The White Stripes: What Made Them Such A Revolutionary Rock Duo? | Amplified

[Music] there's something baby i need you to see [Music] me [Music] [Applause] [Music] in 1997 the white stripes formed as a quirky two-piece band from the rough suburbs of detroit in the usa now they are one of the most recognized bands in the world so just how have this supposed brother and sister gone from playing in small bars and clubs to headlining some of the biggest music festivals around the world is it just the red and white that's made them stand out [Music] john gillis later to be known as jack white was born on the 9th of july 1975 to a musical family in southwest detroit he attended kaz tech music college in 1992 and afterwards landed an apprenticeship at the muldoon studio an upholstery shop in detroit in 1994 john successfully auditioned as the drummer for goober and the peas it was here that the band nicknamed him jack first time i came across jack white was during the waning days of goober and the peas when he was the latest in a succession of drummers that were part of that band and he was just jack the new the new drummer in goober and the peas kind of a quiet guy and although dan miller who you know who was goober and now works with white stripes yeah at the time did did make a comment about what a good musician this was so but you know but nobody could have looked at this guy playing drums for goober in the fees and said he would become jack white of the light strikes he was playing drums with a band called goober in the peas and i had seen them around that time and i knew him through other connections with with mag and all that and i kind of forgot he was in a band and then he came in one night on one of our open mic nights and was playing drums and he was really good while in goober in the pens jack met meg white a detroit girl from the east side of town the couple married in 1996 with jack taking meg's surname of white the following year they started the white stripes the white stripes were odd for the detroit scene the concept of a duo a guitar drum duo was not really odd in rock and roll there were a few of them out there but yeah the first thing you you often heard from people who saw the lights drives were like oh there's only two of them and there's no bass player and the drummer's a girl i remember their first show a little bit it was um actually they may have played a couple times i know they played at least one open mic night at the gold dollar our sunday night open mic and it was questionable nobody was like we're going to go see the white stripes they're a new band you know everybody came they're opening up and everyone was like oh it's the you know the two-star guy he's got a band you know and uh and they get on and like you know they have this little pedestal podium pedestal he put his amp on and he draped this red scarf over it and you know they had the red and white image and the candy cane on the drum kit i think once people figured out that this was a drummer and a guitar player a drummer who frankly wasn't very good at that point there was probably sense that it was kind of gimmicky maybe maybe it was sort of a a whimsical side project for jack who was you know clearly a gifted guitar player i just remember that jack had this crazy like strawberry hair and it was really curly and it worked kind of high on his head like and it was it was definitely interesting it doesn't look anything like he looks today i think the first time anybody saw the white stripes up until certainly up until their notoriety it takes you back for a minute because and not just the duo the concept of the duo but it was certainly in the beginning it was so raw and so kind of jagged and you know meg kind of chasing jack and jack trying to both direct meg and go where he wanted to go you think she's playing basic simple beads now well they were simpler than and there were a lot of you know mistakes and tempo problems and it's amazing she's really picked it up the white stripes were just getting started and so their whole trip was kind of interesting to all of us there wasn't anybody but it was bantum rooster there were bands that were doing two-piece stuff and r b based two-piece stuff but the white stripes sort of had this delicate quality started out as yeah we're just gonna do this for fun this will be interesting and then it started picking up and he was still doing the other projects and then it picked up even more i think beyond his or anyone's conception at the point where everybody was kind of like you know being like oh this band's cool and people more people were coming remember there being a show where they're like 50 people at the gold dollar watching the white stripes when they were starting you know they weren't like the first of three bands they were the second of three bands and uh and you know them playing a show and her you know up really badly and you know jacking on the mic is like can anybody in this in the crowd play drums i think i need a new drummer [Music] the white stripes home town is detroit in the state of michigan on the east side of the united states once a famous industrial motor town detroit suffered greatly in the 80s when car giants general motors ford and chrysler all relocated out of the city detroit is a very it has a very visceral quality to it i mean it's it's it's built from the ground up it's it's cement it's it's cars it's it's motor oil they like to suggest that the reason all this rough and tumble music comes out of the city is because it's such a mess but the truth is most of the influences that inform the kind of music we make around here come from elsewhere detroit is uh unique in a sense that it's a city