The White Stripes - 300 M.P.H. Torrential Outpour Blues (Live)
To Bury the Ghosts or To Live With Them
The severe drag about living with ghosts is there’s no dialogue. There’s potent wisdom and information to glean from the lives and memories of the dead, but ghosts aren’t known for dazzling conversation over dinner and drinks. Hence the enduring popularity of psychic mediums. Those demons though… those demons won’t shut the fuck up. They’re in the closet knocking out push-ups by the score and in your head banging out pull-ups ten at a time waiting for you to fuck something up. Those demons force you into a position in which you have to decide to avoid them or accept them in your life. 300 M.P.H. Torrential Outpour Blues is about those ghosts and demons and the deals we make with ourselves in the small hours. It’s about the restless sides of nighttime minds who burn lean tissue straight through to the dawn rehashing all the great beats of their lives. I am counted on the side of restless minds.
‘Blues’ isn’t simply a word in the title of the song. That would be a middleweight fight for the heavyweight White Stripes. This is a Blues number, to be sure, but it’s unquestionably four different Blues numbers, at least in terms of styles. "That started on an acoustic guitar - it became an idea to use as many different styles of the blues as I could in one song. It goes from the really screeching, distorted, heavy blues sound, to an almost wimpy Wurlitzer kind of loungey blues sound, to white-boy takes on the blues, to real earthy, country blues,” Jack White said in the June 28, 2007 issue of Rolling Stone. The song is haunted and occupied by four different ghosts and demons because the Blues is haunted by ghosts and demons and by extension, so is Jack White. So am I. That’s part of what the Blues does. The Blues provides staggering insights and gifts that help us address the hardest parts of L-I-V-I-N livin’, but the Blues always arrive when the bill is due. We all have a debt to pay, and the Blues was always as concerned with livin’ as dyin’ and to a greater degree about the final tally. The Blues always gets what’s coming to it. You can fight it, rally your squad against it, and try to bargain with it. Time, saltwater, and the Blues remain undefeated.
The live version of the song from Under Great White Northern Lights is the version of Jack’s vocal that provides access into that inescapable aspect of the Blues. He’s eyeball deep in it, Meg White is thundering away at her drum kit just as she should, and Jack just. Lets. Go. He’s either overwhelmed or doesn’t give a good goddamn anymore, and he stops playing his guitar altogether. At that moment, between seconds 22 and 23 four minutes in, the Blues showed up and everything inside Jack rejected reason and calm. He stops playing his guitar altogether and vents his frustration. He wants answers and he knows his time ain’t long, which is as classic a Blues feeling as any in the American songbook. Jack’s a true Blues devotee and because of this he knows he’s never going to get a proper answer until expiration, and it’s killing him. That’s the misery of it. Jack just doesn’t know if these frustrations and small-hour thoughts will continue to haunt him once he gives up his own ghost. None of us do. That’s why I have a dialogue with my demons. There’s pieces of them in everything I write, and the music I love most is always a little haunted.
But I can't help but wonder if after I'm gone
Will I still have these 300 mile per hour, finger breaking
No answers, broken back, dirty cancer, bee stung and busted up
Empty cup torrential outpour blues?-The White Stripes, 300 M.P.H. Torrential Outpour Blues
The only thing Jack knows for sure is that which he has direct control over. It’s the same for all of us, but Jack has always had a slightly different focus. He’s gonna have the shinniest pair of shoes in that graveyard. I’ll be sure to keep his grave clean.