mastered by Bill Skibbe at Third Man Mastering

By long time White Stripes fan Mike:

Missoula - June, 2000

Have Blues, Will Travel

From the White Stripes’ first headline tour, on the road promoting the upcoming release of their second album, De Stijl.  This show in Missoula took place in the middle of a three-week journey from Michigan through Wisconsin, Minnesota, Montana, Washington, Oregon, California, Colorado, Kansas, Iowa, and Illinois.  Like itinerant musicians, they were traveling in a van, sleeping on sofas, and selling merch for breakfast and gas money. Performing music that was a bit of garage, a bit of country and folk, a bit of punk, and a lot of the blues.

With just a drum kit, the Airline and Kay guitars, and a Fender Twin this tour would be the blueprint for the Stripes on the road, with the Silvertone amp and Crestwood guitar used for the band's early shows left at home and replaced with a streamlined setup for traveling. This tour would also be the first to feature the two-microphone setup for Jack’s vocals, completing the stage configuration that the band would use for the rest of their live history, with one mic facing the stage, and another mic with reverb on it next to Meg’s drum kit. As opportunity allowed, some shows were captured on cassette from the soundboard, and others were filmed by the band using a borrowed handheld video camera. When the stars aligned, shows like this one in Missoula were able to have both, with the performance of "Apple Blossom" missing on the soundboard recording completed here using audio taken from the video.

Still being a relatively unknown band, the crowd sizes at these shows would of course vary.  Just before this show in Missoula, the band played at Ralph's Corner Bar in Moorhead, to about 10 people. The day after Missoula, they played at Sit & Spin in Seattle to a few more. Certainly the house was packed at Spaceland when the band opened for Weezer, who were performing under a secret alias (Goat Punishment), whereas the Stripes’ LA debut the night before at Al’s Bar was witnessed by a lucky few. In the video of the Missoula show, you can see a mixed crowd of friends out for a night, people in trucker hats, and passersby moving freely in front of the stage, with the band performing in front of a banner advertising "$1.25 pints of Pabst".

Just like the new album, the setlists on this tour would be the first to feature multiple blues numbers. Alongside the quick-burst songwriting of "You’re Pretty Good Looking", "Hello Operator", and "Apple Blossom", would be songs like "Death Letter", "Your Southern Can Is Mine", "Little Bird", and the re-worked slow-blues version of "Stop Breaking Down", now translated to the Kay. With covers by Robert Johnson, Son House, and Blind Willie McTell (who De Stijl was dedicated to) already captured on the Stripes' records, Jack’s expanding blues vocabulary would get regularly featured in the live shows as well.  He would cover Howlin’ Wolf for the first time on this tour, performing "Three Hundred Pounds Of Joy" at a show in Milwaukee, and in Chicago he would cover Blind Willie Johnson's "Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning" after an audience member called out the bluesman’s name.  At other shows on the tour, Son House's "John The Revelator" would get an additional verse of "God came down in the cool of the day...", and "Death Letter" would get quotes from House's "Walkin' Blues", merging the two songs into one. Throw in covers of Bob Dylan’s "One More Cup Of Coffee", Dolly Parton’s "Jolene", Iggy Pop’s "I’m Bored", The 5.6.7.8s' "I Walk Like Jayne Mansfield", and deep-cut recalls like David Bowie’s "Moonage Daydream", and the genre coverage on this tour was impressive, especially for being such relatively short performances.  At this show in Missoula, at just over 40 minutes long, you get a perfect slice of the tour, complete with Jack getting some help from the crowd for a persistent headache.

Just days after this show, the tour would reach a significant high point at The Bottom Of The Hill in San Francisco, a town which Jack would later refer to as “the first city to like us”.  Taking place the day before the release of De Stijl, the San Francisco show would prove to be a sort of pre-fame buzzer beater, with the crowd's reaction on that night serving as proof that the early singles and first album had successfully done the job of turning people onto the band, based on just the music alone.  For the group to have such a strong response in a city that they had never been to before, thousands of miles away from Detroit, and without any major label distribution or radio play to lean on, on a Monday night, is impressive no matter what kind of music you’re playing.  It's not likely that the band made much, if any money on this first tour, but what they accomplished was far more valuable.