that never recovered from the riots so you've got a lot of low-cost housing the ever you grow up and destroy a completely cynical big business because everybody you know works for the same big businesses and gets screwed and gets laid off and you're surrounded by total poverty that was created by big business you know as like a concerted plan and uh yeah you totally grow up cynical of it all also you're the constantly the underdog you know everybody in detroit is happy to be the underdog because that's what you are and uh there's a romance to that people fight for that you know their particular line of work whatever it is they take pride in what they're doing and it's it's this this you know honest approach to life the way detroit affects the music that's written i think has a lot to do with the weather the weather here sucks the sky is always gray people are agitated i think that that's a great environment for good rock and roll in detroit we already had a really solid foundation literally going back about 40 years with uh everything from the pleasure seekers and the unrelated segments to the rationals and bob seger everyone's aware of motown everywhere you know as aware of john lee hooker and a lot of the great blues a lot of great jazz it's the classic northern industrial city where you have this just melting pot of people who came here to work in this case the car industry inevitably they were going to want to be entertained and inevitably the people who entertain them were going to draw on each other so that's why it at the same time right now in the 21st century we get a kid rock and an m m and a white stripes [Music] [Music] in the 90s the most influential music venue in detroit was the gold dollar jack and meg have often talked about how they developed their musical style and image in this much loved venue the epicenter of the local music scene in general especially uh any music that wasn't kid rock or eminem or anything was the gold dollar which was a now defunct bar on cass in the heart of the cass corridor i saw the first white stripe show there the gold dollar used to be a drag queen bar back i don't know 70s 80s and it closed down and neil yi bought it and opened it up and it just turned into like the hip place neil put people in there that were brand new or that hadn't really proven themselves i think the white stripes played their first show at the gold dollar during the autumn of 1997 the pair played at many of the local detroit music venues but their favorite haunt was still the gold dollar i started the gold dollar because i really wanted to have a place to put in all kinds of music that no one else would book is a large part of it uh what paid the bills was the detroit garage rock scene and that sort of thing and some of the more out there stuff we did we were trying to be really adventurous about it the gold dollar was uh dark and dingy it was kind of your classic you know grimy rock clubs very detroit you know but uh it definitely became the mecca the attitude that i had with it is this isn't a bar this is a music venue we were only open when we had shows we were open thursday friday saturday for i think three years i ran the open mic night on sunday by myself there but we were looking at it as a venue at the gold dollar it was really this kind of open room very open to whatever these bands wanted to play and that it became an incubator really became a place for them to to learn how to do what they do to learn how to perform live to write their songs to try their songs out a lot of local bands could easily slide in because you didn't charge that much at the door and for some reason you know sometimes you've got this magical thing going on where the building has a great sound you don't have to screw with it [Music] the first person to take the band more seriously was dave buick of italy records who approached jack and meg about the possibility of releasing a record the first single let's shake hands was released towards the end of 1997 but only 500 copies of this single were initially pressed i remember dave buick the guy who started italy records saying that he came up to jack and said hey you want to make a record i want to put out 45 of the white stripes and jack was like well i can't afford to do that so in his mind he hadn't even come to this point where he was thinking about making records when jack first started out his uh those singles that he had on italy records the drums were very primal and it was probably because meg was just learning but because they've stuck together for so long i could hear the development over the years jack gave me the first one that they did and and i picked it up and looked at it and i remember turning it kind of sideways to look at it and all this stuff came pouring out like money and little scraps of paper with little ideas and pieces of history on them and i was like what is this it's like a little grab bag of interesting stuff and and it was just unusual it was very sort of unceremoniously homemade [Music] this is just folk music really i mean just storytelling and melody behind it you know that's basically what uh everybody really wants to hear in the back of their head you know the front part of their brain might tell them that they want something new and something electronic with a lot of gadgets and a lot of trickery you know but really what their mind wants is a story and they want to sing along with it by 1999 the white stripes had cut their first self-titled album with the help from detroit producer jim diamond it was released by independent california label sympathy for the record industry when i first saw jack and meg playing together it was uh you know it was kind of funny