“A Tip From You to Me” appears on White’s 2022 album Entering Heaven Alive. It’s folky, with acoustic guitar and piano, a bit of country jangle and a mix of bright melody/harmony and some darker-edged minor chords. Side B has the demo version of “A Tip From You to Me.” It’s just Jack and an acoustic guitar so inherently more mellow and definitely sadder. I think I like the demo better than the album version.

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The Tulsa shows are blistering high energy with some covers and medleys sprinkled into the Raconteur mix. Some of my favorites include the little infusion of the Beatles’ “Blackbird” (with an endearing false-start) into “Top Yourself” from the 2008 Consolers of the Lonely and the songs “Gloria” and “I Want Candy” into “Hey Gyp (Dig the Slowness)” from the 2019 Help Us Stranger LP. Other top picks are “Help Me Stranger,” “Sunday Driver,” “Only Child” (all from Help Us Stranger), the frenetic and borderline bonkers “Salute Your Solution” (from Consolers) and “Steady As She Goes” (from the 2006 album Broken Boy Soldiers).

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The second LP is from a live show at the Magic Stick in Detroit on December 31st, 2000. Since they were just back from a tour of Australia they play a couple of AC/DC covers: “Let There Be Rock” and “Dog Eat Dog,” Iggy Pop’s “I’m Bored,” plus live versions of some De Stijl songs like “You’re Pretty Good Looking (For a Girl),” “Little Bird” and “Let’s Build a Home.”

I haven’t watched the DVD yet but the Vault insert states that it is video of “TWO killer shows never seen or heard before their sharing here, from the peak of De Stijl touring…From June 15th [at Jay’s Upstairs, Missoula MT], the band performs strongly while advertising happy hour Pabst pints behind them. Only in Missoula. We think. Excitingly, this show is synched with crystalline soundboard recorded audio giving it an added ‘oomph’ not usually found on these videos…Follow that with the White Stripes first ever in-store performance at Fallout Records in Seattle on June 17th.” They performed a mix of originals and covers, including Bob Dylan’s “One More Cup of Coffee” and Robert Johnson’s “Stop Breaking Down.”

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Discs 1 and 2 are exactly what you’d expect from a White Stripes retrospective: a collection of 26 songs like “Fell In Love With a Girl,” “Dead Leaves on a Dirty Ground,” “We’re Going to Be Friends,” “Jolene” (one of many covers songs, this one originally by Dolly Parton is my absolute favorite), “Ball and Biscuit,” “My Doorbell” and their biggest hit “Seven Nation Army.” Disc 3 is of most interest to me, with some real gems like the hair metal meets a punk Spanish Conquistador-styled rendition of “Lafayette Blues,” the glam-rocker “Walking With a Ghost,” their live cover of Loretta Lynn’s “Rated X” and “Good to Me” (a breakneck blues stomper). But there’s a couple of stinkers on it like “Who’s a Big Baby?” (it’s waayyy out there, like Jack White found a couple of hidden settings on his grandma’s parlor organ and just went to town) and the most offensive:  “Trendy American Remix” of “You’re Pretty Good Looking” which I hope to god was a joke as it’s entirely in autotune and just awful.

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The second LP on red vinyl is a recording of their show at The Ritz in Raleigh, NC from September 26th, 1999. Included are live versions of several White Stripes songs like “Jimmy the Explorer,” “Sugar Never Tasted So Good” and “Screwdriver,” plus a few covers like the always amazing “Jolene.”

The accompanying look-book of photos, setlists, newspaper reviews and show flyers is a great addition to the package. Especially excellent is the large rendition of the promo art for their show at Milwaukee’s Cactus Club, a venue in our neighborhood. The original still hangs in the bar. The White Stripes opened for one of my favorite (now defunct) local bands, The Mistreaters, for their 7″ inch release party on November 13th 1999. We still kick ourselves every time that show comes up in conversation because we missed it – pretty sure we had a family obligation to attend that night.

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As with most Vault subscription packages, this one comes loaded with a bunch of extras: four large and slick photos of the band members, a “R” insignia embroidered patch (“for your rocker jean jacket”), four silver stickers of artwork from the album and a 45″ single of two new Raconteur songs, “Now That You’re Gone” and “Sunday Driver” (which I’ll review in another post).

When the album first dropped in 2008, it was the band’s second LP and, mostly, a complete surprise to the public (though it was accidentally leaked a little early on iTunes) as the band had only finished recording it a couple of weeks prior to its release. It hit #7 in the US and #8 in the UK, receiving a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Album and winning the Best Engineered Non-Classical album category. Consolers of the Lonely is big music on a big double album: power chords and riffs, horns, organ, piano, strings, a banjo, stylophone and clavinet for goodness’ sake. An album Allmusic describes as a “bubbling blend of bizarro blues, rustic progressive rock, fractured pop, and bludgeoning guitars.” Some of my favorite tracks have pretty much all of those things – “The Switch and the Spur,” “Hold Up,” “Attention” and the Zeppelin-esque “These Stones Will Shout.”  I also really like the laid-back vibe of the slide-guitar heavy “Top Yourself.” I’m not as crazy about the country-twinged and twanged, old-time saloony “Pull This Blanket Off” and the 80′s hair-metal-power-ballad-meets-Queen-rock-opera “Rich Kid Blues” is both awesome and weird and I can’t decide if I love it or not. The Raconteurs released four singles from Consolers of the Lonely. The first they released the same day as the album, “Salute Your Solution” which went to #4 on Billboard’s Rock Songs chart. The second single was “Many Shades of Black” which went to #37 on the Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart and had a version performed by Adele. The last two singles, “Old Enough” and “Consoler of the Lonely” did not chart (at least I don’t think so).

