Jack White
“Over and Over and Over”
limited edition one-sided tri-color, 200 something copies pressed, complete with custom picture sleeve that will be slightly different from the standard released version
Do you guys know how pumped I am?
For the record, I first heard this monster riff in 2005 at Jack’s house while he and Meg were recording “Get Behind Me Satan.”
I am pretty sure that the “Blue Orchid” riff pre-dates this one by a few days, but in my mind, they exist hand-in-hand. While “Blue Orchid” smashed that recording process wide open and gave Jack the inspiration to make that album as bad ass as possible, THIS riff, inarguably, is ten times stronger. I feel like Jack was originally calling it “Thermonuclear Counter-Thrust” but maybe I’m just imagining that. I can find no contemporaneous documentation of that name.
There are two takes of demo recordings of this song from 2005 (with the riff played solely on fuzz bass). There are demo recordings from 2007 with the White Stripes trying it in rehearsal leading up to the tracking of the “Icky Thump” album. Imagine the guitar profile more in line with the octave-pedaled presence of the song “Icky Thump” and that’s a good start for understanding the 2007 version. I guess the Raconteurs tried it but I never heard any evidence, same with the Dead Weather. It was apparently the main track that Jack and Jay-Z worked on together in 2009, under the title “Ray Bans” or “Behind My Ray Bans” and although I’ve never heard that working, I’m told to imagine the phrase “Behind my Ray Bans” to coincide with the last five notes of the riff.
As Jack has already said, this had been his white whale. We sincerely considered including the ’07 demo as part of the “Icky Thump X” Vault package last year. I have no recollection of Jack ever previously giving me such an impassioned plea…”I just really think we shouldn’t put this on the Vault” he said. My response was pretty matter-of-factly, “Well, it’s your label, so please don’t feel like you have to convince me.” Maybe he was trying to convince himself?
Regardless, at the end of 2017 when Jack finally had played me this version you hear now, upon the end of the song, I looked at him and said “I’ve been waiting twelve years to hear this song with lyrics.”
The final version of this song is everything I’d ever dreamed it would be. It is my favorite moment on the album, with the coda to “Humoresque” being a close second. I cannot wait to see this monster unleashed unto a sell-out crowd at Little Caesar’s Arena, a stone’s throw away from the Gold Dollar where this whole mess got started.
I’ve got an extra copy of this limited tri-color to give away here. AUTOGRAPHED by Jack White, today, explicitly for this purpose. Don’t use my give-away here as an excuse to miss going to any number of the listening parties we’re throwing at record stores worldwide though. Even though we’re giving away tri-colors at the listening parties, none of those will be autographed. Man we spoil you kids.
As for the giveaway, post a comment, can be about whatever, but maybe talk about a significant wait you’ve endured in life. Can be funny, pithy, in iambic pentameter, whatever. The “best” comment will be solely determined by me. Please chime in by noon central time on Tuesday, March 13th.
***WINNER HAS BEEN CONTACTED***
Weight
I’ve been waiting for years to win a Blackwell contest. Perhaps that wait is over?
Awaiting the birth of my sons. I don’t know what iambic pentameter is or was, but the birth of my kids. Longest wait and well worth it.
I’ve waited my whole life to meet The Muppets on The Muppet Show tonight.
The waiting is the hardest part.
I waited for you to read 159 comments before you got to this one. Maybe more depending on how quickly other people respond to the vault twitter notification, or how slowly I type on my phone.
I waited in line for the first iPhone in 2007 outside a AT&T store in Metro Detroit for six hours. When the local cops drove by and asked what the line was for one of the line waiters snapped at the cop. I’ve never seen such full-on nerd rage in all my life. Ahhh the glory and innocent time of the Aughts.
There wasn’t a listening party neer me but this would be amazing to have and listen to
I waited my whole life to get married. Now I listen to music to escape it.
What I’m going to write about involves different kinds of waiting; apologies in advance, and bear with me if I ramble a bit, because I probably will.
When ‘Get Behind Me Satan’ came out in 2005 I bought it on the day of release from my local record shop, Track Records in Doncaster (Yorkshire, UK), and I loved it. Sure, I’d enjoyed and played to death a bunch of records before, like most kids and teenagers do, but this was different. Its sound, its look, its experimentalism, and, at its heart, its great pop songs, just struck a chord with me, and made me want to become a musician in some form or another. It led to my first wait, for my sixteenth birthday, when I was taken to pick my first electric guitar (red, of course) and the inspiration that Jack and Meg, and that album, gave me in that respect I will always be grateful for. Anyway, I bought all the singles from the album, and waited for the vinyl version (a working-class kid like me couldn’t afford to fork out for the promo version!) but it never came. And, unfortunately, a while later Track Records closed down, and a couple of years after that The White Stripes officially split up. I never got to see them live, and I was left with the closest proper independent retailer being a bus and train journey away.
Fast forward a few years, and one wait sown had come to fruition – a new record shop, The Notorious Aardvark, had opened in my home town. Then, in 2015, the Record Store Day list was released and ‘Get Behind Me Satan’ beamed up at me. I’d been waiting 10 years, but knew that, realistically, the chances of finding a copy were slim, especially in Doncaster (we’re not exactly a thriving cultural hub!). So I went along to the Aardvark the day before to ask the owner (a lovely guy, as it happens) if he was going to have any copies. He proceeded to go into the stock room and came back with his only copy, letting me have a look at it in case I wasn’t first in line to get it. Honestly, it was like being taken back to my mid-teens. I was so determined that the next morning I got the first bus into town. It was an unusually bitterly cold April morning and, to my amazement, there was no queue. So I waited there, more people arrived, we had some great chats about music, and, many hours later, the doors opened and I had the album in my hands. Well, just about; despite the fact that I was wrapped up like a Christmas turkey, being a slim guy I was shaking from the cold and my hands had turned blue and numb. But it didn’t matter – I paid Si the shop owner, and walked out of the shop on jelly legs with a secret smile inside. That afternoon I opened the record and played it, because a good record deserves to be played, not just looked at, no matter how pretty it is, and it was just as wonderfully, eccentrically brilliant as the first time I had heard it. A friend asked later on, after the standard version was released, whether I would still have waited that day for my copy now if I had known that it would soon be available everywhere. The answer, truthfully, was yes, because my copy reminds me of that day, of the anticipation, of the in-store events on the day – basically, a story, an intangible something which no record, vinyl or otherwise, from a chain retailer like HMV could ever hope to replicate. And, as all fans of The White Stripes know, a good story can be an important thing.
What I think the spiel I’ve written shows (I hope!) is that nostalgia and memory are powerful things, and that waiting and anticipation give more worth to things or experiences than the instant gratification of getting them when you want them ever could. ‘Get Behind Me Satan’ means something different to me now than when I was a teenager, but that’s as it should be – things should change, just as ‘Boarding House Reach’ is pushing people’s expectations of Jack, like ‘GBMS’ did before it. That album now reminds me of secondary school English classes, when we each got to pick a song for a mixtape and one guy referred to my choice as ‘The Dental Twist’, it reminds me of dressing only in red and white when going on nights out at university, and it reminds me of that cold morning, of places I’ve loved that have now gone – including the Notorious Aardvark, which closed at the beginning of last year – and it reminds me, having been a presence for nearly half of my life, of all the relationships and friendships I’ve had in my life so far based around great music.
As I mentioned earlier, rambling. But I think that waiting sometimes brings the best rewards in life. I believe so, and I hope my thoughts here can attest to that.