http://www.howlinwuelf.com/

Artist Name: the twilight singers
Record Title: blackberry belle
Set to be released by Fall of ‘03 via Birdman Records Group

The twilight singers are an ever changing collective, a chance for greg dulli to be in whatever kind of band he needs to be in at any point in his career. Not a dulli solo project, but more a particular outfit assembled to record a particular collection of musical moments/ compositions. On the second twilight singers album, blackberry belle the line up comprises: greg dulli, mathias schneeberger, mike napolitano, michael sullivan, jon skibic, brian young, scott ford, petra haden, apollonia kotero, mark lanegan, stanton moore, greg wieczoric, steve myers, chris phillips, matt hergert, hoss,
nikki crawford, jesse tobias, rick steff, richard ford, kamasi washington, josh lampkins, chris gray, amay

track listing:
1- martin eden
2- esta noche
3- teenage wristband
4- st. gregory
5- the killer
6- decatur st.
7- papillon
8- follow you down
9- feathers
10- fat city(slight return)
11- number nine

“Rock is visceral. It either moves you or it doesn’t. That is why, generally speaking, it is useless to critique it using academic and cultural references. But, as a professor in the Harvard Music Department once said to me, referring to Beethoven, “it makes it all the sweeter, knowing how he got to where he got.”

“To understand how Greg Dulli got to where he got, you would have to understand the town of Hamilton, Ohio in the seventies. A world of endless pick-up basketball
games, fist-fights in the King/Kwik parking lot, egging cars, Lynyrd Skynryd blasting out of the speakers of a passing ’69 Camaro. Catholic Mass, Shakespeare, The Who, Brian Wilson, Marvin Gaye and the writings of Jack London.

“I first met Greg in 1989. The Afghan Whigs were playing in a pizza parlor/punk rock club called Treetos in Champaign, Illinois. We bonded over innumerable shots of tequila and pitchers of beer while watching the San Francisco Giants play the Oakland A’s in the World Series. Just when I had reached a point where I couldn’t distinguish inebriation from reality, a massive earthquake struck the Bay area. We watched in stunned silence at the news coverage of a pan caked Bay Bridge with cars parked underneath. A night that won’t be forgotten.

“Years later, Greg Dulli remains a dear friend and I, an ardent fan. While none of the rock fury of the early Whigs records has been lost, the emergence of the Twilite Kid has brought with it a new efflorescence in Greg’s music. He has become a classic American crooner in the best possible sense.

“As with the Whigs, the Twilight songs are marked by hauntingly beautiful and simplistic melodies that weave their way in and out of a weightless world of atmospheric ephemera. But the wine has grown only sweeter with time, the tannin more rich. The lyrical world of Greg Dulli reminds me of Hamlet’s second most famous existentialist soliloquy, “I have of late, but wherefore I know not, etc…” sung with the get-down gusto of Howlin’ Wolf.

“Greg Dulli’s genius has provided a soundtrack for my life since that night in 1989. It has kept me company as I drove across lonely stretches of west Texas in the middle of the night. He has given a voice to my darkest id-ian urges and got my ass shaking on the dance floor. He’s made my mind hum with his intellect and made me piss my pants with laughter. I’ve seen him get body slammed by Tony Curtis over a tequila-filled Easter egg and watched him sing a karaoke duet with the late Dodi Fayed. I’m proud to be a fan, happier to be a friend.”

Donal Logue
Toronto, Canada
10 June 2003

The Afghan Whigs new album is here. It’s called 1965 and it’s the group’s first album for Columbia. It’s intelligent, well performed, and – more importantly – a rump-shaker of epic proportions. Eleven years into this thing, the Whigs have pulled out all the stops and give it to you straight – no chaser. Also no remorse, no regrets and no sleep, either.

Recorded in New Orleans amidst typical Whig-ian turmoil and controversy, 1965 proves once and for all that this is one of the great rock & roll bands walking (and/or stumbling) around on this planet. Greg Dulli, the Whigs’ street-fightin’-man songwriter and lead singer, says “Guilt takes a back seat to lust on this album.” Never one to make excuses for his libido, Dulli gets to the heart of the matter on 1965. He boldly engages in the battle of the sexes on this new record, sometimes as conqueror but just as often as the conquered. Beneath it all looms a wealth of amazing, hook-laden riffs and melodies. It’s the most accessible, catchy, rockin’ thing they’ve ever done.

