The Afghan Whigs present their newest album in the AB

The title of the new Afghan Whigs’ new album could not be more representative of a band that has always had drama and soul in plenty. On In Spades, frontman Greg Dulli travels back to the ten year-old Huckleberry Finn he once was. “I would tell him to stay on the path.”

Whether the tag on the collar of his puffer jacket is right, Greg Dulli asks me when he stands up in a café in Amsterdam North, a boat stop over from the centre. Outside it is raining more than during Noah’s Flood, inside the 52-year-old singer from Cincinnati has lit some candles for us. Cosy, as the Dutch would say. But cosy is not the word that we most associate with this notorious rock survivor.

The frontman of the indie rock icons that formed in 1986, who is also the lead singer of The Twilight Singers and The Gutter Twins, has something of a reputation. Mostly of being a pain in the ass who was not always very nice to the people around him and to himself. The death of the Soundgarden figurehead Chris Cornell has recently reminded us of how self-destructive the grunge generation has really been.

Dulli is no exception; he pumped himself full of drink and drugs, almost died of an overdose, and was in a coma for a while when a group of angry bouncers beat him up after a concert in 1999. But that’s all in the past. Today, Dulli looks radiant, the only indulgence he allows himself to succumb to seems to be good food – the singer has gained a few kilos over the past few years. But, he tells us, he is finally enjoying life.

“Run / Seek thy fear / All come down / Disappear,” Dulli sings on “Arabian Heights”, a song that typically combines Led Zeppelin guitar solo’s, a dash of Motown, and Dulli’s ravaged vocals. On In Spades, the second album that the Whigs released since getting back together in 2012 after an eleven-year hiatus, he has found the courage to look his demons in the eye without exorcising them completely.

The title is a metaphor for the way Dulli lives now: in the best way possible. Unfortunately, it was joined by the news that guitarist Dave Rosser had been diagnosed with inoperable colon cancer. “We did not know Dave was ill until the record was done,” he says. “I still had one set of lyrics to write, that became ‘I Got Lost’. We don’t know if Dave will recover, my good thoughts are all I have. We don’t know if he’ll ever return to the Whigs, but he’s here now. That’s all I need to know.”

When you read the title of the album in this light, it takes on a completely different meaning.
Greg Dulli: Yeah, “in abundance”. Wealth to me is love, friendship, happiness, trust, beauty. Those are the only things that really exist. Money comes and goes, some people have it, some people don’t, some people have a lot of it and are miserable. Some people have none and are the happiest in the world. All you really have are the gifts between us all: your family, your friends, your experiences, your livelihood.

Is that something you have come to realise more now than before?
Dulli: Oh, man. I can tell you that I’ve been really present for the last six, seven years. Aware of my good fortune, very grateful for the life I’ve been able to live and for the people that care about me. As you get older, you’re supposed to get wiser. I think it all finally caught up to me. [Laughs] Not complaining about what I didn’t have, but celebrating what I do have. It’s that thought that you might get hit by a bus tomorrow. My time with Dave or anyone that I love is incredibly valuable and very precious. That is what the record means.

Last year, Uncut Magazine summarised the 20th anniversary edition of the Black Love album as “drama and soul in spades”. I found that a very apt description.
Dulli: [Surprised] Cool...I hadn’t seen that. I’ll tell you something I haven’t told many people before: at the end of 1999 I wrote down three titles and put them in a drawer. Those titles were Dynamite Steps, Sunset Machine, and In Spades. Two of them are now album titles, one of them is the title of a song that never came out – and it’s the name of the wifi network at my house. [Laughs] Calling this record In Spades has in a way fulfilled a silent contract that I had with myself. Now I can move on and take it out of my drawer.

There is a positive side to the album, but a shadow hangs over it too, which is hinted at in the dark artwork.
Dulli: Yeah, it’s a woodcut by a Brazilian artist, Ramon Rodrigues Melo. The first song that I wrote for this record, was called “Demon in Profile”. When I saw that woodcut, I thought, it’s that demon! So, I contacted him and it clicked. I have a lot of spooky art in my house. My cleaning lady is from Mexico, she’s very Catholic. I’ve had to assure her several times that I’m not a devil worshipper or anything like that. I’ve caught her in my house burning sage. [Laughs]

But she’s wonderful. Every week when she comes, I make her breakfast, and we sit down and talk. And then she’s like, [Spanish accent] Greg, why all of the dead things?

“So if black is invisible, baby / And fact indivisible, baby / Be the light,” you sing in “The Spell”, nevertheless one of the more spooky sounding songs on the record.
Dulli: There’s always been a darkness in me. I sort of stayed there...and now I can visit it, without it being complicated. And stay in the light. You can’t know one without the other. If there is only darkness, you’re just in a cave.

