CLUTCH Guitarist: 'I Can See Us Going Another 20 Years Easily'

Metal Israel recently conducted an interview with guitarist Tim Sult of Maryland rockers CLUTCH. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Metal Israel: You guys have been around for almost twenty years. I'd call you one of those legacy bands. Why do you think you've been around so long?

Tim Sult: I don't know. It's just something that we want to do, you know? We've never had a huge commercial success or really been a huge band. We just do it because we like playing shows, and people show up at our shows, and we're just going to keep playing until people get sick of us.

Metal Israel: Where do you see yourself in the next 20 years?

Tim Sult: In 20 years I'll be 60, so hopefully I won't be in an iron lung or in a wheelchair by then. I can see us going another 20 years easily. We might end up sounding like the GRATEFUL DEAD, but we'll still be going.

Metal Israel: What do you think of all those younger bands today that kinda fit into the box. Do you think it's an age thing or a generation thing… What do you think?

Tim Sult: Just the fact that we're older and have been on tour for 20 years, we've just had a lot of time to hear different kinds of music and to really let that soak in, and to bring it out with our own. We originally started jamming live just because we were sick of playing our own songs and wanted something different, so I guess the whole sound kind of evolved with different types of music that we'd be listening to on tour, that those sounds would gradually creep into the live show.

Metal Israel: Is there anything that you listen to now that you thought you'd never listen to or that you're just kinda surprised that you even like?

Tim Sult: You know what I'm actually surprised that I like? I totally missed out on them back in the '90s. But we played two festivals with FAITH NO MORE. I thought they were awesome and I never really listened to them at all. I didn't even give it a chance. I had no interest in listening to FAITH NO MORE.

Metal Israel: Something I noticed is that you guys seem to go pretty natural, you don't really throw out a lot of effects, you just sound like a good ol' stoner '70s band sometimes. So how come? Why does that natural sound appeal to you vs. all of the tools and computer gadgets and everything that they have out there today?

Tim Sult: Well, I definitely use effects a lot when we're jamming, for sure. But as far as that sound goes, as far as the guitar sound goes, I just like a big natural kind of guitar sound which a lot of '70s amps have, that perfect tone, you know? You can just plug in a guitar, turn the amp up all the way and it sounds great. With the effects and all the gadgets and stuff, that's something fun for playing around in your bedroom, but I think that once you get into a live situation, you need like a real loud amp as opposed to a big processed tone. That's just my opinion.

Metal Israel: This is a little strange, but describe to me the anatomy of a jam. How does it work? What's the feeling? How do you go with it?

Tim Sult: Well, with a lot of the songs that we play on this tour, we've jammed about a million times, and it's just constantly changing, really. A lot of the times we'll kind of like go off on one of the ends of our songs, the drum beat will change a little bit and then next thing you know we're playing something that we never played before. But one of the main jams we did on this tour was "Cypress Grove", and that's pretty much how it starts off. We do like the first two chords of that song and then it goes into a drum beat, and then Dan, our bass player, will make up some totally different bass line out of the blue. And I'll follow along with that for a little while, and then solo a little bit, and then we'll come back into the solo. It's not really rocket science or anything. There's lots of 4s, lots of 8s. I mean, mostly with jamming you just have to be conscious of where the one is in the measure, and then just try to phrase it out and the 4/8 bars keep constantly changing, y'know.

Metal Israel: Speaking of changing, you guys are going to be reissuing a lot of your work in different formats, including vinyl. Why? What's making you do it?

Tim Sult: Well, we just have the opportunity to do it. We've been on labels in the past that had absolutely no interest in putting out vinyl on a mass scale. So now that we own our own label and we got back the rights to our three DRT albums, we just have the opportunity to it and it's something that'll be cool. Looks cool, looks nice, and we'd figured we'd do it just because we can, because we own the rights to the albums.

Metal Israel: Why vinyl?

Tim Sult: It just looks cool. It just looks really nice. I mean, I'm not personally a huge vinyl collector, but I think it definitely looks cooler than buying a CD. At this point in the music industry, you may as well buy something with cool artwork as opposed to, I don't know. You're probably just going to download it anyway, so if people like it enough to buy it on vinyl then I appreciate that. I don't know. It just looks awesome and we have the opportunity to do it, so we're doing it.

Read the entire interview from Metal Israel.