The Black Ghosts Pictures

The Black Ghosts: Most viewed pictures

Picture: Single Minded: The Black Crowes, NIN, Bauhaus, Kathleen Edwards

The White Stripes Discover Small is Beautiful in Nova Scotia

“Well, you’re in your little room, and you’re working on something good,” Jack White once sang. “But if it’s really good, you’re gonna need a bigger room.” “Little Room” was just a forty-five-second ditty on 2002’s White Blood Cells, but it also spoke to the paradox of fame: Once you’re a celebrity, you can never again be the person who created the art that made you one. Five years later, the White Stripes are genuine rock stars touring the far reaches of Canada in an effort to play all the little rooms they can find — elementary school classrooms, hockey rinks, cramped pool halls, Inuit Elder meetings, fishing boats and city buses. For their tenth anniversary show on Sunday in remote harbor town Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, they managed to find one room that was nearly perfect: The Savoy, an intimate theater built in the early 1920s to replicate old Victorian music halls – and which happens to be schemed almost entirely in red, black and white, and (if you believe the locals) haunted by as many ghosts as the band’s music. Both sides of the “White family” were in attendance for the occasion, and eager fans dressed in color-coordinated outfits were rewarded with small cups of champagne by the Stripes road crew pre-show. (For details on the Stripes’ two-hour tour through the best of their catalog and more, read on.) Over two thrilling hours, Jack and Meg laid out their catalog in trash-candy collage form — stitching old riffs into new songs, teasing familiar melodies, improvising verses and balancing nostalgic rarities (“Wasting My Time”) with the majority of its new material. All the songs flowed into one viscerally played stream of consciousness, and as they bled together, the common element between them — White’s encyclopedic command of American musical traditions — became clearer. Ultimately, the only ghosts of the night were the ones White summoned from his influences: Son House (“Death Letter,” “John the Revelator”), Blind Willie Johnson (“Lord, Send Me

Published: 2007-07-17
Provider: Rolling Stone
Keywords: Rock News