Jack and Meg White remain rock & roll's biggest mystery .Jack White pulls his black Ford pickup truck to the curb on a quiet, tree-lined street in his native Detroit and hits the 'play' button on the CD player in the cherry-red dashboard. He turns the volume up to deafening and grins proudly as howitzer-fire drumming and squeals of distorted guitar rattle the windshield. There are bursts of marimba, too, which sound like someone shaking a bag of bones. The singing is really just shouting, and the lyrics are kid stuff: "You're my top special, baby/Top! Top!" But the total effect is elementary, irresistible ecstasy.
Jack is playing "Top Special," a new White Stripes track recorded a week earlier with drummer Meg White -- who is sitting quietly in the back seat -- for a special Japanese single. The chorus, Jack says over the din, is a phrase popular with Japanese teens: "It basically means 'You're my best friend.'"
There is no better way to describe the White Stripes themselves. A few days later they perform "Top Special" for an adoring audience at Keller Auditorium in Portland, Oregon, the fifth stop on their current U.S. tour, promoting the Top Five album Get Behind Me Satan. But Jack and Meg are playing to each other. He stands at a mike set at the foot of her kit, his eyes pinned on her as he sings and thrashes his guitar. She looks up at him with the same undivided attention as she keeps steady, thundering time.
It is a perfect picture of a remarkable bond. Publicly, Jack and Meg, both thirty, claim to be brother and sister, even though a Detroit newspaper blew their cover a couple of years ago, revealing them to be ex-husband and -wife (married in 1996, divorced in 2000). But on their five albums as the White Stripes, and especially onstage, there is no mistaking the truth of their relationship. They make music like inseparable kindred spirits. "It will always be us two," Jack says of the Stripes over lunch that day in Detroit. "I will never do the White Stripes with another drummer. She'll never do it with another guitarist."
The White Stripes are at a commercial and creative peak. Satan is their third hit album in a row, following the 2001 breakthrough White Blood Cells and 2003's Elephant. Satan is also their boldest record, combining the Stripes' whiplash rock and Jack's passion for vintage blues and country music with a gothic-roadhouse tension scored with grand piano and marimba. "There is an authenticity about everything Jack does," says T Bone Burnett, who produced Jack's solo tracks on the soundtrack to the 2003 film Cold Mountain. "I don't know many people under thirty who have done the research Jack has done -- and can do a credible Blind Willie McTell cover."
The White Stripes are, in most ways, Jack's creation. He writes the songs, plays everything except drums and devised the band's peppermint-stripe color scheme. And he does almost all the talking. "I'm just a very shy person," Meg confesses at lunch, although she defends the primal quality of her drumming with sweet firmness. "That is my strength. A lot of drummers would feel weird about being that simplistic."
Born John Gillis in 1975, Jack (who took Meg's surname when they married) actually started out as a drummer, at age five. But music was not his first career choice. In high school, Jack, a Catholic, seriously thought of entering the priesthood. After graduating, he considered joining the Marines but instead worked as an upholsterer and, for a time, as a gofer on TV car-commercial shoots. "I could see that it was impossible to get your ideas across, with all the people -- the soundman, lighting people, producers -- you had to go through," he says. "I suppose that put me in the direction of a two-piece band."
Jack played drums and guitar in several Detroit garage bands (Two Part Resin, the Go, Goober and the Peas, the Hentchmen) before he and Meg, another Detroit native, made their local live debut in 1997. Jack soon found that underground cool came at a price. "We were everybody's secret band," he says. "Then our second album [De Stijl] came out, and it was 'Oh, they're not that good anymore.' When we hit the mainstream, I had to go through that game all over again, on a worldwide scale."
Jack may be a reluctant star, but he is a fireball in conversation. He speaks at high speed, his brown eyes looking directly at you like derringer barrels, and his laugh is a series of short, sharp bangs, like a string of firecrackers going off. For more than three hours, over two sessions, he goes into excited detail about, among other things, the Captain Beefheart and Gun Club records that blew his teenage mind, the album he produced for his idol Loretta Lynn (2004's Van Lear Rose) and the record he's finishing with his new band, the Raconteurs, formed with fellow Detroit rocker Brendan Benson.
