“It’ll be completely random,” he says gleefully. At each gig, the audience will not know whether it is the all-male or the all-female band backing White until they come onstage. White’s extravagant concept is to take both bands out with him on the road. Notably, a second band have turned up: an all-male ensemble featuring a hip hop drummer (Daru Jones), a mandolin player from The Old Crow Medicine Show (Cory Younts) and the fervid organist Ikey Owens, plucked from the unlikely environment of The Mars Volta. The image shift turns out to be serendipitous, since “Sixteen Saltines” is a priapic rocker reminiscent of “The Hardest Button To Button” from that year’s Elephant album. This time he is dressed in a black t-shirt and tight black jeans rather than a blue western suit, looking uncannily as he did around 2003. White, meanwhile, contents himself with keeping the rhythm on his new Gibson acoustic, which turns out to be nearly a century old.Īn hour or so later, however, White returns with a light blue Telecaster and an entirely different group. We went on forums and typed in ‘female pedal steel player’ and it was bone dry.”). “Love Interruption” is brief and understated on Blunderbuss, a little like an Everly Brothers song, but live it becomes something fuller and looser, peaking with a duel of sorts between Lillie May Rische, a fiddler from Nashville, and Maggie Bjorklund, a pedal steel player from Denmark (“I’m telling you the truth, man,” says White, “she’s one of four or five female pedal steel players in the world.
What some people call a gimmick, others will call art.” And all of that stuff was no different from Charley Patton playing between his legs at juke joints, or Tommy Johnson playing behind his head. He was setting his guitar on fire, playing with his teeth, dressing in marching band outfits, with amazing giant hair.
JACK WHITE TONGUE TRASH TALKER FULL
“But make no mistake, the man was full of gimmicks. “We can talk about the intensity of Jimi Hendrix’s playing, and how unbelievable it is,” he says. The charming game of hide-and-seek is, it seems, still on. The enigmatic strategies and outlandish concepts remain just as critical to his appeal as the songs and virtuosity. It would be easy to envisage Blunderbuss – the 11th album of White’s mature career, after six with Meg White in The White Stripes, two fronting The Raconteurs alongside Brendan Benson, and two playing mostly drums in The Dead Weather – as the point where much of the subterfuge stops, and something akin to a real Jack White emerges. I consider all of it to be the blues, but I’m trying to present it in a way that shakes it up for me and the listener.” The sound, the rhythm, is not what someone would label blues, and I think that happens with a lot of songs on this album as well. “‘Seven Nation Army’ has become a soccer chant to some people, but to me it’s a blues song, a struggle of one person against the world. “With The White Stripes, I wanted to have a new blues,” he says. That day, White says, he recorded three songs, including a shit-kicking homage to James Booker called “Trash Tongue Talker”, and embarked on a trajectory that culminates this month with the release of his first solo album, the rich, nuanced and thoroughly entertaining Blunderbuss. Not entirely out of character, the Wu Tang rapper cancelled at the last moment, which left White and a bunch of musicians hanging around with nothing else to do except work up a couple of ideas he’d been toying with for a while. Sometime last July, White thinks, he was waiting at Third Man to produce a couple of tracks for the RZA. For the past three years, White has been inviting musicians down to his Nashville studio to record 45s for his Third Man label recent visitors have included Tom Jones, The Alabama Shakes, and the Insane Clown Posse. The way Jack White tells it – though historically, his relationship with the truth can be a little capricious – his solo career started by accident.
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