In the same song, you also sing “Here come flat top candy cane / He come slitherin’ down again”. Is that a reference to Lennon’s “Come Together”?
Dulli: Yeah. When we’re recording, I do scat versions of vocals. It helps me to find the melody. I have a riff, and I do like, zip zap zibbedi zap. When I went back and listened to what I sang, I was like, oh, I know where that came from. [Smiles]

You’re not afraid to get sued? John Lennon got sued by Chuck Berry’s publisher because the lyrics and the melody were similar to Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me”.
Dulli: Wow. Well, Flat Top Candy Cane, that’s my nickname for you. [Laughs] You can’t prosecute that. And, if I got sued by the Beatles, that’s free publicity.

Speaking of the Beatles: at the 1994 MTV Movie Awards you did a raucous version of “Helter Skelter” with the Backbeat Band.
Dulli: Oh, man. Thurston Moore fell all over me and hurt my knee so badly that it was all swollen up afterwards. But that was a hell of a performance.

You were really losing it.
Dulli: Yeah. There are two songs where I also cut loose vocally on this record, “The Spell” and “Toy Automatic”. The first one is a mean, evil rocker, the second one is more melancholy, a goodbye to someone I never said goodbye to. They’re sort of the yin and yang of the album.
A lot of this record was recorded live.

Take “Birdland”, the first song. I had never written those words down, so I sang it off the top of my head, in one take. Which means I channelled the song. I didn’t go back to it to change anything. What you hear is what I heard come out of my mouth. That has only happened a couple of other times in my life, with “Front Street” from the Gutter Twins album, “Now You Know” on Gentlemen, and “Tonight” on Congregation.

Those first words are “I was a child.” Going back to childhood is a big part of In Spades.
Dulli: Birdland was a neighbourhood where I used to hang out when I was a kid. One of the streets was called Oriole, which is also a song title. The outro to “Oriole” became the basis of the chord progression to “Toy Automatic”. These songs all started to interact with each other, they’re all a circling of the material.

In the run-up to the record, I kept having lucid dreams about my childhood, very specific moments, looking at myself doing the things that I would do when I was ten. Playing basketball with my friends or riding my bike through a field. My parents didn’t have a lot of money, but we didn’t need it. I grew up near a river so I went swimming a lot. In a lot of ways, I was Huckleberry Finn. I ran around with my dog, barefoot all the time.

What triggered that?
Dulli: I don’t know. We did this whole record without knowing that Dave was sick. So I’m wondering if I was trying to connect something. There is a shadow, and the shadow was his cancer. Without sounding too strange, I was trying to find the source of the shadow. And looking through my own life.

Were you a happy kid?
Dulli: There were some less happy times, but yeah, I was a happy kid. As I went through life and started meeting other people, and hearing shitty stories about people’s lives and childhood, I would never fucking complain.

I saw a picture of your mom wearing a hoodie, saying “Who the fuck is Greg Dulli?”
Dulli: She’s my tiny little angel. [Laughs] My mom was seventeen when I was born, she was still in high school. My father was nineteen, but he wasn’t around a lot. Because there is not a big gap in our ages, my mother was kind of like a friend. She played Motown records all the time. So when I was covering Motown songs with the Whigs, it came very naturally to me. It’s what I knew.

I was born in 1965, a great year for music, you had Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Motown and Stax were flying high, Curtis Mayfield was making records with the Impressions... All of it being transferred to me by my teenage mom. While my dad was telling me I had to look for a real job because I was throwing my life away, my mother was always supportive. I would draw and write poetry, and she encouraged me to get better.

What would you tell the kid with the knowledge that you have now?
Dulli: I would tell him to stay on the path. You’re on the path, you see the path, don’t leave the path. [Smiles]

Have you been off the path too often?
Dulli: Yes. Do you know the phrase “Careful what you wish for?” I started playing in bands when I was a teenager. I wanted to tour and make records and be famous. But when it started to happen, around Congregation and Gentlemen, it fucking freaked me out. I liked playing, but I didn’t like the attention. It got strange and I moved away from it. That’s when I started taking drugs... A, it’s the classic.

After the Whigs broke up and before the Twilight Singers, I didn’t really play for a couple of years. I bought a bar in LA and managed it. I loved not being on tour. I woke up and went to a job every day, working for myself. I would pack my lunch and go in and do the inventory and the deliveries.

Some friends helped me to build a DJ booth, and we were having dance nights. It was amazing. But then I started missing the playing again. That’s when I formed the Twilight Singers. But having a break from it all helped me remember what made it so rewarding. And I vowed not to be the same fuck-up anymore as I was before.

You’re 52. Do you look at life differently now, given that 2016 was such a cruel year for pop music?
Dulli: Yeah, the Reaper was very hungry last year. The death of Prince probably affected me most. His perfectionism always encouraged me to improve. I would have loved to work with him, but unfortunately it never happened. So now I just focus on Jimmy Page. [Laughs] Page is a weirdo. I have questions for him. First of all, what the fuck have you been doing since Led Zeppelin? I want to hang out with him, ask him about his art. And collaborate. I reach out to him every year. And I’m going to do it again. One time it’s going to happen.

> The Afghan Whigs. 15/06, 20.00, Ancienne Belgique, Brussels