Be Sweet: The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen at 30
Reflecting on the album that asks, “How dark is dark?”
Toxic masculinity has been around for millennia. It shows no signs of going away.
The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen, released 30 years ago today, wasn’t afraid to look at it unflinchingly, in its portrait of a relationship falling apart.
The band had a couple albums under its belt and was fortunate enough to be on the same label as Nirvana — Sub Pop — when the majors came sniffing around for what they thought might be the next big thing.
Nirvana’s success was well-timed for the Afghan Whigs on another level. Sub Pop wasn’t at a good point financially when they started recording what would be Congregation. The money ran out at the production and mixing stage and Dulli, the lead singer and main songwriter, had to take a second job to pay for it.
When the sessions finished in the summer of ’91, there was a question of whether the album would be released. But Nevermind came out the following month, exploding not long after. The royalties from it provided the needed jumpstart.
Congregation was released at the end of January, 1992. It picked up enough critical and fan buzz to draw the interest of numerous major labels.
The follow-up was informed by a couple of artistic avenues. The Uptown Avondale EP, recorded after Congregation, featured soul music covers presented in a way that inspired the band sonically.
“The songs that I picked were like, ‘Come See About Me,’ ‘Band of Gold’–happy songs where the words were really, really sad,” Dulli told the L.A. Times in 1994. “And I wanted to make the music more sympathetic with the lyrics, so we made the music more minor key, slowed them down, and that’s what I wanted to go into on Gentlemen. How far can I go into it? How dark is dark?”
The other avenue resembled interstates and two-lane highways, as a fair amount of the album would be written while the band was promoting Congregation. Soundchecks and downtime were a fertile ground for ideas. Dulli was in the most prolific writing period of his life to that point, as two albums would be released within 18 months of each other.
“Gentlemen is the only record that I can remember writing on the road, while we were touring Congregation, which is the longest rock ‘n’ roll tour I’ve ever done. 200 shows, I think,” he told Rhino.com in 2014. “We just kept on going. We went to Europe probably four times. We just kept going, going, going, and we were writing songs as we go. I was writing pieces of songs along the way and trying them out as I wrote them, a lot of times with nonsense lyrics or just patois, but learning how I wanted them to go and trying them out on people who didn’t know what it was.”
The new songs were workshopped on the road as Dulli began to figure out what worked, helped by audience response. With at least half the album molded into shape before they’d even recorded demo versions, the group was ready.
Dulli had ambitions of being a screenwriter for a time, but found that screenplays have a lot more people who want to force their creative input than a band does. His inspiration for Gentlemen came, not from a classic, but Francis Ford Coppola’s first big flop.
VIDEO: One From The Heart trailer
Coppola’s untouchable ’70s (Godfather, The Conversation, Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now) gave way to 1982’s One From The Heart. The romantic drama made back well under a million on its $26 million budget, but one of its leads clicked for Dulli.
“I really, really identified with the Frederic Forrest character in One From the Heart, and that was sort of the beginning of the thematic process. He was just a real kind of heel, but you could tell he didn’t want to be one, that he wasn’t really one,” he told the Times.
Gentlemen became a dark, breakup album because Dulli was going through one, a long, drawn-out ending that did neither he nor his girlfriend any favors. It lyrically took the shape of an indie relationship drama, if John Cassavetes were Gen X and did a shitload of coke.
The relationship in this tale was toxic and so was the guy. And deep down, he knew it.
“I have a complicated relationship with Gentlemen,” Dulli said on the Let There Be Talk podcast in 2019. “To me, that record is a bunch of great songs on it, some that I still love playing. It’s really mean and to, like, to go there sometimes, I’m like, ‘I’m not gonna go there tonight.'”
The album’s most notorious lyric, the one he knew would be the pull quote, was the opening to “Be Sweet” where he sang, “Ladies, let me tell you about myself/I got a dick for a brain/And my brain is gonna sell my ass to you.” It’s as if he knows its a shit come-on, but he also knows it has worked before.
Paired with the verses and their stop-start riff from Rick McCollum (which he came up with at a Paris soundcheck that Dulli freestyled the first lyrics to), things turn more intense on the choruses. Here is a self-loathing cad who knows he’s a cad who doesn’t appear to have the slightest interest in being anything but.
Dulli’s screenwriter’s eye doesn’t just show up in the lyrics. It sounds like ominous wind at the start of album opener “If We Were Going.” In actuality, it was the sounds of traveling a suspension bridge with metal grates. Bassist John Curley recorded it by sticking a mic out the car window as it crossed Cincinnati’s Roebling Bridge.
It’s the first appearance of lyrics that show up again in “Debonair” (which was written prior) — “Cause it don’t bleed / And it don’t breathe / It’s locked its jaws / And now it’s swallowing.”
“I wanted to use it in a more meditative way. Almost as an overture. I wanted the introduction for what was to come to be intimate before it got all stormy. Telling you this story in a quiet bar,” Dulli told SPIN in 2014.
Dulli’s love of R&B and soul was evident. He sometimes gave off the vibe of a guy whose dream screenplay was a blaxploitation flick with himself in the lead. Although one was never going to mistake them for anything other than a rock band, the Afghan Whigs definitely put those other influences to use, infusing them into their sound.
VIDEO: The Afghan Whigs “Debonair”
“Debonair” throws a little funkiness into the stew. Those repeated lyrics from “If I Were Going,” once foreboding, now plunged into darkness as if they’re strangling Dulli on their way out of his throat. Things had turned. The protagonist knows he’s going to hell, perhaps not literal, but one of his own making nonetheless. The band behind him, Curley in particular, delivers it with a potent intensity.
The moody verses of “What Jail Is Like” give way to an exploding chorus, but no matter the backing, the lyrics are dripping with angry recrimination. Dulli lashes out like a wounded feral cat. “That song is blaming other people for my problems, and I had yet to examine my own culpability, and full-stop examined it on that one,” Dulli told SPIN.
“Fountain and Fairfax” hits hard with its drums. Steve Earle, no, not that one, was the not-so-secret weapon on Gentlemen. Even if Dulli, as Bob Gendron’s 33 1/3 book on the album claimed, wrote a lot of the drum parts, Earle had to play them. Combined with the cutting slide guitar, his playing helped put listeners into the minds of the addict being written about.
The song was inspired by an intersection in West Hollywood, where drugs were particulary easily and a church at the corner hosted AA and NA meetings. A friend asked Dulli to come along once for moral support (and maybe a hint, as Dulli wouldn’t kick cocaine for over a decade). The stories he heard were mostly deeply moving, but there were a few he felt were there to work on their acting.
If he insisted he was “off that stuff”, the woozy feel of the preceding “When We Two Parted” suggests that was a recent development. However much substances can loosen lips, when the words that escape them are “Baby, you can open your eyes now/And please allow me to present you with a clue/If I inflict the pain/Then baby only I can comfort you, yeah”, things are in state where things are violent without so much as a hand being raised.
The combination of swaggering machismo and the level of self-awareness of “I might be the asshole here, but do something about it? Ehhh” threatened to be suffocating.
That’s when the album’s crucial moment — “My Curse” — hit. It was the most personal song he wrote for it and one he was too afraid to sing. That fear was justified, because the reality was that the woman in the relationship had no voice, no agency to that point.
Marcy Mays, a friend of Dulli’s from the Columbus band Scrawl, agreed to come in and sing it. The key proved to be when she basically told Dulli to stop directing her, take a nice lunch break away from the studio and let her do it the way she wanted.
The result is as intoxicating as it is exhausting. The woman knows that the situation is not healthy, to put it mildly. There’s a sense of resignation of giving into pleasures even as things circle the drain (“And there’s blood on my teeth/When I bite my tongue to speak/Zip me down, kiss me there/I can smile now/You won’t find out ever”).
It was a last gasp, because the guy calls it off for good on “Now You Know”, his voice sometimes veering off key. And even though he knew he was quite culpable, things had regressed to the point where a clean, relatively painless break wasn’t possible. The twin guitars of Dulli and McCollum punctuate just how much the couple had consumed of that rotten apple.
