Day After Day #253: Front Street

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

Front Street (2008)

When two great artists work together, there's no guarantee they'll come up with something great. Remember when Bowie and Jagger did that cover of "Dancing in the Street"? The less said about that, the better. 

In the '90s, Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan fronted two of the best alt-rock bands going, the Afghan Whigs and Screaming Trees, respectively. Both were charismatic with unique voices and presences and after their bands split up in the late '90s, the two collaborated on Dulli's next project, the Twilight Singers. 

By the end of '03, the two decided to work on a project together, which they dubbed the Gutter Twins (a takeoff on the Glimmer Twins, the name that Jagger and Keith Richards used when they produced Stones albums). But they had other things going on (Dulli with the Twilight Singers and solo, Lanegan with Queens of the Stone Age, solo and many collaborations with other artists), so a Gutter Twins album wasn't completed and released until 2008.

The album, Saturnalia, was released on Sub Pop in March 2008 and featured many contributors who had worked with Dulli and Lanegan in the past: Dave Rosser, Scott Ford, Jeff Klein, Matthias Schneeberger and Cully Symington (Twilight Singers); Dave Catching, Mario Lalli, Troy Van Leeuwen and Natasha Schneider (QOTSA); and Martina Topley-Bird, Joseph Arthur, Petra Haden and more. 

Dulli referred to the Gutter Twins as the "Satanic Everly Brothers," a brooding combination of the lecherous yet soulful Dulli and the world-weary smoke-drenched Lanegan singing songs of sin and redemption. The combo got some attention with the dark rocker "Idle Hands," playing on Letterman and touring the U.S. and Europe throughout 2008.

The closing song on the album was "Front Street," which starts innocuously enough with the sounds of birds chirping. But it's a lament of a lothario looking back at the wreckage of his life, with Dulli taking the lead and Lanegan backing him up with just an acoustic guitar behind them at first.

"Front Street ain't no place for a boy/Who likes to talk the way that boys do/Unstrung, young, dumb/Comfortably numb/I'm as old as the star who bears you/Black as the bitch who wears you/Tears you, rips you apart/And then it turns around/Come on feel me/I ain't the only one/When it comes apart/We're gonna have some fun, son/Give me five minutes/With your sweetest sweet tea/If she's as fine as your missus/Then she's fine enough for me."

The song slowly builds as the protagonist sings of his past.

"A rod out the window/A suburban street/And I ain't slept since Monday/Jump in and ride we got deadlines to meet/People to use, lovers to break/Handful of pills, no life to take/River too cold, oven too hot/Bridge a one hundred and fifty foot drop/But there was a day I could say that I loved you/Early one evening I cut through Longview/Lifted you up and you turned it around/Here on Front Street/All the good girls and their boys know/Down in the mine there are diamonds/Down on the street walk the lifeless/And now I know that you're through with me/Can I tell you my love, dead honestly?/Life is shame and your hands are stained/Walk in chains and change your name."

Both Dulli and Lanegan had seen some serious shit by this point, whether it was drug addiction, near-death experiences or just life on the road.

"Go where you go but forget me not/Take a memory too, if it's all you got/Chase your pain with a shot of rain/Dig with a spade or a razor blade/Come on feel me now/I ain't the only one/When it comes apart/We're gonna have some fun, son."

The Gutter Twins only played one tour, although they came through Boston twice and I saw them both times. They played most of the album, as well as some Twilight Singers and solo Lanegan songs and a few covers of songs by Massive Attack and Jose Gonzalez (the band released an EP of covers called Adorata later in '08). The two eventually went back to other projects, with Dulli reviving the Afghan Whigs in 2012 and Lanegan continuing his solo career. They had talked of doing another Gutter Twins album, but Lanegan died in 2022 before it could happen. Still, the short-lived project was a great document of a great idea.