You see, I’ve known these guys since even before they started making noise in Cincinnati in the late 1980′s. I grew up a healthy spit away from Dulli in a working-class suburb of Hamilton, Ohio, and got to know him better when our bands started trading gigs in town. The first thing Greg said to me, after seeing my band play for the first time, was “You guys suck, but there was nothin’ on TV tonight.” I bought him a beer, the first of many throughout our friendship. I came to admire him for saying whatever he was feeling at the time, his exposed-nerve worldview and, most of all, for his loyalty to the people and things he believed in. In many ways, Dulli hasn’t changed at all; the bullshit detector is still set on high.

The Whigs got started when Greg hooked up with D.C. transplant John Curley and Louisville, Kentucky, guitar-savant Rick McCollum. Dulli and Curley had played together in a pre-Whigs punk band, The Black Republicans. The new group began gigging around town immediately. They honed their playing skills and began writing songs in earnest during a summer-long residency at The Squeeze Inn, an off-campus lesbian bar. The inimitable personalities began to emerge there in that 30′ by 40′ stageless room: Curley – the stoic bass thumper, given to fits of reckless abandon (and laughing); McCollum with Gibson Firebird slung perilously low, always the perfect mixture of style and substance; and Dulli – voice cracking & fingers bleeding. Greg’s half-hour-long on-stage cigarette breaks, complete with running commentary on sexual politics and attempts at matchmaking which at first enraged, but later fascinated the clientele. We had running bets on how long it would take them to get tossed out of the gig, with most people betting a couple of weeks (I said a couple days). They lasted all summer and became such a smash that they were asked to preserve their handprints in fresh concrete out front of the club. I walked by the place the other day, and they’re still there.

We all knew these grubby misfits were something special. Only an idiot (or jealous members of rival local bands) could fail to see that the band was surely destined for bigger things. There was way too much character up on stage to be denied. Dulli got drunk, joined in fights in the audience (or started them), and insulted all the tastemakers and club owners in town. It was hilarious and totally punk rock, and many of us found ourselves totally enamored with the Whigs.

They were so broke. I was working at Bogart’s, the city’s 1000-seat showcase night club, and I was always letting them in free, even “hired” Dulli on a couple of occasions to get him some extra bucks. He never really worked per se, but all the crew guys loved to hang out with him, so it was cool. He would insult the dinosaur musicians who played the club, asking them “Now? who are you exactly?” He stole beer and food from the dressing rooms. He let all of his friends in through the back door. He was once chased down the backstage hall by a winded Meatloaf, who was yelling “That son-of-a-bitch took my vodka, man!” I’ve got plenty more juicy anecdotes, but I’m saving them for my unauthorized, tell-all biography.

Dulli’s budding career in the rock & roll production biz was halted as the Whigs began playing more and better gigs, drawing bigger and bigger crowds. They pooled their funds and recorded Big Top Halloween which they released on their own Ultra Suede label and sold at gigs. The album (now a big collector’s item) whet our appetite. They also began making believers out of punters in nearby towns, and were soon brought to the attention of Sub Pop Records in Seattle. In this B.N.N. era (Before Nirvana Nevermind), Sub Pop’s signing of the Whigs created quite a stir; they were the first non-Northwestern U.S. band to record for the label. By the time the Up In It album was released, the group had been hard at work touring all of the shitty clubs in fly-over country and had in the process developed into a force to be reckoned with as a performing unit. One indie rock crit wrote that the Whigs were “…the most cartoony band in all of hairdom.” I always loved that quote, and I think the band did too because it meant that they had enough presence to be considered “cartoony” in the first place. I can remember a Whigs gig in Cincinnati about six months after the album was out: total abandon; packed club with lots of people we had never seen before in our local hangouts. It was a very exciting, totally heady time for the Whigs and their friends. That first taste of the elusive rock & roll dream would not be their last.

The Congregation album nurtured the budding legend. The group’s love of soul music began to come to the fore, and it was a delight for us to watch Dulli begin to impose his personality and its inherent idiosyncrasies on an unsuspecting public. Rave reviews followed. The Whigs toured the States and went to Europe from the first time. I’d get postcards from Amsterdam and Brussels with illegible scribbles on them; at least they cared enough to try to write I thought. Then, after one last Sub Pop release (Uptown Avondale – a strangely sentimental nod to the American soul music they care about so deeply), the Whigs and the Seattle label amicably parted ways.

