Listen to The White Stripes’ Last Ever Show
Jack White sure is someone who likes to keep himself busy.
If he’s not bringing down the house with The Raconteurs like they just did at Toronto’s Meridian Hall, he’s recording a cool cover with them at a legendary studio for Amazon Music.
He also has his own label to keep him up at night with good problems like making content deals with nugs.net. Third Man Records recently partnered up with the online gateway to over 30,000 hours of live music, webcasting three Raconteurs concerts in a row from Nashville for free as well as posting select performances by White’s other “rockxperiments”.
The latest addition to the nugs.net database is a significant and historic one – The last-ever White Stripes show that took place on July 31st, 2007 in a midsized Mississippi town to end the North American leg of the Icky Thump tour. Jack and “Big Sister” Meg White were supposed to visit the UK that fall, but the latter drummer came down with a case of acute anxiety; besides playing “We’re Going to Be Friends” on the final Late Night with Conan O’Brien and an appearance at the Toronto International Film Festival for Under Great White Northern Lights, that was it for the most influential two-piece band of the 2000s.
The entire, high-quality-sounding 24-song set is available to purchase for as low as $9.95 in MP3 format. If nothing else, Ben Blackwell wrote an anything-but-impromptu essay about the events of that fateful night and his ensuing emotions that’s worth its weight in gold. If not more! The now-TMR co-owner told me in an email how he “had the idea to write this piece and then spent the next week tearing up my office and my basement and everywhere in between looking for where in the hell I put those two sheets of paper. One I found them (in my work desk, imagine that) the writing was almost an afterthought. You ever write something where it feels like everything is predestined, like the whole story is ‘there’ and you literally just have to clack it out on a keyboard? That is how I felt writing this.”
I know exactly what you mean Mr. Blackwell, although one detail he didn’t divulge is what’s next in store for Jack White. Let’s leave that for a surprise, as whatever it may be is sure to amaze us. He’s been doing just that for the past twenty years, as the You Don’t Know Jack…Until You Hear This Playlist I curated earlier in the summer proves.
