LIVE DEAD Performing for an invite-only crowd at Third Man, March 11, 2009

ing, of the three weeks she spent in Nashville recording the album at White’s never-before-used studio. “But we do kind of hit each other and make fun of each other and pick on each other quite a bit. That’s our relationship, really. I don’t think I’d ever forgive myself if suddenly he just stopped talking to me. But I feel like I’ve pushed it to that point every now and then.”

 

ILL ANY SANE person ever invoke the phrase “voice of a generation” again without feeling the need to at least lightly mock the very idea? The body count alone over the past 40 years has left only the most narcissistic lunatics among us hazarding such ambitions.

So despite being the most talented, charismatic, and opinionated rocker to emerge in the past decade, John “Jack White” Gillis has assiduously avoided that trap. No one has ever been as insistent that virtually all of his decisions have resulted from pure happenstance or kidlike impulse—from taking his first wife’s last name as his own, to starting a band with his namesake even though she couldn’t play or sing, to claiming that she was his sister (even after they divorced), to secretly marrying a second time (to British model Karen Elson) in the Brazilian rainforest with a shamanic priest, to initiating various unexpected side projects (producing Loretta Lynn, recording a James Bond theme with Alicia Keys, penning a

W

jingle for Coca-Cola). The litany of feints and fake-outs is fairly stunning, tweaking celebrity media pimps and crabby critical gatekeepers alike.

Interviewing the Dead Weather’s four members at Third Man in early March (soon after White made the surprise announcement of the band’s, and album’s, existence), I simply asked how the group formed, and White replied, “How did we foorrrrm?” as if I were inquiring how humans took shape from celestial matter. “I think it kinda formed us,” he added with a cursory smirk. “It’s apparently tempting,” he continued, “to think things are mapped out, and that’s the funniest thing for me, because I’ve never really been able to totally succeed at planning something out carefully.” Which, of course, implies that he’s tried.

This commitment to coy diversion (abetted by Meg’s heady silences) is why he remains at arm’s length, an elusive, almost timeless figure who you admire, flirt with, periodically obsess over, spurn, rant about, even fetishize, but never fully embrace as your own. Clearly inspired by Bob Dylan’s provocative, shape-shifting conundrums (and the folk-blues legends from which they sprang), White has never shared the elder trickster’s penchant for social commentary or prophetic damnation. He’s too self-contained, too particular and quixotic. It’s fitting that the Dylan song he chose for the Dead Weather to cover—“New Pony,” from the sketchy 1978 post-divorce, semi-Christian album Street-Legal—is a lurching blues riddle that depicts a mystical woman as a teasing, devil-

ish horse. One assumes the “How much longer?” refrain is about Dylan’s shattered marriage. Or a reference to a more vast, Luciferian torment. Or not. And when the lyrics are sung by Mosshart like a sexual dare from a woman’s perspective, the meaning gets even twistier.

But there’s also a startling, restless drive to this, and the rest of the Dead Weather’s music, that feels revelatory (even if it’s unclear what’s being revealed). If you listen to White talk about the album, or the making of it, his manner becomes visibly more viscerally direct. It would be presumptuous to say that he longs to put the willfully wide-eyed primitivism of the White Stripes behind him, but he does assert his independence bluntly: “I could take the easy route right now and just go out and make albums and play shows with Meg, because it’s working, it’s selling, people are interested. It’s a bad business move to stop the train and start something else, but that’s not where my head’s at, at all, and I’m not going to curtail creativity for a business decision.”

It’s also true the Stripes have only played live once (on Conan O’Brien’s final Late Night episode) in the almost two years since Meg’s “acute anxiety” forced them to cut short a 2007 tour. White insists there will be another Stripes album in the next year, and a film is planned, as well. But for now, he’s a happily married Tennessee property owner with two kids (Scarlett, age three, and Henry, turning two in August) who clearly aches to reinvigorate his artistic life after

MICKIE WINTERS

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