11 and 10 Notes For Jack White & The White Stripes

This week was the 11th anniversary of The White Stripes’ bittersweet retirement announcement. The snow fell, gloomy as it always does on the East Coast, but just a little gloomier than usual. There was a weight in the snow, the way it clung to the ground, tree branches, shrubs. Campus sagged. The window outside my dorm buckled, trying to keep the difference between outside and inside as distinct as possible. In these conditions news always travels slow, but as it was gloomier than usual, the news traveled a little slower than usual back then too. A text message on the low-res screen of a Blackberry (lol): “hey, you okay?” A fair and unalarming question, I’d left campus in snowy Columbus, Ohio early that morning, to catching a flight to snowier Washington D.C. “Yep, just landed,” I typed back while wandering the golden façade holding up the windows of Regan International Airport, the district just waking up across the Potomac. My friend urged me to “check this out,” adding a hyperlink to a Pitchfork article. The headline said it all, but I skimmed the text, stopping on an imagine straight from The White Stripes’ website.

The city slush looked like death, not the possibility I had been from just below the wingtip coasting over Georgetown’s campus, where I was now very excited to see my brother, and drink his and his friends’ beers. Funerals, I figured, can be parties too.
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I kicked ice and snow at my feet, pea coat collar pulled way up like Jack’s was in the incredible footage from the documentary on, unbeknownst to viewers at the time, The White Stripes last tour, in Northern Canada. It was just getting good. The Dead Weather were exciting distractions, sure, I liked The Raconteurs okay, but it was, always, The White Stirpes I kept going back to, again, and again. 

This week was the 10th anniversary of Jack White’s “Love Interruption” and the announcement of his debut solo album Blunderbuss, which was his third post-Stripes enterprise, but the first since announcing their retirement officially. Like the previous winter, it was snowy, and even more desolate from outside the window of my first-floor apartment style dorm room: campus had transitioned from a College to a University and from quarters to semesters. To make sure seniors wouldn’t graduate short credits, Otterbein offered a four week “J Term” that left campus sparsely populated. It was a great month for thinking about the future, that old sense of possibly coming back, and reading and just starting to get into drinking coffee. My roommates and the seven other people taking the Experimental Women Writers course I was seemed not only like the only people on campus, but also the only people alive. In place of human begins, snow drifts moving undisturbed across sidewalks, crosswalks, roads, and the lawn.

I can tell you where I was sitting: a desk I had stolen from my freshman dorm room in the middle of the night two summers earlier, back to the rest of our apartment where one of my roommates was probably getting ready to go the gym and the other probably watching Star Trek, the blinds over my double-wide window mostly open, Christmas lights dangling and flickering, further obscuring that not-quite morning not-quite afternoon glow, the ridiculous blood-red bedsheets tussled on my thousand year old twin mattress, a Postal Service record probably spinning on my turntable. 
 
That January the only real responsibility I had was to form cogent thoughts on Virginia Woolf and read A Room of Her Own, which allowed me the time to be very online before that was a thing. This meant I was literally online when they announced Jack White’s debut solo album with the release of “Love Interruption.”

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The year between The White Stripes and “Love Interruption” I turned 21, which seems like a momentous age when the worst thing that happens in your life is your favorite band calling it quits, or the best thing in your life that happens is when the guitarist from that band announces a solo tour. This year, between 31 and 32, I got a house, a Ph.D., a kid, and somehow in the mix with all of that Jack White is going to release two more solo records. Some things change and some things don’t change and some things have a way of looking different, while staying the same. 
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Here's 10 and 11 things about the end of The White Stripes and Jack White’s Blunderbuss.

1. The last (as in most recent) variant of Blunderbuss I got is the last (as in only one remaining) of the vinyl variants for the record and it only took ten years to get: the “lightening bolt” vinyl with a blast of “blunderbuss blue” shooting through the LP was the first of the two variants, the other, the “inverted lightening bolt” is, well, look:

2. While they waited four years from their last show (July 31, 2007, Southaven, Mississippi) to call it quits, The White Stripes run was almost exactly ten years long, which means this year they have been officially retired longer than they were officially a band.

3. Their last ever released song came five years after retirement, “City Lights,” which was unearthed for the Jack White Acoustic Recordings compilation album in 2016. For my money the official statement of Jack White’s prowess as an acoustic musician was his too-brief set at Neil Young’s Bridge School Benefit show in Mountain View, CA in 2012. “City Lights” unseated The White Stripes cover of The Greenhornes “Shelter of Your Arms” as the last “new” White Stripes song I had personally ever heard, which I discovered messing around in a YouTube wormhole instead of writing my poetry manuscript for my M.F.A. program at University of San Francisco.

4. Speaking of the University of San Francisco, I have to confess that during my brief tenure as a DJ for the college radio station – KUSF – I pilfered from the seemingly ignored pile of singles a copy of the exclusive pinball magazine 7” split Dirtbombs / White Stripes single featuring “Red Bowling Ball Ruth.” I liberated the record from Cowell Hall and it remains one of my favorite rarities.  

5. In San Francisco, I saw Jack White twice, a back-to-back series of shows at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in August 2014. During night one Jack sprained his ankle, which was treated by the Oakland Athletics’ training staff (per banter during night two) and played so mighty a version of “Ball and Biscuit” the earth cracked open and California gave me the only earthquake she did during my three years in the Golden State.

6. Speaking of ankle injuries, I saw Jack White in Oakland one time, at the local alternative rock radio station’s Not So Silent Night music festival at the Oracle Arena. The Gaslight Anthem, The Shins, and M83 were notably also on the bill. I had just days earlier had an air cast removed from my shattered ankle injury earlier that fall. Arena music festival: great durability test for a bum foot.