The Afghan Whigs signed with a major and began work on the brilliant Gentlemen album, a quantum leap for the band. Containing Dulli’s best lyrics and the band’s most powerful playing to date, the album made me realize that not only were the Whigs a great band, but they were a uniquely great band. They sounded like no one else.

There were network television appearances, more touring, more triumphs and headaches. By the time of the release of the Black Love album, their second and last for that major label, the Whigs were used to press accolades and ecstatic live audiences, yet there were dark clouds on the horizon. The group members had poured their hearts and souls into Black Love. Dulli came to understand that he was painfully purging some demons by writing this album. “Black Love was me trying to wake myself up from a bad dream,” he said. The album was texturally complicated, cerebral, and very beautiful. It was a shock that it didn’t connect with a wider audience, although history will bear out the true worth of Black Love, especially in the context of the Whigs’ body of work.

The Whigs were very excited to tour with Neil Young and played their collective asses off, but after continuing disappointments, they decided to pack it in for awhile. They didn’t play together again for a year. I had some pretty intense conversations with a strangely reserved Greg Dulli during this period, and I knew, I just KNEW that my friends were getting ready to do something about it. Always close, but now living in different places (with only Curley left in Cincinnati), the Whigs did what they had to do: they requested and negotiated a release from their label. They brought in long-time friend Michael Horrigan to fill the vacant drum throne, and got back to work. They were tired of people bummin’ out their good time. They were sick of people messin’ with their good life. . They wanted this new album to be more concise, more rockin’, more upbeat. It was their goal to create a stripped-down, concise piece of rock.

1965 is all that. “Somethin’ Hot”, the album’s lead track, starts with a slow burn and culminates with an incendiary chorus that serves as a musical release to the tension created by the verses’ incessant riffing; sounds like a radio single to me. “Crazy” features the legendary Alex Chilton doin’ some tasty background vocal work and, especially noteworthy, McCollum’s totally brilliant guitar lines add to the song’s playful lope nicely. Plus, Dulli manages to rhyme “therapy” with “pharmacy”, and that’s pretty damn cool in and of itself. “Uptown Again” is another wolf in sheep’s clothing. Did I mention that this is Rick McCollum’s best playing ever? And did I mention that John Curley is a total asskicking, melodic innovator on bass here and throughout 1965? How about the fact that Michael Horrigan sounds like he’s been in the Whigs for 20 years, or that his snare hand is as solid as, well, a rock? Damn!

And it continues? Whether or not the 22 second “Sweet Son Of A Bitch” was actually recorded “as it happened” in Greg’s bedroom is a debatable subject, but I wouldn’t – or will not – put it past him. “66″ is my favorite tune on the album right now. Catchy as the flu, it starts immediately to paint some pictures in your mind: “You walked in/just like smoke/with a little come on, come on, come on in yer walk?” “Citi Soleil” is a Stonesy mid-tempo number that will hook you in the first couple of bars and continues the album’s optimistic theme? Shall I continue?

“John The Baptist” is positively anthemic. The chorus’ fantastic wordplay is buoyed by a “Nawlins” horn section extraordinaire, led by the Re-Birth Brass Band’s Roderick Paulin. Outstanding arrangements and soulful blowing by Paulin & Co. show up several times on 1965, but this track really highlights his beauty and power. “The Slide Song” is one of the album’s more historical Whig-like compositions, and McCollum once again shows how technical expertise and raw emotion can co-exist when playing guitar. “Neglekted” is sexy and funky with guest vocalist Susan Marshall turning in (as she does on “Somethin’ Hot,” among others) a truly gorgeous performance. Marshall and Dulli not only sound like they’ve sung together before, but they also sound like they’ve both been through the tension and release brought forth by the lyrics. “Omerta” slinks along like a hooker with pride, and has some more great lyrical moments. I, for one, plan to help make “shuffle off to Buffalo” a new term for getting your head. Think you’re tired of “yeah, yeah, yeah” choruses? You won’t be after digging “Omerta,” which is anything but a “Stone Temple sob story.” Just listen, will ya?

