RECENT ITEMS»

The White Stripes
Greek Theater
Filter Grade: 90%
by Sam Roudman | 01.01.2007

The following review will be presented as a series of confessions, regrets, and apologies of and related to the White Stripes show I witnessed the other night at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles.

I am sorry to say that I’m not any White Stripes fanatic. I don’t own de stijl, or even Elephant. Yeah, I like them; I’m all down for the whole re-imagining classic genres, the fake sibling ruse, the color coordination- the whole White Stripes persona. But you know, it’s just impossible to get around to every single worthwhile release that has been released in a single month, let alone half a decade, so I entered the show with my Stripe-thusiasm-ometer registering a reserved six out of ten.

OK, I’ll level with you, who I really wanted to see was LA boys-make-white-noise band Autolux, who I missed because my friend who drove insisted on a casually disastrous lack of punctuality. The absence of Autolux coupled with what I soon realized was an exorbitant ticket price converted my near ambivalence to the White Stripes into a heavy, sticky pessimism. Before the show started, I knew (as much as I can know anything about the future) that I wasn’t going to enjoy this show.

And to tell you the truth, my powers of foresight proved abysmal. The White Stripes are an amazing albeit slightly gimmicky live act. On a stage all black with outlined palms, white faux-floral arrangements, and splashes of candy-stripe red, they came out and performed for a seamless and upbeat 90 minutes of distilled and minimal roots (emphasis on the pluralizing ‘s’) rock.

I gotta confess that the following statements are true. Jack White DOES look like the demonic spawn of Zorro and Michael Jackson. Meg White IS NOT that great technically behind the kit. Sometimes Meg would get slightly off beat, and Jack would have to hold a riff and they’d come back into the verse a couple seconds late. But the point is that this is how REAL MUSIC--or at least real rock music--is played. The warts and the scars made the experience real rather than regurgitative, and when slight variations on tunes everyone already knew succeeded, the result was exhilaration.

I am well aware that this can be construed as all cheesecornfoodball, but the connection between the two playing together was palpable to all six thousand there. I hate to even mention this, but there were VIBES flying back and forth between the two for ninety minutes; weird, magic, scorned-lover, blue-grit, lonesome-cowboy-prayer VIBES!

Lord am I guilty about this, but, I found a new appreciation for Meg White’s drumming. She is HOT when she drums. Before you, the hyper-PC educated reader, label me Chauvinist Prick of The Day, remember it is OK to be sexual in rock; isn’t that kinda the point of most of it? Either way, Meg as a performer rocks and writhes in all the right ways. Why can’t I adore her?

And dude, I’m not the guy to sacrifice sheep at the altar of musical virtuosity, BUT, Jack White shreds in ten musical dialects. His voice and his guitar were not just calling and responding, they were mashing and fighting, yodeling, howling, and scratching. He would bang on a chord when he was singing and the next measure would be a lightning moan of a reply. Normal tracks were extended for dramatic flourish. "The Union Forever" went on about that long with Jack adding extra verses about refused offers of expensive cigars in hotel lobbies, while his solos were explosions of twang and twirl.

So yeah, I was a bit put off by the four or five references Jack made to him and Meg being brother and sister, and no, I wasn’t too fond of the timpani interludes, and I wasn’t that impressed when Beck came out to do an encore of a few songs that I didn’t know (Should fame have a bearing on how much I enjoy a performance?). But damn, what more can you really hope for from a show at a huge outdoor hilltop venue, from a huge band, with $25 dollar t-shirts?

I’d like to say I was sorry that they didn’t even play “Fell in Love with a Girl,” but who cares? I fell in love with a band.