My Secret Soul Brother: Greg Dulli
It’s well known that in American culture we like our heroes to have a dark side. And I am feeling my demons, today boy! Now, I usually spend my musings prosthelytizing about the cheerier or more optimistic side of music, but today I have my trench coat on, I’m walking down lonely streets in the rain and fog, smoking a clipped cigarette and cursing most of what comes into my sights, with a tragically romantic wanderlust and absolutely painful coveting longing aching deep in my heart.
Today I am counting all the things I am not blessed with, I am listing all the things which I go without. (Don’t get me wrong: I know that, as Kant said, “ Ingratitude is the essence of vileness. So be it. Let me be vile for a while.)
What is that human gravitation toward the melancholy? The seemingly incontrollable urge to rule out the beauty in the world, to let the pessimist in me keep court with my demons, to allow the anti-hero in me become surrounded by, as Courtney once wrote, “weird, strange, insane sexual vistas that haunt me and make me feel as though I am going insane.” Maybe I can get to the church, ask God to remove the lust in my heart, my unnatural preoccupation with sex and death and destruction. (Alternately Freud said the studying of those subjects is actually the most natural thing in the world.)
No-one is awake/ I’m back at my cliff/ Still throwing things off…
These periods of wayward wandering come and go for all of us. I know you; I know I’m not the only one. Last night after I left a stellar show in town, I decided to take my trouble down to the water for a private little after hours listening party of my very own.
My recreational and professional lives bring me into contact with dozens of people every week, even sometimes on a daily basis. Which I love, but I am deep down inside an introvert. I love you all, but I am exhausted. I am at lying down at cliff’s edge, letting my arm hang over a steep precipice under which harsh landscape spreads to the edge of the forever in all directions.
Don’t worry, I’ll come back.
But for now I want to brood, to sudor for succor that I know will never show.
Anyways, last night around 2 AM, I parked at my favorite secret spot by the Atlantic and played through an hours worth of tunes from my own favorite stash of songs to self-destruct by, with the majority of selections coming from my fellow tortured artist, the one and only Mr. Greg Dulli.
Dulli gained an international following back in the mid-nineties as frontman for the Afghan Whigs. Artfully combining the musical elements of soul and funk with classic rock and punk (in college, Dulli had two posters on his wall—Earth, Wind, & Fire and Pink Floyd), the Whigs broke onto the scene with their arresting and heady blend of sound in 1994 with their second album, Gentlemen.
Dulli’s handsomely macabre subject matter is filled with all the things we feel but none of us talk about, all the hell we put each other and our own selves through for something as ephemeral as an illicit and feverish stolen evening of wonton and manic passion. “I must admit/ When so inclined/ I tend to lose it than confront my mind/ It’s all a lie/ It’s nearly dead/ It’s in our love/ Baby it’s in our bed…”
After the Whigs broke up, Dulli moved onto the project he currently inhabits to this day, The Twilight Singers. They played at the Trocadero in Philly last week, where I had asked a more than obliging Dulli back in ’96 to smoke a marijuana cigarette with me and sign an French import vinyl single for “When We Two Parted” after a Whigs show.
That’s still to this day one of my favorite meet and greets of all time. He was such a bad ass. The way he stumbled out of the Troc after playing to a sold out crowd and onto the street to light up a fresh cigarette and spend a little time with me, a 17 year old girl clutching a record, whiskey and god knows what else pinning his eyes…You could just tell the guy lived it, head to toe.
The Afghan Whigs
So Mr. Dulli and Co., that’s what I was mostly listening to last night as I stared out at the water, assured only in the knowledge that experience is esoteric, and universal truth, outside of the realm of scientific law, is largely a myth.
All I really know is that I have my holy moments. To stack them together, to try to take these events and give them sense or reason or causation or a culminating effect, to try to string them up and hold them to the light in an effort to understand some bigger picture—that is perhaps the most futile endeavor any of us can ever attempt.
We are dust intent on settling into the oblivion of the forgotten. You have now. You have this song to rest your head against right this instant. Now is all you can every really prove, that you can ever hold in your hand. Many psychologists say that our recounting of our lives that we keep, the identity we tell ourselves we assume is largely a story we tell ourselves in an attempt to make sense of a world hurtling towards entropy. I’m inclined to agree.
Which brings me back to music. Songs are a way we try to capture those holy moments, good or bad. Music protects me, it keeps me, it’s a sign post left by a soul from another realm, an empathetic and tangible marker that reminds me that despite my standing at the edge of the world, I am not alone. Someone else has been here before.
And many will come after. Maybe you were out at this cliff right before I got here; maybe you’ll be along right after. But you’ll be here. You’ll come and sit down and rest your head as you look out over the dark and yawning canyon, toying with the idea of letting it swallow you up, even though you know you never will.
After all, I know you; I know I’m not the only one.
XOXO
Ang
