In praise of the Afghan Whigs
What are we going to do about the Afghan Whigs? This was a band from Ohio that sprung up around the same time as all those other bands that cropped up like herbicide-resistant weeds in the wake of Nevermind - you know who I mean: Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots - and seemed, if the amount of bank that appeared to be getting pumped into their cover-artwork alone was any indicator, heading to the same well-deserved cultural grave in which history was and still is going to bury all of them. I filed the Afghan Whigs away as a band to avoid - not difficult, I just needed to stay put - and left it at that.
My friend Davy though, whose taste is generally unimpeachable, always got this certain tone in his voice when mentioning the Afghan Whigs - a tone which was recognizably one not only of the affection one has, say, for Kiss, but of the respect which one reserves for rock bands who seem actually in the business of accomplishing something, like, for example, New Order around the time of Low-Life. To summarise his opinion: whatever you might think of any individual album, you had to give it up for the Afghan Whigs, whose project was so obviously interesting as to render any argument on the subject petty. This seemed as odd to me as it would if had been saying: “Oh, sure, everybody’s got differences of opinion, but the one thing we can agree on is the greatness of Mother Love Bone.” Being stubborn, it took me a while to shake myself free of biases I’d formed without bases and to actually sit down with an Afghan Whigs album. I first listened to Gentlemen on headphones while laying on a friend's living room floor, staring up at the 100-watt light bulb, sweating out the poison of a long night.
As they say in the charismatic churches: Jesus Christ.
Gentlemen was released in 1993 and was the most technically accomplished of the Afghan Whigs' albums: the guitar work shimmers like fresh snow. It is a very young man’s album, and it’s about sex and cheap heroin. Anger shoots from its eleven songs like sparks from a bonfire. It is wilfully perverse (the cover models are a couple of young children, the girl recumbent in bed, the boy sitting on its edge, the whole scene highly suggestive of weighty adult conflicts) and more than a little impressed with itself. To me it is the touchstone against which everything Greg Dulli produces* is going to have to be compared, because even though I think that 1965 is a better Afghan Whigs album**, Gentlemen is more arrogant. It reeks of youthful ambition and for that it is glorious. In it, Dulli meant once and for all to solve the problem of sexuality. I am reminded of what seems to me the natural response to Thoreau’s claim that he means to “suck out all the marrow” of life. "Just you Henry, in the woods, all by yourself?" Gentlemen was going to impress you or die trying. It didn’t do all of what it set out to do but the heavy perfume of its all-encompassing desire is quite enough to make it a completely essential album. Some of the songs are so tight in their small, determined perfection that you can almost feel the band burning up their talent like fuel; it would not have been any surprise at all if, after Gentlemen, none of them had had any talent left at all. “Debonair” alone, the album’s blistering centrepiece, is more fury than most artists will be lucky enough to harness in their entire lives.
The result is a breath of fresh air, though fresh air is the last thing Gentlemen wants you to think of: its heart lies with the smoky rooms and plaque-encrusted arteries of lives lived badly. By the time one gets through the ballad, “My Curse,” sung achingly by Scrawl’s Jody Stephens, one is utterly terrified. You can just let Gentlemen play and enjoy it for rocking out with greater skill and enthusiasm than most bands can muster, but if you search its depths, it’ll move you.
* Twilight Singers, Gutter Twins with Mark Lanegan, a couple of solo albums
** 1965 is an album that swings with a playful, lifting self-assurance. It's also the one genuinely soulful Afghan Whigs release. Compared to Gentlemen, 1965 is much tamer. The melodies are made of bits and pieces from the Bachman Turner Overdrive songbook, which is the most underrated source of inspiration in all of music, and the musicianship is sterling. The piano in particular you can feel in your shoulders; it makes you rock back and forth in your chair. Dulli’s singing is all easy swagger now, having been down in the gutter enough times to know when to hold back, so that it’s both funny and very, very sad when, in “Crazy,” he glides over the lines:
So what’s going to happen to you now?
Therapy, the pharmacy
The songs on 1965 find a happy balance between the ‘60s soul that Dulli has always loved and the hard guitar rock that is every band's birthright; you could dance to most of them if you were so inclined. With the Afghan Whigs you had a project with a traceable change in tone between albums. The band matured with you. If Gentlemen was all about living dangerously, 1965 embodies the point of living dangerously: to come to an understanding of how good you had it before the guilt and the shame began to stick to you (and that the benefit of coming to that understanding is that it makes the shame taste even better).
The Afghan Whigs - Gentlemen http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRiaYIIkLmw
The Afghan Whigs - Debonair http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C26BI1kJdkk
And from 1965, Something Hot http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e34dIGEgHVw&feature=related