Women, Listen to Your Mothers

We saw the White Stripes last night at the Merriweather Post Pavilion. Cool venue, great show. Look, that's them in the pic at the right. Really. Ok, no need to enlarge that photo; you'll just have to trust me that we were there. Hey, and check it out, you can be there, too! NPR recorded the show and it's now available for your listening pleasure! Or if you subscribe to NPR's All Songs Considered podcast, I believe today's download will be this show.

As you can tell from the recording, for two little people, Jack and Meg sure can make a lot of great noise! Before the show L wondered whether the Jack and Meg ('cause, you know, I'm on a first name basis w/both of them, now that I've seen them play live) were going to play everything themselves. I figured they'd be using taped loops or whatever to augment their own instruments; I was wrong. It was just the two of them the whole time, and that was awesome!

They also did a great job of adding variety to the set—keeping the big hits recognizable, yet jamming them out to keep reminding you that this is live. (I hate it when bands just play their songs exactly as they were recorded; that always gives me the feeling I might as well just be listening to the CD at home.) The two of them are also relentless—they just kept playing and playing and playing at this frenetic pace (they played almost all the songs much faster than the recorded versions) w/out pause for water or even catching their breath. Pretty impressive, really.

Watching these two perform, I was thinking that maybe one of the reasons they're so popular (besides creating catchy rockin' tunes, of course) is that they sort of seem like humble, normal people. I don't know why this is; maybe it's just that they don't both look like supermodels or something, or maybe it's because I know Jack used to be a manual laborer (a furniture upholster) before he became a rock star. They're just cool people who like to rock out. At least that's the vibe they seem to project.

Anywho, good show. Worth a listen if you're even a sort of fan.

Posted September 28, 2005 10:56 AM | ai music