With a soulful sound and soul-baring lyrics, the Afghan Whigs rode the post-Nirvana boom to the big leagues. Their frontman explains his exploration of the male ego – and how Usher got the band back together
The Afghan Whigs were always heavier than their grunge-era brethren. Not musically – their turbulent, sophisticated rock was rooted in soul and funk, and frontman Greg Dulli says the group only embraced distortion in order to be heard over the volume of metalhead drummer Steve Earle’s playing. “Any kind of jangle wasn’t gonna work.” But Dulli’s lyrics, inspired by the likes of Motown bards Holland/Dozier/Holland, were pitch-black, depicting lovers in co-dependent cycles of betrayal and recrimination. Afghan Whigs songs take place in a world where sin is irresistible, punishment inevitable and some kind of judgment inescapable.
“My songs acknowledge consequence, more than they deal in judgment,” Dulli says, between sips of water in the bar of a London hotel. Forty years on from their formation, the Whigs are resurgent. Their new album, Soft Control, ably holds its own with earlier dark masterpieces such as their 1993 breakthrough Gentlemen, and its bleakly funky conceptual follow-up, 1996’s Black Love – records that affirmed their frontman as alt-rock’s poet of arch romantic dysfunction. “I understood sorrow and loss and loneliness from an early age,” he says. His dad was the youngest of 14; several of Dulli’s uncles died when he was young. “I had been there, so why wouldn’t I explore it?”
Possessed of devilish charm, Dulli was raised Catholic during a “very Huckleberry Finn childhood” in Hamilton, Ohio. “I was an altar boy,” he grins. “My attitude was, if I’m going to church, I might as well be on stage. I had a great seat, could scope out the talent. Clearly, I was into the attention.” By age 12, however, he was “asking hard questions. Like, what’s with all the kid killing? ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son’? Not necessary. I told Mom: I’m not going to church any more, I don’t believe in it.” Dulli leers “We both know God ain’t real, baby” on one of the new album’s songs.
Dulli’s dad “wasn’t around a lot”, so he was raised by his mother, grandmother and aunts. “When you’re surrounded by ladies you gotta work hard to get away with stuff, because they’re vigilant. But they were also nurturing, supportive and encouraging.” And his mum had a killer record collection: “Motown 45s and Jesus Christ Superstar,” Dulli remembers, smiling. Their influence would prove indelible, as would that of his first gig: psychedelic soulsters the 5th Dimension at Ohio state fair in 1973. “I developed a crush on Marilyn McCoo immediately. They did Let the Sunshine In, and her husband – Billy Davis Jr – went off on his full-on gospel lift. I was eight years old, but I was high. Some kids want to be an astronaut or a cowboy; I always wanted to be a rock star.”
He played his first gig at 14, wrote his first song at 15, and spent college in the pit for shows by Ramones, Hüsker Dü and Black Flag. Inspired, he formed the Black Republicans, whose shows were frequented by a bearded guy who regularly told him, “I’m better than your bassist.”
“And he was,” Dulli adds. The bearded guy, John Curley, asked if he and guitarist friend Rick McCollum could sit in. Soon, the Black Republicans were done, drummer Earle enlisted and the Afghan Whigs were ascendant. Their first rehearsal was Halloween 1986. “We played One Day by the Church, Psychedelic Shack by the Temptations and Powderfinger by Neil Young, and fucked around with 39 Lashes; Rick loved Jesus Christ Superstar as much as I did.”
With their second album, 1990’s Up in It, the group became one of the first non-Seattle signings to the Sub Pop label – who had released Nirvana’s debut – building a buzz with their eclectic live cover versions. “We could learn them fast,” Dulli says. “Had no desire to be a covers band. But eight songs into our show and we wanna play Mandinka by Sinéad O’Connor? We would. We were onstage one night, a couple of us tripping on acid, and I told John, play the bass line to Hall & Oates’ Maneater. I started riffing on the Supremes’ My World Is Empty Without You. People freaked. We were subverting it, but still honouring it.”
The Whigs wore their influences on their sleeves, particularly soul music. Further covers followed, on stage and as B-sides: Freda Payne’s Band of Gold; TLC’s Creep; the Supremes’ Come See About Me. “That song is so desperate,” Dulli says, admiringly. “Motown songs are dark, but the music is peppy and happy. I thought, what if the music was more sympathetic to the lyrics? It darkens the song, it changes the meaning. And it’s exciting. You listen to the words, and it’s so awful what’s happening to that person.”
As the Whigs completed Congregation, their second album for Sub Pop, Nirvana became unlikely superstars. “Watching those dudes knock Michael Jackson off the No 1 spot … that escalated quickly,” Dulli says. When the post-Nevermind gold rush started, “our lives changed”. The group signed with Elektra, a major label. “But we weren’t worrying over if we’d be as big as Pearl Jam. We’d created our own sound.”
Gentlmen was the product of Dulli’s “very stormy relationship” with a woman credited on the sleeve as Miss Ruby Belle, and whose voice had graced Congregation (her true identity has been the subject of fevered conjecture among Whigs devotees). “We were gone all the time, and nature abhors a vacuum,” he remembers. “I came back from a seven-week tour and my girlfriend had a new boyfriend, and he’d been in our bed. I asked her, ‘How dare you do this to me?’ Even though I’d done it to her all the time on tour. I was confronted with my own hypocrisy. Gentlemen became my exploration of my culpability.”
Gentlemen also served as an examination of male ego, sexuality and chauvinism. “I’d grown up surrounded by women, but I come from a very patriarchal society,” he says. “Homemakers stayed home, made babies and dinner and shut the fuck up. I had to learn how to be, for lack of a better word, a feminist – to realise, there is another side to this.” The song What Jail Is Like posited fear of commitment as existential panic; Be Sweet had Dulli playing a suave lothario with “a dick for a brain”, using said brain to “sell my ass to you”. On My Curse, meanwhile, Dulli put forth “the counterpoint – I put myself in her head as best I could”, and drafted his friend, Marcy Mays of Ohio indie-rockers Scrawl, to sing its lyric of helpless, self-destructive infatuation. “I micromanaged Marcy’s performance,” Dulli remembers, “until she said: ‘I really wish you’d get the fuck out of here and let me do this by myself.’”
When Dulli played his mother the record, he told me in 2004, “she couldn’t believe I still got laid”. Today, he says that midway through touring Gentlemen in 1993, he struck Be Sweet from the setlist, never to return. “It was a great lyric,” he says, but its central “dick for a brain” bon mot “became the pull-quote for every magazine story about us. I was like, ‘I’m not singing this fucking song – I don’t want to be that guy any more.’ I felt like an animal in a zoo.”
The Whigs’ next album, the excellent Black Love, spun a film-noirish yarn, fulfilling “concept album ambitions” Dulli had developed since obsessing over Quadrophenia as a kid. “It is wildly misunderstood, and still one of my favourite things I’ve ever done,” he says. But the hits Elektra had been banking on never materialised. They moved to Columbia, releasing their next LP in 1998: 1965 was an open bid for mainstream success. “That was the only time I tried to write a hit song,” Dulli says. “That was our ‘the self-loathing is gone – it’s party-time’ album. And I loved the freedom: thank God, I don’t have to be in fucking Hamlet again.”
They toured with Aerosmith, “the nicest band” Dulli has ever toured with. Still, commercial success didn’t arrive. “By the end, we were three guys going in three different directions.”