King Only

Monday night, I was standing in line outside the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square when an obviously inebriated Englishman wearing sunglasses at night sauntered up.

"Who are you in line for?" he loudly interjected, punctuating his question with a warm blast of booze breath.

"Greg Dulli," said the woman behind me.

"Well, tell me about him," the drunk impatiently insisted.

"Uh, he was in a couple of bands...the Afghan Whigs, Twilight Singers," said one of the woman's friends.

"Ish he a STAAAARRRR?"

"He is to me," the woman said meekly.

"Hmmph," said the drunk before wandering off.

By all rights, Dulli should be a star, if you consider the body of work he has produced since the late '80s. The Afghan Whigs started out as a Cincinnati-bred punk combo in the vein of the Replacements and Husker Du, signing to Sub Pop and releasing two excellent albums Up In It and Congregation before making the leap to the majors. By the time its final album 1965 came out (in 1998), the band had incorporated soul and R&B influences into its dark, booze-fueled sound. Dulli moved on to form The Twilight Singers, which had a rotating lineup of players over the last decade, releasing always interesting albums that peaked with 2003's Blackberry Belle and 2006's Powder Burns. He also released a solo album, Amber Headlights, that he'd recorded in '01 but had shelved after the death of his friend Ted Demme. In 2008, Dulli and Mark Lanegan teamed up to record an album and tour as The Gutter Twins, which explored even darker themes.

Now Dulli is preparing to release another Twilight Singers album in February, but before then, he's doing a tour of small venues accompanied by Twilight Singers/Gutter Twins guitarist David Rosser and violinist/cellist Rick Nelson. Venues don't get much smaller than the Brattle, a tiny (250 seats) art movie house. Tickets were general admission so I managed to snag seats in the fifth center row, but really, there are no bad seats in the place. We were so close to the action, we could sort of make out what Dulli was saying to the other guys away from the mike.

Having seen him several times in various band incarnations, I was excited to see Dulli in a stripped-down solo format, as he was on the excellent 2008 album Live at Triple Door. He offered a balanced 90-minute retrospective of his career, playing mostly Twilight Singers material but mixing in some key Afghan Whigs and Gutter Twins tunes as well as some covers. Dulli noted that he once taken a date to see "Kiss of the Spiderwoman" at the Brattle, and later hilariously admonished some guy up front who was checking his e-mail.

After playing a cover of Bjork's "Hyperballad," Dulli said he had seen her first group the Sugarcubes 10 times, including their last show. "Well, the last show before they get back together, because everybody gets back together. Well, almost everybody," he cracked, referring to the Afghan Whigs. "There's a reason people get divorced."

Still, he didn't shy away from playing "If I Were Going" from 1993's Gentlemen, "Step Into the Light" from '91's Congregation and "Summer's Kiss" from the 1996 release Black Love. One of the new songs also featured the "Don't forget the alcohol" refrain from "Miles iz Ded," the hidden track at the end of Congregation. Dulli and crew also tore through Twilight Singers classics "Bonnie Brae," "Forty Dollars," "Candy Cane Crawl," "Teenage Wristband" (with a verse from the Who's "Pinball Wizard") and "King Only." Although he refused repeated requests from a feverish fan to play "The Killer," citing the difficulty of the piano part. Of course, he's played it many times in the past, but what the hell. We more than got our money's worth.

Craig Wedren, frontman of another hallowed '90s alt-rock act, Shudder to Think, opened the show with an excellent 45-minute solo set. He played acoustic and electric, and used a pedal-operated tape looper to accompany himself on backing vocals and occasionally add riffs or percussion. Since Shudder to Think, who I saw at Avalon back in '95 opening on the first Foo Fighters headlining tour, broke up in the late '90s, Wedren has released solo material and mainly done music for TV and movie soundtracks. His operatic voice was in fine form as he sprinkled in some old Shudder classics including "Hit Liquor," "Red House" and "X-French Tee Shirt."

Sure, Dulli and Wedren may not qualify as stars to today's rock radio listeners, or even to drunken Englishmen staggering through Harvard Square. But to their devoted followers, they never stopped being stars.

Classic clip of Dulli and Donal Logue hosting MTV's 120 Minutes in '94, pt. 1:


Part 2: