My particular Jack White fandom is a broken mirror in an abandoned lot, a snarling & smoky venn diagram with the rest of my life. My whole life -- but especially the early 1990s in the midtown Corridor of Detroit, Michigan & of course the mid-2000s in Nashville, as music city continued to nurture its shredding, if stylized, harder rock side.
According to biographical snippets I can glean about early Jack, back in motor city, we visited the same coffeehouses, bowling-alley-rock-clubs, & even attended the same university at the same time, although I was a twenty-something senior, & he would have been a freshman who never matriculated. We both revered the Gories & the garage-punk thing that would later deconstruct the first years of the next century. Turns out that post-post-modernism was primitive AF, & we shared something primal about that, because decades before Jack was featured at the gala re-opening of the historic Michigan Central station, that was one of many scary sites for urban spelunking, that rebellious, adventurous kids just could not help exploring.
But I don’t have a proper Jack White origin story, because I left Detroit for Tennessee in 1995, just before things really blew up. We were both there, but I didn’t know about him -- yet. Then, I took several years off of more devoted music fandoms, & later I would joke that Jack White followed me to Tennessee, except he has no idea who I am, even as I dressed in all black & red & a fedora at Bonnaroo one year, grateful that the other freaks in the field knew who I was emulating.
I want to say I am a Jack White superfan, but I guess that is life-goals & aspirational still, as in the last few years my listening devotion has faded & traded for other folkier & twangier tracks, so now I am rediscovering it all with renewed vigor. In the Aughts, it was really 4 albums that engraved themselves in my brain & engrafted themselves to my bones, the last two White Stripes albums & first two Raconteurs albums. These were the last days (for me), where the music that I had was the music that I owned, on Compact Disc. Cd’s lent themselves to listening devotion as serious practices, contrasted with my current & deliciously wild ADHD temptations of a streaming account, with vast catalogs of everything & then some, just a click away.
Just scrolling through the socials as we do on Friday, July 19th, I saw a friend posting about their quick jaunt to a record store for a special surprise. I felt that feeling in the Force, as I learned about the No Name new album by Jack White getting slipped into bags with purchases at Third Man Records stores in Detroit, Nashville, & London. The surprise No Name physical drop was followed by official encouragement from the artist to rip your copy & share & suddenly versions were showing up everywhere, from YouTube to shared Google Drives (keeping in mind that The White Stripes at one point had official releases on USB flash drive).
Call it a merry prankster prank or pretentious stunt, but this got all the buzzy buzz & viral love that U2’s iPhone debacle sought but lost. Because instead of being spam, this required effort from the fans, like a treasure map & scavenger hunt. Days after the news of this percolated absolutely everywhere including old-school Detroit newspapers, Jack White announced a pop-up tour of live shows in tiny venues throughout the south. It started with an American Legion hall gig in Nashville, then moved to Atlanta. It started with a Monday night at The Earl, a neighborhood restaurant with a bar in the back, the kind of deliciously scuzzy OG punk rock room that hardcore fans adore, replete with stickers covering the walls & a tangible sense of all the grease, sweat, piss, swill, & dirt that had consecrated the space on DIY-multi-band marathons past.
On Tuesday, the show rolled into the legendary music scene of Athens, Georgia, & the revered temple of indie that is the 40 Watt Club. Everything about this tour is extra in the “back to our roots” aspect, right down to the plain white van parked right outside the venue with Davidson County TN plates; of this same plain white van, there is a reel of Jack driving it down the interstate. That is the kind of DIY this drips. Jack is driving the damn van.
Fans were queuing up all day in search of a rail spot. By the time I got there around 5:30pm to meet some fellow fans & hang on the line, it was a steam-room between a recent rain shower & humid summer swelter. The 5-minute walk from my hotel room left me drenched. I couldn’t stop sweating for the entire 90 minutes we stood there waiting for doors to open & our wristbands. Being the 40 Watt, ins-&-outs are allowed, so once we had our merch, I headed back to my hotel to stash my swag, take a shower, & change my clothes. I was still back at the club in plenty of time to get a decent spot & catch the infectious opening set by Wolf Twin.
