Whigged Out : Group’s ‘Gentlemen’ Delves Into Dark Psyche of ‘90s Male

The Afghan Whigs’ album “Gentlemen” wasn’t a commercial smash, and it didn’t show up on a lot of year-end Top 10 lists, but it just might be the overlooked masterpiece of last year.

The Cincinnati group’s first major-label release, which came out last fall, is a grueling immersion in the latest methods of warfare in the battle of the sexes--a dark, dramatic wallow in lust, shame, guilt, despair, deceit and obsession that’s framed in dense, uplifting rock.

Its key lyrical images and melodic motifs recur in shifting forms, generating a unified feel that reflects its musical inspiration, Van Morrison’s landmark 1968 album “Astral Weeks.” The immediate trigger for the story itself was Francis Coppola’s 1982 romantic fantasy “One From the Heart”--no surprise, since Whigs’ leader Greg Dulli was a teen filmmaker before he took up music.

“I really, really identified with the Frederic Forrest character in ‘One From the Heart,’ and that was sort of the beginning of the thematic process,” Dulli says. “He was just a real kind of heel, but you could tell he didn’t want to be one, that he wasn’t really one.

“I think people get kinda disappointed when I say the album isn’t all autobiographical, and I’m like, God, that’s kind of mean, to think something like that. Why would you want poor little me to go through all that?

“It’s like anything else. You use some license. It’s observation. Maybe it started out with something autobiographical, and then you want to blow it up into something bigger. Once I got onto the theme with the songs, I pressed on to see how much further I could go into the dark psyche of the ‘90s male.”

Dulli, 28, grew up in Hamilton, an industrial town north of Cincinnati, and turned to music when he moved to Los Angeles in 1984 after dropping out of film school at the University of Cincinnati. He worked at Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard and started seeing rock shows around town. L.A.’s Dream Syndicate is the band that inspired him to become a musician.

Back in Ohio, he teamed with guitarist Rick McCollum, bassist John Curley and drummer Steven Earle to form the Whigs. They released an album on their own, then made three records for the influential independent Sub Pop label--concluding with “Uptown Avondale,” a collection of five Motown songs that got the special Whigs treatment.

“That was actually the beginning of the new album in a way,” Dulli says of the collection. “We started playing with atmosphere. . . . The songs that I picked were like, ‘Come See About Me,’ ‘Band of Gold’--happy songs where the words were really, really sad. And I wanted to make the music more sympathetic with the lyrics, so we made the music more minor key, slowed them down, and that’s what I wanted to go into on ‘Gentlemen.’ How far can I go into it? How dark is dark?”

The Whigs built a following on the alternative-rock scene, leading to their signing by Elektra. “Gentlemen,” released last fall, hasn’t put the Whigs in the ’93 breakthrough class with Smashing Pumpkins and the Breeders--two other bands from the geographical heartland and the psychological frontier--but it’s early, and Dulli is content to wait it out.

“I’m not impatient at all. We’ve always been a gradual band. . . . And you know what? If that never came, I can really honestly say that the day we finished that record and I put the final touches on the last mix, the pride and satisfaction that I felt were enough for me. Deep in my heart I know that we made a special record.”