Jack White performs at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, California on Friday, Oct. 4, 2024.

The last time I saw Jack White was with 20,000 others at the Shoreline Amphitheater, before that it was with tens of thousands more at the Reading Festival in the UK. So to see him at the 470-capacity Great American Music Hall on a very hot and sweaty San Francisco October night felt like a rare treat, and one that no one saw coming.

The show, along with one at the Phoenix in Petaluma on Thursday, was only announced last week. White has opted not to tour his new album “No Name,” like most big acts in 2024, and is doing it his way.

“Lotta folk asking about when we are going to announce 'tour dates,' well, we don’t know what to tell you but the tour already started,” White wrote on Instagram in August. “We will mostly be playing at small clubs, back yard fetes, … Some shows we won’t even decide to do until that morning.”

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This spontaneous approach has succeeded in creating a huge amount of buzz and demand around the shows. The San Francisco performance sold out in minutes Thursday. Only paper tickets were........

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