The Afghan Whigs, Cleveland, OH, May 5, 2026
Down at Fountain and Fairfax.
The Afghan Whigs walk out onto a stage set with that white backline (which Dulli credited to Lynyrd Skynyrd when I asked), purple ambient lights and strings of clear fairy lights (as they call them in the UK). The set opens with a deep rhythm, it’s like their version of “The Crunge,” except that it’s “Parked Outside,” which is the kind of song you open with only if you are very sure of your band and your audience. But Dulli opened Do To The Beast with that track. He’s confident. He’s always been confident.
I’ve never seen a shitty performance by any band that was fronted by Greg Dulli, whether it was the Whigs v1, the Twilight Singers, the Gutter Twins, or the Whigs v2. (I didn’t get to see Uptown Lights and remain bereft.) The Whigs v1 was the first band I saw after I moved back to the States in 1993, after having broke Gentlemen on the other side of the world. I remember walking into the Academy (RIP) thinking I knew what I was in for. I wasn’t incorrect, but I also had absolutely no idea. Zero. None. It felt like I was stepping into a whirling dervish; it still feels that way, all these decades later. Dulli has also released some of my favorite albums of all time (Black Love and Blackberry Belle) but there are also no duds in the discography either.
We have survived so much, and by this I mean Dulli, myself, and his myriad configurations of various bands. The Whigs were grunge and classic rock and soul and rnb, all thrown into a blender; he had a sense of humor, he wrote incredible, cinematic storylines; he knew how to be a frontman, he knew how to lead a band. (There was a fucking horn section at one point; next to anything from “Jesus Christ Superstar,” I would move mountains to go see a Whigs lineup with horns again.) The Twilight Singers were meant as an antidote to that but they still ended up being incredibly Dulliesque. The Gutter Twins headed back in the other direction, except with Mark fucking Lanegan (OBM). The lyrics are always evocative, cinematic, open to endless interpretation.
But — and this is important — seeing Dulli is never about nostalgia. He is always getting up to something interesting, something worth seeing, something worth my time. At the VIP Q&A (I was seeing one show, I wanted to guarantee i had a rail spot. I am old.) he told someone who asked that he never goes back and listens to his old record again. I mean I think that’s probably true of most musicians based on a casual midnight sweep of my brain. But I don’t know if Dulli could survive going backwards; it wouldn’t suit him.
That said, this is billed as a 40th anniversary tour; there is a new record coming but it’s not ready for prime time yet. So they’re slow rolling out new songs (“House of I” and “Duvateen”) and filling the rest of the set with songs from every record, “Except one,” Dulli said tonight. “You know which one that is.” (Big Top Halloween, which really has an outsized place in the legend for what it is.)
I have been staring at setlists since this tour started and I know every single song but I still felt caught off guard tonight in Cleveland in that the setlist felt bigger and louder and different, and then at the end of the night a friend got the setlist and I looked at it and realized it was the same one I’d been looking at for…okay, it’s been all of a week, so they haven’t even had much of a chance to get the machine in motion. But that’s because it already felt solid. The songs felt all-enveloping, dialed in, formidable as a collection.
“I’m Her Slave,” for example, was the second song of the night, and nothing about it felt old, or dated; if anything, I think they probably play the older songs better now because they’re better musicians and because they have lived enough of a life to inhabit the entire range of emotions the songs contain. Get off that stuff she said/and I’ll stone you instead was a warning when it first came out and now it is a story of survival. But a decision was made to resurrect that number and put it in the set; it means something.
I realize that this scenario isn’t unique to this particular ensemble, but sometimes bands go back to the oldies kind of begrudgingly, and it shows. You can feel it, and you wish they hadn’t ruined the memories you already had of it. Last night in Cleveland, there was nothing delivered out of obligation; we even got a romp through “Roadhouse Blues” during “Son of the South” and for a second it was the 90s again, and as much as that was fun, as he reminded us, his Jim Morrison cosplay used to go on for 20 minutes. I wasn’t the only person in the audience who said something like “We got time,” but these days, I’d definitely rather have three more Whigs songs in those same 20 minutes.
Dulli’s said this before, many times, and he also brought it up during the Q&A: he’s not going to play anything that he can’t feel, because if he can’t feel it then we won’t feel it. And that matters because this man could probably make truckloads of money if he just went out and played the Gentlemen album every night at the core of the set. I always play the game of, why is one of my favorite bands not more popular? This is why. Because he knew it would have been a trap. It would have been bad for him, bad for the band, bad for 70% of the people in the audience any given night who didn’t want to have to navigate a beer-fueled mosh pit full of aging frat boys. We did it once already, during the Reformation, and I was glad when it was finished. (Young frat boys are stupid. Aging angry frat boys are dangerous.)
Greg explained during the Q&A that the setlist was kind of streamlined right now because of their new drummer, Bryan Lee Brown, taking the place of the much beloved Patrick Keeler who has been claimed by Jack White these days. My Whigs sisters in NYC whispered “he’s a monster” and they are correct in their assessment. He plays with deep precision, like a human click track, but with so much space and power. This is another of Dulli’s skills, his ability to find new puzzle pieces when necessary. Witness Christopher Thorn, guitar stage right, who has the firepower that Dulli requires when necessary but is also enough of a journeyman to know when to step back without needing to be told. The only negative to last night’s show is that I could not hear him enough in the mix; there were unfortunate sound problems all night. (I will blame the House of Blues for this, because boy did this venue suck.)
