Greg Dulli
Greg Dulli has always seemed more confident and in control than most of his peers, but the 41-year-old leader of the '90s alt-rock underdog The Afghan Whigs and the mastermind of The Twilight Singers isn't a stranger to setbacks, including depression, heroin use, a club fight that resulted in a fractured skull, a meltdown in an airport that sent him to the hospital and put him in restraints, and the cocaine-related death of his good friend Ted Demme. With his new Twilight Singers record, however, Dulli is finally attempting to match his onstage persona and his personal one by ditching the hard life and lining up a less traumatic future. Recorded around the world and completed in Katrina-ravaged New Orleans, Powder Burns finds Dulli near the top of his post-Whigs game, effortlessly delivering big rock and bigger hooks with the kind of panache typically found on bigger stages. The A.V. Club recently caught up with Dulli to talk about friends in low places, returning to New Orleans, and why he's finally stepped into the light.
The A.V. Club: In addition to Los Angeles and New Orleans, you've spent a lot of time in Italy over the past few years. What attracted you?
Greg Dulli: I've always loved going there. When the Whigs started playing there, we actually did really well, and then when I started The Twilight Singers, we played there with this group, Afterhours, who are one of the biggest rock bands in Italy, if not the biggest. I became really good friends with them. They asked me to produce their record, so I did, and then I ended up joining their live band, so I just kind of moved over there for a while. Playing with them and being a side guy in their band was probably one of the more liberating moments I've had in music.
AVC: Why's that?
GD: Because I didn't have to be the guy, you know? I didn't have to be the focus guy, and by concentrating on playing, I think I upped my guitar skills considerably by just playing the shredder role. I played guitar and I sang and I played piano. They would push me out there at the end of the night, and I would sing a song in Italian.
AVC: Your bio mentions that when you started the new Twilight Singers record two years ago, you'd been in a "drug haze" for seven years, but when we spoke in 2000, it seemed like you had just been through a drug haze and were pretty clean. Was there some sort of relapse?
GD: I think what happened was the tour that I did on the first Twilight record. I hated it. I'm an enormously oversensitive person, and I just kind of stopped playing music after that tour. I stopped playing music for about a year and a half, and then when I started playing again, a very dear friend of mine passed away, and I just probably excused myself into oblivion after that. Whether it was a relapse or just a continuation of the self-destructive streak that I've had running through me since I was a boy, I don't know. A couple of the songs on this record are from that era, and then I stopped. And I've been clean for two years now.
AVC: So when we talked on that tour, were you clean?
GD: No. And if I told you I was, I was lying to you.
AVC: It was obvious that you had passed through a dark period in your life, and things seemed a bit more celebratory for you, especially around the time you made 1965 with the Whigs.
GD: They were. And honestly, I'm not going to portray my years of drug use as all darkness, because they weren't. In particular, that 1965 period was fun. It was like the Stones' 1972 tour. It wasn't like, "Oh, I've gotta do drugs to kill my pain." It was, "I want to do drugs so I can stay up and see every fun thing I can possibly see." I had to, at some point, kind of reconcile why I was doing drugs, and why I did them all day long, and for days on end, and it became kind of sad to me. I felt terrible and I looked terrible. I was probably gonna die if I didn't stop. I'm not in a program or anything like that. I'm a very strong-willed person once I decide something, so I decided to get on with my life without a crutch. And once I made that decision, life got a little easier for me. I'm always gonna have some fucking demon crawling up the back of my leg, but I've gotten to the point where I'm firm in the decision to not let outside influences take me down. Outside or inside, for that matter. I want to play music probably more than I ever have wanted to, and the best way for me to do that is to live an honest life. Not like being honest with you, being honest with myself. So I'd be shocked if I ever went back to that, because I think there's really only one way for me to go. I clearly am not a moderate person, so I have to learn what's good and what's bad. You know, I still have a couple drinks. I smoke a doobie now and again. But the Class A's, they had to go.
AVC: Many people around you have had drug problems—why are you attracted to those kinds of people?
GD: I'll put it to you this way: When I was a kid, and when I started to read William Burroughs or Hunter Thompson or listen to the Velvets or the Stones and read Creem magazine about Keith Richards and shit like that, I couldn't wait to do drugs, and I couldn't wait to do all of them. And then I went and did it. I started doing drugs when I was 14. I'm thinking it's probably been some sort of warped fascination for me from an early age, and I don't think I'm the first or last person to have that warped fascination. And it would stand to reason that I'm probably going to come across other people who have a similar fascination. Especially in the line of work that I'm in, it's a common travail. I think you do what you do and you like who you like, and then at some point in your life, you have decisions to make. I'm not an anti-drug person, and I would never tell anyone not to take drugs. I don't tell anybody not to do anything. Don't fuck children, don't murder people, and don't illegally invade Iraq—those are some of the things off the top of my head that I would say "Don't do." But the rest is up to the individual to choose to experience or not experience. I've been asked before if I have regrets—I have none. I did what I did, and now I do what I do, and it's really that simple.
AVC: What happened on that initial Twilight Singers tour that made you stop playing music?
GD: It was a thrown-together band, and outside of Michael Horrigan, who I played with in the Whigs, it was an unpleasant experience with people that I didn't know very well. Strange egos emerging that I'm like, "Where the fuck are you coming from?" I've always said about bands: You've gotta have a leader, but everyone has to be in for the experience, and you have to let yourself go with that. There were members of that party that were not allowing that to happen, and it just broke my heart, and I wanted nothing to do with that again. So when I decided to play again, I played around L.A. and New Orleans, and just did it casually. I jammed with people with no expectations, until I got around people that I could trust. And when I had built a record and was ready to tour it, I knew exactly who to go to, and I knew that I would get along with those people, and I was correct.
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