The song’s last words, “Now it’s through” could have been the end. But there’s still rubble strewn about and a crane shot pulling out to see the couple in the midst of it would have made Gentlemen darker than it already was.
Dulli turned to a song he’d listened to nightly for comfort — Tyrone Davis’ “I Keep Coming Back”, which somehow wasn’t one of the singles off his terrific 1970 album If I Could Turn Back The Hands of Time. Davis’ original was a simmering love ballad, where it felt like he was practically whispering in your ear at some points and emphatically emoting at others.
In Dulli’s hands, there’s no slow burn to be had with only embers remaining. What’s left is vulnerability, the swagger in tatters. Again, he gets pitchy, but it only underscores that the cornered animal has no fight left in him. From there, all that’s left is to roll credits, which is what the instrumental “Brother Woodrow/Closing Prayer” was designed to do — a way for the sunrise to break through the rubble, offering sorely needed lightness and hope.
The band didn’t make it intact through the end of the ensuing tour, as Earle quit the band before it finished, thus becoming persona non grata to Dulli.
And as challenging as Gentlemen could be to the listener. Dulli’s bandmates knew it was to the man who put it together. “As a musician, I could appreciate playing songs with such deep content,” Curley told Sic Magazine in 2009. “It didn’t get boring because the emotion was always real. It took a toll on Greg and as a friend, that was hard to watch. It was personal, dark and painfully honest music.”
Even years later, Dulli picks and chooses what songs from the album he’ll play live, based on mood and willingness to put himself in that headspace. “That version of me is not someone I want to hang out with every night, know what I mean?” he told Let There Be Talk.
For his part, Dulli didn’t immediately take ownership of just how much of himself was in Gentlemen. He told the Times, “I think people get kinda disappointed when I say the album isn’t all autobiographical, and I’m like, God, that’s kind of mean, to think something like that. Why would you want poor little me to go through all that?
‘It’s like anything else. You use some license. It’s observation. Maybe it started out with something autobiographical, and then you want to blow it up into something bigger. Once I got onto the theme with the songs, I pressed on to see how much further I could go into the dark psyche of the ‘90s male.”
By 2012, in an interview with The Quietus, Dulli admitted his particular brand of honesty had come up with prospective partners believing it was what he really was like.
When the interviewer suggested he could use the actor’s defense of, “That’s just the part I was playing,” Dulli replied, “That’s never gonna fly, on a girl. They know.”
One can’t talk about Gentlemen without talking about that cover, based on the Nan Goldin photograph Nan and Brian In Bed, but with kids, farther apart physically. The Afghan Whigs’ Elektra labelmate Linda Ronstadt, who shared a publicist with them, hated it and made her feelings known.
Ultimately, the kids were stand-ins for Gentlemen’s couple, but not in the way QAnon tinfoil hatters would think. Rather, as co-dependent as the couple was, childhood traumas would explain a lot. As the saying goes, “Hurt people hurt people” and there was hurt before there was ever a relationship.
The album, as resonant as it was, wasn’t a huge hit. Two more albums, also quite good, followed. 1996’s Black Love felt like the adapted screenplay that some claimed Gentlemen was and had the killer close of “Bulletproof,” “Summer’s Kiss” and “Faded.” 1965, two years later, was full of sultry darkness without the heightened psychodrama of Gentlemen. By that point, Dulli had undergone treatment for depression and it was reflected in how much the self-loathing had been dialed back.
The band broke up on good terms 2001, physical distance apart being a big factor, returning 11 years later, with new players around Dulli and Curley.
Gentlemen stands as one of the high water marks for the band and Dulli himself, considering his various other projects (Twilight Singers, Gutter Twins, solo work).
There’s no prologue, no seeing what drew these two people to each other. It drops you right in the middle of a very painful breakup. Not only is it not an amicable parting, it also avoids heartbreak ballads and snarky putdowns.
It’s real, raw, honest, harrowing and addictive in its examination of co-dependency and the male id, delivered by a band with an intensity as unsparing as Dulli’s words.
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