Music

Five days and a few thousand miles between gigs — and the formal release of his new album, No Name — gave Jack White a good excuse to show one of his homes where his heart is.

Just two days after playing the Pentaport Rock Festival in South Korea, White and his quartet were on stage Monday night (Aug. 5) at Saint Andrew’s Hall in his native Detroit, tearing through a characteristically frenzied, nearly 100-minute show that served as the album release celebration for No Name.

White released the 13-song set secretly on July 19, when white-cover copies were slipped, for free, into customer bags at Third Man Records stores in Detroit, Nashville and London. The album was formally released last Friday, the same day tickets for the Detroit show were put on sale (and, with less than 1,000 available, sold out instantly).

Among the notables on hand were White’s wife Olivia Jean, John Fogerty (who played in the Detroit suburbs the previous night) with his wife and manager Julie and members of his band and touring party, and Major League baseball all-star Kirk Gibson, now a broadcaster for the Detroit Tigers. (White took in a game on Sunday, shortly after arriving from overseas.)

The atmosphere was festive, both on stage and off, and certainly more intimate than Detroit’s nationally televised Michigan Central opening concert White performed at in June. “That’s my town! That’s my town, right there!” White declared after an enthusiastic early-show call-and-response during “That’s How I’m Feeling,” one of seven No Name tracks included in the 21-song setlist.

The largely more straightforward, hard-rocking material — including “Old Scratch Blues,” “Morning at Midnight,” “Where’s the Rumpus?,” a joyous “Underground” and “Archbishop Harold Holmes,” with a vocal cadence not unlike fellow Detroiter Eminem — fit well alongside the garage-derived material from his White Stripes days, too, though he did touch on solo favorites such as “Love Interruption,” “Why Walk a Dog?” and “Lazaretto,” bisecting the latter’s funky gait with a furious freak-out jam.

And White paid tribute to some other Michigan heroes, the Stooges, with a room-shaking rendition of “I Wanna Be Your Dog” sandwiched between portions of the White Stripes’ “Cannon.”

While White had played at the venue, a Detroit music landmark, prior to his White Stripes days, it marked the first time he’d been on stage there in more than two decades. “I’ve seen so many shows in this building, but I’ve never really played here,” he told the crowd. And before the White Stripes’ “Hotel Yorba,” meanwhile, he quipped that “I have to be careful; the last time I played this song in Detroit I got married” — referring to his on-stage proposal and marriage to Olivia Jean on April 8, 2022, on the opening night of his Supply Chain Issues Tour at the nearby Masonic Temple Auditorium.

He also shouted out his 93-year-old mother, who he said was watching from the Saint Andrew’s balcony.
Mostly, though, White and the band — longtime bassist Dominic Davis, keyboardist Bobby Emmett and Raconteurs/Greenhornes drummer Patrick Keller — turned in ferocious treatments of everything they touched, filling the performances with improvisations, vamps and musical asides without ever losing control of the songs. Keeler’s style in particular brought a garage-y kind of propulsion to the mix but with chops that elevated the likes of “Ball and Biscuit,” “The Hardest Button to Button,” “Little Bird” and “Hello Operator.”

White reached back even deeper to one of his early bands, The Go, with “Keep on Trash” before offering “Broken Boy Soldier” and “Steady, as She Goes” from the Raconteurs. “Seven Nation Army,” of course, brought the show to a momentous end, with White finishing atop his amplifiers, swinging his resonator guitar off his shoulder to salute the crowd.

“Thank you for all the love you gave tonight,” he told fans who clearly would have stayed for another 100 minutes if he offered it. “I hope we gave as much love back to you. Music is sacred!”

White next heads to Gothenburg, Sweden to play at the Way Out West festival on Thursday, Aug. 8, the start of a three-day run that includes shows in Norway and Denmark. His only other concert on the books right now is during October at Desert Daze in Lake Perris, Calif., with the exact date still to be announced.