Spitting out these 300 M.P.H. Outpour Blues

 
I love the way Jack White talks about the music that's meaningful to him.  In a panel discussion about the Rise and Fall of Paramount Records back in 2013, surrounded by erudite, scholarly types and people who write about music for a living, his descriptions of the songs and the impact they had on him was down-to-earth and easily relateable.  In that snippet above, what he says about the song Mama's Angel Child especially resonated with me-- That part about "he's speaking for me", that's one of the things that definitely draws us to music. Those songs that speak for us, the ones that make us feel as if the song-writer pulled our own thoughts and feelings out of us and set them to a melody, are intensely powerful.

Jack's wish that we could all have the sort of moment he had with Mama's Angel Child was fulfilled for me with one of his own songs, one that's come up at this blog a couple times over the last few years-- 300 M.P.H. Torrential Outpour Blues. It's the song that first grabbed me and shook me and told me I had to get into his music. If you held a gun to my head and forced me to name my favorite White Stripes song, this one would be it. To my ears, it represents everything about him as a song-writer-- The cleverness of the word-play, the deceptive simplicity of what he's expressing, the dramatic shifts in dynamic.  It's soft, it's tempestuous, it's acoustic, it's electric, it's acerbic and thoughtful, wry and regretful.  And it speaks for me in a way that is both reassuring and unsettling.

"I'm getting hard on myself, sitting in my easy chair..."

So many of us go through that dance with self-loathing angst--  "I'm not this enough, I'm not that enough, I'm not good enough, I'm not doing enough, why did I do that?, why did I say that?, why didn't I say that?, I really screwed up, I'm really screwed up...."  And yet our lives, to anyone looking in from the outside, are perfectly fine. We have food, shelter, family, friends.  Money may or may not be a little tight, but we can pay our bills, buy some records, and go see a movie once in a while. And yet we suffer.  We get hard on ourselves sitting in our easy chairs.  Why?

"Safe to say somebody out there's got a problem with almost everything you do..."

So much wisdom, and again so simple. But one of the hardest lessons for some of us to learn, something we get hung up on over and over again and that leads us right back to that easy chair, getting hard on ourselves. For what?

"Well, sooner or later, the ground's gonna be holdin' all of my ashes, too..."


And yet, there's a defiance of all those troubles at the end, the strength to stand up to those who have a problem with everything we do and, just as hard, to stand up to our own selves.  That final twist, that's the reassurance this song gives us--  

"One thing's for sure, in that graveyard... I'm gonna have the shiniest pair of shoes."

If that's not the blues, I don't know what the hell is.


 

Christmas road-trip, Md to Fla 2015: Going

Drove from Maryland to Florida for a belated Christmas this year. Left Christmas eve morning, well, actually more like noon, and hit the dreaded I-95 Corridor through northern VA.  I've driven 95 from Connecticut to the Carolinas (before this trip) and the stretch through Virginia is consistently the absolute worst in terms of traffic slowdowns for no discernible reason.  Fortunately, there was a flashdrive full of music plugged into the car dash and it more than once set both the mood and the pace of the trip, both going and coming back.  Though I learned something important on this drive-- Setting music on shuffle makes time go more slowly than listening to something with a discrete time-frame, like a podcast or album. 

Hit the border of VA and SC a little after 8pm with the intention of stopping at that famous (notorious?) spot that is the entrance to SC. But South of the Border just does not live up to its kitschy potential. Very sad. Obviously there was a time when it was a fun spot, but those days seem to be over. I thought of staying at Pedro's motor inn just for the fun of it, but lost the taste for it after taking a quick spin down the road beyond and passing a gentleman's club and "Asian spa", where I would swear a drug deal was taking place as I pulled a u-turn in the lot. Went back and wandered the deserted aisles of Pedro's gift shop looking for a fun memento or silly gift for a co-worker, even just a bumper sticker or post card, but came up empty-handed. Just a lot of nothing clever there.

Woke up Christmas morning a little farther south than South of the Border and got back on the highway. Spent half of Jack White's album Blunderbuss tucked into a line of four cars doing a consistent 90-100mph. No one was being competitive, there was no tailgating, no passing. Just smoothly pacing each other at high speed. It was great. Then in the middle of Trash Tongue Talker we came up behind a clump of slower cars that couldn’t be easily passed and it all fell apart. 

 

When we finally got by, the two in front got slow, the guy from New York who’d been bringing up the rear got aggressive and that was it. All good things must come to an end. A few songs later, after one had gotten off at an exit and I’d passed the two who’d been leading, I put on the brakes myself to let New York get in front of me, and then watched him proceed to tailgate and pass cars up ahead, to the point of using an on-ramp to pass a truck on the right. 


