Jack White Is Emulating Bob Dylan

First of all, is that not insanely daunting? Bob Dylan was only 34 when he released Hard Rain, where you hear that angry, mythical version of "Idiot Wind" at the end. The album that song is on, Blood on the Tracks, came out in early 1975, when he was still 33. I mean, that is insane to ponder, if only for a second.

Jack White is now 34. He has not released a comparable invective, but he is getting frighteningly close to Dylan's temperament during the Rolling Thunder Revue of 1975. I refer to his new band, the idiotically dubbed "supergroup" The Dead Weather. How could they be super? They have Jack White, and that is really it. Well, not really. Alison Mosshart of the great duo (oddly like The White Stripes) The Kills is the lead singer. Sort of. White gets the biggest applause from the audience when he emerges from behind the drums and sings, either alongside Mosshart or by himself. Then there's the Queens of the Stone Age guitarist and the bass player from The Raconteurs, another side project of White's, but one that was only interesting for a second.

His duets, or at least backup vocals, with Mosshart bring me to my point. They are beyond sultry, and I can't be totally unsure that the two aren't making out when they sing into the same microphone. This reminds me disturbingly of Dylan's duets with Joan Baez on the 1975 odd, peripatetic megatour, The Rolling Thunder Revue, that he headlined. The two would sing together on several songs at the end of Dylan's first set, and one or two at some point during his second set. (Remember when rock musicians did multiple sets? Me neither.) Their mouths would get so close together that many people at the time could not tell whether or not they were kissing. (And that would have been scandalous--it was a simpler time.)

Jack White writes very good songs, but he gets most passionate when he does covers. Listen to "Jolene" in any bootleg, but certainly on the Under Blackpool Lights live DVD, and you can easily see the difference in intensity and passion from White versus some of his own songs. His own songs are terrific, but it would be a stretch to call any of them "great." This doesn't bother me, though, because his covers are tremendous. When he plays "Death Letter" by Son House, I get scared because I have to check and make sure that an atomic bomb didn't go off on the next block. Also, his take on Burt fucking Bacharach's "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself" explodes. He also does incredible versions of songs by Dylan, like "Love Sick" or "One More Cup of Coffee," or, seen also in the Blackpool DVD, "Outlaw Blues." The first of these songs came out when Dylan was 56. The Dead Weather's ferocious version of 1978's Street Legal's "New Pony," originally a plunky throwaway ditty, is another entry here, and Dylan was 37 when he wrote it.

White is only 34, so we can only wait to see where he goes. I hope that in fifteen years, more or less, he won't become a fundamentalist Christian. Maybe his whimsical but ultimately fruitless dalliance with the Roman Catholic seminary got that out of his system. Hope hope hope.

(Writers have a much different sense of time and age. The one example I know someone could cite is Norman Mailer, who was 25 when The Naked and the Dead was released. That book isn't that good, everybody, and he turned 35 before Armies of the Night, which isn't bad but isn't great, and was 57 when he published The Executioner's Song, his true masterpiece and an amazingly long (1,000+ pages, people) exercise in fiction/nonfiction about the life and execution of one Gary Gilmore, a stereotypically undependable ex-con and simultaneously Shakespearean tragic character. Plus, Cormac McCarthy was 52 when he published his "early" Blood Meridian, and 73 when he became a comically reticent and reluctant member of the "Oprah Book Club" with The Road. Don DeLillo, too, was 60 when the best American work of the last quarter-century, Underworld, came out in 1997, and was almost 50 when he first garnered national acclaim in 1985 with White Noise. So there you go. Safran-Foer sucks, so I won't even count him, or Dave Eggers or whoever.)

R

*(Disclaimer: Poetry might be the one exception, but that might be way too long ago to consider.)