New Orleans was a good idea for the Whigs. It got them away together in a new place and helped them focus on the task at hand – making great music together. Curley said that being in The Big Easy eliminated a lot of distractions for the band but, he adds, “you have a lot of new distractions to worry about down there.” Indeed, they did get a little nuts down south. The combination of living in the French Quarter, hanging out and jamming with some great musicians, and the city’s legendary reputation and vibe made it the perfect locale to get it together and create. The Whigs’ hard-earned penchant for landing on their feet after troubled times returned. They definitely had the gris-gris, which is always a good thing to have when you’re fixin’ to welcome some insanity into the proceedings on the bayou. Indeed, it got so crazy that even Rick McCollum (who is the nicest and most mild-mannered guy I know) got thrown in the ‘Nawlins pokey on the last night of Mardi Gras. Curley dutifully bailed him out. Dulli was M.I.A. for a few days near the end of the sessions. He mysteriously returned with a strange instrumental called “The Vampire Lanois” which puts a rap on things (in an economical 41:32, I might add). I asked Greg what this title meant, and he was very hesitant to discuss this. I did manage to get out of him that the song’s inspiration was 3000 years old and slept in a casket covered by dirt from his homeland of Acadie. I wanted to know more, but Greg stopped me, fearing certain preternatural events that could take place if he continued to discuss it.

If this sounds like it was written by a fan, o.k. then, because it was. Play this motherfucker and tell everyone you know about it.

Dan Reed Louisville, KY., USA
Summer 1998

The Afghan Whigs were born in a jail cell in Athens, Ohio. Greg Dulli had spent Halloween 1986 getting drunk at a party, so stealing policeman’s hat seemed like a good idea at the time. Only the cop could run faster. When he landed in the tank, he met a fellow shady character, fellow Cincinnati native Rick McCollum. There was nothing to do put play cards and scheme until morning. Afghan Whigs, named after a Florida-based white Muslim biker gang from the Sixties who were into love, not war, finally got it together a year later, with Steve Earle on drums and John Curley playing bass.

They stepped right out onto a stage, cranking out covers of the Stones’ ‘Cocksucker Blues’ and Neil Young’s ‘Like A Hurricane’, and released an album whose title was either a testament to the night they founded or the title of a long lost Harry Crews novel, ‘Big Top Hallowe’en’ in 1988. Released on John Curley’s newly formed Ultra Suede label, the record was later described by Greg as, “Quite forgettable.” Maybe that’s because those were days that tended to pass in a blur of drinking and fighting as the Whigs roadshow hauled around America. “When we were all drinking way too much and taking drugs all the time, travelling around, trying to compete with each other’s egos and shit…twice somebody got punched out onstage, John and I got into a big fight,” remembered Dulli in 1993. “It carried on into the dressing room – and then the promoter came in and said if we didn’t play another 20 minutes we wouldn’t get paid, so we had to go back and play after the fight or we wouldn’t have any money to get to the next town. So we did. I didn’t want to be stranded in Boston with those fuckers!” Pointedly, the singer was residing in LA, where he had gone to study film, while the rest of the band were in Cincinnati.

Come 1990, the band got a call from Sub Pop, who released the ‘Up In It’ album, from which it could first be discerned that something extra-ordinary was rattling forth from Dulli’s ravaged tonsils and the wrecked and glowing songs the Whigs had rescued from the ruins of rock. It was clear from tracks like ‘Retarded’ that this band were using reference points far removed from the garage/metal concerns of their peers; ones that would emerge ever more clearly in their subsequent releases. But, while on a low key UK tour in 1991, a cold that Greg caught from spending nights freezing on people’s floors refused to get better and he finally came down with pneumonia. The Whigs were back in the badlands of their own making, more band disputes erupted into fist fights and Greg was eventually dispatched to hospital for urgent medical care. The sickness was an obvious shock to the singer’s psyche; he got paranoid and refused to leave his apartment in LA, instead he stayed in writing stories, a screenplay and a new album’s worth of brilliant songs.

‘Congregation’, 1992′s Sub Pop released collection, mirrored Greg’s fraught moods and tapped into his obsession with the tragedy wrought soul classics of the Stax/Motown vaults. Sultry piano’s and a cool vocal appearance from Ruby Belle added to the Whigs’ disembowelled Spector-isms, and the harshly revealing lyrics of ‘Turn On You’ and ‘I’m Her Slave’ were a testament not only to Greg’s personal experience but his storyteller’s powers of observation in others. The line, “I’m gonna turn on you/Before you turn on me,” actually came from an argument he heard one of his female friends having with her lover. ‘I’m Her Slave’ delighted in turning traditional relationship models on their head. Dulli the demon lover, voyeur and detective was coming into the fore. And no one, in those days of Black Sabbath/Led Zeppelin inspired grunge, sounded like The Afghan Whigs.

‘Congregation’ was closely followed by two singles releases which would put paid forever to any comparison between the Whigs and their Sub Pop peers. The first, a ghostly and powerfully emotive version of The Supremes’ ‘My World Is Empty Without You Babe’, with Greg singing in Curtis Mayfield-style falsetto over a bare boned, clattering backdrop astonished everyone who heard it. The second, the ‘Uptown Avondale’ EP of covers – dark, troubled laments such as Al Green’s ‘Beware’ and Percy Sledge’s ‘True Love Travels On A Dusty Road’ unravelled through bleeding guitars and Dulli’s hoarse and ravaged vocals – firmly established that the Whigs were, in the words of one reviewer, “A soul band.”

And the turbulent life of their vocalist was to again inspire what would be the record to consolidate that epithet once and for all. A long term relationship was coming to an end, and Greg Dulli was leaving Los Angeles: “I got my stuff out of our apartment in California and kinda said goodbye,” he explained in September 1993 “I came back to Cincinnati and the Whigs actually started playing together as a band again, rehearsing and hangin’ out, which we hadn’t done since we first met and started doing it.

“When we began working on ‘Gentlemen’ I started thinking that the songs might be too personal – this might be my own trip, and I don’t wanna bring three of my friends into my own melodrama. So I said, ‘Look, let’s scrap this and I’ll clear my head out, we’ll go for something else,’ and they were like, ‘No man, we’ll help you.’ For all the crap in the past, all the bickering and fighting, I found out why I loved these guys in the first place.”

‘Gentlemen’, released in October ’93 on Blast First, was recorded in Memphis, where Greg would spend night times cruising through the mists that rise of the Mississippi, listening to Elvis’ unnervingly eerie version of ‘Blue Moon’ (“He sounds like he’s singing it from beyond the grave”) like a Method actor in training for his greatest performance yet. Certainly, the opening ‘If I Was Going’ captured the ghost town ambience perfectly, as, against a backdrop of moaning wind, Greg intones, “And it don’t bleed, and it don’t breathe/It’s locked it’s jaws and now it’s swallowing/It’s in our heart, it’s in our head/It’s in our love baby, it’s in our bed…” a refrain he takes up again in the groovestruck abandon of ‘Debonair’. By now, the Whig’s musical dexterity was more than a match for the marathon Catholic guilt pouring out from their frontman. Perhaps the most beautiful moment was when Scrawl’s Marcy Mays took over on vocals for ‘My Curse’, the most vicious the alcoholic’s venomous curse ‘Fountain And Fairfax’ (where AA meetings take place in LA). There was only one cover on ‘Gentlemen’; Tyrone Davis’ ‘I Keep Coming Back’, which adroitly complimented the mood of the Whigs’ originals.

At the time, Greg said he was singing in characters and that, “They’re not happy either. They’re plagued by a lust that won’t go away – or, like on ‘If I Was Going’, it’s somebody who sticks with something that was dead a long time ago, just for the affection for the other person. To me there’s nothing sadder than that, a relationship that drags on for way, way too long. That’s what ‘When We Two Parted’ is about. And ‘I Keep Coming Back’.”

‘Gentlemen”s most celebrated line was from ‘Be Sweet’ – “Ladies let me tell you about myself/I’ve got a dick for a brain/And my brain is gonna sell my ass to you.” Said Dulli: “Guys don’t say that but that’s the way a lot of guys walking down the street are thinking, including myself a few years ago. I should have walked around with a sign round my neck saying that shit.” He also made two important points on the nature of his songwriting: “The thing to lose right away is that I wasn’t gonna be politically correct for the sake of being so. That would be dehumanising. I’ve got a lot of friends who don’t subscribe to the New Man theory. Not that I don’t have a little of that guy in me myself. But I know where I stand. I respect women.”

It would be three years before their next album, in which time Steve Earle left the band, to be replaced by Paul Buchignani, and the Whigs moved from Blast First to Mute. John had been steadily building up his Ultra Suede studios in Cincinnati, producing and recording bands like the Ass Ponys, while Greg also produced and championed another local band, Throneberry. The Whigs made a cameo appearance in Ted Demme’s Beautiful Girls, as a bar band providing the soundtrack – a cover of Barry White’s ‘Can’t Get Enough’ – to an exchange between Michael Rapaport and Uma Thurman.