 
On my own again and with 300mph Torrential Outpour Blues set on repeat, I started taking a closer look at the scenery, sizing it up and drawing conclusions about it. I think I wrote once years ago about driving through the desert of Utah and feeling that the landscape there, so wide open and lacking in coverage or shade, so much hot sun relentlessly pounding down on your head, could drive a person mad. But I got the same feeling looking at the landscape passing alongside the road in S.C. Instead of wide open, it’s dense with thick, seemingly impermeable stands of tall, dark pines and scrubby undergrowth, here and there immersed in stands of swampy water. Having to make your way through that back in the day before there were highways or even many roads would be a tricky thing for the sane, though a convenient thing for the insane or merely surreptitious looking for places to hide. And if you weren’t mad already, I could easily imagine it making you mad, all rough bark and sharp needles scratching at your brain. So easy to picture those convoluted woods filled with moonshine stills and guys like Ernest T. Bass. 

 Hopped off the highway for a moment for a break and bought a pack of Raisinets and a black-and-white, Harlequin-painted resin skull at the truck stop. Made sure to say “Merry Christmas” to the woman at the cash register as I paid for it. It was very tempting to follow the narrow road down through the pines on the other side of the overpass, but instead I hopped back on the highway and took off to the tune of Bear Cat. 

 

Had to chuckle a bit at the GA border over the fluttering U.S. and S.C. state flags, landscaped palm trees, and graciously worded signage (“Thank you for visiting South Carolina"). What is it about S.C.’s relationship with Georgia that made them put this up, in contrast to the sketchy neon kitsch of South of the Border up north by N.C.? 

 95 through Georgia spread immediately from S.C.'s 4 lanes split by a swampy pine divider into 6 wide open lanes with a Jersey wall divider. It also immediately became quite dull, aside from frequently having to pass folks with their brains stuck on cruise-control in the left and middle lanes. The monotony was broken here and there by marshy rivers like the Jerico and Cat Creek, which reminded me of Jug Bay and Blackwater back home in eastern MD. 



Perfect road-trip song, huh? Though I may live a predominantly static lifestyle, afraid to let go of the stability of a steady, well-paying-though-usually-unstimulating job, trips like this and the rest of the travelling I’ve done the last few years are necessary to keep me sane. Certain family members might consider some of the travelling I’ve done to be irresponsible and selfish, but my feeling is that I have to do it now while I can. I couldn’t afford to do it when I was younger, and in a handful of years I may have to take on the sort of responsibility for others that I’ve always shied away from. I don’t know what to expect, but the possibility of it is what drives me now to drive and fly and follow my addictions to road and music. Now is when I can do it and I have to take advantage of that. 

 After all the billboards along the highway had left visions of peach salsa and peach cider and peach ice cream and peach bread dancing in my head, I was very disappointed that Peach World was closed for Christmas Day. 

Spent several miles debating who recorded the better version of Solid Sender- Chico Leverette or John Lee Hooker.





Totally different songs, not variations of the same. Both have strong selling points, but I'm inclined to lean towards John Lee. 

 

Crossed over into Florida to the tune of Son House’s Death Letter. I don’t have much to say about Florida. It’s not my favorite state. The natural flora is exotic and mysterious and sometimes beautiful, but the human development (I almost said “encroachment”) seems mostly haphazard and ill-conceived, and frequently shabby. I’ve seen some interesting and even wonderful things in Florida (culture in Sarasota, the Edison-Ford Winter Estates, incredible cloud formations), but overall the state just leaves me on edge. It’s a hard place for me to relax in. Though I’ve always experienced it through the prism of family or work, so maybe this trip, driving through so much of it on my own, will let me form a different connection with it. 

Connections might be tough to form, though, as there seem to be damned few places to stop.  Went all the way from Jacksonville to Ocala via routes 10 and 301 with nary a rest area or hotel/restaurant haven, and thought I was going to be out of luck dinner-wise in Ocala. Cruising the outskirts of town, the Family Dollar store was open, but Burger King was not. That says something. Thank goodness for Aunt Fannie’s Restaurant, which, as the servers kept answering the phone near me at the counter, was “open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year!” The counter was so high that I felt like a little kid sitting there, especially as the stool was also so high that my toes didn’t touch the floor and the glass they served my sweet tea in was so big it took two hands to grab and lift it to my mouth. A bit Alice In Wonderland-ish, but the ham steak was damned good. Three hours to go, headed back to the highway accompanied by Hank Williams’ 6 More Miles To Go.


