Leave it to Greg Dulli to open a big outdoor set by Afghan Whigs with a song about a relationship that has turned nasty, a combination of threats and tears.
“You’re gonna make me break down and crrrrrry,” Dulli rasped at the outset of the Whigs’ set a few weeks ago at Riot Fest in Humboldt Park. It was the band’s first show in Chicago since releasing “Do to the Beast” (Sub Pop), their first album in more than a decade.
“Parked Outside,” the track that opens the album, also kicked in the reunited band’s brief but potent Riot Fest appearance, and it was a rumble of corrosive guitars, whomping beats and Dulli’s blood-soaked vocals. In contrast to the boozy imprecision of some of the singer’s concert performances about a decade ago, he sounded focused and ferocious. The man in black was emphatically back, one of rock’s nastiest bad boys, a villainous character out of a Jim Thompson or Iceberg Slim novel with a low-slung guitar, shades and a smirk.
There have been bad boys (and girls) in rock for decades, from the cartoonish (Kiss’ Gene Simmons, Alice Cooper) to the downright scary (G.G. Allin, Norwegian death-metal marauder Varg Vikernes). Outspoken figures such as Courtney Love, Johnny Rotten and Axl Rose are all notorious button-pushers who elicit love or hate, and rarely anything in between. Unlike some of the others, Dulli’s life-of-excess persona is tied in with his art and its illicit, outlaw flair. Out of Cincinnati during the ’80s, the Whigs were a band of brawlers that broke up and reunited countless times over a fractious decade-plus, when they released a half-dozen good-to-excellent studio albums.
Dulli’s interactions with his audience in concert were legendarily confrontational, and he departed one show at a Texas club with a fractured skull. But over 1,500 concerts, the Whigs established a well-deserved reputation as a lethal live act, with the singer often embodying the scoundrel narrators in his songs to an unnerving degree. Dulli would call out hecklers and confront them on stage, or he’d badger his audience as he did one night at Metro in the ’90s: “You’re all in denial,” he announced matter-of-factly after one particularly nasty song. “You tell yourself, ‘I don’t drink too much, I don’t get too high, I don’t yell at my spouse or loved one.’ But you do, don’t you?”
The band broke up for real in 2001, leaving behind a history of mayhem on the stage, but most memorably in their songs. “Do to the Beast” resurrects Dulli’s bad-boy persona, the sum of his interests in noir film, pulp novels and crime photographs, plus more than a little of his own outsized appetites. His alter-ego in potent new songs such as “Lottery,” “Royal Cream” and “These Sticks” is older, but not necessarily wiser, his obsessions still gnawing away at his soul. In “Lost in the Woods,” he’s a stalker who can’t move on past a failed lover affair. “You know me by now,” he hisses from the shadows. Strings swirl and a piano tolls – an ominoua soundtrack for a story that isn’t going to end well for either one of the splintered lovers.
The Whigs at their best built to momentous crescendos on classic albums such as “Gentlemen” (1993) and “Black Love” (1995). Back then, Dulli was a filmmaker-turned-rocker making good on a childhood realization that the bad guys get all the best roles. But if treachery and black-hearted purpose were the only reasons to write about these characters, Dulli and his audience would’ve moved on long ago. In his best songs, the singer nailed the ambiguity and the humanity behind the scum-bag exterior.
“I remember as a kid watching a cowboys and Indians movie and I was rooting for the cowboys,” Dulli once told me. “My grandfather asked me why, and I said, ‘Because they’re the good guys.’ And my grandfather explained to me that the Indians were fighting for their land and that the cowboys were trying to steal it from them. Then he said something to me that I never forgot, which was, ‘Good people aren’t good all the time and bad people aren’t bad all the time.’ I’ve been exploring that gray area ever since, the idea that saints can fall and sinners can transcend.”
Greg Kot co-hosts “Sound Opinions” at 8 p.m. Fridays and 11 a.m. Saturdays on WBEZ (FM-91.5).
Sharon Van Etten: With her highest-charting album yet in “Are We There” and a commanding performance at the Pitchfork Music Festival in July, the singer-songwriter is having a breakthrough year. 9 p.m. Friday at Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St., $18, $20, $30; thaliahallchicago.com
Charli XCX: The U.K. singer has written key hits for Icona Pop and Iggy Azeala, and is touting her third studio album, “Sucker,” in a rare small-venue show. 7 p.m. Monday at Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln Ave., $18; lincolnhallchicago.com
Twitter @gregkot
When: 9 p.m. Friday
Where: Metro, 3730 N. Clark St.
Tickets: $31; metrochicago.com
