BY THOMAS CONNER Pop Music Critic
(Tom Cruze/Sun-Times)Jack White closed out this year’s Lollapalooza with an epic performance of the same kind of blues-rock that inspired the festival’s Friday headliner, the Black Keys. But White is more than the yin to someone else’s yang, he’s the whole colorful circle of modern American music — bashing out rock, digging up roots and careening through country.
Fortunately, he brought along a band that could handle the breadth of material. In fact, he brought two.
On tour, White has been traveling with two bands: one all-female, one all-male. They usually take turns playing each gig. For Lollapalooza, they both hit the stage.
Opening Sunday’s show with a serious-looking, suited crew of heavyweight gentlemen, called Los Buzzardos, White — in black, with white boots, looking every bit “The Crow” of rock and roll — began drawing from the scope of his work as part of projects such as the White Stripes (“Black Math,” “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground”) and the Dead Weather (“Blue Blood Blues”). Without the dead weight, as it were, he could showcase the same mlange of material and underlying razor focus displayed on his recent solo debut, “Blunderbuss.” Crunching through “Sixteen Saltines,” from that album, White and his moody men ran hot at full throttle and in low gear. Even when things backed off a bit and White took a turn at the piano during “Missing Pieces,” sitting back-to-back with the Buzzardos keys man, the force was always fully felt.
Midway through the set, the gents retired and the ladies took over. The Peacocks, as they’re called, dressed in white and maintained the hardcore energy and country gentility, continuing through more solo, White Stripes and even a Raconteurs (“Top Yourself”) number.
All business, and hardly chatty (“We got lucky with the weather tonight, didn’t we?”), White intently screamed, shrieked and growled into a set that rarely let up for an hour and a half. Then came the encore, a punishing blow of recognizable, raucous riffs: “Steady as She Goes” (another Raconteurs tune, which White used for some call-and-response with the packed crowd), “The Hardest Button to Button,” “Freedom at 21” (during which the Peacocks’ drummer bashed so hard she knocked off a cymbal) and “Seven Nation Army.” In the end, both bands took a bow.
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