 
Looked over my left shoulder a while later to see the Full Cold Moon rising.  Listened to Son House singing Pearline and tried to imagine him at 60-something in a recording studio with “Blind Owl” Alan Wilson helping him to remember his old songs. Was Pearline one he originally did way back when, or was it made up during those studio sessions? I should look that up some day, see if I can find out. It’s my favorite of his songs, with lyrics that consist of pretty much nothing but “Pearline, what’s the matter with you?” and “Pearline, I love you”. His slide guitar sums up everything else about their relationship in between those two sentiments. 


 
One of the truisms of the road—No matter what state you’re in, a dark highway is a dark highway is a dark highway. 

A White weekend: Five year anniversary

Wish me a happy anniversary, it's been five years since my first White weekend. Between that and a bunch of recent shows, this be-log's been a little inundated by Jack White the last couple of days (weeks, months, whatever).  Might need to take a break and try to write about other things for a while, even I'm beginning to need a little relief from the addiction (just a very little).  But before I do that, I'm gonna reminisce over how it all began and then draw a parallel.  

So it's been five years since my epiphany but, really, it's been longer than that since I first began trying to get into Jack's music.  I heard of the White Stripes on the message board for another band I was into at the time, where people were discussing the Stripes' tour of Canada for Icky Thump.  The crazy b-shows they were playing struck my fancy and I began paying attention to conversation about the band.  But I didn't go looking for their music, not yet.  I was just fascinated by the idea of what they were doing up there in Canada and the whole nothing but drums'n'guitar, brother'n'sister thing.  It wasn't until an October night in Baltimore that I heard their music. 

Some friends and I were in B'more for the annual Fells Point Festival, one of the largest, longest-running festivals on the east coast.  For lunch, we escaped the crowds by ducking into the restaurant upstairs at Sláinte, where we ended up with an especially flirtatious waiter. Yeah, I know this seems like quite a digression, but this guy is The One Behind It All. He told us he was tending the bar downstairs that evening and that we should come back later to see him. How could three single women resist an invitation like that?  So we finished lunch and headed back out to wander the festival until evening.  

The bar was packed when we came back. And our buddy the waiter was now a very harried bartender, with people placing food orders in addition to drinks and no one from the restaurant upstairs bussing for him. There were stacks of plates and cutlery all over the floor behind the bar. He was pissed as hell about it and acting out his anger in an alarmingly maniacal manner.  He flirted up a storm with us again as he took our orders, then headed to the other end of the bar, cussing out loud and kicking plates along the way.  But we settled in and after a while he brought our drinks.  By that time, I'd been struck by the music playing in the bar and asked him who it was. He said it was the White Stripes.  Ok, I was finally hearing this band I'd heard so much about.  A few songs later, I was still digging the mix and when he waded through the debris of dishes down to our end of the bar, I asked him again "What's this song?"  Again, he said it was such-and-such song from such-and-such album by the Stripes.  Then he picked up a glass from behind the bar and, while looking me straight in the eye, threw it over his shoulder where it smashed into a pile of plates.  The dude was insane, but I was seriously excited about his choice in music. This went on and on, every single song I asked about was the White Stripes and he finally said that was all he was playing, just their six cds on rotation. I asked which of their records I should start with and he told me the later ones were best because Meg finally learned how to keep time (if I'd known more about the band at that point, I might've chastised him for dissing her. Meg was integral to the band whether she kept proper time or no.).  By that point we'd finished our drinks and realized he was keeping us hostage by not bringing our check, so I headed upstairs to find a manager and get us out of the line of flying glassware.  I hope to this day that I didn't get the guy in trouble, because I owe him a huge debt of gratitude, crazy as he was.

It was still a while before I picked up any of the band's records, though. Dunno what held me back.  And when I did finally get ahold of a copy of Icky Thump, I was held back again. The music was immediately appealing, and I was struck hard by Jack's lyrics.  Four songs on the album resonated with me especially-- 300mph Torrential Outpour Blues ("I'm getting hard on myself, sitting in my easy chair".  The simple profundity of that line was like a punch in the sternum. To this day, if you held a gun to my head and forced me to name a favorite White Stripes song, this would be it.), Little Cream Soda, Rag and Bone, and Martyr For My Love For You.  The word-play in all was so witty and clever and the sardonic angst expressed in them was something I related to strongly.  But then there was Jack's voice, so high-pitched and nasal and unpolished compared to singers like Chris Cornell and Maynard James Keenan, who I was heavily into at the time.  I just couldn't connect with it. 





