Jack White Does It Better In ‘It Might Get Loud’ Rock Doc
Posted by lorraine on 29th April , 2010
The great rock documentary It Might Get Loud showed up as streamable content on my Netflix account–and that’s the sort of news that really gets an impecunious bastard like me salivating.
The film manages to bring in one room three generations of electric guitar masters–Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, U2’s The Edge and The White Stripes’ Jack White–to talk about and riff on their craft. But it builds up to it. You see the three in their cars on their way to the sound stage, the helpers setting up their gears, White, ever the sparkplug, suggesting “there might be a fistfight.”
It’s an engaging film too and that’s in no small part thanks to Director and Producer Davis Guggenheim who managed to make a PowerPoint presentation from a politician into the fascinating An Inconvenient Truth. The editing–which helped liven up the doggedly verbose Albert Gore, Jr.–is superb, whirling between the three stars with equal reverence and attention. The filmmakers make good use of archival footage in introducing the heroes while capturing gems themselves. Witness, in the opening sequence, White fashioning a make-shift slide guitar out of a bit of wood, a wire, some nails, a Coca-Cola bottle and a pickup. He plays a few notes, shrugs and says, “Who says you need to buy a guitar?“
This attitude is the polar opposite of The (Technological) Edge’s method. You see him in a little recording studio, tweaking knobs all the time. He strums and stops. Shakes his head, flips another switch or two, just straining to “make the sounds coming out of the speakers match the sound in (his) head.” For the tete-a-tete with White and Page, his guitar tech sets up a pedal board comical in its elaborateness, with 30 or so separate pedals on its palette. Certainly, it makes sense when you think of the painstakingly crafted image of his band U2.
For my money, I’ll side with White on this one, though. “Technology is a big destroyer of emotion and truth,” he says. I remember in 2001, discovering the White Stripes’ White Blood Cells album really before it blew up on the radio the way it did. After spending a lot of time listening to arrangement-heavy groups like Broken Social Scene or Belle & Sebastian and music made by control freaks like Everclear’s Art Alexakis and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, I was jolted awake by the rawness of the White Stripes. The songs, led off by “Dead Leaves and The Dirty Ground” and “Fell In Love With A Girl,” were pure blues-rock nuggets full of feedback and guitar squeals. It was invigorating and a bone rattler that matched my dissatisfaction with the shit-bag known as Senior Year High School.
“By the time I get into my teenage years in the late 80’s,” White says in It Might Get Loud, “I don’t remember that many rock and roll bands that were that popular. Things were changing so much in music and technology was taking over so much. Technology was heavily distracting everybody. I mean people would spend weeks trying to get the perfect snare drum and gated reverbs.“
This is from a guy who is forced to loop riffs and use octave pedals to be able to play live without a bass player or second guitarist, but still. The concert footage is where the three rockers in the documentary diverge. In one grizzled piece of tape, Led Zeppelin’s players feed off each other on an intimate stage. U2’s Bono and The Edge, meanwhile, showboat through the stadium crowds on catwalks, freed of wires by new technologies.
The White Stripes have long been a band apart when it comes to the live fare:
“I always worry about getting satisfied. When you get satisfied, you die,” White said. “It takes me three steps to get to the organ on the stage in the middle of a song. Put it four steps away and then I’ll have to run faster and I’ll push myself harder to get to it. Meg and I don’t even talk about what we’re going to play. We just get up there and do it. Think of something fast ’cause these guys want a show. People know when something’s fake and when something’s rehashed and rehearsed. They know when you’re telling the same joke you told at the show the night before. They can smell it.”
