Good Mischief, Indeed

God bless the Delta Blues and all who dig into its Muddy (Waters) red clay for rock inspiration. (Warning: music geek conversation follows.)

My birthday surprise was a nice dinner and tickets to last night’s relatively intimate Dallas-venue performance by The Raconteurs.

It was an awesome show. Jack White might be this super-group’s entrée to fast-track stardom, but he hardly fronts the band– at least in the traditional sense of the word. He’s there, he plays (and plays very, very well) and sings, but he does so with a classic (and classically undervalued) Jimmy Page sensibility.

Instead, he shares lead guitar/vocal duties with Brendan Benson, freeing him up to concentrate on improvisational guitar genius. I swear, at times it seemed as if White was looking down at his guitar as if to ask what it wanted to play, and it never steered him wrong. He, along with the rest of this “power cinco,” delivered a virtuoso performance.

I have to admit to a large lack of knowledge about the group before we arrived at the show; I knew the Jack White factor and little else. Because of my recent workload, I haven’t even had the chance to watch the MTV Video Music Awards show, on which they were, essentially, the house band.

We arrived just before they went on, having missed the opening act and, once they began, I looked over at the she monkey and said “they sound like the ‘birds,” and they do– in an “influenced-by-but-take-into-new-space” sense of the phrase. (If you don’t know the Yardbirds, shame on you but it’s unimportant for enjoying The Raconteurs’ sound.)

Their sound was slightly post-punk tinged, blues-rock from start to finish. Unfortunately, with few exceptions the Dallas Über-hipster crowd couldn’t fully fall in to it heart and soul. Our seats– excellent ones, especially for the pregnant she monkey who needed a cushy spot to sit– were four rows up from the floor. Having grown up with punk (and wearing a Dead Kennedys’ “Too Drunk to Fuck” T-shirt), I desperately wanted to see someone, anyone, mosh. Finally, during the encore, a small area of the pit began to writhe but, before I could look over at the she monkey and tell her I wanted to drop in and join the fray, it was broken up and dispersed.

It’s probably for the best; at my age I would have likely broken something.

The almost total lack of crowd participation didn’t matter. These guys have more than enough talent to put on a great show without needing to feed off the energy of others. This is a live band, not a group of Ashlee Simpson/American Idol overdub, magic box studio fakers. I’ve spent the morning listening to their CD (which came with the tickets) and, as great as it is, I have to say the live show, which was full of wall-of-sound fuzz distortion improvisation, was even better.

I’ve placed one of the tracks off their debut album into the Music for Monkeys playlist over in the right sidebar (track #7). For sure, buy the CD; but if they come within a hundred miles of where you live, go see them live.

I hate to admit it but thanks to Michel, Tamara and my wife, it was a terrific way to spend a birthday.

Email Article Saturday, September 16th, 2006 at 02:10pm Mack Simpson

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