Jack White is a post-Hendrix guitarist wrecking ball readjusted to a quartet. Amazing where the sound of the electrified diddley bow has evolved to.
Close to capacity in the Great Hall. White has played a Powerstation show the previous night to satisfy demand.
There are always people who disparage the sound in iconic Town Hall, but it is a unique space for the deep echoing bass sound which lifts the high ceiling off the place. Most importantly it’s a balanced sound.
A malevolent rolling riff barrels out from the stage, bristling with nastiness. It’s I Wanna Be Your Dog. White paying homage to his Detroit roots and to the fabulous Stooges.
James Iggy Pop Osterberg explained his band’s early music as their attempt to replicate the urban Blues as played in the many Detroit bars.
Jack White also draws his bedrock style from the building blocks of Americana like Eddie Son House, and the complex polyrhythmic foundations of Charley Patton.
White is a board member of the Library of Congress National Recording Preservation Foundation, and to which he has given significant funding.
He is immersed in Americana to the extent of owning many vintage guitars once played by ex-Blues musicians. He is fan of old analogue equipment and would seem to be a vinyl junkie still.
A rider to that is digital technology, which has cleaned up the scratched and hissing original Blues recordings and made them a revelation.
A strange type of American bird from the start is White.
John Anthony Gillies was born in Detroit, Michigan, the youngest of a family of ten with Catholic parents. He learnt to play from hand-me-down instruments from older brothers.
If it wasn’t for a new guitar amplifier, he may have gone off to seminary school to become a priest. Gonna get me religion/ Gonna join the Baptist church sang Son House.
Became a tradesman upholsterer with his own business. Chairs and couches.
The Blues is a chair said John Lennon. Not one to look at but to sit on. As an artist you sit on that music. As the Beatles, we were building our own chairs (circa 1970).
So was young John Jack. The final piece of the riddle fell into place when he met bartender Meg White. They clicked artistically and married. He took her surname, and in JFK fashion he became Jack White.
Forever misdirecting, he announced them as brother and sister.
I saw the White Stripes live once, when they played a triple headline evening at Big Day Out with The Stooges and Franz Ferdinand.
I appreciate the symmetry tonight. Especially as John Baker first brought them out here to tour many moons ago. More about him later, being the resident Wild Man Fischer for support group Ratso.
All who saw the great guitar hero movie It May Get Loud will have insight into the retro to avant-garde chair that White sits on.
He makes a diddley-bow from a piece of wood with some screws to hold down a length of fencing wire. Then plugs it in to play to a herd of cows who burp and fart.
Later he gets to play with Jimmy Page and The Edge.
Straight after the Stooges cover, he rips out three from his new No Name album.
Old Scratch Blues is the first guitar solo of lacerating Blues, whilst That’s How I’m Feeling slows the tempo to get sludgy and lumbering.
It’s Rough on Rats (If You’re Asking). The drums lay it down to start until the guitar unleashes nasty and febrile rolling riffs with an air of Desert Blues.
Mention of rats, and Ratso lay down a blitzkrieg bop of manic Rock’n’roll and try their best to upstage the headliners. They are heroically close.
Of course it’s Kiwi Dad to the White Stripes, John Baker who assumes the Bez of Happy Mondays role as the loon onstage.
A howling maelstrom of meshed guitar and engine room firepower. More Wax Chattels than Metal. They don’t have the technical prowess of the fifty shades of metal.
Baker is wearing a gang patch Rock’n’Roll Ramraider which will get him arrested as soon as he finishes his set.
He’s not all glammed up tonight, but he doesn’t need to be. Scary enough with no make-up. He still looks like one of Rob Zombie’s Devils Rejects, the brother to Captain Spaulding.
He races around the stage. Leaps up on crates, tries to scale to the Circle seats. He charges at the front pit barrier and even contemplates crowd surfing. That’s a bit intense, and he thinks better of it.
Third song in and he starts with a roll call. Gene Vincent, Pretty Things, Yardbirds, The Who, Stones, Cliff Richard… Cliff Richard!? (Possibly I made the last one up. He is playing in New Zealand next year).
The band unleashes an MC5 wall of sound.
The final act is Baker handing out Fuck Ratso! placards to the audience. For an old geezer he can still kick out the jams, mothers and fathers!
Jack White and band play a stack of White Stripe songs.
Black Math is relentless and monolithic in Ramones Phase One fashion. They play call and response with the audience.
Offend In Every Way has a steady tempo until the bass bridge. A gear shift and the guitar wails off into Hendrix country.
The transforming spiritual Blues energy style best heard on the live Woodstock version of Voodoo Chile. Excuse me we’re just jamming here, as the mountains shift.
White taps into this primordial and essentially primitivist style, simultaneously avant-garde, from start to finish.
The music is seamless as the electric field never departs until the band leave the stage.
Just a few more picks.
The Hardest Button to Button. Riding on the back of a Blues motif, the engine can get heavy and lumbers along until the guitar suddenly ignites and fires off in many directions.
High Ball Stepper has the airplane (Jefferson) and jet (Byrds) sounds. Whatever it is, the guitar becomes molten and incandescent.
There is a fair amount of echo on the vocals as White sings often in the higher register, which means you can’t really distinguish the lyrics. But this suits the sheer power and energy that this band put out.
The encore starts with the classic Lazaretto. This is the first time I notice the keyboard textures, though he’s been playing all night.
Archbishop Harold Holmes (off No Name) sounds like A Led Zeppelin drone riff which becomes epic.
Naturally the closer is Seven Nation Army, where everyone gets to chant along.
The last word on Jack White, historian, archivist, maker of chairs, guitar maestro and serenader of cows, is monumental.
Rev. Orange Peel