"I've got enough time," Jack says cheerfully of having two groups at once. "I don't have a day job anymore." And Meg claims she is not worried about the effect on the White Stripes' future. "Jack's always done five things at once," she says. "He was in two other bands when we started this one. This is not unusual."
Get Behind Me Satan must be the most overdubbed album you've ever made. Did you worry about how you would perform those songs live? A duo can only make so much music without tapes and samples.
I've always centered the band around the number three. Everything was vocals, guitar and drums or vocals, piano and drums. So what's the difference? I can only play one thing at a time. The minimalism is still there: vocals, marimba and drums or vocals, grand piano and drums. Or I play piano, Meg plays timpani and she sings. It's all in threes.
The whole point of the White Stripes is the liberation of limiting yourself. In my opinion, too much opportunity kills creativity. I remember in high school, a friend of mine had a magazine with a story about some popular band of the time that was recording an album. The story said they had eighty guitars in the studio to choose from and that there were over 120 tracks of guitar on this one song. Good Lord! Listen to the Stooges' Fun House. You know there can't be more than one track of guitar on there [laughs]. Maybe two.
But when I first saw the White Stripes live, it took me a while to get used to the hole in your sound. I kept asking myself, "Where's the bass? Where's the bottom?"
I can see that. I was in high school when I first heard the Flat Duo Jets. They were a guitar/drums band, and I thought the same thing. Then, within months, they became my favorite band. Some kind of rawness hit me, and I saw there was no need for anything else.
A year ago, I listened to the first tape Meg and I made. It's a recording of the first time we played together. It still sounds raw and cool. We did [David Bowie's] "Moonage Daydream." Then we wrote "Screwdriver," our first song. There was a red screwdriver sitting on the table. We wrote the song that afternoon, and it hasn't changed at all since that day.
When we play a song I wrote, it's the White Stripes covering a Jack White song -- that's the best way to describe it. I write most of my songs on piano and acoustic guitar. Then I show it to Meg, and it's like, "OK, how can we do this onstage?" That becomes the way we do it, from then on.
Are there times when Meg's style of drumming is too limiting -- that you can't take a song as far as you'd like to go?
No. I never thought, "God, I wish Neil Peart was in this band." It's kind of funny: When people critique hip-hop, they're scared to open up, for fear of being called racist. But they're not scared to open up on female musicians, out of pure sexism.
Meg is the best part of this band. It never would have worked with anybody else, because it would have been too complicated. When she started to play drums with me, just on a lark, it felt liberating and refreshing. There was something in it that opened me up. It was my doorway to playing the blues, without anyone over my shoulder going, "Oh, white-boy blues, white-boy bar band." I could really get down to something.
Do you think the brother-sister thing was a miscalculation -- that you overdid the mythmaking?
I saw a review of our new album, and it said, "Every single component of the White Stripes is a gigantic lie." What does that mean? Have I sat down and said I was born in Mississippi? No. Did I say I grew up on a plantation and learned how to play guitar from a blind man? I never said anything like that. It's funny that people think me and Meg sit up late at night, in front of a gas lamp, and come up with these intricate lies to trick people.
But because you present that relationship as fact, it obscures your real connection as a couple -- the truth and value of what you play together.
I want you to imagine if we had presented ourselves in another fashion, that people might have thought was the truth. How would we have been perceived, right off the bat? When you see a band that is two pieces, husband and wife, boyfriend and girlfriend, you think, "Oh, I see . . ." When they're brother and sister, you go, "Oh, that's interesting." You care more about the music, not the relationship -- whether they're trying to save their relationship by being in a band.You don't think about that with a brother and sister. They're mated for life. That's what family is like.
So when did you come up with the idea?
I'm not saying I came up with anything [laughs]. It's like people thinking we would be more real if we went onstage in jeans and T-shirts. How ignorant is that, to think that because they don't wear a suit onstage that someone is giving you the real deal? People do come and see us and think, "Look at all these gimmicks." Go ahead, man. Go ahead and think that.
Taken from www.rollingstone.com
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