Jack White with The Protos at Tivoli/Vrendenburg in Utrecht - 26 February 2025
The lovely M and I thought we were pretty lucky when we left our vacation apartment, set among endless rows of identical little townhouses, each seemingly guarded by a cat lounging on the sill of its enormous front window. The weather report had called for rain, but the skies could hardly have been any clearer. So, leaving our umbrellas behind, we set out, and then, after a quick stop at a really cool bar in our neighborhood, we set out on our one-hour walk to the Ronda venue at the TivoliVrendenburg Theater in downtown Utrecht, where Jack White would be performing in a few hours. I was feeling pretty excited, because this would be my first time seeing White in person. Twenty some years ago he played a major role in restoring my faith in Rock music after years of Nu Metal and Post-Grunge had pretty well convinced me to look elsewhere, and ever since I’ve regarded him as a kind of kindred spirit who seems to like a lot of the same music I do for a lot of the same reasons that I like it. And, of course, I’m a big fan of his unique ability and/or willingness to release the true percussive potential of an electric guitar.
What we failed to consider in our hubristic departure was the fact that clouds can move pretty fast over the notoriously flat landscape of the Netherlands, so we ended up spending the majority of our walk with little to protect us from a driving rain that still retained a good bit of its February chill. By the time we made it to the venue we were well soaked and extremely ready for a beer. The only problem was that the TivoliVrendenburg is one of these slick, urban performance-arts centers that looks an awful lot like an upscale movie theater and not, to us anyway, like a place you would go to for a heavy rock show. We spent about twenty extra minutes in the rain, just walking around the building looking for a grungier corner, before we finally realized that all we had to do was go upstairs.
The Ronda is a huge club space with clean modern lines and room for around 2,000 people. Being pretty early we got something to drink and proceeded to find a spot close to the stage. As we walked in, Link Wray’s proto-surf guitar classic, “Rumble” was howling over the sound system. The selection seemed so singularly appropriate to Jack’s vibe that we started to kill time talking about whether we figured he would want to curate the pre-show playlist himself or leave it to the venue staff. As time went on, the sounds shifted to glammy punk, a sludgy grunge tune that might have been Mudhoney, or possibly Tad, Ozzy Osborne, The Who, Fugazi, Outkast, The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” — “such a pre-show song,” according to M — and even, incredibly, “Psychotic Reaction” by Count Five, the 60s garage classic that I had randomly predicted Jack would cover in the show a few days before. Who knows whether the man himself was responsible for these selections, but whoever was seems to have been someone who had put some thought into what someone might want to listen to before a Jack White show, which was a nice touch.
Before too long the opening act, The Protos, a bass-less trio from Amsterdam who describe their music as “primitive, fuelled-by-hate(sic.) garage punk,” took the stage. I have to say, for a group that’s fueled by hate, the three of them, Daan, Guus, and Sid Proto, seemed to be having a lot of fun up on stage, and they seemed to really know what they were doing. It’s not often that I’ve seen a group playing such aggressive music who seemed to be so well-rehearsed or so comfortably on top of the relatively subtle effects that they were pulling off. My hunch is that this is largely due to the drummer, Sid, who struck me as a player with Lebron James level court vision, constantly aware of and responsive to whatever the two guitarists were up to while also delivering a decisive and reliable pulse to keep her bandmates in line. Another fun feature, which seems specifically appropriate for a band opening for Jack White, was that their unusual lineup leaves one of the guitarists, Guus, free to wander the stage, which he did, a lot, playing striking, creative, and really quite virtuosic lead lines, something which makes them stand out, particularly among punk bands. This made me think of Dinosaur jr — something that’s not hard to do. I had already noticed that Guus was playing what I think of as a J Mascis kind of guitar, and sure enough, in one of their last songs he played a ringing, feedback-laden solo that felt like it could have been lifted right out of You’re Living All Over Me, which was nice to see, especially from someone who was probably born around the time of the band’s 2005 reunion. They were also just a lot of fun to watch, largely because they seemed to be so present and engaged in what they were doing, but also because of the near constant intense, smokey looks being exchanged between Sid and Guus. I don’t know what was going on between those two, but I definitely enjoyed bearing witness to it for a short time.
So then it was finally time for the main event, except not quite. Jack kept us waiting for quite a while as a small army of guys dressed for either a Mennonite church picnic or a shift at a Brooklyn hipster bar wandered on and off stage, carrying massive trays of pedals, tuning guitars, testing amplifiers, and generally finding more things to fiddle with and adjust than seems humanly possible. Granted this was the biggest club show that I had been to in a while, and, having arrived pretty early, we had positioned ourselves so far in front that running off to the bar or the toilet quickly became an unrealistic proposition. I was starting to feel a bit claustrophobic when finally we noticed that the stage was clear of anachronistically dressed technicians. The sound system finally faded down, and the band entered. Wearing exclusively black and white and drenched in blue light, reflecting Jack’s current color obsession, they proceeded to enter into a screaming opening hoedown, followed by three of the bluesier numbers from Jack’s most recent solo album, No Name, “Old Scratch Blues,” “That’s How I’m Feeling,” and “It’s Rough On Rats (If You’re Asking).”
An early and surprising highlight in the show was during “Old Scratch Blues,” when the famous Red and Blue chair by Utrecht home-town hero, architect and furniture designer Gerrit Rietveld, was suddenly brought out on stage, and Jack proceeded to lounge in it while he played his guitar solo. I later learned that Jack had been inspired to borrow the chair and to dedicate the concert to Rietveld after a visit to a local museum earlier that day, but neither M nor I can remember him saying anything about that to the crowd, or really anything at all other than “thank you” once or twice. It might have been interesting to know, though, at least for someone of the nerdy persuasion, as Jack, who is originally an upholsterer by trade, is clearly interested in furniture, and his signature approach to color and form, particularly with The White Stripes, seems to be particularly influenced by Rietveld and other designers from that brief moment in the 1920s when Modernism was actually fun. I also learned later that, as part of this tribute, they played a run of five songs from The White Stripes second album, De Still, which is named after the art movement that Rietveld was once a part of, including one “Jumble, Jumble,” that he apparently hadn’t played live since 2002.
They followed the De Stij segment with an even older song, “Cannon” from The White Stripe’s first album, which was a highlight, and then went into a jumble of songs from various points in Jack’s career before closing their proper set, rather abruptly, with another new one, “Archbishop Harold Holmes.” When they returned to the stage almost immediately for an encore of “Icky Thump,” “Steady, as She Goes,” “Fell in Love With a Girl,” and “Seven Nation Army,” there definitely seemed to be a slight feeling of “this is what you want; this is what you get” in the room, and this was more or less typical of the show in general. Jack was good, of course, because he is good and he has great musicians backing him, and his guitar playing left me feeling like I’d been punched in the face just as much as I had hoped it would. I can’t say that he seemed particularly engaged or inspired, though, especially in comparison to what we had just seen from The Protos, or that he seemed to have much, if any, communal feeling with the audience. If I were a bit more cynical I might say that he basically seemed like he wanted to mess around with his high tech arsenal of custom equipment for a bit, play the songs that he knew most people had come to hear, and get the fuck out of there. Fortunately though, I’m not. I’m happy to have seen him in action for what I hope will be the first of many times, and I’m even happier to have discovered The Protos, a group that I’ll definitely be keeping a close eye on going forward.
-Peter Lawson - 9.3.25
