Thanks to a Facebook tweet from the smokin’ hot DFW DJ Vydra I found out just in time that Jack White’s new superband, the Dead Weather, was about to have their first public performance at the Bowery Ballroom. Â After wrestling for twenty minutes with the Ticketmaster interface, I scored my tickets and danced happily into the rest of my day.
Now, I’m not usually much of one for live shows – I can rarely understand the lyrics, unless I’m intimately familiar with the music, in which case the deviations from the album version tend to annoy me rather than thrill me; it’s loud; it’s crowded; I dislike waiting in lines; yadda yadda yadda – but this was pretty fucking awesome. Musically, I appreciated the talent present, as evinced (to me) by the way they kept swapping instruments. (Clearly, my musical sophistication is in short supply.) And the lead singer, Alison Mossheart, was liquid sex onstage (albeit a direct invocation of Janis Joplin)… I’ve never wanted to do heroin as much as I did watching her strut around the stage, if only to capture a bit of that rockstar glamour for myself.
That said, the opening act (the Crystal Stilts) didn’t even qualify as disappointing. The whole crew needed a haircut, the lead singer was doing his best impression of the Magnetic Fields vocalist (who’s ‘thing’ I already detested), and their only redeeming quality was a drummer whose talent was distinctly out of place on that stage.
I will even go so far as to note that, as soon as their album is available on iTunes (as opposed to the single currently available), I will actually fork over the cash for it.
