It wasn’t until he crossed paths with Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains that all this changed and he felt inspired to pursue a solo career under his real name. After all, if Cantrell can do it, why can’t Puciato? (Replace “Cantrell” with “Nick Cave,” “Neil Young” or “Lou Reed,” and you have an equally valid statement.)
“Every single day, we show up to these fucking shows, and it has my birth name outside on a marquee, which is absurd," Puciato says over the phone. "That sounds ridiculous, and if you told me that three years ago, I would have been like, ‘Don’t do that. That’s embarrassing. Please don’t put my name on this fucking thing. Can we please do the band name?’
“And by the time your name’s on the marquee, you don’t even care anymore. It’s like, ‘Yeah, of course it’s on the marquee. I put a fucking record out. Why wouldn’t it be on the marquee?’”
Puciato's modesty is deeply rooted.
“I came from [a] very poor neighborhood in Baltimore where it was really beaten into me that you shouldn’t be braggadocious about anything," he says. "But you’re not being braggadocious; you’re owning reality. That’s what Jerry taught me.”
This realization came amid a deluge of long-suppressed creativity that Puciato finally felt free to unleash following Dillinger’s breakup in 2017. In 2020, Puciato and Sepultura’s Max Cavalera dusted off the cobwebs of their Killer Be Killed project and dropped Reluctant Hero, the band’s first full-length in six years. He also devoted more creative energy to The Black Queen, a post-punk/darkwave project he started with Steven Alexander, a former guitar tech for Nine Inch Nails and Dillinger.
But Puciato’s work with Cantrell on the latter’s 2021 album Brighten (in which he sang backup vocals) and the subsequent tour promoting it is where some of the prodigious strides in his artistic development were made, namely the decision to further embrace performing and touring under a solo name.
While playing music you’re proud of in packed theaters with swanky backstage catering every night certainly has its perks, Puciato says his ongoing solo tour, which hits The Studio at the Factory in Dallas on June 1, is part of a peak stratum of relief and creative freedom.
“I have a hard time caring as much about something I don’t own [versus] something that I do,” he says. “I care a ton about everything that I did in Dillinger — even though we didn’t own it outright — and a ton of other things like Killer Be Killed. ... I still care a ton, but you don’t realize your capacity for caring, that vessel isn’t as big; it can’t hold as much care as when you release it on your own.”
This concept of “owning [one’s] work” lingers throughout the conversation.
“It’s the difference between renting a house and owning a house," he says. "You can still fucking give a shit about how you decorate it and what you do with it, and the things that happen in it. The memories are all still the same, but there’s definitely something a little bit different once you own something.”
Recent developments have also led to Puciato finding a healthy gulf and balance between his professional and personal lives. While the Dillinger years were what Puciato described as “loose” (in the sense of having no domestic commitments and configuring your focus exclusively on your work), Puciato’s home life is now, he says with something of a comedic cadence, “starting to resemble what a normal 25-year-old’s might resemble."
“I’m happy that I’m not injured, that I can do what I still do, and somehow my voice is still good and my knees aren’t blown out from jumping off the speaker sets,” he says.
“I’m happy that I’m not injured, that I can do what I still do, and somehow my voice is still good and my knees aren’t blown out from jumping off the speaker sets." – Greg Puciato
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To Puciato’s point, a vocalist’s salad days are the one time in their life where they can redline on the transgression and confrontation gauges in a live setting without having to worry about immediate or grievous repercussions. In Puciato’s case, his Dillinger years included many a set where he jumped from the balcony into the crowd, destroyed gear and sprinted off the stage onto people’s heads and faces (including at a Virgin Mega-Store in 2005).
In one particularly infamous case, Puciato defecated on stage at the 2002 Reading Festival. That same year, Dillinger was in Europe touring with System of a Down, a big break at the time seeing as they were just a fledgling act with one album under their belt. The tour did lead to more exposure for the band, but not in any ways favorable insofar as the crowd voiced their disdain for Dillinger on all of the tour dates.
“We had short hair and no tattoos and looked like we shopped at J. Crew,” Puciato remembers. “It was loud every night, but there was one venue in particular where the boos were so loud that we couldn’t hear ourselves play. It was so loud that it drowned out the monitors. So we were literally looking at one another on stage trying to figure out where we were in the song, which is next-to-impossible in a band like ours.”
Chaos has continued to linger in Puciato’s career of late, and not always in a glamorous way. At a May 10 tour stop in Denver last week, a drunk driver collided with a gear trailer loaned to Puciato by the daughter of Tyler Bates, a horror film score composer and Cantrell’s touring and studio guitarist. Puciato shared pictures of the wreckage on Instagram the following day. Thankfully, no fatalities or serious injuries were reported.
“It [was] like a bomb went off, and everyone looked, and there was a car sideways on the street," he says." If anyone was standing there, they would have been fucking crushed to death [by] the trailer. There were people five feet away. Hopefully now, there won’t be any trailer-related hold-ups in this operation.”
Greg Puciato is playing The Studio at the Factory on Thursday, June 1, with Deaf Club (Justin Pearson from The Locust), Escuela Grind and Trace Amount.
