Clutchy Hopkins

Eigentlich wollte sich unser Mitarbeiter matt2.9 ja nur einen gemütlichen Videoabend machen – da klingelte auf einmal das Handy, am anderen Ende der Leitung ein gewisser Clutchy Hopkins aus den Staaten. Ob denn die bei ihm georderten CDs wohlbehütet angekommen wären und wie’s denn sonst so gehen würde. Promotion dieser Art erlebt man auch nicht alle Tage! Das Ende der Geschichte: Rückruf vereinbart, durchgeklingelt – und ein ziemlich merkwürdiges Gespräch geführt. Zum guten Schluss hat man zwar jede Menge Text beisammen, wird aber das dumme Gefühl nicht los, immer noch nicht recht zu wissen, wer oder was dieser Clutchy Hopkins denn nun eigentlich ist. Darauf mache sich bitteschön ein jeder seinen eigenen Reim…

PS: Da seit März mittlerweile ein paar Tage vergangen sind, schieben wir eine Neuigkeit gleich hinterher: seit Mitte Mai ist Clutchy bei Ubiquity Records gesignt.

Alright, please, let the people know who Clutchy Hopkins is.

Here’s the thing about Clutchy Hopkins: I have his music. My brother and I found his music at a yardsale. The tapes weren’t supposed to be sold. He wanted to keep those just for himself as kinda like a diary of his life. We were at that yardsale and there was basically a bunch of stuff no one would be interested in. But then I saw to the side a pile of the tapes and I asked “what’s on there?” The woman at the yardsale, who later turned out to be Clutchy’s daughter said “I don’t know”. So I said “well how much for the whole box?” And she said “You can have the whole box for $10”. And I have a reel-to reel-player so I put it on there and there it was. I have around 75 recordings of which we’ve put out about 25 so far. Anyway, we went back to Clutchy’s daughter and told her the music was great and asked her where the music did come from. At first, she said “Oh, I can’t tell you that”. So I just kept on calling her and letting her know that I really wanted to find out who the guy is who did the music because I wanted to put out a legitimate album. And then she told me it was her father, Clutchy Hopkins, who did the music. So, we have the real tapes, his old tapes. And, we got the rights to put out his music. So, what it is, we’re looking for the real Clutchy Hopkins. We are looking for him to give him a portion of the money that we’ve made off of his records but we can’t find him anywhere.

He’s been sending us stuff. He sends us, like, some photos, some paintings, some more music, but he won’t let anybody know where he’s at. We’re basically keeping in contact with him through his daughter. So all I can do is basically tell you all that I know. And what I do know about him is that he is… I spoke to him a few times… he’s a really nice guy, but he’s only interested in making music. And it hadn’t been heard until we found it. It was a collection of recordings that he had done with a number of people. A guy named Lort Kenjamin, another guy called Gene Harrington, Dave Ersick… all these artists that he travelled the world with and would record. He uses, like, these really weird micing techniques and whatnot and uses homemade instruments. He is a really trippy guy, really mysterious. I mean, he is nice, but he wants to keep his distance from people.

So you’re the guy who helped putting up the myspace-page, released the music and everything?

You know, there’s a team of people that are trying to put out as much about him as we know. It’s me, my brother and a few other people that we work with that are just trying to let people know just as much as we know. As I said before, we communicate through his daughter, Kelly Hopkins, and that’s basically where we get all of our information from. Like I said I spoke to him a few times as well. But there’s another album coming out that we have, called Clutchy Hopkins and Lord Kenjamin – “Music Is My Medicine”.

The Interview seems weird to me at first. Anyway, I keep asking questions to find out more about Clutchy Hopkins: So, just so people can barely imagine what Clutchy Hopkins might look like: Is he the guy that is shown on the cover of the current album “The Life Of Clutchy Hopkins”?

Yeah that’s him. That is one of the photos that we have.

What can you tell me about the album and his music in general?

Well, the thing is, we’re in negotiation with some bigger record companies, because they want to rerelease “The Life Of Clutchy Hopkins” under a large label. I have representatives from two different labels coming out here on monday, just to sit down and to talk about this. The music on the new album with Lord Kenjamin: It’s gonna be 12 tracks I believe. And it’s his recordings when he was in Kingston Town in Jamaica. He’s been in Jamaica for a while and met that guy named Lord Kenjamin. And while he was there, he studied different micing techniques. It was at a time, like in the ‘80s, where there was a lot of this electronic music and he felt that music was going in a direction that he wasn’t really comfortable with. So, his techniques in recording and whatnot reflects all of that. The music on the Lord Kenjamin and Clutchy Hopkins album has a little more of that, you know, Jamaican flavor. There’s a little bit of Reggae flavor, but it stays true to the Clutchy-Funk like on the one.

Not being able to talk to Clutchy Hopkins himself makes it hard to get the answers to the questions that I had prepared. However, we keep talking about Clutchy and his music for a while.

The music is something that is really special. We’ve just got a review on the Roots’ homepage, on okayplayer.com, and we had a meeting with Egon from Stones Throw last week. We gave him some of the tracks. You know, we’re just trying to get it to as many people as possible. The music has been played on Giant Peterson’s show, Benji B’s show, out here on Divine Forces Radio, which is a huge Hip-Hop supporter, independent supporter. So, the music is being played all over the world. We’ve gotten a couple of offers to do some movie-soundtracks to a couple of movies that are going to be submitted to the Cannes film festival.