Caryn Rose
“Parked Outside” is such a satisfying opener because it is the rhythm section cranked up to 11 and then these deliciously crunchy guitar chords and Dulli’s voice at the edge of the precipice. The zig zag of the setlist transports you between the eras: “Light As A Feather” is just from 2017, but it fits beautifully next to Gentleman’s “What Jail Is Like.” Dulli really loves to play with textures and these two back to back wouldn’t necessarily be where your brain went, but it makes sense to him and it feels right when you’re standing there witnessing it.
Likewise, the ladies’ choice fave “66” nestles comfortably in adjacent to “House of I,” the title track from the upcoming album. “Oriole” clears the palate before “Going To Town,” the midpoint of the saga of Black Love. “Gentlemen” will calm the former frat boys that still show up and “Algiers” and its Wrecking Crew homage will continue to pull them along. “Catch A Colt” is a track from 2022’s How Do You Burn? which was almost invisible given the timing of its release, but it nestles beautifully into “Demon in Profile.”
I did not know I needed to sing “Fountain and Fairfax” until I was singing “Fountain and Fairfax” with every cell in my body. The darkness definitely pulled me in to these early songs, it was a way to cosplay along with the characters and explore the similarities of emotions and feelings and then there was always a riff or a line or a chord or a chorus that brought catharsis and some kind of deliverance, some minor salvation. “Fountain and Fairfax” was the closest intersection to a particular AA meeting in Los Angeles; it’s not like I ever understood that life but he made you feel like you did. He always brings you along.
The moment when he steps back from the mic to let the audience yell “FOUNTAIN AND FAIRFAX” is a great exemplar of Dulli as a front man, but also Dulli as a diehard music fan. He writes things to let us sing, like during the chorus on "Going to Town" where, as usual, he yells, "YOU SING IT." He knows what matters. I always want to hear anything from Black Love but it doesn’t matter what he’s playing. I don’t even need to know. I only looked so I had a basis of comparison and so I could get my head right and ready for the show. He is one of my musical ride or dies. I do not make that assertion easily.
Despite seeing “Son of the South” (from Up In It) on the setlist I didn’t actually internalize this was going to happen until it did, nor did I expect for Dulli to remind us that this was when he used to live his Jim Morrison fantasies, giving us a little bit of “Roadhouse Blues,” which was like throwing red meat to the former fratboy lions. I remember seeing a Whigs show at the Showbox back in the day, where someone was complaining that he was talking too much, and Dulli responding, “I guess you’ve never been to an Afghan Whigs show before.” I am grateful he is not indulging his demons to the same extent any more; gone are the days of the sport bottles of booze and the ashtray holder on the mic stand. We would probably not have this moment in 2026 if he had continued along that particular trajectory. This is not a secret to anyone.
“Duvateen,” from the upcoming record, is lovely and I look forward to getting to know it better, but I do not think its position at the end of the set is doing it any favors. Because as soon as the intro to “Summer’s Kiss” began to incrementally pull itself together, the first words out of my mouth were: oh no, oh no, oh no, i am not ready for this. This song is undeniably dénouement, its place as the penultimate song on Black Love, it is homecoming and heartbreak intertwined. It is always overwhelming, it is always going to deliver what you need as well as everything you didn’t know was missing.
This was, of course, the moment that some bonehead decided to make a blitz for the front via my position on the rail. Thanks to the House of Blues’ crack security who made sure absolutely no umbrellas entered the venue on a day of pouring torrential rain, but were nowhere in sight when this went down; thanks to the various women in my vicinity who jumped in and got him out of the crowd (while the dudes just… stood there).
Dulli takes off his guitar — it feels like a gunslinger has decided to let down his weaponry for the day — and unwinds the mic chord, working each side of the stage for “Into the Floor,” which always brings some form of finality, whether it’s good or bad. I think at that moment how I wish he could have lived in another age, another time, where he could have stood at the front of that stage and led a band — tonight during “Son of the South” he was commenting on how being a lead singer means he gets to do stuff like this, which was getting the band to stop on a dime. But put this man in a tuxedo and on a stool with a mic and he could’ve headlined the Sands or the Copa once upon a time.
We get a little bit of “Miles iz Ded,” at the end. It’s billed as “slight return,” and it is slight, it is the band’s way of escorting us into the afterglow, it is goodbye. Dulli leaves and John Curley gets to hold down the fort and let the band close the show out in one last wave of Afghan Whigs-ness. It is beautiful. It is overwhelming. It is enough. One of the many joys of the evening was watching Curley and Dulli enjoy playing in this band together; my only regret is that my angle of the two of them stuck the microphone in Dulli's face so I have no great photos of this moment. As Greg pointed out earlier when he introduced the band, Curley has been by his side (although sometimes he was on the other side of the stage). Also, shoutout here to Rick T. Nelson, because he is the super glue of the outfit, playing everything that needs to be played at an exemplary level.
Like I said earlier, I don’t have nostalgia with this band. I have seen all of these songs throughout the years, in context and then later on as setlist stalwarts. You hear the songs for the first time on the record, you hear them live, you watch them grow and shift and occupy new meaning. You remember the people you went to the shows with, you remember where you were when you heard it for the first time or the time that the song evolved within your personal repertoire. But Dulli’s insistence on looking forward means that the songs and the music keep taking on new meanings. They are strong. They are durable. They can hold anything he decides to fill them with. It is just such a gift that I get to keep traveling through my life with this band.
Mercury Rev opened tonight’s show and I will admit I had not listened to them in several decades but tonight they persevered against a very chatty crowd and built this beautiful world of sound and fog and light. I am grateful to Greg for giving them this stage.
