Day After Day #229: Din

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Din (1995)

The music industry likes to pigeonhole artists into categories that are easy to understand. This one's a folksinger, this one is country, this one is a blues singer, this one plays hard rock. But when you decide that you don't want to stay in one box, you can run into some problems, at least if you're on a major label. That's what happened to Chris Whitley, whose career zigged and zagged in interesting directions until he ran out of time.

Whitley was born in Houston but moved around a lot as a kid after his parents split up. He began playing guitar at 15 and at 17, ended up busking on the streets of New York City. After four years in 1981, a Belgian travel agent gave him a free plane ticket to Brussels and got him in touch with a local promoter. He formed a band there called A Noh Rodeo with his girlfriend Helene Gevaert and her brother. Whitley eventually married Gevaert, had a daughter, Trixie, and then moved back to the U.S. in the late '80s. 

Producer Daniel Lanois heard some of Whitley's music and had him record at Lanois' studio in New Orleans, which eventually led to Whitley scoring a deal with Columbia. Whitley's debut album, 1991's Living with the Law, featured the single "Big Sky Country," which became a minor hit, getting up to #35 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart. The rootsy Americana sound, boosted by Whitley's National steel guitar work, connected with the mainstream rock world; blues-based artists like Eric Clapton, John Lee Hooker and Buddy Guy were still getting a lot of attention. 

I liked Living with the Law, but ultimately, I was more drawn to the heavier and dirtier (not necessarily grungier) sounds that were coming out a few months after the album was released in July '91. Whitley agreed, calling the songs too precious and cleaned up from the way he normally plays them. It took four years for the next Whitley album to come out, and it was very different from his debut. 

Din of Ecstasy was a heavy rock album, steeped in distortion and murk, and it turned off a lot of fans of the airy sound of his first release. Lyrically, it was a lot darker as well, since the four years in between albums included drug addiction and a divorce. Whitley rebelled from the blues gunslinger image he'd had on the first album, leaning into influences like Jimi Hendrix and Nirvana and producing an album that a lot of the blues crowd hated. Me, on the other hand, I loved it. Whitley was clearly going through some shit and pouring it into his music, which lined up with the darker edge of artists like Soundgarden and Nine Inch Nails that were huge in '95.

In 2014, Din of Ecstasy co-producer Danny Kadar posted an alternative version of the album on SoundCloud that doesn't include the post-production effects that he said watered down the songs. It's cool, but I still like the original. I was one of the few, because the album totally stiffed commercially. 

"Din" is an uptempo rocker with lacerating lyrics.

"Well, when I got your letter, I could not contain/The urge to go beyond our inheritance again/And the drug of ages, in pages of your pen/I got to put it down/Maybe you got glazed by all the shit you had/To taste for to descend, to let me in/Maybe it's okay now if you turn and run away."

In interviews at the time, Whitley called the album more vulnerable than his debut, even as it's much louder and more aggressive.

"Anesthetic days of crusades and consent, the idiot intent/And though our love was likely your disease is so competent/You're so proud of the few risks you've taken, child/But no it's nothing new, we all continue/Maybe it's okay now/If you turn and run away, well, yet again/Vacant above the din, vacant above the din."

Other highlights of Din of Ecstasy included "O God My Heart is Ready," "Narcotic Prayer" and a gnarly cover of the Jesus and Mary Chain's "Some Candy Talking." The one and only time I saw Whitley live was on the tour for this album, in October 1995. I went to a Bruins game earlier in the evening and then drove over to the Middle East Downstairs in Cambridge, where I joined about 25 others as we got our faces melted off by Whitley and his band. It was probably a little too loud and a lot of the vocals were drowned out, but it was a pretty amazing experience as the waves of guitar noise washed over us. 

Whitley's third album, 1997's Terra Incognita, combined the blues sound of his debut with the rock edge of Din of Ecstasy, but it didn't make much of a dent and Whitley was dropped by Columbia. Whitley responded by recording a solo acoustic album in his father's Vermont barn; the raw Dirt Floor was released in 1998 on indie label Messenger Records. He began drinking heavily but continued releasing albums fairly regularly. In 2001, he moved to Germany to live with his new girlfriend and recorded two albums there. He continued touring and releasing albums despite being in pretty rough shape. In 2005, he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and died in November at the age of 45. 

Whitley's daughter Trixie began playing drums at age 10 and by the time her father died (she was 18), she was writing and recording her own music. She released her first EP in 2008, has worked with musicians including Lanois, Robert Plant, Marc Ribot and Joe Henry, and has released five solo albums. She also drew the cover of Din of Ecstasy.

Ultimately, Chris Whitley left us too soon, but he left a lot of great work behind for us to enjoy.