But the forces that would shape the next LP took hold of Greg in the first months of 1995. Suffering from another bout of overwhelming paranoia, Greg once more became a locked-in reclusive, and this time he retreated to a place he could easily call a second home; the world of noir fiction. When not sitting in a darkened room watching the Coen Brother’s classic film debut Blood Simple over and over again, he was re-reading the brilliantly paranoiac and amoral crime fiction of Jim Thompson and James Ellroy’s epic, four-novel journey into LA’s hidden past, The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and, in particular, White Jazz. His final redemption from depression came in the form of a play called The Gospel At Colonus, the story of Oedipus set in a black Pentecostal church, and starring Clarence Fountain, of The Five Blind Boys Of Alabama, as the ill-fated Oedipus. “I have wild mood swings,” Greg later explained. “High highs and low lows, and it was kind of a low time. I don’t go to church any more, but I came out of that thing feeling cleansed. I went back and read the Oedipus Trilogy again, and that combined with all the crime novels I was reading, all the noir films I was watching and my generally twisted state of mind, crystallised into what I wanted to do.”

‘Black Love’, the resultant LP, released in March 1996, was structured like a novel and resounded with the redemptive qualities of gospel. Using the same device Ellroy employs in White Jazz, it opens with a narrator taking stock, calling back the past, in the aptly named ‘Crime Scene Part One’, and then proceeds to unfold the story, so as you come full circle back to the beginning. In between, Dulli gets to vent some rage on those who have betrayed him (“Got you where I want you, motherfucker” – from ‘Honky’s Ladder’) and indulge in a romantic, Bonnie and Clyde type fantasy about burning a town down on the Morricone-esque ‘Going To Town’. “It’s does start as a flashback,” confirmed Dulli. “It’s set up like an adaptation of a crime novel – if I had the money to make it into a movie, this would be the movie; these would be the lines that people spoke, these would be the sounds that they heard, the acts they carried out. It’s tough to talk about that without sounding pretentious, but I’m trying to do something different.”

Stepping back from the intensely personal ‘Gentlemen’, Dulli had found the perfect medium in which to investigate other people’s motives, actions and secrets by drawing on the inspiration of noir; a genre totally infused with layers of secrets, paranoia and fear. The sound the Whigs summoned for this material was that of a slowburning fuse, darker denser and more opulent than ‘Gentlemen’, but, by the time you reach the closing splendour of ‘Faded’, by way of the soothing and tender ‘Step Into The Light’, ultimately more uplifting. “I think the thing that pervades this record is ordinary people trapped in extraordinary circumstances,” Greg opined. “Which is probably what I’m most interested in. Cos I’m often an ordinary person trapped in extraordinary circumstances.”

The buzz of a life of crime didn’t stop for Dulli with the making of ‘Black Love’; he has also bought the film rights to Ann E. Imbrie’s intensely personal True Crime book Spoken In Darkness, and intends to start work on an adaptation with partner Ted Demme after touring ‘Black Love’ has finished. The book concerns a school friend of Ann’s called Lee with whom she gradually lost touch, and who ended up the victim of a serial killer. Imbrie’s search is not only into the events leading up to Lee’s last days on earth but also into why an exceptionally bright schoolgirl became a junkie, thief and prostitute, and how she could be missing for a year before her body was found without anybody missing her. “It’s so powerful,” says Greg. “It’s going to be a real challenge to make it; a lot of it is going to occur in flashbacks. Ann got the title of this book from the Bible (Luke 12:2-3), where it says, ‘Whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light.’ She went and took away the curtains from this dark room and illuminated this girl’s life that nobody knew about. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. And that’s probably the next thing I’m gonna do, I’m co-producing it, and I’m gonna score it as well. I’ll start as soon as the tour is over.”

For Sub Pop, the band recorded the LPs Up In It, Congregation and Uptown Avondale, a five-song EP that featured tormented covers of such soul classics as Freda Payne’s “Band of Gold” and the Supremes’s “Come See About Me.”

Wooed by several major labels, The Afghan Whigs signed on with Elektra in 1993. The highly praised Gentlemen, a stunning chapter in the Whigs’ ongoing cycle of songs about men and women who live “all messed up but nowhere to go” marked the band’s major label debut. The Whighs are currently working on a new album.