Why Jack White ‘insisted’ on playing in Christchurch
The Detroit-raised rocker has the world at his feet, but he’s also a student of music and a fan of Flying Nun, writes
JACK White’s only New Zealand show is in Christchurch and why not? This current tour is taking him to some strange and exotic places.
The South Island is historically off the beaten track for touring bands. And that stung, especially when the band that made White famous – the garagerock duo the White Stripes – played Auckland venues ranging from a primary school to pubs to Mt Smart Stadium but somehow never reached the south.
So this time White insisted. ‘‘Can I find it on a map?’’ he jokes, before launching into a hilarious story about watching Saturday Night Live at home with White Stripes tour manager John Baker, who happened to be from Auckland. There was a world news bit in the show but New Zealand was left off the map. Baker was incensed.
‘‘He sprung off the chair, went over to my phone and called up NBC complaining. That’s how I knew how amazingly patriotic
New Zealanders are about their country. I smile every time I think about it.’’
When the White Stripes officially came to an end in 2011, White already had two more bands on the go – the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather. His first solo album emerged a year later, and four more have followed.
Two appeared in 2022 after a burst of lockdown activity. Fear of the Dawn is an experimental rock album. Entering Heaven Alive is folkier.
Although White no longer lives in Detroit, the current tour started there. On opening night in April, White proposed to and married his girlfriend at the time, singer Olivia Jean, on stage. She is his third wife after White Stripes drummer Meg White and model and singer Karen Elson, with whom he has two children.
White normally puts three or four White Stripes songs in the set: Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground, Hotel Yorba, The Hardest Button to Button or the classic Seven Nation Army.
It’s not hard to balance old and new. As we speak, he is parked in front of the venue where he is performing in Oklahoma City. ‘‘I see about 25 Raconteurs T-shirts, 15 or 20 Dead Weather T-shirts, a dozen White Stripes T-shirts and a ton of Jack White T-shirts on people standing in line. If everybody had a White Stripes shirt on, I know my job would be to play nostalgic songs from this band I was in 20 years ago. But luckily for me, that’s not the case.
‘‘Many of the shows this year have been teenagers moshing and crowd-surfing at the front. Hundreds of them. To be doing this 25 years in and connecting with the youth in that way, that’s impressive to me.’’
There are role models, if you want to talk about longevity. Bob Dylan is an influence in many ways. Like Dylan, White is a student of music history, an archivist and collector. Like Dylan, White played tricks on the press, including feeding into a myth that he and Meg were brother and sister.
‘‘He’s always been an inspiration,’’ White says of Dylan. ‘‘It’s nice to have him alive and well and still creating and performing in the world. That’s just an astounding thing.
‘‘Take country music. I live in Nashville. Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton are the only ones left from the old guard. George Jones, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash – they’re all gone.’’
But once you are gone, you take on a different aura. This is White the collector talking.
The aura lasts ‘‘even if you become this obscure thing that only three people care about,’’ he says. ‘‘I have conversations with musicians and we’re talking about somebody who made a record in 1926 and there’s only two copies of this record in the world because nobody gave a damn about it in the first place, and here we are being inspired by it about 100 years later. It’s a beautiful thing, art.’’
Dylan, Neil Young, Tom Waits and Paul McCartney have all demonstrated to White how rockers can keep on rocking. The Rolling Stones prove you can play when old and not look ridiculous. He feels luckier in that he had more influences available to him.
‘‘Bob Dylan didn’t listen to Deep Purple and Rage Against the Machine and the Cramps. There are other strange routes that we don’t know about yet.’’
Those strange routes led to Fear of the Dawn and he sounds genuinely pleased to hear it described as sounding like a lost classic or a detour music never took, like a missing link between Prince and heavy metal.
He felt he was pushing into uncomfortable places, ‘‘and trying to fight my way out, song by song, chord change by chord change. It made me a guitar player like I’ve never been before.’’
It must sound intense live. Christchurch will know in November.
There is another Christchurch connection. White owns a publishing company, Third Man Books, which is about to copublish a history of Flying Nun Records by Canadian superfan Matthew Goody. White got a copy of the book, Needles and Plastic, a couple of weeks ago. ‘‘It looks so cool. I can’t wait to devour it.’’
He liked the Clean’s music in particular, but as a label owner he also admires the Flying Nun story. ‘‘When you go through the trials and tribulations of an independent record label, you are immediately a champion of every other label. You know how hard it is.’’
White has a label, a publishing company, some stores, a record pressing plant and is an active philanthropist. Why aren’t other musicians doing this much?
‘‘They’re way better at video games than I am,’’ he jokes.
But seriously: ‘‘One of the weirder things about me is I owned my own upholstery business at 21, before I started touring. That’s not very normal. I had already learned how to combine art and commerce.
‘‘There’s a part of me that might not be that good at show business but might be a good salesman of it. That used to be a bad word, but good business sense is crucial to trying to perform music and art.’’
Jack White plays the Christchurch Town Hall on November 21.