Rock and roll Fantasies

Further thoughts on Jack white and what the White Stripes did:

Here's the first sentence I want to scribble here, and I want to make sure you know that this one sentence is vicious and mean and you must let it stab through your thoughts, and bleed inside of you: When Jack White created the White Stripes , he liberated the blues from an absolutely horrific box that I believe they had been trapped in-- tragically-- for decades.

Why am I saying this? Allow me to explain: When you start to follow the trail of certain famous blues songs, especially the very early songs by artists like Robert Johnson, and you research and listen to  how  they have been interpreted across the years, generally what I feel you're going to find is that many of the covers that have been done , have basically done two things: 1. They have 'cleaned up' the grittiness of the original Robert Johnson recordings, and made sure you can hear it in a very crisp way (this was Eric Claptons approach when he learned them note for note ) or, on the other hand, they have merely plugged the songs in to an amplifier , and played them loudly. This was what the Rolling Stones did in the 70s, with tracks like "Stop Breaking down" on Exile on Main Street.

Now , when you first look at how Jack White recorded his own version of "Stop Breaking Down" decades later in the early 00s, it almost just seems like maybe it's little more than a whackier version of what the Stones were doing back in the 70s, or even what Eric Clapton and countless other electric  blues artists like him are still doing. At first glance it really almost seems like that, but then you look twice and, in my opinion, you see the real magic of what White did, and it's very simple but so meaningful: He essentially  unlocked the "tortured spirit" of the songs -- the howl , you could say-- in a manner that the Stones and those other artists clearly have not. White actually got closer to the original vibration and feeling of the song, in my opinion, and created a sort of "parallel" in our own time, of how it perhaps sounded to the people of Johnsons.

For many years I would often look at Whites reworking of blues songs and I would just sort of write them off as poorly performed adaptations. It just sounded childish, I suppose, especially after I really, as an adult, went and dug into the very "neat" way that artists like Clapton and so on do the blues standards. But then one day I had an epiphany about this 'cleaning up' that Clapton and Company had done , and what I realized was that, as important as it was to help "the gentle people" understand the blues, what Clapton did also sort of sterilized the blues, to the point where it became too tame, too nice, too polite, and too predictable. It works for the Vienna Opera House I guess-- where Joe Bonamassa can be seen playing these highly sterilized versions of the blues songs---but it also *ruins* the feeling that was so often there , in the original period of the blues. It makes them seem polite. As though it's the sort of music a nice fellow or lady ought to listening to. And though it might sound hard to believe, even the versions  the Stones gave us often leave me with a "too polite" taste in my mouth. For Mick Jägger never really seems angry enough. He's too much of a hippie, one imagines, to play these songs in a ferocious way . He's also, maybe, too English.

This isn't really what happens with Jack Whites rendering of the blues music. It's almost as though, by virtue of being an American, and having come of age in one of modern America's most destroyed and certainly racially conflicted cities , Detroit, Jack somehow managed to really hear the absolute rage in these songs that Clapton and the Stones simply missed. For the truth is that, when you listen to the English artists tell the tale of the songs, often what you wind up hearing are tales about how "depressing" and "deep" and "sad" the blues are. What you never really get, however, is this idea that, though the blues does represent depression and sorrow, it also at times represented a very deep anger, as well as a fear. A fear of being smited by God, or kidnapped by the Devil-- and also of course a fear of being lynched or murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, et cetera.  And these two things, I just think, are perhaps difficult for someone whose grown up outside of the American ball game - like the English obviously have--- to understand. Jack White unlocked this anger, this viciousness, and above all this fear and confusion when he played his blues . Now, was he able to tap into an anger that is most certainly as deep as the one a modern black fellow might feel? No, he didn't. But the unfortunate fact is that most black folks are actually not allowed to express a rock and roll style, bluesy anger in their songs, so that's really a whole other topic. The fact is that Jack White was the only one who offered us up the blues in this most recent light, and in my opinion he unlocked it in a way no other post 1960s blues artist really ever has, as a direct result of his initial proximity to this troubled and racially distraught city. I especially began to see that Jack White was a little different than the rest when I realized he had a featuring on Beyonce's most recent Lemonade project, on the song I just so happened to myself like most, "Don't Hurt Yourself". I can guarantee you that next to no other modern rockers would probably even go near Beyonce, for fear that their fanbase -- who knows nothing about the blues or black peoples incredible role in rock -- would abandon them. For Jack, it wasn't a problem: His fans understand....

