Jack White Goes It Alone (Kinda)

Jack WhiteJo McCaughey/Nasty Little Man

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


In 2011, the White Stripes called it quits. “It was necessary to announce that the White Stripes didn’t exist anymore for me to really put myself out there as a solo artist,” frontman Jack White told Rolling Stone.

By then, White had carved a niche for himself as an artist in his own right, making the rounds between two high-octane rock n’ roll bands, The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather, and at last founding a brick-and-mortar outfit for his eight-year-old private label, Third Man Records, in Nashville. But he hadn’t yet done the thing one would most naturally predict from a solo artist: a solo project.

That changed last Tuesday with the release of Blunderbuss, White’s “debut” album as a solo artist. It’s a wild-eyed, lushly orchestrated work that tends to showcase White’s ear as a songwriter over his hand as a guitarist. Both talents were on display Friday night as White and his vast and fluid retinue of backing musicians played New York City’s Webster Hall.

The small, dim space was sold out to a crowd of black-leather-jacketed punk rockers, moms with cargo pants tucked into combat boots, greasy hippies, and a healthy contingent of clean-cut white kids who looked to have walked off the set of Girls. Photographers circulated with Polaroid cameras, leaving behind a wake of happy couples shaking negatives. Whispers (unconfirmed) circulated that Jim Carrey was quaffing champagne on the balcony. The show was broadcast live on YouTube; one might not have noticed but for a moment just before the first set when a screen descended and played a Jack White music video, presumably being watched simultaneously by eyes from Tulsa to Tokyo, for which, in a bizarrely meta twenty-first century moment, we all clapped.

Opening the show were The Black Belles, a Third Man Records-produced trio of white-faced, black-lipsticked femmes fatales who looked like they ditched out on Slytherin Quidditch practice to ride down to the Lower East Side on broomsticks, smoking cigarettes and blasting the Sex Pistols. Their set left behind a vague scent of premature Halloween. This was compounded by the stage hands, who drifted about in a fog of dry ice and sported porkpie hats and prodigious beards, as if the fresh ghost of Levon Helm were keeping watch in the wings. 

At last, searing blue lights panned onto White, strutting onstage in a tight-fitted powder-blue suit, encircled by a sextet of female musicians draped in gauzy white dresses, looking like Odysseus if he had said “Fuck it,” and gone to jam with the Sirens. In the second set White’s backing band would be fully male, the gender divide being conceived as a way to keep each show on the tour fresh (and, conceivably, to further probe issues of gender roles and male/female dynamics that are touched on in songs like “Freedom at 21“).

The biggest difference between this Jack White and others of the past is his onstage company.

Indeed, the biggest difference between this Jack White and others of the past is his onstage company. Forget about a lone drummer with a stripped-down kit. The instrumentation is like what you’d hear at a Nashville backyard pickup session: upright bass, fiddle, harmonica, mandolin, keyboards, and lap steel—lots of lap steel. As the band(s) rolled through most of Blunderbuss and a delicious sampling of White Stripes classics, White called out soloists and let the ensemble do the heavy lifting, a refreshing and venerable turn for any “solo” artist.   

But White’s melodic sensibility and lyrical styling are, if more refined, not substantively different from the straight-ahead, full-blooded rock n’ roll we’ve been hearing from him for over a decade. Blunderbuss is a feat of orchestration and a welcome addition to the White canon, but it boils down to this: if you liked Jack White before, you’ll like him now; if you didn’t, you won’t. And for those of us who recall having our minds blown by “Fell in Love With a Girl,” that’s a good thing.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate