The White Stripes @ MSG - Jul 24, 2007

Thank you for buying our records, thank you for coming to our show

Jack White turned out to be quite a simple and adorable man. I thought Mr. White, besides being a great guitarist and musician, was a pretentious guy thinking he was top of the pops in current music these days, but last week after seeing him to headline the Madison Square Garden only the great guitarist and musician part remained in my head.

Their show pretty much started right after Grinderman finished, which by the way was excellent and deserves to be talked about but I will wait until I see them headlining. Everything you could see was suddenly colored in red, white and black with their crew walking all over the stage dressed up in red and black with cute hats. On stage there was Meg's drum set, of course, a huge red piano, and mics all over the place suggesting Jack was going to move around quite a lot. All this had a pretty background... a simple red wall on which shadows of the couple of fake siblings were going to be minutes later.


Jack and Meg went into business almost nonstop playing lots of new songs as non very known songs sort of like introducing the whole audience into their music. I started wondering when they were going to play their big songs. Too many consecutive non-hit songs are kind of dangerous in a show... they let the attention go down and you have to be playing REALLY good songs to keep it up. Let's say the new White Stripes' album is good but not that much. During all this time I noted the obvious: Jack is an awesome guitarist. He was showing it off... sometimes too long tho.

This was the first Stripes show at the Garden. Jack even made the comment that they hadn't played that bar before... funny. He actually looked kind of nervous, but played like he was not. On the contrary, Meg looked very comfortable and I might not be an expert on the drums (indeed I know nothing technical!) but she didn't look too special at all. When she moves her hair and replies to Jack's vocals are the moments when I am happy with her, and thankfully there plenty of those at the show.


After a long set The Stripes finished with Fell in Love With a Girl/Ball & Biscuit and after a long break they played the encore everybody, including me, was waiting and paid for. Nine songs left the garden exhausted of singing. Everybody got to hear I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself, We're Going to Be Friends, Catch Hell Blues, My Doorbell and a slowed version of Seven Nation Army. That's the best encore I have heard in a show, and I gotta thank them for not letting me loose their faith in them.

Nice to meet you Mr. and Ms. White. Hope to see you soon again... [photos of the show]

♫♫♫♫

Were you at the show? How did you like it?

The White Stripes Links: Stream Icky Thump, Official Website, MySpace, YouTube, Wikipedia