Too Smooth to Die

Greg Dulli Makes The Twilight Last

originally published November 8, 2006

“I’ve got a dick for a brain!” screams a young lady at the back of the Double Door, a Chicago club the Twilight Singers have now packed two nights in a row. That’s a quote from Gentlemen, the 1993 LP by the Afghan Whigs, Greg Dulli’s band at the time, an album noted for its self-lacerating honesty or its raw misogyny, depending on which side of the kitchen you’re slicing from. It’s the record that put Greg Dulli, now frontman for, and sole constant member of, the Twilight Singers, on the map. But it took more than that to keep him there. And he’s too far away to hear this young lady.

Greg Dulli is the rare beast that can succeed in this biz. He’s a narcissist with empathy. He was probably born a smug bastard. Over the years, he earned the right to be a smug bastard by picking up everything he found and looking at it until he understood why it existed. He worked and endured until he could hand-pick his band, and he’s not afraid to let one of his recruits (in this case Mark Lanegan, of Screaming Trees fame, back then, and of Twilight Singers fame, tonight) sing lead and steal the show for a few numbers.

The stuff Dulli does now is a mix of everything he likes, which includes orchestral soul, storytelling and callbacks on loan from hip hop, and a certain cinematic grandeur. It takes a certain panache to pull off this sort of bricolage in a live setting. (I’m not sure there’s a word for it, and I make money off this shit.) Dulli has it. On top of that, he’s got Satanic charisma, even as a microdot from the back of the room. On top of that, he manages, during the course of “Too Tough To Die,” to practice his standup act. (Dulli sniffs his armpit. “Smells like cookies… What flavor? Your favorite.”) Who knows when he’ll need it?

Before it’s over, Dulli works in a few bars from a song off Gentlemen. Not because he could hear the young lady, but because he knows it’ll go over well. It does.

Greg Dulli grew up in Cincinnati and lives in Los Angeles, but he loves the city of New Orleans. It’s documented. Portions of Powder Burns, the album behind which the Twilight Singers are now touring, were recorded there, directly in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, on generator power. The song “Forty Dollars” is lyrically based on very specific New Orleans drug slang, and the album’s closer “I Wish I Was” is an agonizingly romantic tribute to the city built below sea level.

With some difficulty, Dulli fit the following conversation into his schedule while stopped in Tucson, a city with “warm weather… good-looking women… good tacos.”

Flagpole

When was the last time you were in New Orleans?

Greg Dulli

Three weeks ago.

Flagpole

How is it going down there? You don’t hear that much about it, it seems like.

Greg Dulli

Lot of crime. Lot of violent crime. They’re trying to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but unless they get some real leadership down there, I sense a rough road.

Flagpole

So right now it’s unfettered free-market capitalism, basically?

Greg Dulli

Sure. And there’s a lot of out-of-towners down in there, like, busting in on the construction trade and everything. I don’t see a whole lot of the civic action that I used to see, the tight-knit communities. It seems like the upheaval has been pronounced and extended.

Flagpole

Is this [Twilight Singers] lineup jelling pretty well?

Samuel Holden

(L to R) Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan

Greg Dulli

Yeah. We’ve been playing together since May. We played about 75 shows, then we took a six-week break, and now we’ve just done two of 40.

Flagpole

What would you say makes a good Twilight Singer? I know the lineup has shifted a little bit, and technically it’s whoever else is in the room, but what would you say that you look for now when you’re looking for people to play in the band?

Greg Dulli

Gotta be a great player. Have to be a good guy. Have to be able to get along with everybody else. But these guys are all my friends. I brought them all together. None of them knew each other before. I knew them all individually, and kind of hand-picked them.

Flagpole

In your lyrics, what role would you say that guilt plays? I know it comes up in reviews quite a bit.

Greg Dulli

I think probably more in the Afghan Whigs material. I don’t think I’ve really harped on guilt in about 10 years.

Flagpole

People still talk about it. But the new stuff seems a little bit more self-actualized.

Greg Dulli

Yeah, sure. Or even abstract. I was a young man exploring my psyche, and I’m sure it probably stuck as some kind of a rep. But that’s lazy journalism, in my opinion.

Flagpole

Are you planning on doing a lot of covers on this tour?

Greg Dulli

We’re doing a few. Reinterpretation has been a fascination of mine since I was a kid. I’m constantly finding things I can weave into other things. Like last night, I did a piece of “The Killing Moon” by Echo and the Bunnymen, out of nowhere. I hadn’t done that before. It just happened organically. I was surprised when I knew all the words.

Flagpole

So what do you think makes a good cover version?

Greg Dulli

You gotta love it. You’ve gotta love the song. You’ve gotta read the room and see who your audience is, if they’re gonna get what what you’re doing. And you have to make it your own.

Flagpole

I was in Cincinnati over the summer, and I had a really good time there. It seemed like those people knew how to party. But I couldn’t find anybody there who seemed like they were happy about the fact that they lived there. What do you think is going on in Cincinnati?

Greg Dulli

It was a great place to grow up… There’s a conservative undercurrent in that reason, that anybody with the slightest liberal take on life gets a kind of pariah status. The underground there, which is where I came up, it’s pretty close-knit. I’m still bros with everybody who stuck it out there. I love visiting. My family still lives there. But I knew, as a boy, that I wouldn’t be hanging out there too long.

Flagpole

What would you say to people that hate Los Angeles?

Greg Dulli

I would say that four million people don’t live there because it sucks.

Flagpole

It does seem to have some draw. What drew you out there?

Greg Dulli

I like warm weather. You seek to find an environment where you’ll feel comfortable, and find people who are like-minded. There’s a fantastic community out there. The cliché of Los Angeles, I never see that, because I’m not over there. Fake, shallow people are everywhere. They’re in Chicago. They’re in Omaha. They’re in Paris. They’re in Gary, IN. I don’t hang around with people like that. I’ve often said that if I ever met Woody Allen, I’d kick him in the balls and say, “You know what I’m talking about.’”

Emerson Dameron

WHO: The Twilight Singers, Stars of Track and Field, Jeff Klein
WHERE: 40 Watt Club
WHEN: Thursday, November 9
HOW MUCH: $10