Delve deep into the depths of live music databases such as Concertarchives.org and setlist.fm, and you won't find a single recording that white stripes ever played in Toronto in the fall of 1997, just a few months after they formed in Detroit. And yet they did it with promoter Dan Burke, White Stripes archivist Ben Blackwell and even Jack White himself recalls a show that clearly made a huge impression on everyone involved, even if it left no trace on the Internet.
“It doesn’t make any sense why or how,” Blackwell told Exclaim!, marveling at the improbability that the then-unknown duo would travel to another country to play their fourth ever concert.
The show took place on Saturday, October 11, at the Shanghai Club, a long-closed venue on Spadina Avenue, south of Dundas Street West. Promoter Dan Burke booked bands from Detroit every weekend that month; Other bands performing in October included Rocket 455 And henchmenfor which the White Stripes have already opened houses in Detroit.
“Attendance was low,” Burke wrote in an Instagram post about the show earlier this month. “We could have sent the whole audience home in one taxi,” I joked later. But this series became the basis for Toronto's role in the great garage rock revival of the late '90s and early 2000s.”
Blackwell agrees. He wasn't at the show himself, as he's Jack White's nephew and just 15 years old at the time, but he remembers a story his uncle told him about the show: “He told me that during sound check he played a riff from a Gorey song,” Blackwell says. “He didn’t sing anything, he just messed around. And the astonishment was that after the soundcheck someone came up to him and said: “Oh, are you going to perform some Gorey songs tonight?” And Jack was like, “Did you know!?” The fact that you go 500 miles away and people there know it, people only know the riff? It was something of an indication of the psychological foresight of Toronto's musical tastes in 1997.”
White himself commented on Burke’s Instagram post with another story about that night: “This show happened. The lead singer of High School Hookers and I put on makeup backstage in front of the same mirror at the same time before the show. Meg and I slept on the floor of the room with a single painter's light taped to a wooden board for illumination that night. We took the light bulb home with us too because we thought it was a funny fire hazard.”
No photographs or recordings of the show survive (if they ever existed), but Blackwell was able to track down both the poster (above) and the set list (below). He notes that the set list (which was written on the back of a flyer for another Shanghai club show that same month) may not be entirely accurate due to the White Stripes' penchant for playing songs on the fly, but what is recorded shows a 13-song set including early White Stripes classics such as “Let's Shake Hands”, “Screwdriver” and “Jimmy the Exploder”.
“Big Girl” was the working title of the song that became “Little People” on their 1999 album of the same name, and “Marantette Blues” became “Lafayette Blues” by the time it was released as a 7″ single in 1998. “The Protector” became “This Protector” in 2001. White blood cellsand this was probably the debut of their cover of Love's “Signed DC”.
Despite playing in Toronto so early, the White Stripes never played Windsor, which was just a short drive across the Ambassador Bridge from where they lived in Detroit. That said, the White Stripes do have a key connection to the University of Windsor: “I first heard the White Stripes on the radio on CJAM,” Blackwell recalls.
The cover of the band's new album also features a nod to Ambassador Bridge. vinyl box set. “No one has noticed it yet, but the cover of this box shows Jack and Meg standing under the Ambassador Bridge,” says Blackwell.
“Before 9/11, you could literally walk up to the concrete piers of this bridge,” he continues. “Nothing is blocked. Full access. You can fucking climb that shit! They don't let you do that anymore. I love this photo because it is a testament to the fact that you will never be able to take this photo again, not in a million years.”
