Connecting the Dots

By Phil Hunt
Contributing Writer

“...there was maybe two-dozen people there. When we started out there wasn’t anyone…maybe a handful. And as I sat videoing the show, I turned around every three or four songs and every time was more and more people. By the time the show was over it seemed there was four times as many as when it started… which was still only 20 people!”

That’s Ben Blackwell speaking and remembering the night the White Stripes played at Ralph’s Corner. Today he works for Third Man Records, a label and record store in Nashville that’s run by Jack White. But in 2000, he was the White Stripes’ road companion, merch salesman and camera man. The highest profile band to ever play in the dingy back room of the beloved watering hole didn’t receive any special treatment on June 13th, 2000. Still, the White Stripes viewed it as a success.

In Moorhead’s defense, the White Stripes weren’t exactly household names at the time. They had just released their second album, De Stijl, on the Sympathy for the Record Industry label. I remember wanting to attend the show for their record label alone. I liked Sympathy. Even so, I forgot about the show until the day after it happened.

I was one of the many people who didn’t show up that summer night. Even so, the White Stripes, along with Blackwell, had a good time. Jack and Meg White played a great show. Blackwell just happened to catch it on video. Since that night the White Stripes got really, really well known. They broke up. And now the video evidence of this little evening in Moorhead is going to be unleashed on the public as a concert DVD.

It’s not a big, widely released DVD. It’s a premium for subscribing to Third Man Records’ Vault membership service. If you want it (along with a double LP of their final show in Mississippi and a 7” of early covers) you’ve got to be a subscriber for three months at $20 a month.

It should have been an under-the-radar release, but the White Stripes aren’t under the radar at all. Every big music publication had the story on their home page. Even Huffington Post teased headlines for a while about the return of the White Stripes. In every article, there’s a little mention of Ralph’s—and the White Stripes DVD “Under Moorhead Lights All Fargo Night.” It’s kind of cool, if only that the wider world knows something of this little bar and music venue that no longer exists.

At first it’s puzzling to imagine a band, with probably dozens of professionally recorded shows to choose from, picking an early gig, filmed with one camera, for a DVD release, but when you put it together with the other goodies included with the Third Man Records package, you’ve got a career-spanning retrospect of sorts.

“I think it’s an era of the band and a kind of setting that there’s not much evidence of… the White Stripes playing small corner bars, or the White Stripes playing in front of you know, probably two-dozen people,” said Blackwell. “This package as a whole shows the band at three different periods in their career: the extreme beginning before they’d even put out any records; this (DVD), which is effectively the middle period, right after the release of the De Stijl album; and then the final concert they ever played in 2007. So as a whole you kind of get a really short, condensed version of the band’s history.”

It’s also further evidence of a band that seemed to succeed wildly at doing things in a slightly contrary fashion. The White Stripes had red and white clothes and gave cagey answers to questions about their personal lives while keeping the music very authentic. This, at the time when music gets increasingly fake… and traditionally serves as a vehicle for putting (generally ugly) personalities on full display. Instead of following the traditional route to success, the White Stripes shifted the focus away from themselves and back toward the music by projecting a kind of false personality. The image was interesting enough to write an article about, but it ultimately didn’t lead anywhere, and you had to pay attention to the music. In a way, this Ralph’s show is a perfect DVD release for the White Stripes. It’s hard to argue that anything gets in the way of the music here—there’s not even much of an audience.

Still, this is another one of those articles by a writer trying to connect dots that don’t really exist.

“It wasn’t overly theorized or thought about,” said Blackwell. “We had some footage from a handful of other shows and we kind of just examined what we had on hand and the Fargo show seemed to stick out… so we ran with that.”

It seemed like a good idea in Jack and Meg White’s minds. Occam’s Razor… Wiki it folks! The tendency for the White Stripes to simplify makes the DVD of “Under Moorhead Lights All Fargo Night” a fitting marker in the band’s timeline. They are a two piece, after all. Fargo’s had a lot of two pieces over the years. Standard—the opening band that night—was a two piece.

There I go connecting dots again.

“It was always just moving forward…” said Blackwell. “Never sitting back and thinking about what they’ve done or over-analyzing it. Moving at a quick pace. If you look at the first three years of the White Stripes, or their first three albums, they were recorded and released in 1999, 2000, 2001… that’s three albums in three years.”

That sounds about right. The White Stripes were doing the work, and 30 people (or less) got to see a band that understood the power of momentum, early on.

Ben Blackwell says it best:

“I think in one of his books [Chuck Klosterman] mentioned people trying to save Ralph’s… and trying to get him to say something about the White Stripes show that he had seen there. He had to tell these people ‘I wasn’t at that show! I think it’s become one of these Fargo legends, that if everyone who claimed to have been there was there, you know, the show would have taken place at the high school football stadium or something’ When we started out [at Ralph’s] there wasn’t anyone. There was maybe a handful. And as I sat videoing the show, I turned around every three or four songs and it seemed there was more and more people. By the time the show was over it seemed there was four times as many as when it started… which was still only 20 people! But still, that to me gave evidence of the appeal and allure of the band. They could play in front of twenty people and they weren’t going to whine and moan about it. They do their job. They play a show and, you know, almost like the pied piper people come following and come in. In a nutshell I think it’s just a great snapshot of how things can go for a band.”

For information on “Under Moorhead Lights All Fargo Night” visit http://www.thirdmanrecords.com.

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