 And of course what's so hilarious about this all  is that Jack White isn't even at all respected within blues circles. In fact, he often seems to be despised to me. Why? Well the answer is simple: by the standards of what the genre has now twisted itself into-- the  polite standards, the technical standards etc-- Jack White can "hardly play" the blues. Put him up against someone like Stevie Ray Vaughan or Derek Tedeschi , and White really cannot compete. He does not play long proper solos and it's hard to imagine him on a stage with the Tedeschi Trucks band. His blues are simply too strange to mesh with theirs. They're selling a refined, polished product that is , one imagines, purposely supposed to remind us of the blues at its electric peak . Susan Tedeschi actually knows how to sing properly and Derek Tedeschi can play the old famous solos exactly as they are. The lyrics are more synonymous with the blues as they were in their mature years.

Jack was instead selling something deranged and demented and though he didn't manage to do it in every song, there were times when Whites music did actually sound unusually dark; and, in my opinion, the guy basically connected us back to that good old Satanic thing the blues used to have going for it-- and even the guitar--- which you can now see has been somewhat lost in every genre, save for metal. For the fierceness of the guitar has actually now been very much lost when you look at it from a mainstream angle, and really none of the metal bands, try as they might, have ever been able to truly summon it up. And neither were bands like Pearl Jam or Nirvana able to either, for all of their songs don't really ever seem to go anywhere truly dark. They get mad-- but they never make you think Satan might come snatch you. The lyrics with most modern rock bands never seem all that serious, I feel, and a big reason why is because many of those bands weren't very interested in American myth , in the manner that Jack White was. For that matter, they weren't even very interested in anything Biblical either. So you never wind up with the sort of lyrics White would sing, when he said something like "...I'm going to Wichita, far from this opera forevermore ....I'm gonna work the straw, make the sweat drip out of every pore...." In addition , you'd also never get any of those joyous references to things like "the hounds of hell" (mentioned in the same song) that are so obviously pulled straight from blues lore, and Robert Johnsons "Hellhounds on my Trail". These bands were only pulling from a musical vault that started in the 1950s--- maybe even just the 1960s. Jack White was so revolutionary because he went further back, just like the original rockers had done, but he saw it all from a wildly new perspective that, as I wrote, the original rockers missed, mostly due to society just not being ready.

So now it comes to the next stop of the train, and the question now becomes "what can it be next?" and "can it go beyond where Jack White has brought it?" Well, I have been pondering this question in recent days as I have been fiddling around with my piano again, and what I have realized is , in fact, yes...of course....it can not only go beyond where Jack brought it--- it can actually go far beyond. But in what way you ask? It is simple: If rock wants to start having an appeal for people again, then I think what it needs to do is to realize that people did actually like Jack White --- in an era whne they liked almosr no other rockers --- and they need to understand that the main reason why was because he didn't just play hard and free , but he also wrote these very superstitious and strange sounding songs, and he looked, in his costumes,  very theatrical (as I mentioned elsewhere) . He summoned up this old "evil spirit" of rocks weird, twisted origins and brought it to life as much as he could in the early 2000s. He actually brought back a certain fantasy world that the Bible gave us which has now been all but abandoned in our mostly secular society. Therefore, when I sit down at my piano  and I think to write in a Jack White inspired style, I tend to just go straight back and I try to think: what might an incredibly superstitious religious person believe about the World? Especially someone from the deep past? What might be some of the things they're convinced are real? Ghosts, demons, Angels, hell hounds, God..Satan, crucifixions...et cetera. All of these things which are at once so commonly known--- but also, you'll see, hardly at work in the actual modern rock songs. For I don't know about you--but I am hard pressed to find a rock song that has a character , say, being chased by hell hounds, through Louisiana or Kansas , or some such place. I'm hard pressed to find a song where the singer is screaming in fear about someone they love, some girl named Ellie Mae, perhaps, being crucified and burnt at the stake for being a witch....,

This type of imagery , as I've gone over in previous writings of mine, is simply no longer at work -- and actually never really was--- in music. It's all something that still, mostly, has yet to happen. Oh it has indeed happened in literature, and as you see it flickered briefly in that old blues world, where men like Robert Johnson probably seriously believed in it all--- but then we never really saw it again. The old superstitious blues songs merely became a short stop in a set list for rock bands that otherwise sang songs about love and jet planes and being rich rock stars. The fantasy fell right out.

I say it's high time to bring it BACK.