Unless you’re a Taylor Swift or Bruce Springsteen fan, $125 is a lot to pay for a show. In 2023, I paid $75 to see The Smile, led by the two most visible members of Radiohead, who I’d never seen live. (At this point, it’s unclear if Radiohead will tour or record in the future.) It was worth it to see Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood operating at the height of their powers, still so effortlessly in sync and creatively untethered after nearly four decades of playing together.
In 2022, I grudgingly shelled out $145 for a mid-tier PPG Paints Arena seat to see Rage Against the Machine, a mulligan for their canceled 2000 tour with the Beastie Boys, which had broken my 15-year-old heart. That seemed like a pretty high price for a band with an ostensibly leftist, revolutionary message, though they did donate $167,000 from ticket sales to the Abolitionist Law Center and the Black Farmers and Urban Gardeners of Pittsburgh. Again, worth it, that time for the nostalgia factor and the knowledge that Rage would likely never tour again.
But is $125 a fair price for Jack White, formerly of the legendary duo the White Stripes, whose set would primarily draw from his solo catalog, half of which is, generously, not very good? The tickets for which were announced just two days prior, requiring pre-registration, a special code, and a long, frustrating wait in TicketWeb’s bug-ridden queue?
Actually, yeah. White is a rare sort of performer. He’s a traditionalist in his reverence for analog recording methods, vinyl, and the blues. But he’s also a weirdo with a unique guitar sound and an often perplexing penchant for out-there experimentation. Until Thursday night at Mr. Smalls Theatre, my only experience seeing him live had been with quasi-supergroup the Raconteurs at the American Eagle-sponsored New American Music Union at the SouthSide Works in 2008. I find the Raconteurs perfectly bland. But White was electric, commanding the stage to the point that the three other dudes in the band may as well not have been there. I never got to see the White Stripes, who I’d loved since Elephant was released in 2003. Of course I was going to try to get a ticket.
As I mentioned, the TicketWeb experience was almost comically kafka-esque. (Check out the Reddit posts and the comments on the Mr. Smalls Instagram accounts about the show.) Somehow, though, it sold out nearly instantly, I got through and was able to buy a ticket. No one else I know successfully purchased one. A friend won one of four tickets given away by Mr. Smalls. But outside my social circle, some people clearly were able to secure tickets; the place was more packed than I’ve ever seen it.
And White gave them what they paid for. Fronting a four-piece band of drums, bass, and keyboard, with White himself the sole guitarist (of course), he ripped through a musically heavy set, favoring No Name but selecting crowd-pleasers from throughout his career. (White’s other-other side project, The Dead Weather, weren’t represented on the setlist.) The highlight of the night came early on, with a scorching cover of Robert Johnson’s “Stones in My Passway,” which the White Stripes had been known to cover. Seamlessly slotting this into a six-song run otherwise dedicated to No Name highlights demonstrated just how well White synthesizes past and future, paying tribute to blues music’s titans while twisting the nearly two-century-old genre into new forms.
It was a great show, but not a transcendent one. “Love Interruption,” an acoustic-guitar-and-Wurlitzer ballad from 2012’s Blunderbuss, received a full-band makeover that stripped the song of is intimate power. White indulged in just a bit too much extended bluesy noodling throughout the night. And there is no excuse for including yawn-worthy deep cuts from the Raconteur’s 2006 Broken Boy Soldiers and White’s 2018 career low point Boarding House Reach when his discography is so stacked. These were exceptions, though. Over the course of generous, 19-song setlist — including two encores — the energy and volume rarely dropped out of the red. White closed out the evening with a particularly rousing take on the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army,” just hours after he’d excoriated a Trump aide for using the song in a campaign ad. My ears are still ringing.
Was $125 for a ticket worth it? It was. But the price meant this show was inaccessible to many people, and the whiplash way tickets were announced and sold made it even less so. (Good luck getting a ticket if you worked anything other than an office job that allowed you to be online and monitoring a 20-minute queue at exactly 1:00 PM the day before.) There was a gesture at affordability with a “very limited number of students tickets” (per Mr. Smalls’ Instragram account) being sold for $25 in person only at the Mr. Smalls box office the day of the show. Still, acknowledging my own position as someone who had the time and money to secure a ticket, I wish more people would’ve been able to.
Jack White made us pay the price at Mr. Smalls
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