My curse

 Last Sunday there was a threatened air traffic controllers strike in Italy. It was the day I was scheduled to leave by plane, and all weekend I was praying for it to happen, because if it did, it would a) disrupt the G 7 and b) make me miss my flight home, and thus allow me to legitimately stay in London and catch the Afghan Whig gig at Koko club in Camden Town.

Alas, it was not to be. The strike was cancelled. Monday morning, I was aloft over the Atlantic, listening to the Whigs new record “In Spades” under headphones instead and feeling really bad about it. Sick, even. It felt like I was in mourning, not just because I was missing the show, but for the person whom I had become – the one who doesn’t just say ‘fuck it’ and overstay my trip anyway.

Once upon a time, that would have been a no-brainer of a decision. Now it’s different. Staying in London off my own bat would have required spending a lot of extra money on a flight change. But more importantly, it would have meant informing my family and workplace that the Afghan Whigs are more important to me than they are. And as much as I love them, I feel that is not the case.

Or is it? Listening to “In Spades” over Iceland or wherever, I came to feel I had made a wrong decision. Last year, I had a chance to go see Prince, and I didn’t, and he was dead a few weeks later. I don’t think the Whigs are in any danger of that, but you never know when it might be your last chance, and when the bottom drops out of America, as it is surely about to do, and we no longer have the leisure or the money or the space in our psyches to live for bodily pleasures anymore, skipping the Afghan Whigs gig at the Koko club will be writ large in the book of my regrets. They are high on my list of intoxicating sad passions, but I feel inadequate when it comes to saying why. Let’s face it, they are the band equivalent of my participation in the sport of high diving: you either love the rush of it, or nothing on earth could induce you to take the plunge.

What they do to me is secret. Like love itself, they render me inarticulate. Also as with love – and with high diving -- I am not sure I even want you to share my obsession. Honestly, it’s easier (and more fun) to bash on something you hate (see: U2) than reveal what Lester Bangs once called our musical ‘erections of the heart,’ and it’s especially hard when it’s a band so many others profess to hate. And I don’t even blame them, because there is something intrinsically wanton about liking the Afghan Whigs. I have many friends whose eyes will glaze over, or who, if they are in bands themselves, will feel sad and frustrated by this encomium. I’ve been writing a long time, so I well know this to be true, but I still have this compulsion. So here goes nothing.

“In Spades” is more or less the Whigs seventh studio record and second since the reformation. Back in their sweaty grunge boy days, their music was menacing and direct: about drugs and lust and anger and their intersection. But this one is not a story record like “Gentlemen”: here, the fragmentary lyrics are both allusive and illusive, always either buried or screamed. It is music that is always slipping aurally around a corner before you can hear what it’s actually about. Some of the songs invoke necromancy, with an emphasis on the romancy: Oriole, for example, with its softcore video, might make anyone think twice about throwing down with these guys. A word that gets used frequently here is ‘silhouette,’ and it is fitting one, because the words here are just a faint outline of something much more intense. If anything, it is a record about time, and about memory and about imagination and the past; it is about the way that we can cast out demons when we speak of them aloud. Surely at some point on this record, a spell is cast, and later on it is broken, but more than that I cannot say. It is a journey of self-discovery, but the depths being plumbed may very well be my own.

louche or farouche?

Anyway, in the end it doesn’t really matter what “In Spades” is about, because when it comes to the Afghan Whigs, sound is what is paramount. Its peaks and its valleys. Its depth and its breadth. The cello – it is cello, isn’t it? – that twines itself around the rhythm like kudzu…or a vice. Oh, and how time and again, the songs clamber up a particular ladder of chords, all the way up to some sonic vaulted ceiling where they hover and brood for a short while before bearing down on us like some relentless hammer of intent. As a band, the Whigs are really more than the sum of its parts. Greg Dulli’s intermittent charm notwithstanding, they are a brutal force field as well as a background to his smutty vision. They jam, yeah. But they do it darkly. You have to like darkness to like them.

