Metal band, Clutch, made a drastic change with their side project and “alter-ego” blues jam band in the 90s called The Bakerton Group. With their heavy following with each band, the group recently decided it was time to start their own label, Weathermaker Music. On February 17, The Bakerton Group released El Rojo produced by J. Robbins, on Weathermaker Music. Drummer, Jean-Paul Gaster talks about the switch, the recording industry and shares what’s in store for Clutch and The Bakerton group.
Many band members have side projects, but what made you guys decide to have a jam band "alter-ego" with all the same members (with the addition of Per Wiberg)? How does Bakerton differ from Clutch?
We originally started The Bakerton group in the 90s. Neil actually moved to Denver for a short amount of time and we found ourselves with downtime and wanted to try the instrumental thing.
We’re all way into jazz and the blues and wanted to play that style of music, so at the time we played some Thelonious Monk and Coltrane covers. More than anything it was an experiment.
We decided that when we started Weathermaker we wanted to make and release a Bakerton record now that we had some real distro and a real label. We’ve been friends with Per for a long time and toured with him a bunch in Europe.
He’s a monster keyboard player and has an affinity for funk, jazz, and the blues so it was a natural fit. It turned out he had time off after an Opeth tour to record so it worked out perfectly.
What influenced the completely different sound?
The biggest difference is being able to write songs that aren’t focused around lyrics. After the years we’ve become really good at writing Clutch songs, and on the flipside, it’s a great challenge to write the Bakerton tracks. We’re much more concerned about the form of the songs and trying to find what melodies are working where, and really the instruments themselves become a lyrical focal point. At the end of the day its still hooks. We’re trying to write those things that still stick in peoples’ heads.
Why did you decide to create your own label, Weathermaker Music?
We realized after we were finally done with D.R.T. (our previous label), that it was time to do something drastically different. The idea of running our own label was always something we’ve been interested in, but at the time the distributors were not into the idea of working with just bands.
Over the past few years though, it was apparent that we as a band could sell as many records as any of the indie labels out there… that’s kind of what spurred it. It’s exciting to have our own label; we have a lot of projects planned that we’re excited about.
Would you recommend other bands to create their own label?
No doubt about it. The idea of a label as we know it really is nonexistent nowadays. The industry’s changed so much.
There’s a lot of ways for bands to get recognition today. The internet has had a large impact on the way bands do business. Anything you can do yourself is the way to go; you can’t wait around for people to get interested in your band anymore.
These labels were trying to sell millions of records and that doesn’t happen today, whereas years ago that happened way more frequently. Major labels are definitely a dying breed and anyone who can start their own label should definitely do it.
Two bands, a record label... What's next?
I’m pretty sure we have our work cut out for ourselves at the moment. These days we’re either on the road or writing more songs for both bands. It’s really gone like that steadily for the past year. We’ve had no time off in over a year so I think we’ve got our work cut out for ourselves right now.
I don’t think we’ll put out any bands on our label not related to Clutch, that was never the plan, but we’ll have the new Clutch full length this summer which we started recording after this tour, and maybe some other surprises coming soon as well.
-AlarmPress
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