#anthonyisright

Ha – weirdly I’ve been avoiding this one even more than Fleetwood Mac! I guess because I’m just disappointed that Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks weren’t part of my upbringing even though I heard Fleetwood Mac songs all the time. But that makes it a bit easier, too, I have to approach it from an artificially imposed distance. 

Afghan Whigs are something like the opposite. They’re a band whose existence has been on the periphery of mine for most of my waking life, but whom I’ve never knowingly listened to. They were too alt for indie and too indie for alt, which means that I never to my knowledge heard them on an alt-rock radio station but also never read about them on indie websites when I “got into” music as a teenager. Pitchfork “yada yadas” over Afghan Whigs while lionizing Teenage Fanclub or Archers of Loaf, two bands I thought of immediately when I started listening to this album. 

So the first thing that Afghan Whigs – just the name, not the music – brings up is a whole kaleidoscope of dated references – Buzzworthy, Lollapallooza (via the Simpsons, mostly), which brings in Cypress Hill and Smashing Pumpkins, and that one band that I knew was cool but was too cool for me to “get” yet (Sonic Youth). I slotted Afghan Whigs somewhere toward the Sonic Youth end of the spectrum but also knew I could have (but probably didn’t) hear them on WHFS or 98 Rock, the two relatively alternative-rock format radio stations (totally alt on HFS, mostly on 98 Rock) in Maryland in the mid-nineties. 

But this was music for people who were 4-7 years older than me, which I think is how much older ACM is than me. “4-7 Years Older” is a very treacherous distance a kid. At 7, 11 is just barely imaginable, 14 unthinkable; at 10, 14 is high school and 17 practically an adult (people who can drive!); at 17, 21 is _actually_ an adult, even though very, very few (not to say zero) 21-year-olds are really “adults” in their own minds and 24 is ancient.  It’s not until you’re about 25 or so that those distances start to close, so that, say, my sense of “how much older” ACM is than me feels a lot less relevant when I read some of his writing now than it did when I was 20. 

But MAN, when I was ten? When I was ten! 

When I was ten, I took a formative summer trip to Rehobeth, DE with my family, who’d rented a beach house.  This was the summer of 1994, a fact I can remember only because the boardwalk cyclotron ride only played one song, the John Mellencamp (sans “Cougar” IIRC) and Meshell N’degeocello – a name whose mental pronunciation, which is wrong (I add an “L” and pronounce it “en-deg lee-oh-CHELL-oh”) dates to that summer – cover of “Wild Nights.” “Fantastic Voyage” was all over MTV. Boyz II Men was even more popular with “I’ll Make Love To You,” which I watched many times in front of my parents without realizing how, uh, weird that is. 

The music is more backdrop than formative memory material, as it usually is. The music takes on more significance now because, unlike the memories or the carnival rides, I can actually re-experience it, distorting its significance in my recollections. Or so I’d guess.

My best friend Jimmy, from my old neighborhood – I’d just moved away the year before, two years after my mom died and after my dad remarried – cancelled coming up to join us a day into the trip. He was scared and had some issues with separation anxiety, and I was angry at him for not coming and at myself for taking it as a slight rather than something he was struggling with. We completely lost touch afterward, making it my first “friend break-up.” 

The cancellation left me alone with two older sisters and their friends. My biological sister, two years older, had a friend whose approval was very important to me for some reason. I had a difficult relationship with my sister in those years, and once I went on a trip to the boardwalk with her friend, and without her, and she was furious about it. 

Another older sister (I have three), my step-sister, had a friend who habitually tormented me in VERY amusing ways throughout my childhood.  (My step-sister may or may not have also invited a friend who was, I’m pretty sure, the first person I ever convinced myself I was in love with and therefore wanted to marry some day – at ten I knew that sex existed but didn’t understand it, so usually I just skipped the details and imagined being married – and whom I haven’t seen since high school.) On this particular trip, the night my friend cancelled, the habitual torturer friend orchestrated an elaborate prank in which everyone threw wet paper towels at me as I slept from the floor below, so that when I woke up I’d be greeted by a chorus line of sisters and sisters’ friends, all squeaking penguin toys from a carnival game. 

Without a friend of my own, I had to either prove myself to the teenagers in the house or sit around watching TV and playing the Sega Genesis I had inexplicably lugged along from home (I remember watching The Brothers Grunt on MTV and playing the Tazmania game). This meant doing reckless things on carnival rides and knowing the risque lyrics to pop songs, mostly, and probably resulted mostly in my annoying my sisters, as I often (OK, always) did. 

I bring all this up because even though it’s from ‘96 I immediately pegged this album as ‘94 – in vibe, anyway, in aura – and also because in the middle of writing the above paragraphs it switched over into their ‘93 album and I couldn’t tell the difference. 

Afghan Whigs are like my older sisters, in that they are in obvious ways familiar to me but just alien enough that they make me feel uncomfortable about myself. And they specifically transport me to 1993, 1994, 1995, and 1996, four years (the four after my mom died, and the beginning years with the new family) that probably marked the most meaningful changes in my life, not that I could really tell at the time. I just kind of went with it. 

Afghan Whigs are NOT like my older sisters, though, in that there is no way on earth that my older sisters (or older brother, who introduced me to early Metallica and was really into Alice in Chains) would ever, ever, ever listen to Afghan Whigs. If I had listened to Afghan Whigs between 1993 and 1996, my sisters would patiently explain to me that, much like not having hair parted in the middle or not wearing a visible undershirt with collared shirts or not daubing Cool Water on your neck or not using an amount of deodorant that it took me a VERY long time to realize was purposely excessive because they thought it would be funny if I coated my body in deodorant and thought it was totally normal, listening to Afghan Whigs would make you a DORK and no one would want to date you or be friends with you. 

you know, “life is a highway,” “steal my sunshine,” “call me maybe,” et al. i was thinking soundscan era only because if you go much further back it could get grim…although if you use that limit you can't fairly name the playlist Lunatic Fringe

Am I a fan: Very much so, since I was a kid. I grew up on a ton of old albums, some CSN&Y and Buffalo Springfield best ofs, the Decade compilation, and the Weld live album. 

First song I heard by them: I honestly couldn’t tell you for sure. The ones that feel the oldest in my memory are either from After the Gold Rush (the title track or “Don’t Let it Bring You Down”) or Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (“Cowgirl in the Sand” or “Down by the River”).

Favorite song: My go-to answer is “Cortez the Killer,” but honestly I could list twenty songs here and not be done.

Seen them live: Twice! Once nominally on his own (amazing), once with Crazy Horse (even better). It was inspiring.