
I interviewed another band today and they were like “Yeah, we
started in 1997” and I was like “I was 2 years old in 1997!”
[laughs] My goodness. So it was completely different than it was
when we started this business. When we started the band, we did not have the
intention of making a career out of this. We just wanted to play good shows and
make good recordings and the idea of doing this for 25 years was not on our
radar. Oddly enough, here we are and it’s the best job in the world, I love it.
But you asked about the state of the music industry. It’s really important for
bands to get out there and work harder than ever. More and more weight is gonna
be put on the live show and that’s just because people aren’t buying records.
So the bands who I think are gonna succeed are the ones who can put on a good
show, who can play their own songs, and have those kinds of songs that can
translate to an audience. So that’s more important than it’s ever been.
So what is next for the band?
Well, we’re gonna finish out this tour. We still have 3 week left on this thing and then we’ll go overseas to Europe. We like going over there, it’s a lot of fun. We’ll do some festivals, kind of this sorta environment. Maybe a little more rock and roll, a little more metal kinda of stuff. We’ll do just a few gigs over there, not very long at all and then the record comes out in September.
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