Scourged
When I went to see the Afghan Whigs at the Fillmore in October, I was very sick with some tuberculosis-type lung disease, but when I woke up, I was well. It figures. I was cured by my fever, which broke as I stood next to the stage in a magic circle of space, elbows out, rocking slightly forward on the balls of my feet, like I was about to do a very bad Tower takeoff, pogo-ing with fervor. No one there up front came near to touching me, either because I smelt, or was visibly sick, or because I was dressed, as my sister said contemptuously before I left the house, like a terrorist, in a shirt that read BUDAFCKNPEST.
I wore the shirt to remind me of the magical last time I saw the Whigs on my way to Hungary. That was only two months ago, but it feels like forever, as my summer has faded, wiped out by time and horror and all the crap of daily life in America.
That Vienna show was the first night of the second leg of the Afghan Whigs European tour and they have tightened up a lot since then. They’ve also lost a member (Ed Harcourt, the opener, who played a lot of instruments in their set, so they were more like a six piece then). They can play like fury as a five piece also, though: at their best, during a song like “Arabian Heights,” for example, or “Lost In the Woods,” or when Greg Dulli stands before a floor tom and beats the fuck out of it while he sings it’s like the denizens of Asgard formed a band.
At the Fillmore it took a few songs to get into that groove and I still feel unsatisfied with the versions of “Oriole” I’ve seen, but from “Can Rova” on it was stupendous. And THEN Marcy Mays, from Scrawl, came on, and sang “My Curse,” and words fail me. I wanted to scream “STORY MUSGRAVE” as loud as I could, or maybe just “CHARLES” but, as I said, I had TB. (Dear Scrawl: please reunite.) After that — during “Something Hot” and so on — the band seemed to turn it up, getting louder and louder and louder. But I like that. In my opinion they can’t play loud enough. I like to hear music in my body as well as through my ears.
The truth is, before we went, I had been a little worried because I was going with Kathy, my friend who is visiting me from Texas. Kathy is in — was in — a band, and people in bands invariably hate other people’s bands. (Kathy’s band, Glass Eye, was super highly acclaimed, too, which makes this tendency worse.) I love hanging out with her but I was worried she’d hate the Afghan Whigs. She didn’t, but she hated the opener, Har Mar Superstar, with a passion, and that led to an interesting discussion about masculinity and the weird disguises that it uses to make itself seem less toxic than it is. Har Mar Superstar seems to be playing with the idea of the pathetic old balding man with a pot belly and giant ego, and the sight of that, short of making us laugh, kind of opened up this big abyss. Har Mar bothers me because a) there’s a lack of sincerity, a mockery, in his schtick, and I don’t like mockery in any form, b) he reeks of privilege, because if a woman did that she’d be stoned by the crowd and c) that kind of 70s boogie/soul music — Boz Scaggsiness, I call it — isn’t a favorite of mine anyway.
Kathy got really concerned when I said that the Afghan Whigs love HarMar and that they have some common thread or other, but in fact, it’s hard now to figure out what that it is. Maybe it’s just that the Whigs used to have some HarMar in them. Not anymore though: one of the many things I admire about them is their evolution. Unlike most bands, their records have gotten so much better over the years, so rich, so intense, so that they no longer come on stage and fuck around: there’s no patter, and hardly any covers, even, because to take time out to play “True Love Travels On A Gravel Road” or “Creep” or “If I Only Had a Brain,” much as I would be thrilled to hear them, would detract from what I, and well, all came for, i.e. Afghan Whigs songs. There’s just no time for it now.
Which isn’t to say they didn’t sneak snippets of “Penny Lane” and “Boys of Summer” into their set, because they did, and it was awesome. But not as awesome as their originals. You know, Emmanual Kant once said that “enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” I know there are people, many of them in rock bands, who would prefer immaturity over adulthood; childhood over growing up. The thing about the Afghan Whigs is that they are enlightened. They prove that grunge grew up, and that it grew up good. As, I hope, have all the rest of us.
