The Muse

By PATRICK FAGAN

GREG Dulli is bringing a “monster” six-piece Afghan Whigs to Ireland on Monday.

But asked if the beast inside himself is calmer than in his volatile 20s and 30s, he laughs: “I fucking hope so.”

The Whigs’ final Irish show before their 2001 split threatened to explode into violence when a punter heckled the Ohio-born frontman.

The offensive comment, delivered during a short re-tuning break in a storming set at Dublin’s Mean Fiddler in 1999, wasn’t memorable…unlike his target’s response.

Dulli told his inebriated detractor he’d take his “girlfriend backstage and fuck her” if he didn’t shut up. Almost sixteen years later, the Cincinnati man is a much more contrite and reflective man.

Bristling at the memory, he says: “I’m telling you man, on that tour, it sounds like somebody who’s on a bunch of drugs…

“I’ll put it to you this way, if someone heckled me, and that was the best I could come up with now, I would be sad.”

Five years later, Greg was back in Dublin playing with his new band, The Twilight Singers, and had already mellowed significantly.

The best of the hi-jinks in Whelan’s that night involved him trying to slip his hotel key into a girl’s back pocket…from the stage. It seemed leaving the Whigs had made life more bearable.

He explains: “How can I say this, I had anger issues in my early days, and I self medicated, and I was not shy about sharing my pain in whatever way…sometimes in a poignant way, sometimes in an absolutely inelegant way that served no-one.

“So, those are things you learn about. Time goes on and, hopefully, you mature somewhat so you can actually be taken around in public without lashing out.”

However, some of this anger - and a fair bit of love and heartache - did fuel one of the mid-Nineties’ hidden musical gems, the Whigs’ third release, and first on a major, Gentlemen.

The album was sandwiched between another two, Congregation and Black Love, that shared the theme of desperate longing and loss.

Dulli says: “Love is a part of many people’s continuing journey. Gentlemen and Black Love, Congregation before that, those three records were written during stormy times in my life.

“I was chronicling what was happening to me in real-time. When those things happen or don’t happen, you can’t predict them. I’m certainly not going to write about something that I’m not feeling or experiencing.

"Most likely, those things will never happen again, and they exist in that time. In a lot of ways I can go back through my records and they’re like photographs…I can remember the me that existed in that time.

"Certainly, Gentlemen, in particular, was a crazy time in my life. But I still enjoy singing those songs today, so there’s a peacefulness in that too.”

Following the Whigs’ break-up, Dulli toured and recorded five albums with the Twilight Singers, and one album with former Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan, under the name The Gutter Twins.

Then, in 2012, the old band reunited for a string of shows that garnered rave reviews. The expanded Whigs line-up featured original bassist John Curley and lead guitarist Rick McCollum, the latter of whom fell out of the picture before the recording of their stomping 2014 comeback album, Do To The Beast.

Dulli smiles as he admits he relishes playing as a six-piece - minus Rick, far left of the photo above.

He says: “I love it, it’s a monster of a band. There’s many gears to the band, it’s got a great dynamic. It switches gears with ease. All of the players are monstrously talented.”

But asked if there is any way back for Rick, Dulli gets suddenly solemn.
He says: “I miss playing with a version of Rick that existed a long time ago. Honestly, I missed playing with that guy on the reunion tour in 2012, because he was not there either.

“That’s really all I gotta say about it. Rick is not who he used to be, and I don’t think we’ll ever see that person again.”

Dulli lights up again, however, when talking about the upcoming tour, which kicks off in Dublin’s Academy on Monday night.

“I am so looking forward to it. We rehearsed last week and it sounds amazing, and I’m so excited to play.”

And there’s still plenty of that cheeky swagger about him, even if the anger is gone.

It’s put to him that former Red House Painters singer, and current Sun Kil Moon man, Mark Kozelek has been bemoaning the fact there’s no “hot chicks” but plenty of “guys in anoraks” at his own shows nowadays.

Dulli laughs again: “I love Mark Kozelek, he’s great. Women (still) show up (at our shows), that’s all I know. Although, years ago, the Gutter Twins were playing in Belfast, and I looked out there, and I was like, ‘Where are the chicks?’

“That was the only night I remember thinking, there won’t be a line at the ladies’ room tonight. But we do all right with the ladies.”

The Afghan Whigs play The Academy in Dublin this coming Monday, February 2. Their comeback album, Do To The Beast, and 21st anniversary version of Gentlemen are both out now.

Below are Spotify links to tracks from 1996’s Congregation album and, 18 years later, Do To The Beast. (Rather annoyingly, Spotify seems to have been asked to remove Gentlemen while its 21st anniversary version is in the shops.)

The Afghan Whigs - Do To The Beast

The Afghan Whigs - Black Love

By PATRICK FAGAN

There’s a song I can’t listen to without crying.  Nearly every time.  And if I don’t cry, it’s because I’ve somehow been distracted and I’m not really listening to it.

It’s called I Watched The Film The Song Remains The Same, and it's by Sun Kil Moon; a moniker used by the 47-year-old US songwriter Mark Kozelek and the various musicians that play with him.

I have to write about it because it’s the first song that has ever compelled me to do so.  It inhabits me as I listen to it, and lays dormant within me, just below the surface of my eggshell heart, until I listen to it again.  And weep again.  It’s a whole new experience for me: it’s like scratch-and-sniff but it’s hear-it-and-weep.

Mark Kozelek’s music entered my life in 1994.  The first album, Down Colorful Hill, by his first band, Red House Painters, was given to me by the only other person in my school year who liked bands on the 4AD label. (Thanks Nigel!)  I was 16 at the time and was getting heavily into introversion.  So much so that I was already writing my own melancholic odes to adolescent love, and to other intricacies of the heart of which I thought I knew more than I did.

Down Colorful Hill both cradled and changed me.  I had it on constant rotation with what has since become my all-time favourite album, Gentlemen by Afghan Whigs.  These records combined irrevocably altered what I thought I knew about myself, about life, about love and about music.

“So it’s not, loaded stadiums or ball parks.
And we’re not, kids on swing sets, on the black tyre.
And I thought, at 15, that I’d have it down by 16.
And 24, keeps breathing in my face… like a mad whore.”

Following a sparse, reverb-laden, plucked-guitar intro, those are the very first lyrics of Down Colorful Hill’s opening track, 24.  As far as I can tell, it’s about everything not improving with age.  A sadness that doesn’t lift with time.  As a sensitive, introverted 16-year-old, I thought that I would have had it “down by 16”, too.  When I eventually turned 24, I still didn’t.  Damn it, Mark was right.

Red House Painters – 24

Add another 12 years to my tally, and 23 to Mark’s, and we’re both still down with the non-musical blues.

This bit of I Watched The Film… chokes me every time:

“I got a recording contract in 1992, and from there my name and my band and my audience grew.
And since that time so much has happened to me,
But I discovered I cannot shake melancholy.
For 46 years now I cannot break the spell,
I’ll carry it throughout my life,
And probably carry it to hell.
I’ll go to my grave with my melancholy,
And my ghost will echo my sentiments for all eternity.”

Jesus.  That is black.  The last line even shows his wearied distain at his dramatic self for singing about it.  It’s the most honest description of depression I’ve ever heard, read or seen.  It shows the unbeatable beast in all its horrible beauty: its longevity, its patience, its strength, its damning nature, its part in shaping some of the most powerful music ever written.

Back in 1998, when I’d just turned 20, I almost met Mark.  Our almost-meeting was as powerful a game-changer in my life as his music.  He played the then-Mean Fiddler (now Village) in Dublin in August.  It was a good gig but had turned out rockier and more meandering than I’d hoped. (More straight-up acoustic pain would’ve been nice.)  I remember seeing a hammered-drunk fan slumped with his head right in the middle of a PA speaker, and thinking to myself: “Well, there are some more intense fans than me.”  My long-term ex-girlfriend was also there … with her dad.  I’m pretty sure I was responsible for that double conversion.

Following the show, Mark graciously stuck around to talk to some fans.  I lurked nervously, awaiting my turn to tell him how his music meant so much to me … got me through so many dark nights … thought me so much about real love, heartache and pain etc.
I was one person away when a roadie approached and said: “Hey Mark, there’s a girl over there who really wants into your pants.”
Mark walked off in pursuit.  Everything I believed in died.  A powerful lesson about art and life, and the mixing thereof, was learned.  The base humanity of the situation appalled my idealistic soul.

Ridiculously, the art/life equation was rebalanced by Mark himself at a solo gig in Dublin’s HQ venue (now The Academy) in 2000.  After berating a boozy fan - and by extension the entire audience - for drunkenly and repeatedly asking for his classic tune Katy Song, he launched into the story of that night with that girl back in 1998.  Turned out she was so drunk she ended up crawling into his hotel wardrobe and used it as a toilet.  It was a miserable brand of justice, but one fitting for the rift he obliviously caused between himself and a fan he’d never met.

The honesty, though, to tell that story resurrected my appreciation of him somewhat - even if the following 11-12 years were littered with albums I felt fell some distance short of his earlier output.  His 2008 and 2010 Sun Kil Moon releases, April and Admiral Fell Promises respectively, made me a different type of sad; I grieved for the death of the music of someone I considered a kindred soul.

Laying it on a bit thick, aren’t I?  But that’s my sorry connection to his music.  When the music became more, let’s say, musician-y, and the lyrics became less tortured and personal, I lost my connection to it.

And this is the main - and saddest - reason why I cry every time I properly listen to I Watched The Film The Song Remains The Same.  I mean, yes, the lyrics are beautiful, smart and thought-provoking, and the stories they tell are unbearably moving.  But the key ingredient is that his misery is fully, unquestionably and seemingly eternally confirmed.  I feel bad for him that he can feel that low, and I feel transcendently happy/sad that I have music in my life again that nourishes the darkness within my own soul.

That said, the 2014 album the song comes from, Benji, does finish with a humorous track, Ben’s My Friend, that actually makes me laugh every time I hear it.  I’m not sure where this leaves us.

Sun Kil Moon – I Watched The Film The Song Remains the Same

Picture of Mark Kozelek by Gabriel Shepard