 And yet I don’t. I don’t! Typically, I don’t like darkness or discordance in music. I don’t like heavy things, and I hate Har Mar Superstar. The video for Oriole makes me yawn with distaste, but both that and "Demon In Profile" exude exactly the kind of dirty thrill that characterizes what keeps me coming back with an almost Victorian sense of titillation, time and time again. I especially don’t usually like white boy blues or pseudo-sexy singers -- and yet...what I like about Dulli is his ugly insouciance, his insistence that he is what he clearly is not; the utter nerve of his whole performance. He is just so wrong: a fuckboy by choice rather than stupidity, and what an abhorrent concept that is. To listen to him at all is sort of the mental equivalent of secretly using Tinder, a thing I’d never ever do.

So what do I even like about this?

I honestly don’t know. As I said, words fail. We all have those bands that we can’t explain why we like them. All I can say is that for the last, ugh, 27 years, I have liked every Afghan Whigs record more than the last (and I liked the early ones a whole, whole lot), and I can’t listen to just one song. "Arabian Heights." "The Spell." "Into The Floor." On the airplane, I tried to go backwards: I listened to “Algiers”, and “What Jail is Like”, and “Blame Inc.” and “My Confession” – earlier songs that have punctured my brain for good and all, and now bleed out of it at times when I am alone in my car or in my room, when it’s time to choose a feeling, and the feeling I choose to feel is dark. But I kept coming back to “In Spades” and sinking into the whole damn thing like a pillow. It is the first record that I have ever heard that I thought, “Damn, these songs are too short.”

I thought that as I listened to it on repeat over Greenland and over Hudson Bay and over Winnipeg and then Utah. And as the plane flew on and on into the night, I felt like there was a bungee cord attaching me to the UK, where I could have gone to see them at the Koko club, and that it was stretching ever more taut, and that the tautness was actually becoming even more painful with every time I pushed repeat.

And then the plane landed, and it snapped. Home had won out. Presently I was back in Olympia, and my daughter and my cats and even my students all said how much they missed me, and I thought, well I must have done the right thing then, and I put my ticket to the Koko club away and tried to forget what was happening there without me.
Unfortunately, that was pretty difficult given the scourge of social media sites I belong to, which hasn't stopped raining images and set lists and Youtube videos and photos of fans with the In Spades demon tattooed on their arm. Maybe I’ll get to see them sometime in the next few months, in Europe when I return there in July, or in San Francisco in the Fall, but it won't be the same. In the meantime, they are my curse.

(Update.)
Yesterday someone sent me a link saying that the Whigs set at Primavera was going to be streamed at 2 p.m my time today, and I shrugged and thought, well, I'll have to miss that: it's right in the middle of teaching. Then class got cancelled due to threats by various white supremecist organizations - I did mention that the end was nigh earlier, didn't I? -- so I went home and tuned in. It was a like a sick moment in a game my mom used to play with me called fortunately/unfortunately. Unfortunately, my university is under credible threat of hate crimes. Fortunately, it meant I got to see the Afghan Whigs at Primavera!

Make of that what you will.

At two in the afternoon here in Olympia Washington, it was damp and grey as always. The woods waved outside my window. But for an hour, I was mentally in night-lit Barcelona on the beach, watching the Whigs, bathed in eerie blue light, blister through most of "In Spades" with a couple of songs from "Gentlemen," "Do To The Beast" and "Black Love" thrown in for good measure. It was semi-awesome and I enjoyed the music, but at the same time, it gave me that claustrophobic feeling that all concert films give me, because you can't turn your head and see what you naturally want to see on stage; rather, you're lassoed to the camera-person's choices, which often include close-ups of people's fingers on frets, the backs of their heads, or, in this case, numerous weird angles of the drums. I couldn't help but notice that many of the cameras seemed to be  on tracks at the performer's feet. It's frustrating.

Still. Half a loaf. And given the alternative of either a) working or b) being, you know, shot by white supremacists, it was certainly a better spent hour than it could have been.