Let’s talk about the collaboration with MF Doom. I imagine particularly that project brought a lot of attention to Clutchy Hopkins within the Underground Hip-Hop community.

What happened was, he was in NY and met up with MF Doom. I really don’t know that many facts about that. He sent us that music and we just put it out. It was really weird how it went down. I guess that MF Doom kinda appreciated the… the… not the secrecy but the… mystery of Clutchy, how he didn’t want to be seen. Almost how MF Doom doesn’t want to be seen behind the mask you know.

Could you date the music of Clutchy Hopkins to a certain year or decade?

There are recordings from right around 1978 all the way up until around 1987. There are recordings covering all of that time period. I mean, the music might sound newer, it could be newer than that, but the only thing I have that I can refer to are the dates on the tapes. Most of the tracks off of “The Life of Clutchy Hopkins” were taken from the reel-to-reels that were dated from the mid to the late ‘80s. It was all self produced. He did all the stuff himself. As far as we know, Lord Kenjamin had a studio out there in Jamaica, he did a lot of the work there for “The Life of Clutchy Hopkins” and the Clutchy Hopkins and Lord Kenjamin album. And Clutchy is still sending us new things. There’s a record company called “Jazz & Milk” in Germany that we’re going to be putting out a single with, it’s going to be a ”12. Actually, they want to do a “7 also. I don’t know, we’ll see. We’re trying to get some vocals on the b-side. We’re trying to get Kool Keith on one of the songs. We’re trying to do a Japanese limited edition including the videos, ‘cause there are more parts to the documentary (You can watch some documentary-videos on the current MySpace-site). We’re right now in the middle of filming part three and are still trying to find out just as much information as possible.

Who are the Misled Children?

The Misled Children, “Peoples Market”, that’s what we called there album,… those are the early recordings of Clutchy Hopkins, before we knew actually who he was. We got to talk to Clutchy’s daughter and we asked her about it and she was reluctant to tell us who the recordings were from. So “The Misled Children” is just a name of a collective. She said The Misled Children were some people who she couldn’t disclose the names of. They didn’t want to be known. It was still in the time when Clutchy didn’t want even his name to be out there. So The Misled Children is Clutchy Hopkins recording with other people, other musicians of whom we didn’t get any other information.

How would you describe the music of Clutchy Hopkins?

See, there are a lot of Hip-Hop elements in the music, while the mood and the atmosphere reminds you more of Jazz-music than of Hip-Hop since of the live-instrumentation, the impros, the soli, etc. The Hip-Hop character definitely lies in the drums, it’s all about the drums. The drums and you know what: the baselines! Some of them have the Hip-Hop flavor but, like, the more melodic kind of… like on some he is playing like octaves and whatnot. They’re not so much Hip-Hop but they are a little bit more jazzy. But, when you put the drums and that together it really comes to a beautiful sound! And that’s what really caught our attention. You can see the influence. The Hip-Hop in the ‘80s, you know, most of it was all about sampling. Hip-Hop back then was just really coming alive, growing up. And I think Clutchy was trying to interpret his life through his experiences in the Hip-Hop culture from back then, but with live-instrumentation. Bringing out his interpretation of that through live-instruments and his Jazz-influences also, you can tell that they blend pretty well together. I think the music gets a lot of attention because it’s something new that I think people have been hungering for. Something that is organic, something that’s not just a recycled beat, you know what I’m saying? It has something new to offer even if it’s actually an old sound.

So Clutchy is playing all the instruments for himself?

Yeah, “The Life of Clutchy Hopkins” – that’s just him, as far as we know. It’s just basically him recording on a 16-track. It’s a Behringer 16-track mixer. And he is recording onto, I think, a ¼ Akai reel-to-reel.

Did Clutchy Hopkins ever perform live?

Yeah, actually, he did perform live with Lord Kenjamin and we have a copy of a radio interview that he did in, like, ride around 1978/ 1979. There was a pirate radio station riding around the coast in California and we have two recordings that we are going to be putting out that are radio interviews with Clutchy Hopkins and Lord Kenjamin.

What do you think is Clutchy’s intention by writing and making his music?

Through our conversations with him and through his daughter, it really became obvious that Clutchy is a simple man. He doesn’t want to create relationships with other people, he doesn’t want to read the newspaper, he’s not up on turn events. What he wants to do is express his life, his feelings, his experiences in travelling. He wants to express all this through writing these songs and writing this music. And I think that you can hear the emotion and the experience. In some of the songs there is almost like an Indian flavor, like an eastern Indian flavor. And then in some other songs there’s almost like a little bit of a Native American flavor. It’s all over the board. And, I think, his experiences in life and his recording-techniques blend well together to express the way he is feeling.

We keep talking and talking about Clutchy Hopkins for about 45 minutes until our conversation finally comes to an end:

We’re arranging right now a meeting with Clutchy Hopkins that’s gonna be video-taped and recorded. It’s gonna be like a message, ‘cause Clutchy finally wants to speak to the people who are listening to his music. We’ve talked him into it and he has agreed to, when the time is right, come out and speak to the people. Clutchy is really excited about people, especially the younger generation, being supportive of his music. You know, when you buy his CDs they aren’t $20s or whatnot, you can’t pick up his music really cheap and that is what we’re trying to do we’re just trying to get the music out, ‘cause people deserve to be able to listen to the music. Thant’s basically it I guess. Thank you for everything Matt. And everyone out there who reads this: I hope you got a slight idea of Clutchy and his music. Listen and enjoy.