Having missed the first two installments of Clutch’s “Doom Saloon” livestreams, I was ecstatic when “Doom Saloon III” was announced. Even better was the fact that it was being advertised as a “greatest hits” performance or as the website said, “We have put together a set list of 15 of our most popular songs as requested by you the fans.” Having seen Clutch live many times my only complaint of recent shows is that they rarely play older material so I took this as a chance for fans like me to finally get to hear more of the older stuff. The term “older” does have some relativity here since they are now up to twelve studio albums so what I mean by older is the first two or three albums, having been a fan since the first release Transnational Speedway League. Don’t get me wrong I also like the “newer” material but those first few albums just hold a special place in my heart I guess.
The stream started out with a montage of fan-submitted footage of people singing along and playing along with Clutch songs on their instrument of choice. After this there was a segment called “Clutch Reacts: Archives” that showed the band reminiscing about old footage of themselves interspersed with questions from fans. This was followed by a tour of their combo Weathermaker record label warehouse where they house their wares before being shipped out and band gear and Doom Saloon studio which houses the live room where they hang out, jam and stream. During the Q&A section I found it interesting that the band was evenly split between Jam Room (Neil and Tim) and Clutch (rhythm sectin) when asked what their favorite album was. It was also interesting to hear how integral they consider performing live to the writing process since it gives them an opportunity to test out the crowd reaction. When asked about their favorite song they all said the “newest one we’re working on,” which was akin to asking an athlete why they won the game and receiving a response of “we scored more points than the other team.”
“Earth Rocker” got the party started and although I thought the sound quality was fantastic Neil apparently thought differently as evidenced by his comment immediately after of “OK. Just so you know this is not pre-recorded otherwise we would re-cut that because there’s something going on with the bass. We’ll figure it out. We’ll have to sort that out before “Spacegrass.” What I heard in this comment was a.) the sound quality was about to get even better and b.) I was going to get to see/hear “Spacegrass.” Eff yeah!
Circling back to set list of the most popular songs, Neil further clarified before they began saying that these songs were the top 15 from over 4,000 submissions for “Doom Saloon II “and would be played staring with number 15 going all the way down to number 1. All I have to say is either the group of 4,000 that voted has for the most part a very different idea of the best Clutch songs than I do or Clutch just played what they wanted to play. I’ll never know for sure but I enjoyed the set regardless. “A Shogun Named Marcus” and “Spacegrass” were worth the price of admission alone.
SETLIST: Earth Rocker, Cypress Grove, 50,000 Unstoppable Watts, D.C. Sound Attack!, In Walks Barbarella, A Shogun Named Marcus, The Elephant Riders, The Regulator, The Mob Goes Wild, X-Ray Visions, 10001110101, Electric Worry, Burning Beard, A Quick Death in Texas, Spacegrass