For this set, Wolf Twin are a growling two-piece of guitar & drums, fronted by Heather Gillis. The similarity of their style & sound to the Stripes is not lost on any of the devotees duly assembled & neither is the synchronicity of the front-woman’s last name. Which I immediately Googled, only to find more similar speculation. I could not help asking Heather at the merch table later, if they were related. She said, not that she knows of, & she related that Jack White (born John Gillis) had been asking her the same question every day since the pop-up tour began. Wolf Twin were off by 8:30pm, & Jack White was on at 9pm sharp.
Jack’s main set was an hour, followed by a 30-minute encore. The entire experience felt like a dream-trance as the noises vibrated & reverberated my entire being. I didn’t try to keep up with a setlist, as I often do at shows. I let the entire experience take me over, & in retrospect, it was way too short, because 90 minutes felt like 9 seconds on a heavenly rocketship. I have seen God in a rock god, but it burned out & blasted off like a careening comet, & of course, I want more.
After dialing & dancing more acoustic, folk, & country for a few years, a full-on-face-melting rock show is like cold-water-immersion therapy or like a muscle car in need of a muffler drag racing on back roads, holding my spirit hostage & throttling my entire being into an engine of groove. We got a mix of the new album, White Stripes standards, & more recent tracks across Jack’s solo catalog. No Raconteurs like the night before.
The current lineup includes drums, bass, & keys/synth, which fills out the sound with Jack’s insane guitar surgery in such sonic assault as to investigate the inner reaches of all our beings with shimmer & shudder. Jack doesn’t use a setlist & his chemistry with his backing band to make it all look entirely orchestrated, gloriously effortless, & grittily inspired is such a thing to behold. Jack barely talked but when he did, he sounded like a preacher. That entire pentecostal juke joint vibe included him toweling off between songs, because that motor-city BAMF was baptized in his own sweat like the rest of us.
Jack was casual in a plain long sleeve shirt that seemed to change colors with the stage lights. At various points I was sure it was a red/burgundy throwback, at other times I was sure it was navy, black, or gray. His people or entourage including guitar techs & merch guy were all in black suits with blue accessories. They all wore bowlers or fedoras. I have seen that crowd around Jack at previous gigs & I swear they are a monastic order of gangsters, a sacred secret society of pimps & priests, rabbis & rapscallions.
Jack is anything & everything as far as a rock legend & creative icon goes. Sometimes cynics have leveled this as cosplay, decades of gimmicks, & the dubious accusation of “cultural appropriation.” Except we who are from Detroit know where he grew up & went to high school & cut his chops, it’s hard not to see these epic evolutions & cosmic cul-de-sacs as all part of an intensely visionary trajectory. It’s simultaneously art & artifice, or as one podcaster put it, “Willy-Wonka-core.”
Now I don’t want to get too too deep, & I don’t always trust my hermeneutic decoder ring, but the copies of the Blue Album/No Name available at the show includes the complete lyrics for the significant 13 tracks, & I have a theory of sorts. Apparently going all the way back to the Third Man upholstery which precedes Third Man Records, Jack has always had a numerological & probably theological obsession with the number 3. Not setting aside any other versions of who the third man is, right now it sure feels like the third person of the trinity, the Holy Ghost.
Hear me out, but No Name seems to me a straight-up, old-school, southern-gospel-meets-northern-blues album. No Name as the anchor words, at first we thought referred only to the record itself. The No Name album. That still tracks, but I am now convinced that the No Name also references the great mystery, the nameless aspects of a vast God that is far too great for our words or understanding. But words we offer anyway, for 13 meticulous & miraculous tracks. Rock music as revolutionary praise.
A quick survey of the lyrics, & one could deduce theological themes throughout. I will have to save a track-by-track close reading for another time, but have a look on your own, it’s all there. The searching intensity of the lyrical trajectory is hot & holy but also profoundly humble in its adamantly prayerful posture. Not even the cool blue water of the album’s cover can drown the deep fire of the message. It’s all there to see for those who might look & see, listen & hear.
Andrew/Sunfrog
Athens, Georgia
