Good morning TNC crew,
You join us on this fine Monday, which has only just started but now that we’ve said that it has no choice but to be fine, for a lovely Life & Times chat with Greg Dulli. Niall here. I joined Greg for a face-to-face chat in London last month. It was the Monday morning after England had beaten Mexico in the middle of the night, I was tired, I was weary, I was wondering why I’d opened another can at 4am, but Greg brought me back to the land of the living.
This Friday, The Afghan Whigs, the soulful, grunge-adjacent rockers and the band with whom Greg made his name as their louche, menacing and maverick ringleader, release their excellent tenth record Soft Control. Here’s a wonderfully jagged taster from it:
Here’s a reminder that today’s edition is free for all to read. Which is nice. But what’s also nice is those ledges who upgrade to a paid subscription for £5 a month so we can keep doing whatever it is we’re doing here. Feels like a good thing, so let’s keep a good thing going:
OK, onto Greg. Enjoy the edition,
Ted and Niall
What’s the first record you loved?
I Want You Back by The Jackson 5, from the album The Jackson 5’s Greatest Hits. I was 6.
And the last?
Människobarn by Dina Ögan. I heard this song Orden Brann on the radio and Shazam’d it and listened to it five more times and wondered, ‘What does the rest of the album sound like’. The best way I can describe it, and it actually goes with my life and times, is it reminded me of The Fifth Dimension and that was the first show I ever saw. I was moved in a primal way when I saw them and I saw that show when I was maybe 8, so immediately connected to this song, there was a familiarity. This song made me play it over and over.
I listen to music all the time, there’s three or four radio stations I listen to. First and foremost, there’s a French station called FIP. It’s a vast repository of excellent music, both old and new, but a lot of it I haven’t heard. Being that it’s a French station, they legally have to play a certain amount of French music and there’s some amazing French music that I’ve gotten from there.
What’s your earliest memory?
Watching Lon Chaney as the Wolf Man with my mom one night and watching him turn into the Wolf Man and watching my mom freak out and be terrified. I was fascinated by the dude turning into a werewolf. For years, I had a recurring dream of being chased by a werewolf and at some point in my mid-twenties, I went to sleep, sure enough the werewolf turned up – he didn’t chase me every night, but like six times a year or something – and finally I was like, ‘Fuck you werewolf’ and I stopped running and let him catch me and when he caught me he disappeared.
Do you miss him?
No! Fuck that guy! My birthday was in May and my mom wrote me a card and she mentioned Lon Chaney as the Wolf Man, thanking me for being there for her that night.
What’s your pet peeve?
Mean people. Shitty people. Thoughtless people. Unkind people. Ugliness, ugly emotions, ugly human behaviour. Massive pet peeves. Literal disgust.
What do you wish the 18-year-old you knew?
That you can legitimately believe and bet on yourself and your fortitude and inner-strength and that you will fail, you will slip and fall, you will make horrible mistakes, but you can transcend them.
How do you spark creativity?
In my younger days, I would wait for the muse to alight upon me. Now, I realise that I have to actively engage the muse and put the work in. Even if I don’t have an idea, go do something that is creative and try and engage yourself in creative battle.
When did you switch into that approach?
Probably at the end of the Whigs and the advent of the Twilight Singers. I had to start from zero again and I also did not want to repeat myself and make a carbon copy of the band I was already in. I wanted to do something different and in order to do that, I had to experiment and experiment often and I learned to lean into collaborations and other people’s ideas and be more open to the creative experience.
What’s the key to being a good collaborator?
Recognise the strength in your collaborator, recognise they are a different person with different life experiences and a different skill level or maybe they’re not even super skilful but there’s an innocence about them that brings forth something you might have buried long ago. But trusting your collaborator and letting them take the lead sometimes if you need to, relinquishing total control. And this is from someone who has written all 50 songs from my last five albums by myself! There you go…
Has anyone you’ve ever met made you feel starstruck?
