October 1993: The Afghan Whigs Release GENTLEMEN

It was the early 1990s, and Greg Dulli, the lead singer of Cincinnati band The Afghan Whigs, was going through it. The group's third full-length, Congregation, was successful enough to land the outfit a major label deal with Elektra Records. Their sound, according to The Quietus, was "pitching at a mid-point between Hüsker Dü and Prince." Dulli, however, was also at the tail end of a brutal relationship breakup and spiraling.

“I was kind of depressed,” he told SPIN in 2014 about the earliest inspirations for the record. “And I think playing guitar after hours was my way of comforting myself. It was totally helping me figure out larger issues that were going on.”

Written while the band was on tour, Gentlemen is packed with Dulli's grim and obsessive ruminations on the end of his relationship, with the songs coming to him in a fast and furious fashion: "(Guitarist) Rick McCollum wrote the riff to 'Be Sweet,' and we were playing it in a soundcheck in Paris," Dulli told SPIN about the album's third track. "A lot of the time, I would freestyle vocals, and I remember I was day-drunk and spit out that whole first verse in the soundcheck and immediately took off my guitar and wrote it down on the back of a notebook. I had no second guessing of what that said. I really enjoyed what that said."

The album finds Dulli ranting and raging over the inner turmoil; it creates an ongoing (and harrowing) narrative of "a gentle man" ready to take some of that rage out on the unsuspecting rebound, and by any means necessary. Things got so serious that when he wrote the song "My Curse," it felt so personal that he cast someone else--Marcy Mays of the band Scrawl--to sing the lead vocal.

"I felt at that point I had gotten too close to the record in my mind, and felt that the woman in question deserved a voice in the proceeding," Dulli revealed. "And when I looked at the lyrics — this goes back to the culpability — I fully accepted the culpability and handed it down to the young lady."

For her part, Mays stood in for the ex-lover admirably: "I remember when we started doing the song, I sat in the studio trying to direct her and she tried it a couple of times that way, then told me to get the fuck out of the studio and have lunch and let her do her thing," Dulli recalled. "In almost every way, that song put me in my place and the performance of 'My Curse' is all Marcy Mays."

Dulli, however, had the last word with the song "Now You Know": "It was written in Memphis, and I needed another song," he remembered. "Because I had the benefit of everything that came before it, I was able to custom-write that song. I needed to burn the town down. It’s the most violent song, the nastiest song on the record and in that way the perfect setup to the cover and the instrumental that came after."

Further emphasizing the band's idiosyncratic sound in the face of the then-hot "grunge" movement (part of Afghan Whigs' appeal to major labels was their proximity to former Sub Pop labelmates, Nirvana) was their clear love and inspiration taken from classic soul and R&B music; case in point is the aforementioned cover song, a version of Tyrone Davis' 1970 tune "I Keep Coming Back."

"It was a song that I listened to almost ritually, every night before I went to bed. I would listen to it over and over, it was very comforting to me," Dulli revealed. "I felt like it was the counterpoint to the violence that came before it. It was sweet, it was honest, it was vulnerable. It put everything that came before it into a focus of finality."

Released October 5, 1993, Gentlemen arrived to much critical acclaim, receiving plaudits from the likes of Rolling Stone, Los Angeles Times, and even notorious rock critic, Robert Christgau, had kind words for the LP: "Those conflicted guitars are a direct function of the singer-writer-producer-guitarist's agonized self exposure/-examination," he wrote. "If the album wears down into covers and instrumentals, that's only to signify its spiritual exhaustion."

While the LP wasn't much for the charts (it never appeared on the Billboard 200), it has been deemed an instant classic. It's among the titles celebrated in 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, and was listed at #141 on SPIN's list of "The 300 Best Albums of the Past 30 Years (1985-2014)."

“I think people get kinda disappointed when I say the album isn’t all autobiographical, and I’m like, God, that’s kind of mean, to think something like that," Dulli chuckled to L.A. Times back in 1994. "Why would you want poor little me to go through all that? It’s like anything else. You use some license. It’s observation. Maybe it started out with something autobiographical, and then you want to blow it up into something bigger. Once I got onto the theme with the songs, I pressed on to see how much further I could go into the dark psyche of the ‘90s male.”