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Live at Third Man Records has a mix of tracks from White’s Boarding House Reach, Blunderbuss and Lazaretto, the 2017 single “Battle Cry”  and a few White Stripes songs. Thankfully the live performance vehicle prevented White from a shit-ton of noodling and limited his weird experimentation (though there is still a bit of that courtesy of two keyboards) so the songs from Boarding House Reach are more tolerable than they are on the original. Those songs include “Over and Over and Over,” “Corporation,” “Why Walk a Dog?,” “Connected By Love,” “Ice Station Zebra,” “Hypermisophoniac” and “Respect Commander.” From Blunderbuss: “Blunderbuss,” “Love Interruption,” “Sixteen Saltines” and “Missing Pieces” which ends with a long diatribe against the lies told by the  president of the US. From Lazaretto is just the title track “Lazaretto” (too bad, I really love several songs from that LP). Of course my favorite tracks on Live at Third Man are the White Stripes songs: “Wasting My Time,” “Hello Operator” (which starts out with an awesome audience sing-along), “Fell In Love With a Girl,” “Catch Hell Blues,” “Little Bird,” “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground,” “I’m Slowly Turning Into You” and “Seven Nation Army.”

The package is deluxe, like most Vault packages tend to be (especially the ones featuring White) with super-high quality vinyl and record packaging. The gatefold is die-cut with mix-and-match artwork from the record sleeves to “provide fans with hours upon hours of flip-flopping fun” (LOL, really it took like 5 minutes to do this). The package also has three 8×10 photos from White’s live performances featuring Jack along with band members Dominic Davis (bass), Quincy McCrary (keyboards), Carla Azar (drums) and Neal Evans (keyboards) and a giant Jack White logo flag. I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do with that.

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Now for the actual music. It’s…different. Eclectic. An album Rolling Stone called (generously – it was for their Jack White cover story) “bracingly bonkers.” Funk, gospel, classic rock, electronica, disco, country, some blues (of course), spoken word rants of questionable poetry all kinda tossed into a high-powered blender, weird for weird’s sake. I do like a couple of things: the funk of “Corporation” is totally ass-shaking and the groove and fuzzed guitar on “Over and Over and Over” is pretty great but the (maybe) autotuned gospel backup singers don’t do it for me, at all. But honestly the rest of the record is pretty insufferable.

Pitchfork has a lot to say: “What does he think he’s doing? What does he want us to think he’s doing? All is mystery, except your overwhelming desire to turn away. Boarding House Reach is a long, bewildering slog studded with these moments, which seem to be directly antagonizing you. Deep in the eccentric-hermit stage of his career, with his own successful label and a devoted clutch of fans who will come to see his concerts until their children are in college, White is now free to record and release whatever he pleases. And judging by Boarding House Reach, he wants to noodle to himself in the studio, record spoken-word reminiscences about the first time he played piano in a song titled “Get in the Mind Shaft,” and make the kind of Cheeto-dusted funk instrumentals that the Beastie Boys would have left off of The In Sound From Way Out! What he doesn’t want to do: write any songs at all. The worst part is that he doesn’t even sound like he’s having fun. The few rock songs here, like the lead-off “Connected by Love,” are blowsy, water-logged things, devoid of wit or snap or fire. Usually a good guitar solo will rouse White’s blood, but he doesn’t have many of those up his sleeve here either. Instead, he swamps himself with gospel choirs and organ and even more bongos, and boy, does he ever sound miserable. “Why Walk a Dog” would be a hilarious parody of a mawkish blues ballad—“Are you their master?/Did you buy them at the store?/Did they know they were a cure for you to stop being bored?”—if the sob in White’s voice didn’t convince me he believes every word. What I wouldn’t give for a flash of bright red, something with the verve or conviction of even his slightest Stripes material. On the last two tracks, White finally tips his hand. “What’s Done Is Done” is a goofy country tune that he sings with the right amount of hambone. And “Humoresque” sets to words a scrappy old tune by the 19th-century Czech composer Dvořák, one that generations of little children studying Suzuki violin have scratched out in front of the forced grins of their parents. It’s the only hint of White’s lively mind at work. Sadly, the years have steadily whittled the playfulness from White’s material. His work is now too lumbering and unmoored for anyone to take much pleasure in it.”

Allmusic is slightly kinder, giving White props for being willing to experiment and tear off the garage-blues label saying, “Boarding House Reach is where he expands his horizons and that discipline begins to fracture, and quite intentionally so. “Connected by Love” – the album’s opening track and first single – is a rousing bit of arena rock and the only cut that could truly have appeared on either Blunderbuss or Lazaretto. Once that song draws to a close, White dives into a moody electronic meditation called “Why Walk a Dog?” – an oddity that’s quickly eclipsed by the hard funk of “Corporation,” a song that marks the third different sound in as many tracks. Things get progressively stranger from this point forward. Recitations commingle with raps, gurgling synthesizers tangle with blues piano, operatic overdubs are paired with fuzz guitars, sci-fi send-ups meet their match with short stories. Every moment suggests that White is kicking against the pricks, desperate to be seen as a modern rock artist, not a fusty throwback. While his attempt at redefinition is a success – there’s no question that this is the work of an artist willing to take risks – it’s an open question whether Boarding House Reach succeeds as an album.”

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