Peter Falk. I worked in a record store in California, Tower Records on the Sunset Strip. Every shift, each employee got to work in the information booth which was the centre of the store, where you’d come in and say, ‘Hey, where’s the reggae section?’ and I’d be like, ‘It’s over there’. But the other thing you go to do when you ran the information booth is that you were the DJ for one hour. I was there on a Friday night and it was my turn in the information booth. I can’t remember what I was playing. It’s the Sunset Strip in 1984, so lots of movie stars, rock stars came in, for instance one day I was working in the Singles aisle, and they did not come in together, but I watched Joey Ramone, Lemmy and Tom Waits stand in a conversation, I was like, ‘Wow’. Steven Spielberg would buy records and I’d ring them up.
I loved Columbo, I loved Peter Falk. Then when I got into college, I got into the Cassavetes stuff and I just loved him as a person. I’m in the information booth and Peter Falk walks up to the information booth, I’m like, ‘Oh my god’. He came up and he was like, ‘Young man, are you playing the music here?’. I go, ‘Yes sir, I am’ and he goes, ‘Do you ever play jazz?’. I was like, ‘Mr Falk, I’m 19 from Ohio, I don’t know jack-shit about jazz’ and he’s like, ‘Really? No John Coltrane, no Charlie Parker?’. I’m like, ‘I know the names, I know their greatness, but…’ and he’s like, ‘Are you allowed to open records here?’. We were, we had a shrink wrapper in the back so we could go open something. He goes, ‘Can I pick out a record for us to play so you can hear some jazz and we can all hear some jazz?’.
He picked out Kind Of Blue, which is an excellent entry for anyone to hear jazz for the first time and I played Kind Of Blue for Peter Falk at his request and also at his attempting to teach me something. It turned out that Miles Davis is one of my favourite artists ever. I was in awe that I was not only seeing Peter Falk but interacting with him. I was starstruck.
Who or what is the greatest influence on your work?
On my entry into music, it was my next door neighbour Jim Miller. He was like the neighbourhood Elvis. He had a beautiful wife named Linda and two great kids, Melissa and Tracey, who were my friends. Jim played guitar and you could hear it playing at his house and he’d sit on the porch and give us little concerts and we’d call out songs and if he knew it, he’d play it. He knew a bunch of Elvis stuff. I loved what he did, I loved the way he made us all feel, I loved his charisma and playfulness and when he started sneaking his own songs into his little concerts, I was like, ‘You made that up?’. I asked him and he goes, ‘Yeah, I wrote the song’. Wow. I’d never met someone who wrote a song before. It just seemed so alien and impossible to me and he single-handedly stripped the mystique away. If Jim could do it, I could do it, and that’s what he said, ‘If I can do it, anyone can do it’. He completely made it not-scary.
What was the home you grew up in like?
I lived in a tract housing neighbourhood called Sharon Park. Every house was the same layout, just different colours of paint. We all had little front yards, little driveways, little back yards, a blue-collar neighbourhood, a lot of factory workers, my dad worked for the railroad. We lived very closely to a river, the Great Miami River. I had a little bit of a Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn childhood. It was edgy and you had to defend yourself a lot. I encountered bullies almost immediately. That’s when I learned, even if I was gonna get my ass kicked, I had to engage in the conflict or I would be a mark for the rest of my days in that neighbourhood. Even if the guy whipped your ass, he would never fight you again because he knew you would fight back.
What book would you recommend we read?
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn. If I didn’t say Geek Love, I’d say Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and if you were to read them side by side, you’d see why I chose them both, they resemble each other but tell completely different stories with a similar outcome. I’m not a religious person so I’m not saying playing god or anything like that, but messing with the creation of a human, interacting with something that is mysterious and the consequences that come with that once it comes to the artist’s completion.
What’s your favourite film and why?
Jaws. It’s exciting, it’s a tight story, memorable characters, phenomenal arc, great music, keeps the monster invisible until very late in the movie, allowing your imagination to scare you more anything else. Just absolutely a perfect film. I watch Jaws multiple times a year.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
Good people aren’t good all the time, bad people aren’t bad all the time. We are all innately human, learn the lesson that it teaches you and move on without beating yourself up.
Can you cook? If so, what’s your signature dish?
I can cook. I would say maybe blackened swordfish and succotash.
Which talent do you wish you had?
That I could fly a plane.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Being a good friend.
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