7. I convinced myself I was hooked on the first listen to “Love Interruption” on my shitty white plastic MacBook speakers, but to be honest, I wasn’t totally sold. Less so when the 7” arrived in the mail in February when faced with “Machine Gun Silhouette,” which wasn’t just a slow jam, it was country music. My excitement wanned, until

8. Saturday Night Live, March 3, 2012. https://vimeo.com/65615169

9. I really can’t say what the first White Stripes song I heard was, but I can say “Fell in Love With a Girl” was the first song by them I loved, and that was due no small part to the animated Lego figures in the music video. “Ball and Biscuit” became a late favorite but I’d be lying if I said that song used to be a skip for me! I favorited the punkier songs, the shorter, more vicious guitar songs at first.

10. Then Get Behind Me Satan came out in 2005, the first White Stripes album released to me as a fan of the group and I was all in for the weird, the marimbas, the piano ballads, the spoken word tracks.

11. Icky Thump doubled down on this weirdness. Imagine a scrawny Tony doing cross country training to “St. Andrews” or “Rag and Bone.” 

12. Since I’m telling on myself for songs I didn’t like, Blunderbuss really didn’t take for me when it came out in April 2012. Maybe I was distracted, I was getting ready to graduate and move to California, I was just starting to hang around my now-wife, things were in flux, you might say. Maybe only a handful of days after the album arrived in the campus mail center (it beat the street date, I remember!) I loaded it up with the rest of my record collection and packed it into the back of my friend’s U-Haul with he and his mom’s stuff, conveniently moving to Northern California a few months ahead of me. Blunderbuss patiently waited for me to find it.

13. When I first got to San Francisco, Jack White’s headlining set at Outside Lands Music Festival was a month and a half away. I started scheming for how I might be able to go. I also started scheming how I might make this thing work with Rachel way back in Ohio. I started working at a grocery store in Haight-Ashbury and, long story short, couldn’t get the days off (let alone the money) to go see White play the festival. The store was one block from Golden Gate Park, which meant I was a hundred feet from the same grass White was blasting through his catalogue on.

Having missed it, the walk up the hill to my new campus dorm was a sad one. The fog came in heavy as any snow storm and for the first time (maybe) during my California adventure, I felt lonely. I got back to Lonely Mountain (melodramatic name for a dorm if you want my honest opinion) cracked a warm PBR and put on Blunderbuss, not listening to the album to hear it, but listening to feel there. I’m sure it didn’t work, because if you’ve seen Jack White you know the showman can twist a track live unlike anybody else in the business. But it did sound different, familiar, like home. I’m not sure I felt better because of that, or because at some point between side a and side b I stepped outside to call Rachel.

14. The Blunderbuss tour did not have a proper stop in NorCal, so I justified making my first trip back to Columbus to see him play. The encore that night was better than the show.

15. “I want love to walk right up and bite me” There’s a lot of twisted imagery in the song, and I don’t think it’s a sweet song (as in sentiment, I think it’s a sweet as in excellent song) but when I try to map the journey from meeting Rachel in March 2012 to marrying her in 2019, the road is always persistent and surprising. Like she walked right up and bit me.

16. By the way our first dance at that wedding was to “I Can Tell We’re Going to Be Friends,” which, being smarter and more patient than me, she’d known right away, thank god.

17. My childhood dog Maggie’s favorite White Stripes song was “Cannon” and Desi’s favorite song is “Apple Blossom.” Ben has yet to share his favorite with me but I’m sure it’ll be a great pick.

18. Every year on February 2nd or thereabouts I try to watch Under Great White Northern Lights and this last scene becomes heavier every year.

19. Jack White, knowing he’s put my wife through a lot, played the song he co-wrote with Beyonce one time during the 2018 tour, and it was the one show I cajoled Rachel into coming to. The night prior during an in-store performance, White played the title track of Blunderbuss, bridging the experimental nuttiness of Boarding House Reach with the rootsy first step into his future as a solo artist, which was itself a step from the past as a White Stripe. Judging by the crowd standing shoulder to shoulder with me, this was a generous gift for us all.

20. But back in my dorm, in 2011, on a cold January morning, both White and I had a whole new path laid out before us. One: a bold footstep into the snow, the other, the strum of a guitar, an echo, and a whisper, “I want love to roll me over slowly…”

​21. I’ll close with some symmetry: The White Stripes ended for everybody while I was in Washington D.C. but they also began for me while I was in Washington D.C. I’m not gonna bug my mom to find out what year it was, but probably around middle school, we took a family trip to the District. This could be apocryphal but in my memory it was cold. This was pre iPod so for me in the backseat of our family van it was my brother hogging the GameBoy and my portable CD Player hogging AA batteries. I probably brought every CD I owned, which at the time was probably two Weird Al discs, Billy Joel’s The Stranger and U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind and a few mix CDs from my Uncle Bill. One of those CDs had six songs by The White Stripes and, if I’m remembering correctly, those six or seven songs were: “You’re Pretty Good Looking (For a Girl)”, “Lord, Send Me an Angel”, “Hello Operator”, “Jolene”, “Ball & Biscuit”, “The Union Forever”, and maybe “Hardest Button to Button” or maybe “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground.” There was also some Wilco, but that’s a story for another day.

My Aunt and Uncle was the arbiter of cool in my young life, introducing me to Taco Bell and Star Wars to name a few highly influential nods, and while this CD I think had been mailed for my dad, not me, it took it and somewhere between Breezewood, PA and Youngstown, OH, it became distinctly mine.

​When I see D.C. in movies, the too infrequent visits to see my brother who lives there now, or just imagine that marble city and the Potomac slithering around it, I can’t help but hear those songs, all of those songs, and think about how generous it was that Jack & Meg gave those songs to all of us, to my Uncle, to me.