 



For almost two years I kept coming back to Icky Thump, knowing there was something there that I should be into, but unable to make it click.  Finally my buddy Leo told me that if I was interested in Jack's music, I should check out one of his other bands that she'd seen at Lollapalooza a couple years before, the Raconteurs.  We just happened to be in a record store as she told me this, and that record store just happened to have a copy of the first Raconteurs record, Broken Boy Soldiers, on cd. So I bought it. But I didn't listen to it that day.  No, it wasn't until a week later, on a bright, clear, cold day at the end of January, when I was out driving the curvy backroads along the border of Maryland and West Virginia, that I popped that cd in and gave it a go.  Like Icky, the music struck me as appealing, but it was just that-- appealing. Not profound or astonishing.  Until Blue Veins came up.  

You know how sometimes things happen to you and you know that you will never, ever forget where you were at that moment?  I feel like I'll go to my grave still seeing that bright blue winter sky through the windshield of the car, that I'll always remember the exact spot along the road paralleling the Potomac River when Jack sang the final line of that song and the lightning bolt came down from heaven and I finally... got it.  The combination of intensity and delicacy in his voice in those final few words was exactly what I needed to hear and changed everything. 



I feel like I've learned a lot about Jack since then, and I don't mean personal, gossipy, trivia shit.  I mean about his art and his philosophy.  I've been accused of "verbosity and mind-numbing analysis of... mundane detail" but, for crying out loud, when something moves you in such a way why shouldn't you throw yourself into it deeply and express the things it makes you think and feel?  To that end, I'm going to explore a little parallel before wrapping this up.
 
Around this time last year, I decided to finally get into Elvis Presley's music and went down a similar rabbit-hole to the one I went down with Jack, though not quite to the same degree.  A few months later, Jack covered Elvis's Power of My Love as a b-side to the World's Fastest Record.  To my knowledge, it was the first time he'd covered an Elvis tune and I was struck by the synchronicity (or was my brain just looking for patterns?).  Since then, I and other folks have been seeing what seem to be little nods to Elvis from Jack. Some of the parallels are superficial, such as Jack's recent pompadour haircut. Others are more profound, as in the way both blurred genre lines to make their music appeal to a widely diverse audience and to introduce that audience to styles of music they might otherwise have remained ignorant of. And there's no denying that both have (had) the same intense magnetism, the ability to hold crowds large or small in the palm of their hand. But there's one way in which Jack will presumably always differ from Elvis and it's a vital difference-- Where Elvis allowed decisions to be taken out of his hands by his manager, Colonel Parker, Jack has from the very beginning exerted a strong effort to protect his music. Third Man Records, his headquarters in Nashville (record label, venue, storefront, distribution warehouse) was created for just that purpose, to allow him to maintain control of his art. He will always do what inspires him and just hope that people dig it. So far, his instincts, much like Elvis's in the very beginning, have proven pretty much infallible. It's a sad shame that Elvis didn't have Jack's confidence and strength of will. He seemed to crave love, acceptance, and fame too much, whereas Jack may want those things (it's obvious he gets intense fulfillment from connecting with an audience and his ambition is palpable) but doesn't seem to need them the way Elvis did.

I read this the other day in Greil Marcus's Mystery Train--

"...When an artist gives an all-encompassing Yes to his audience (and Elvis's Yes implicitly includes everyone, not just those who say Yes to him), there is nothing more he can tell his audience, nothing he can really do for them, except maybe throw them a kiss.

Only the man who says No is free, Melville once wrote. We don't expect such a stance in popular culture, and those who do might best be advised to take their trade somewhere else. But the refusal that lurks on the margins of the affirmation of American popular culture... is what gives the Yes of our culture its vitality and its kick. Elvis's Yes is the grandest of all, his presentation of mastery the grandest fantasy of freedom, but it is finally a counterfeit of freedom: it takes place in a world that for all its openness (Everybody Welcome!) is aesthetically closed, where nothing is left to be mastered, where there is only more to accept. For all its irresistible excitement and enthusiasm, this freedom is complacent, and so the music that it produces is empty of real emotion-- there is nothing this freedom could be for, nothing to be won or lost." 

