Kevin Bronson on March 16th, 2010

0

By Richard Cromelin

When I interviewed Jack White in Nashville in 2007, the White Stripes had just shut it down, canceling their big “Icky Thump” tour because drummer Meg White was struggling with severe anxiety.

Jack had filled the void by overbooking himself with more projects than he could handle. It wasn’t bad planning, or overconfidence, he explained, but a way to spark creativity by making things difficult. When you have to push yourself, when things get out of control, that’s when amazing accidents can happen.

That idea is at the heart of the tour documentary “The White Stripes Under the Great White Northern Lights,” which is just out on DVD. Jack expounds on the strategy in one of the self-analytical interview segments, explaining how the instruments on stage are placed a little too far apart for convenient switching, and his spare guitar picks are kept out of easy reach. The old guitars he uses don’t stay in tune, and the Stripes never use a set list.

In fact, the 2007 tour itself is set up to be challenge. It’s the duo’s first tour of Canada, and their self-imposed mission is to play in every one of the country’s provinces and territories. Oh, and not just the major markets, but also the Whitehorses and Yellowknifes. And not just formal White Stripes concerts, but also short-notice outdoor performances in the afternoon, and quick-hit gigs in bowling alleys and cafes, aboard a city bus and at a flour mill.

“Something interesting is gonna happen, hopefully,” Jack says. Interesting enough, it turns out,  and though the 93-minute film’s events never spin into the revelatory chaos the singer-guitarist savors, it has its absorbing and touching moments.

Director Emmett Malloy does a good juggling act with its multiple identities – rocking concert film, life-on-the-road documentary, exegesis on the history and aesthetics of the Stripes, quirky travelogue to some of Canada’s offbeat backwaters.

The feel-the-sweat concert footage, where, departing from standard rock-film practice, songs are often played from start to finish, is bracing, and assumes added value in light of the Stripes’ subsequent absence from the road. There’s also a live album being released, and while the duo officially remains active and on hiatus, there’s no telling when we’ll get a new jolt of the primal intensity that is the Stripes’ specialty.

The interviews with Jack (and a bit from Meg, after much prodding) get a little long-winded, and don’t add much to the established body of knowledge. More revealing are the segments of the pair heading off the beaten path – leading a group of children in kids’ songs, spending an afternoon with elderly members of the Inuit tribe.

These open into a more subtle layer of emotion. Knowing in hindsight that Meg’s issues would seriously escalate just a few months after this tour, her painful shyness becomes less a quirky eccentricity than something profoundly sad – a feeling underscored by scenes of her and Jack strolling in the tundra, two black-clad figures in an alien-looking landscape of grays and whites.

Maybe the lesson is that creativity and amazing accidents aren’t the only things that can happen when things get out of control.

Richard Cromelin is a former pop music writer at the Los Angeles Times.

Photo: a screen grab from the film’s trailer