The picture above was on my bedroom wall while I was growing up. It's of a band called the Afghan Whigs. I was about eleven when I first saw one of their videos on 120 Minutes on MTV, probably '92 or '93. At first the appeal probably had a lot to do with the fact that they were from Cincinnati, and their lead singer was originally from a little north in Butler County, where I grew up and still live. My little mind was amazed that actual human beings from Cincinnati were on my television set, and the music and lyrics were probably a secondary concern.
However, in short order I came to sincerely love the Whigs. Greg Dulli became my one true hero for being so unapologetically confident. I combed Sassy and all the music mags of the '90s for any mention. I put Let Me Lie to You on a mix cd when I was 14 (?!). I taped 120 Minutes when Greg hosted with Donal Logue and they acted out scenes from the Godfather with water guns. I was in it to win it, but I was always too young to go to any shows. When I was about 16 I joined an internet mailing list (remember those?) called Congregation just so I could keep up with all the latest Whigs happenings. In my freshman year at Miami, the band decided to break up and though I've seen Greg Dulli play in different incarnations I truly thought I would never see the original Whigs play live together.
Tonight, I will see the Afghan Whigs play live at Bogart's in Cincinnati. I wish I could try to explain to you what that means to me in a way you could understand. I could tell you my favorite songs, my favorite albums, and why I think everyone should love them. I could tell you that after hearing news of the reunion tour I immediately knew why my life had been spared from that massive pulmonary embolism last year.
I could tell you that I never was really a stereotypical Whigs fan, either a mosh-loving dude or one of the girls who would faint just to be in the same room as Greg Dulli (In fact my fave Greg moment of all time was an old 90's joint interview with Chuck Cleaver from the Ass Ponys/Wussy where they declared the only people you remember from elementary school is the kid who wins the spelling bee and the kid who craps their pants, and only Chuck knows why that is my favorite...haha. hahaha.) I loved the Whigs because I thought their musicianship was hard to beat amongst the other bands of the day (or any day) and their guitar and bass lines sounded so entirely different. Most of all, I loved the Whigs because I felt like Greg Dulli's lyrics, especially the most true, the most emotionally cruel, were an outlet for a side of me few people ever experience. I am not actually overly nice, and I never really was, even at the age of eleven, in the sense that I have always refused to compromise any part of myself to make other people feel better. I have a sense of self that is so strong-willed that it just refuses to be sacrificed to any greater good, and that has been both a saving grace and a detriment at times. And I always felt like it was really something not to be proud of, and Dulli's lyrics in Whigs songs made me feel better about my ability to sacrifice the will of others in order to keep my own self going. As I've gotten older, I am much less ashamed of my ability to be cruel for self-preservation as I see the sorrow people have endured for letting other people stomp on them. And maybe those lyrics about selfishness were actually full of shame but they always made me almost proud of myself.
Lastly, I could tell you this. I could tell you I left that picture on my wall when my parents declared bankruptcy and we lost our house when I was in college, along with the picture of John Lennon from my mom's White Album above my bed, and some other music pictures dating from pre-teen years. I told my mom I would go back and save them before we had to turn over our keys, but for reasons not clear to me I never did go back. I think I had been forced to realized that houses, and pictures of the Afghan Whigs, are not permanent and never were even if we thought so at one time. It's the memories of growing up at that house that I take with me, and it's the memories of growing up listening to the best band to ever come out of Cincinnati that I take with me and not some old picture.
