Last night, I spent much of the evening reading Bob Gendron’s Gentlemen, the newest entry in Continuum Books’ 33 1/3 series, this one on the Afghan Whigs’ 1993 classic. The book is pretty standard history, though with a few good stories – such as Greg Dulli cutting six keeper vocals high on his birthday while trying to impress a stripper – and a nice digression into the cover photo shot in imitation of one by Nan Goldin.
The book brought to mind the year or so around Gentlemen when the Afghan Whigs were as good a live show as I saw. They played the Howlin’ Wolf at the start of the Gentlemen tour, and the set included a long, loose treatment of “My World is Empty without You” a la Uptown Avondale and finished with a cover of “Purple Rain” with openers Love Jones joining for extra guitar and vocals. After the album had run its course, they played Tipitina’s as a road-hardened band. The spare, haunting soul covers were set aside in favor of a heart punch of a performance, most memorably during “What Jail is Like.”
As impressive as the band that played Tipitina’s was, there was more personality in the one that played the Wolf, and in 1997 when they played a Thanksgiving night show at the Wolf on the Black Love tour, they had a ton of personality, though it seemed like it was all Dulli’s. Instead of an opening band, an hour or so of Prince played on the PA – I’ve always assumed it was Dulli’s decision – then they came on around midnight with Henry Butler on piano and a horn section of Roderick and Duane Paulin and Brian Murray. They slammed into Curtis Mayfield’s “If There’s Hell Below, We’re All Going to Go,” an apt choice for Dulli as the song’s as conflicted as the Whigs themselves. A celebration of unity as we all go down together perfectly suited a band’s whose lyrics dealt with the complex repercussions of being a cad – including the pleasure of seducing someone because you can. That night, he took his fascination with contradictory impulses into the business of music and embodied the indulgent rock star, performing as though he were so bulletproof and beloved that there’s nothing he could have done onstage that would have repelled the crowd. Shoot up? Why not? Give or get a blow job? Who’s offering? It was magnetic, though it was also so long that no one I know saw the end of the show, me included. Four songs from it were packaged in limited edition with 1965 when it came out, and it includes a version of “Debonair” that he takes five from because he needs a drink. As the band plays on, he toasts the audience by quoting Dennis Hopper – who else? – in Blue Velvet: “Here’s to your fuck, Frank.”
The audaciousness of that night carried over for me into the next couple of Afghan Whigs albums, where he decided that despite his remarkable, middle American whiteness, he was a blaxploitation movie pimp, a character out of Across 110th Street trying to get over, and took on race and class tensions with equal blitheness (if not equal insight). Just like the Thanksgiving show, the interesting tensions were less in the music than in the relationship between the band and its references, though the records are better than people seem to give them credit for.
I never found Dulli in the Twilight Singers as compelling because in his lyrics, he stopped trying to embrace the opposing poles and allowed himself to sink into disolution, and onstage, the beef that accompanies indulgence made him look more like a high school football player who could get any girl he wanted but hasn’t realized that 10 years and his cheerleader-fucking days passed him by while he was busy selling insurance.
For those who missed the EP, here’s the live version of “If There’s Hell Below”:
