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Jack White rarely holds on to a smile for longer than a few seconds. They seem to fade from his face as quickly as they arrive, replaced by his usual steely look of Detroit intensity. During interviews in the first full-length documentary from his most famous musical experiment, The White Stripes, Jack and band mate Meg White reassume their alter egos of the gritty front man and silent drummer girl.
But when they take the stage flanked by their two bearded roadies in dark suits and bowler hats, they emerge from the phone booth as a two-piece industrial factory of grinding rock and emotion. And by the end of “The White Stripes: Under Great White Northern Lights,” it’s clear that neither piece could run without the other.
In typical Jack White fashion, “Northern Lights” follows the band on their tour of an area seldom covered by famous rock musicians: the Canadian territories. And the duo doesn’t call it quits after Quebec, instead choosing to make a stop in every single province. Coming from White, whose idea of creative inspiration includes playing old Plexi glass guitars and placing his organ just far enough from his microphone so that he “has to jump across” the stage to get to it, the idea seems just eccentric enough to work.
And it does work beautifully, as Jack and Meg manage to connect with crowd after crowd on a level that would be impossible in an American arena show. The film opens with a group of local bagpipers playing on stage, and instead of playing along with them as the viewer expects, Jack launches into the frenzied notes of “Black Math,” completely cutting them off. Based on the roar of the crowd, nobody was offended at the interruption.
On the contrary, the people at every concert and impromptu jam session played by the Stripes seem overjoyed at their presence. As they pull out of a show to yells of recognition in a tiny town so far north that the sun is still out at 11 p.m., Jack smiles momentarily and curtly remarks, “They’re good people in the Yukon.”
Some of the so-called “sideshows” played by Jack and Meg over the course of their travels include a rendition of “The Wheels on the Bus” at a YMCA day care and on an actual bus, Jack bowling a strike with his guitar strapped on and plugged in before playing at a bowling alley in Saskatoon and Jack digging his forehead into the wallpaper of a pool hall in Halifax while singing. As Jack puts it, while playing in these smaller towns, “something interesting will always happen.”
But the most powerful of these spontaneous shows is when Jack and Meg arrange a meeting with a group of Inuit elders. Instead of his usual 60’s Montgomery Airline guitar, Jack brings along his acoustic Gretsch Rancher, named “Rita” for a picture of actress Rita Hayworth on the back. As Jack plucks out a blues pattern and sings the lyrics, “These red-headed women won’t let Mr. Jack White rest,” the Inuit octogenarians can’t help but tap their fingers and feet along with Meg’s tambourine. It’s a beautifully ironic sharing of cultures, and one that Jack embraces all the way through being offered a meal of raw caribou and soy sauce.
Even without these cultural aspects of the documentary, “Northern Lights” is worth watching just to witness the stage presence of Jack White. On songs like “Seven Nation Army” and “I’m Slowly Turning Into You,” Meg’s kick drum is the heartbeat that pulses the crowd into a frenzy and Jack is the defibrillator that kicks the energy up several more notches. He bounds and stomps around every stage, alternating between two microphones, slashing out solos on his guitar, pounding on an organ and any combination of the three at once. The chemistry between Jack and Meg is always evident, as Jack’s second microphone is set up right in front of her drum kit, allowing him to stare at her from behind his strands of black hair and insert her name into screaming lyrics like, “You can do anything you want to Meg!”
In fact, the film’s only minor downfall was that at times it tried to be too artsy with shots of random objects in the Canadian landscape instead of focusing on the sonic mushroom cloud that is The White Stripes. While an amazing guitarist, Jack could never match the technical abilities of someone like Eric Clapton, and Meg’s drumming by itself sounds like something a ten-year-old could bang out on a metal pot. But the emotion and drive behind their playing oozes from every song, as if Jack needed to scream into a pillow and found a microphone instead.
To the untrained eye the White Stripes may seem gimmicky with their red, white and black color scheme and mysterious husband and wife/brother and sister relationship, but as they perform across tiny northern towns it’s evident that they’re in it purely to make music together in an unplanned and unbridled fashion. Who cares if Meg is really Jack’s sister or not. Chances are he’d just flash one of his steely smiles and laugh if you asked him.
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