“The truth of it all,
The truth of it all.
Inebriate me,
Inebriate me.”
— from “Arcadia” by Clutch
For over two decades, Neil Fallon and his band, Clutch, have been a force of nature. Rolling Stone says, “Clutch approach rock & roll like Rocky Balboa: They eat lightning and crap thunder.” And Pitchfork called Neil Fallon “one of rock’s most talented auteurs.”
Thousands of devoted fans immerse themselves in Clutch’s music, not only because the group rocks hard, but also because they have mastered the art of exploring the world of fantasy without losing touch with reality.
And with Clutch’s new album, Psychic Warfare, Fallon continues to show us a universal truth —we need to escape in order to tolerate living.
The delicate balance between embracing and escaping “reality” has long been considered one of the core features of emotional well-being. In theory, “healthy” forms of escape, such as creativity and exercise, allow an individual to take a break from life’s difficulties without avoiding reality per se. Research suggests that music can be a form of healthy escape. Evidence shows that listening to or playing music can improve symptoms of depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and chronic pain.
In contrast, “unhealthy” forms of escape are used to avoid and suppress feelings. Research shows that emotional suppression actually makes negative emotions worse, not better. Moreover, unhealthy escape behaviors, such as alcohol abuse and binge eating, can temporarily allow people to avoid their circumstances, but cause self-harm in the process.
Healthy escape has always been part of Clutch’s music. In fact, Fallon’s embracing of storytelling has been so present that he has referred to himself and other songwriters as “professional liars.” Fallon told me, “When I say ‘liars,’ it’s tongue in cheek. I’ve always been attracted to the idea of a tall tale, where you take a truth, and you exaggerate it. But any story, like if you take myth for example, it may be filled with exaggeration and half-truths. But ultimately, it’s to arrive at or depict a universal truth.”
“I guess sometimes you can take the long way around and still end up at the same spot.”
Fallon’s approach to music has been heavily influenced by his experience in the ’80s hard-core punk and post-punk scene in Washington, D.C. Hard core was perhaps unique among musical styles in that not only did it provide an outlet for people who wanted an alternative musical and cultural experience, but also it was designed to fit into people’s “regular” lives. Hard-core bands such as Minor Threat only played all-ages shows and kept prices low so that members of their community could attend. And bands such as the Minutemen were famous for having one foot firmly in the real world by having “day jobs” and playing early shows for their working audience.
Because of the intensity of the music and the communal feeling of the live shows, legendary music journalist Lester Bangs was famous for saying, “Hard core is the womb.”
Like many hard-core fans, Fallon gravitated towards heavier forms of music because he and his friends saw it simultaneously as a social connector and a form of rebellion. “I got into singing just because it was something cool to do in high school … . I hung out with people that were into music that were on the margins, kind of in the periphery of acceptable music,” he said. “There was a time where punk rock, hard core and heavy metal were shunned, whereas now it has become much more acceptable. It seemed that much more of a threat involved. And I think that what attracted me was the taboo of it.”
The intensity of hard core was an effective strategy to manage negative emotions. “Like most adolescent males, I had an excess of energy and a lot of angst. In hindsight, I had a very fortunate and blessed upbringing,” Fallon explained. “But I just didn’t have an outlet, and I remember being socially awkward, like most people in their adolescence … . You know, you’re listening to Black Flag’s Revenge because someone gave you a hard time at the bus stop or whatever. Music was very consoling.”
Fallon’s experience is supported by research that demonstrates that for people who like more intense forms of music, not only does this music not incite aggression or violence, it actually helps the person become more peaceful. In one study of 39 listeners of heavy-metal music, participants were subjected to an anger induction followed by random assignment to listening to either extreme music from their own playlist or silence. The participants’ heart rates did not increase and their mood improved, suggesting that listening to extreme metal when angry made things better, not worse for heavy-metal fans.
Furthermore, attending live shows provided a place where Fallon could immerse himself in the experience and escape. “Escapism — there’s a couple different ways to look at it. Sure, there’s putting on your headphones and listening to [Pink Floyd’s] Dark Side of the Moon. I love doing that. But there’s also going to see a band play stone cold sober. The music itself, maybe it’s the frequencies or the rhythm — you are transported out of time and space for however long,” he said.
