Crushing set by Jack White
Jack White has offered no apology or explanation for what precipitated the fit of pique that compelled him to storm offstage 45 minutes into a show at New York’s Radio City Music Hall on Saturday, and it’ll be fine if he just leaves it at that.
More than any other performer of his stature in recent memory, the former White Stripes front man understands that to move as a proper rock star, one must maintain a mystique. Music is always but one piece of the larger, overarching art project that is Jack White.
So for all we know the past weekend’s somewhat uncharacteristic hissy fit was just a small bit of theatre intended to sustain the buzz about this year’s solo album, Blunderbuss, through the fall.
Could be the Radio City crowd just sucked, mind you. There was certainly no cause for distracting chatter amidst the crushing set White visited upon a boisterous, sold-out Sony Centre on Wednesday night.
The first of two consecutive gigs at the venue, this one had White’s sixpiece, all-female, Nashville-schooled backing band, the Peacocks — he’s been capriciously alternating between that one and an all-male ensemble dubbed Los Buzzardos since the South by Southwest festival in Austin last March — powering him through an endlessly well-received set of Blunderbuss newbies, White Stripes favourites and the odd nod to the Raconteurs (“Top Yourself”) and the Dead Weather (“I Cut Like a Buffalo”) that was as raw and rangy as the Stripes at full steam. Just more . . . maximalist.
The Peacocks skewed slightly more “country” and the boys more “rock” in the spring, but Wednesday’s set was decidedly more Led Zeppelin III than Grand Ole Opry despite the occasional intrusion of fiddle and lap steel into the fray.
There were some detours into Blunderbuss’s rootsier reaches and some tips of the hat to the White Stripes’ more rustic side on “Hotel Yorba” and the lovely “We Are Going to Be Friends.”
Mostly, however, there was a lot of the scattershot sludge-blues in which most White fans secretly hope he will always indulge. A screeching pre-encore run at “Ball & Biscuit” let superhuman drummer Carla Azar strut with such panache that one momentarily forgot how much we all miss Meg White.
If you got tickets to both Toronto shows, you should probably feel very smug right about now.