Clutch, the four-piece rock band from Frederick, Maryland, is coming to Raleigh’s Lincoln Theater  May 9 as part of its spring tour with heavy metal band Mastodon.

The band formed in 1991 and has been going strong ever since, having released 10 albums and cofounding its own label, Weathermaker Music. The Technician interviewed Dan Maines, the bassist and one of the founding members of Clutch.

This interview has been edited for length.

Technician: Did you start playing bass at a young age?

Dan Maines: Actually no, I didn’t really get into music until I was in high school. I picked up electric guitar from a friend of mine from school and I had been messing around with that for about a year. Some other friends of mine were getting a band together and asked me if I wanted to jam with them. When I got there, there was already somebody playing guitar and there was nobody playing bass, so I thought I’d give that a shot.

T: What music did you listen to before you were in Clutch?

DM: A lot of punk rock. I was listening to some of the D.C. punk bands like Minor Threat, Bad Brains, some West Coast punk stuff and then the New York hardcore bands. I was also listening to what you might call classic rock or heavy metal stuff, bands like Van Halen and Led Zeppelin, and then later stuff like Black Sabbath and Cream. Those were a lot of the influences I was into in that period of around 1989 to 1990.

T: Did anything in the punk scene influence your style as a bassist?

DM: In 1989, I heard for the first time a band out of Vancouver called Nomeansno, which was a punk three-piece. They had a song called “Dad” and another on the B-Side of a record called “Revenge” that really made a big impact on me as far as how I wanted to sound as a bass player.

T: Clutch’s music utilizes a unique mix of punk, hardcore and classic rock ‘n’ roll, especially on the first two albums. What influences do you think helped the band generate this particular style?

DM: If we were all on the same page about anything, it was trying something new and really trying to step out of the box of what we had been doing up to that point. Transnational Speedway League was our first full-length record, and it kind of had two different sounds on it. One was very dark and the other half of the coin was this more light-hearted sound, and the music leaned a little more over toward a traditional rock sound. 

I think that was more of the direction we chose to veer toward for the self-titled Clutch record. Going back to what people today might refer to as ‘stoner rock,’ whatever records came out within that time period from ’93 to ’96, I feel like those are the founding albums for that entire genre. Those were albums we were listening to as well and I would definitely count them as influences.

T: I read that Bam Margera is a fan of Clutch and even directed the music video for your song “The Mob Goes Wild.” What was it like working with Bam? 

DM: Chaotic. He’s actually pretty focused when he’s working. He had very specific ideas for that video, and I think he pulled them off well. It’s a unique Clutch video for sure. He’s somebody who was actually, from the very get go, very supportive of the band and has helped us out a lot.

T: If you could put a name on your sound, what might it be?

DM: We just call ourselves a rock band. When I think of a rock band, I think of a band that plays music that pulls from multiple genres. I think that’s the nice thing about being in a rock band is you have the freedom to pull from those different categories like jazz, R&B, funk and metal and blend them into a sound. For me, I don’t like to get too specific about how I describe the music for the very reason that we’re always trying to inhabit a wide spectrum of sounds.

T: You guys have been in a band together for about 24 years now. Has it been challenging? Rewarding?

DM: It’s definitely rewarding, sometimes challenging. Luckily, we always got along well. We’re always just four friends who wanted to be in a band to play shows. I think it might have been different if we were four guys who thought, “Hey, if we get a band together we’d get signed to a major label record and we can start playing stadiums.”

That was never the way this band’s group attitude was like. I think that has more than anything else to do with the longevity of the band. I couldn’t ask for a better job than to be in this band.