“We grew up in the suburbs of D.C. And I realize how lucky I was to see Fugazi every couple of months. And it made a real impression, because they would just burn down the house wherever they played, and they always play in the most bizarre places. It wasn’t a dark nightclub with smoke machines and lasers. It was a VFW hall lit with fluorescent lights,” he said.
“And they still forgot about time.”
In many ways, what Fallon is describing is flow. Flow is a meditative, mindful state of “effortless concentration,” a complete immersion in experience. Flow is usually characterized by an intense focus on something where the other noise of the world, both internally and externally, is shut down in favor of a particular activity. And that very state of mindful concentration on a specific experience can be the essence of healthy escape. Studies demonstrate that mindfulness therapy programs have been effective in improving symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Fallon described how a state of flow is crucial to his being able to create music. “If I have an idea, and I think it’s awesome, and I try to force it down the song’s throat, it’s always awkward. Sometimes, automatic writing and letting the rhyme scheme do the heavy lifting will take you to a place you would have never imagined, even five minutes prior,” Fallon said. “By way of analogy, you hear sculptors talking about how the sculpture is already in the rock, you just chisel away the excess, and that’s sort of the same way I think for songs.”
“When it’s writing, if I have a little studio downstairs, and I go down there after I put the kid to sleep and say, ‘I’m gonna have a beer and write some lyrics,’ nothing ever happens. It’s always the next day when I’m doing something mindless, like I’m pulling weeds in my garden, and one or two lines will come to my head, and the creative dam breaks open.”
“You gotta distance yourself from your initial intentions and go for the ride.”
And Fallon approaches Clutch’s shows with all of the intensity of the hard-core shows he attended throughout his life. “It’s kind of like scream therapy. I don’t feel too irritated about much after doing a show. It’s pretty therapeutic. It’s important to have these outlets or these venues where it’s socially acceptable to push and shove one another and scream in each other’s faces.”
Moreover, Clutch has been very pointed in its focus on leading “regular lives” outside of their band. “Everyone in this band understands that we’re on stage for 90 minutes, and we can speak through our instruments or through my lyrics, and when that time is over, we’re just regular Joes. There are bands where there is no distinction between that, where they’re always on stage and the stage is just a continuation of what they did prior.”
And perhaps paradoxically, Fallon feels that this foot in reality is the key to being able to escape fully onstage. “The high you feel when you are on stage, and there’s either 100 people or 10,000 people moving in sync to what you are communicating to them, there’s no other high like it in the world. And when you get off stage, you don’t want it to end, but it does. There’s a come down from it, and I think that a lot of musicians turn to drugs to stay up there. And on the flip side of that, if it’s a shit show, and there’s 10,000 people looking at you like you’ve got two heads, you can try to escape from that in a similar fashion. So, I think one of the reasons this band has been able to maintain it for as long as we have is, we have a very marked delineation between [being on stage and off].”
Perhaps because Fallon has maintained a flow state in his creative process, the focus of his work has not remained static, and Clutch’s music has now moved towards more elaborate storytelling. “Those kind of emotionally driven creative impulses can be very therapeutic, but I exhausted those very early on. If you listen to Clutch’s first couple of releases, you hear that and there’s a lot of vague pronouns that are the focus of anger and angst,” he explained. “And that can be a great thing, even if you don’t name it in the process, because you can work yourself to a resolution just by writing it out.”
“Nowadays, when I write, it is very rarely if at all emotionally driven. When I hear instrumental music, I consider it my job to visualize it as a little movie and then create a script for it. That’s kind of the escapism. I ride that now. Sometimes it’s difficult, but in an ideal world, a mood is evoked by the music, and then you crystalize that into words.”
“What’s always been interesting to me is the idea of when music can evoke colors … when I hear instrumental music, not always but often, it’s almost like looking through a dirty window. And you see something going on on the other side, and you kind of want to wipe off the dirt and get a clearer image by creating characters, action and plot arcs,” he said. “It may be super-vague, and I may be the only one who gets it, and sometimes I never get it. And that’s the joy of writing story-based songs, because I’m still trying to figure out what exactly is going on.”
Fallon embraces the humor of music as part of the escape. “There are times when I’ve said in interviews that I’m a liar. It is tongue-in-cheek, because I realize I can get up on stage and boast. One of the things I’ve loved in blues and hip-hop and some rock ’n’ roll songs is just boasting about how I’m the best. And when I say that, I’m not necessarily thinking I’m the best all the time. It’s just this kind of absurdity to say that, and someone can sing along with that and feel the same way,” he explained. “And you get that in metal. Take an Iron Maiden song; you feel like you want to go riding along, horseback with Bruce Dickinson into a medieval battle. It’s very invigorating. I guess that’s a healthy form of escapism — kind of raising your fist in the air, whereas punk rock gets so mired into what you can and can’t do. It’s more of when you’re in opposition to something, you’re defined by what you’re opposing.”
