By Paul Robicheau

The singer/guitarist rolls the dice every night, playing it loose and gritty with drummer Patrick Keeler, bassist Dominic Davis, and keyboardist Bobby Emmett, who deftly hack away at revolving song choices from White’s broad catalog and beyond.

Jack White at Roadrunner. Photo: David James Swanson

Jack White was coming off a New York City blitz of shows topped by Friday’s all-star concert for the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live at Radio City Music Hall, where his band scorched Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” and his own White Stripes anthem “Seven Nation Army.” By Sunday, White sat with a smile among royalty in the live audience for the SNL50 network special.

So, a question going into Monday’s first of two nights at Boston’s Roadrunner was whether White would be fired up or a bit off after his Big Apple conquests. The answer was a little of both — or neither, in a sense. The singer/guitarist rolls the dice every night, playing it loose and gritty with drummer Patrick Keeler, bassist Dominic Davis, and keyboardist Bobby Emmett, who deftly hack away at revolving song choices from White’s broad catalog and beyond.

That edge-of-sloppy attitude aligns with White’s 2024 album No Name, which resurrects the rhythm-rooted, blues-punk simplicity of the White Stripes. And those two poles served two-thirds of the material in Monday’s 90-minute set.

White immediately built high expectations when the group hit the stage with an energetic buildup while its pacing leader held out his guitar with one hand while whacking the neck with the other, exhorting the crowd. White broke into No Name to begin with an organ-cut “Old Scratch Blues” and “That’s How I’m Feeling,” plus a Led Zeppelin III-evoking “It’s Rough on Rats (If You’re Asking),” where he switched to a worn hollow-body and smeared a mean slide solo.

Pros and cons collided in a mid-set stretch where the songs began to blur for those not intimately familiar with White’s deep repertoire, as he stretched and curtailed tunes with guitar-lifting cues and audibles to Keeler, who also plays with White in the Raconteurs. One jam dropped into a sluggish rendition of the Raconteurs’ “Top Yourself” that was tricky to recognize before White shifted to a jaunty “Hotel Yorba,” the night’s first — and among the most popular — of nine White Stripes offerings, prompting fans to sing and clap along.

Jack White, Dominic Davis, and Bobby Emmett at Roadrunner. Photo: David James Swanson

The Raconteurs’ “Broken Boy Soldier” meandered into a shambolic jag where White made a rare stop at his pedal board for a solo laced with clipping tones and slurs. Minutes later, the guitarist dipped into the thick riffs of Black Sabbath’s “Electric Funeral” as a randomly compatible bridge into the Stripes’ “Cannon” and finally segued into a slap-dash mashup of that band’s “I Think I Smell a Rat” and “Hello Operator” that likely appealed most to diehard fans.

White seemed more possessed in “I Cut Like a Buffalo” from undervalued side project the Dead Weather, jerking his picking arm to gesture as he sang. When he closed the main set with the low-key Stripes pick “I’m Slowly Turning into You” after 55 minutes, the crowd turned quiet. Someone tossed a can onstage as the band walked off. It brought to mind how White recently complained in the media about fans who expect shows should reach a certain length.

Ah, but everything turned around in a half-hour encore that hit more crowd-pleasing targets, from White’s rat-a-tat rapping on the new “Archbishop Harold Holmes” to the White Stripes’ raging “Black Math” and a cranked-up “Fell in Love with a Girl” (again nearly unrecognizable in its Buzzcocks-curt delivery). “Lazaretto” was a nice inclusion, with its slinky bass throb, and “Seven Nation Army” brought it home, with White bouncing like a buckaroo with his swiping slide strokes and a thumping tom-tom beat while fans shouted the song’s wordless chant like a hearty rumble at a championship game.

That’s sort of what it was for rock fans. Of course, White wound it back — and up — on Tuesday with a comparable 23-song mix of only several repeats and less-obscure treats, including Stripes hits “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground” and “Ball and Biscuit” plus plucky shots of the old Kingsmen hit “Louie Louie” and Modern Lovers classic “Roadrunner,” an apt nod to the club and the city.

Jack’s in love with rock ‘n’ roll, and Boston got two glorious nights of it.

Paul Robicheau served more than 20 years as contributing editor for music at the Improper Bostonian in addition to writing and photography for the Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. He was also the founding arts editor of Boston Metro.