For all the little signs over the past year that Jack seems to be channeling Elvis, the thing that will always set them apart (or that I assume and hope will always set them apart) is that Jack will never give that all-encompassing Yes to his audience. He constantly walks the line between Yes and a hint, or threat, if you will, of No. The "are you with me or against me?" question at so many shows on the Lazaretto tour, voiced so vehemently recently in Austin and New York, the immediate switch from semi-scripted arena shows in New York and Nashville to spontaneity in Ohio, and to lecture/complaint and willfulness at shows after that in the southwest, are indications that the No will always lurk on the edge of Jack's art. He will never succumb to the complacence that Elvis did. He can pay all the homage in the world with his cover of Power of My Love, his pompadour, playing the stages Elvis played... Hell, tell me that hair, shiny jacket and open collar, and even some of the motions of his recent performance on The Tonight Show don't call to mind the King's early days--

Update 3/14/2017: Thanks for taking this down, NBC. Y'all reading this are just going to have to take my word for it.
 
He could even hit the stage in a rhinestone-emblazoned white jumpsuit, but he will never become what Elvis became. He will always make demands of his audience. One of the best reviews I've read of one of his shows included this line that's become my signature at the two Jack-related message boards--  
 
"And the message is clear: if we want Jack White as our hero, he will entertain, but not pander. We have to accept all his flaws, whims, caprices and manias as a critical, sometimes uncomfortable, part of the contract."

In other words, he will sometimes tell us No. And, as Greil Marcus put it, that is exactly what gives his Yes such vitality and kick.  After five years of addiction to that vitality and kick, I still crave it as much as I did from the very beginning.  And, heaven help me, I hope to still be verbosely expressing mind-numbing analysis of every mundane detail of Jack's art five years from now.  



And is it just my brain looking for patterns again when I notice that this post about my 5 year anniversary is the 55th in which I've written about Jack?  It ain't 3s, but hmmmm... 
 

DC to Memphis Road Trip: Day 2, Getting the blues

Began the day under the kind of low, dark, billowy clouds that you just want to grab and pull up over your shoulders as you roll over in bed and bury your face in the pillow.  Hit the road after breakfast and let the car eat up the rest of the miles between Virginia and Tennessee, while I put The White Stripes' Icky Thump into the cd player and sang along in an attempt to keep the weather from drowning the previous day's joyousness.

The possibility of adding a second Dead Weather show to this trip has been hovering in my mind much like today's dark clouds.  The band is in Birmingham, AL, the night before Memphis.  That show is sold out, but a compatriot from the Third Man Records chat room and I have been hunting craiglist and eBay for tickets.  On the one hand, this idea is excitingly spontaneous.  How could I miss two shows in a row and the chance to meet a fellow fan?  Not to mention that this is an opportunity to see Jack in one of the cities he sings about in the American-ised version of Van Morrison's "You Just Can't Win". Considering how much I'm looking forward to that song to begin with, that would be quite a thrill.  

On the other hand, this situation has added an element of uncertainty and complication to what was going to be a simple, free-wheeling trip. I'm a hundred miles from Knoxville, TN, and I don't yet know which direction to head when I get there-- west to Memphis or south to Birmingham?  The whole purpose of a road-trip is to be on the move, yet I'm trying to wait for answers and go forward at the same time.  It's making me a touch fretful, and the rain that's now pouring down onto the road is only stirring up that tension, rather than soothing it.

I'm bringing back ghosts

That are no longer there

I'm gettin' hard on myself

Sittin' in my easy chair

Well, there's three people in the mirror

And I'm wonderin' which one of them I should choose

Well, I can't keep from laughin'

Spittin' out these 300 mile per hour outpour blues

I'm breakin' my teeth off

Tryin' to bite my lip

There's all kinds of red-headed women

That I ain't supposed to kiss

And it's that color that never fails

To turn me blue

So I just swallow it and hold on to it

And use it to scare the hell out of you

I have a woman

Says come and watch me bleed

And I'm wonderin' just how I can do that

And still give her everything that she needs

Well, there's three people in my head that have the answer

And one of them's got to be you

But you're holding tight to it -- the answer

Singin' these 300 mile per hour outpour blues

Put on gloves, a tight scarf and wrap up warm

On this winter night

Every time you get defensive

You're just looking for a fight

It's safe to say somebody out there's got a problem

With almost anything you'll do

Well, next time they stab you don't fight back just play the victim

Instead of playin' the fool

And the roads are covered with a million

Little molecules

Of cigarette ashes and the school floors are covered

With pieces of pencil eraser too

Well sooner or later the ground's gonna be holdin' all

Of my ashes too

But I can't help but wonder if after I'm gone

will I still have these 300 mph

finger breakin', no answers, broken back, dirty cancer, bee stung and busted up, empty cup, torrential outpour blues

One thing's for sure, in that graveyard

I'm gonna have the shiniest pair of shoes