'Fell In Love With A Girl'

This past weekend I bought the new White Stripes live disk, Under Great White Northern Lights. I went the route of going to my local big box retailer to get a physical copy so I could get the bonus DVD.

The set documents the White Stripes’ 2007 trek across the Great White North, and while the CD is the expected collection of live hits, the DVD contains a few surprises. During the three-week tour, Jack and Meg made stops at several out-of-the-way towns and played some unorthodox venues, such as local cafes and bowling alleys. Hardly settings where you’d expect to find one of the biggest bands in the world. Snippets of these stops, along with the infamous one-note show in St. John’s, Newfoundland, are all on the DVD.

One other thing that came from watching the DVD is a new appreciation, or perhaps sympathy, for Meg. Fans generally know very little about her. She mostly keeps quiet, allowing Jack to speak on behalf of the band. Because of her taciturnity, it’s hard to know where Meg stands. In every scene with Jack, she’s walking behind him, rather than alongside him. The primary focus is always on him, in all meetings with reporters, fans, and public officials. They talk about that at one point on the DVD, and Meg says the decision to let Jack do all the talking is hers; she doesn’t want to talk. She’s very soft-spoken and is actually sub-titled throughout the 90-minute film.

But I think her feelings come out at the end of the movie. In the final scene, Meg is sitting beside Jack at a piano as he plays a solo version of the ambiguous “Holy Ghost.” She’s at first swaying slowly, in time with the music. After a while, the camera catches what looks like a tear on her cheek, but it moves away too fast to be certain. But the next time the camera zooms on her, she’s unmistakably crying. When the song ends, Jack gives her a quick, one-armed “cheer up, pal” kind of hug, which quickly becomes a real hug and you see the affection between them. That unexpected moment of intimacy is something that made the entire movie for me, and made Jack and Meg seem real, not just a “deserted cartoon” that Jack wrote.

I ripped “Holy Ghost” from the DVD, so the sound isn’t 320 kbps quality, but it’s decent. It’s also, as I mentioned, a solo piano version, so it's different than the Get Behind Me Satan version.

White Moon (solo piano version).mp3

Labels: Detroit, movies, new stuff, White Stripes

posted by aikin @ 7:00 AM