Clutch’s song “X-Ray Vision” and the associated video are emblematic of the blurring of the lines of reality and fantasy producing fantastic art. “A charged-up song like ‘X-Ray Vision’ … people see the sense of humor because that’s fun, and I think rock ’n’ roll should be fun, even if you’re not laughing out loud.”
“That video, in particular that discomfort and disconnect, was definitely amplified and identified by Dan Winters, who directed the video. He was able to pick up on that because he’s been with us for over 20 years, taking pictures of us, and he knows our songs pretty well. That song in particular, Phillip K. Dick is a big influence, not literally to any story in particular, but his preoccupation with the collision or the meeting points between reality and unreality and the weirdness that happens when you can’t tell the difference between the two.”
The ride is bumpy at times. Fallon said that Clutch’s artistic risks can be confusing for some fans. “I think there are people that I meet now who are my age and listened to that when they were adolescents who haven’t let go of that and they want to hear ‘old-school shit,’” he said. “And I always scratch my head and feel bad that that’s all they want to. I figure that sometimes when fans of an artist want to hear that one record, what they’re actually asking the artist to do is to transport them back in time to a better place, when that soundtrack is something they want to relive over and over and over again. And that’s all well and good, but to do that for 20 years … I can’t imagine doing the same dog-and-pony show over and over again, especially when it’s based in anger. That’s exhausting.”
Fallon also sees a difference in the way live music is experienced now, and that technology is actually harming the escapist function of music. “One of the things that drives me batty is to see people experiencing that through their iPhones. Looking at a concert that they’re at … and recording it. They’re completely killing any possibility of escaping time for those 90 minutes.”
But Fallon is looking forward to a long career of passionate music. “It’s important to draw a distinction between anger and passion. When I see pictures of myself singing, I’ve got a vein running down the middle of my forehead, and there are a lot of frontmen and women with the same photos, and you say this person looks really angry. But it’s not so much that; it’s passion … . And I think that has much more longevity than anger.”
And just as Clutch’s music has served a therapeutic function for Fallon, it does the same for its fans. “I’ve received letters and emails from somebody that said that such-and-such a song got them through a terrible time in their lives — even go so far as to say that they were in a very dark place, having very dark thoughts, and that got them through that. I can’t imagine any greater validation as an artist.”
Longtime Clutch fan Frank North told me, “I have been a loyal Clutch fan since the beginning. No matter what was happening in my life, I always have had Clutch as a place to escape. And as my life has evolved — job, wife, kid. And so has Clutch. I can’t wait to see what they do next. But whatever it is, I know I’ll be there.”
And the relationship between Clutch and its fans is reciprocal. “Sometimes, I’ll meet people who say I know exactly what you’re talking about in the song, and it’s news to me, because I don’t get it. It’s an interesting exercise to hear what people are taking away, and they can be completely different ends of the spectrum, and I think that’s a good thing.”
“Live music’s been going on for hundreds of thousands of years, and even if what we’re doing is a very contemporary genre or subgenre, it’s still participating in what I consider to be a human sacrament where you communicate by manipulating sound waves. You do mess with people’s heads, and it’s almost like magic when it works. So flow, I think, is a two-way reciprocal between the audience and the musician when it’s at its best.”
Ultimately, Fallon is very appreciative of the opportunity he has had. “I certainly never imagined in my wildest dreams, when I was 15, that I’d be doing this for a living. I hope people think of us as a positive force and not one of negativity.”
And he encourages others to find creativity in some form — “any form” — of art.
“And I count myself very lucky that my job is in one of the creative arts. And most of my friends who aren’t in the creative arts have to wait for those few hours on the weekend or after work to indulge themselves. It’s a very important thing, even if it’s just scribbling on a piece of paper,” he explained. “It will take you places that you never realized that that’s what you’re looking for, or it can help you analyze things that you’ve been through already. And I’m fortunate that that’s what I get to do.”
“It’s not easy all the time,” he said. “But the worst day of rock ’n’ roll is better than the best day of Washington, D.C., traffic.”
