Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan, photographed for Spin in Los Angeles, December 21, 2007 / Photo by Tom Fowlks

When we went into the studio, we had nothing," says Greg Dulli, 42, the former Afghan Whigs and current Twilight Singers frontman, from a corner booth at Footsie's, one of two Los Angeles bars he owns. Dulli is talking about Saturnalia, the haunting new goth-blues album he made with Mark Lanegan, 43, late of Screaming Trees, under the appropriately seedy nom de rock the Gutter Twins. And though he means that the two men hadn't written any songs before they started work on the record in 2003, they hardly went into the studio with nothing: Over the two decades since they were at the forefront of the tumultuous alt-rock feeding frenzy, the grunge-era survivors have traveled parallel paths through major-label near-stardom, postbreakup tussles with drug addiction, and subsequent reinvention as respected, battlescarred career artists. Now that their paths have intersected, however -- Lanegan was also a touring member of the Twilight Singers in 2006 -- they aren't interested in reliving the bad old days, and if they've cleaned up their acts, they certainly haven't mellowed. "I've had some clowns ask me questions and they get stonewalled says Dulli, nursing a Pacifico. "If it's shock-value exploitive shit you're after, go fuck yourself."

SPIN: When did you guys actually meet?
DULLI: [To Lanegan] I met you in '89 at a party in Seattle. But it was just sort of a "Hi, how are you?" I had seen his band play a couple times.
LANEGAN: We'd actually played together.
DULLI: We had?
LANEGAN: In Boston.
DULLI: That's right -- with Primus.

SPIN: That's a weird bill. The Whigs and the Trees sharing a stage makes sense, though; both your bands deviated from the grunge template in interesting ways.
DULLI: I think that's probably what helped us be friends in the first place -- there was a common thread. And we both did a similar kind of get-in-the-van-with-your-guys thing -- you were your own roadie and tour manager. We also both went from independent labels to major labels and then back again. Our career trajectories are eerily similar. We've compared notes: "Did you do this? Did you play here? Did you meet her?"
LANEGAN: Yes, yes, and yes.

SPIN: Each of you made it through relatively unscathed from a wild era in which your bands seemed like the hottest thing on the planet.
LANEGAN: Neither one of us was ever the hottest thing on the planet.

SPIN: But you were part of a cultural moment bigger than yourselves.
DULLI: It was a cultural moment, but there were stars shooting higher in that galaxy. And because we were able to forge through it, we had nothing to live down later.

SPIN: Do you feel fortunate in retrospect to not have been in, say, Nirvana?
LANEGAN: Yeah. Having seen it happen to those guys, I definitely think it makes it a lot harder to make music, for some reason.
DULLI: Nothing against either of our first groups, but I like what he does better now, and I like what I do better now. I feel like I spent all that time learning. It was an apprenticeship, a really long one. Whereas some of those guys, like Kurt [Cobain], caught lightning in a bottle.