Jack White: How He Built an Empire From the Blues by Nick Hasted

Author:Nick Hasted [Hasted, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw
Publisher: Omnibus Press
Published: 2016-03-14T04:30:00+00:00

9

The Big Room

ON August 18, 2001, barely a week after a band it had nurtured became a transatlantic sensation, the Gold Dollar opened for the last time. The Hentchmen played, with Climax Divine and the Love Junkies. Neil Yee quit a scene narrower and larger than the one he’d imagined when his cramped, inspirational club opened, leaving town to travel the world.

“He told me he felt he’d done this, and it was time to do something else,” says Matt Smith. “But my impression was that the local criminals had figured out there were these kids from the suburbs with money hanging out. There were crazed homeless guys running out of abandoned buildings, grabbing at girls. So some pretty scary people in that neighbourhood realised that there were people there that they could victimise. And I think Neil probably closed that place just in time to avoid there being a more severe incident. It was going in that direction, it was getting to that point where you didn’t let your girlfriend walk to the car by herself after a gig there. He opened up this club that had been closed for years for a reason. Considering it was in a part of the Cass Corridor where people were just down there for drugs or prostitution, the Gold Dollar actually went pretty smoothly. But I think it was about to get pretty weird.”

“I think I went to the last night,” says the Go’s John Krautner. “But if I can’t remember, it must not have been that big of a deal. People get their kicks, lose their interest and then move onto the next thing.”

The Garden Bowl, with the Magic Stick upstairs, fitted the new scene’s drawing-power better. Jeff Payne, a scene veteran sipping whiskey at the Garden Bowl when we talk in 2015, remembers Jack sitting alone there around this time wearing a glittering jacket. Payne got his young son to sit with him, so he’d remember being in the orbit of someone soon to be a star. The Lager House, a great neighbourhood bar with a small back-room for gigs on a stretch of Michigan Avenue then almost as disreputable as the Gold Dollar’s spot, became the intimate hangout of choice. Its location in historic, dilapidated Corktown was even closer to Jack and Meg’s homes, and the White Stripes and Von Bondies were already among its regulars.

But the White Stripes were rarely there in 2001, when they played 117 shows. On their return from the UK they hit New York and the East Coast again, then spent September deep in the West and the South, building an American audience. The Greenhornes, who like their fellow Ohioans, the Soledad Brothers, were becoming important friends to Jack, were the support act. On September 11 they were in the Ozark mountains, set to play the Arkansas college town of Fayetteville, when, on a clear blue morning in New York, Al-Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Center, murdering thousands.

Some with tickets for the gig at JR’s Lightbulb Club stayed at home, stunned.

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