because megan just started playing the drums and they were just some you know they're about 10 years younger than i am so they were just beating out i think jack is ten years younger than that nine to ten years younger so they're just beating out some real simple chords on the guitar and drums and he was shrieking and i thought it was kind of funny it was he was cute the first white stripes record probably was i don't know we probably did that in like you know a week seven days five days but it was split up so we'd come in and do all the tracks and then come back and do the mixing so it didn't take long at all jim diamond's sort of now legendary detroit producer lent his hand to it but certainly no polish whatsoever and i think a lot of the die hard fans will tell you that at least sentimentally that's still the one that that grabs them sure but in typical sympathy for the record industry fashion you know i went out and bought it you know rather than waiting for them waiting for that company to try to send it to me you know the one thing about the white stripes very early on was it's not that they were anti-success but jack in particular was so much about doing it on his own terms i mean as far as as jack getting the sound that he wants he had some ideas he was very you know self-conscious i think so we had to run everything i remember we ran all the vocals through a guitar amp because he said i don't want to sound like it's in the studio i said but you're in a studio so then you should do a live recording but so no it was it was pretty easy we had a good time together my first record came out it was just it was like you know one of the first exciting detroit bands to have a record out you know there were a lot of rocker bands putting records out but that was the first one that was kind of like truly quirky at that very exciting time you know i think their other albums have all been very accomplished but that that was the one that sounded because it was the first one it sounded the freshest and and the most original and the rawest and so yeah i was i felt like they did a great job and was very excited that first album in a lot of points sounded like something that was always on the verge of falling apart in a lot of ways that was the charm that was kind of the there was an energy but at the same time it was always teetering on that edge and it gave it that sense of tension i think that that uh the good rock and roll has as far as a favorite memory recording there's this one song on the first regular jack rings his school bell over and over and i really liked recording a bell that was one of my favorite memories [Music] watching her cross closer [Music] the white stripes fame was growing rapidly within detroit's underground music circles although jack has always taken control of the band's performances meg's powerful role within the duo has been less understood she's mega shy you know just like anyone would be if they're put on the spot but i remember her you know she's always the one closing the bar out at night you know she was one of the last ones left every night out of the whole gamut of a lot of detroit rockers he was the one who wasn't like you know just at the bar on the weekend getting wasted or anything any of that he always struck me as being very serious about being in a band and he was one of the few people who was uh seemed business-like about it friends of the white stripes will tell you that meg is a very quiet person probably even sort of shy but that when she does talk jack definitely listens people things that haven't changed he's always been considerate especially to bands that he invites to play with and he's as smart as hell you know he knows what he's doing he's very confident in his shows as the band's reputation grew it was ironic that bass players from across detroit started offering their services [Music] there used to be talk about people would write or say hey man you guys need a bass player i'll try out you know people would joke people would do that seriously man where's the bass player well as the sound man i wouldn't say they needed a bass but i did cheat with them a little bit because i'd say on the new records and the way they play now this guitar sound is a lot thicker he had one amp and it was really thin sounding and i would always actually eq it quite a bit and do some other things to make it fuller sounding because you need a fuller sound you don't necessarily need the bass but you do need a fuller sound well the fact that they don't have a bass player really and the fact that they've gotten away with not having a bass player to me really isn't that surprising because there have been other bands out of detroit that were huge in other parts of the world like the gorys flat duo jets phantom rooster the gory's blues blues men controlling personalities those are probably all the reasons they never got a bassist you know there's already a precedent set for not needing a basis by bands that he really liked i think it was just part of the whole like needing to control the whole product you know he's always seemed really conscious of their image you know even before they actually had the finances to control it as as carefully as they do now they weren't as image conscious at first no i'm sure that i'm sure that happens to every band where the the more fame you get the more image consciously you become i think that's just natural you start to feel you notice that more people are looking at you so you want to put on a show you know on stage those two are very color coordinated the backdrop is often an american flag red and white close friends of jack will tell you his whole house is done up in red and white from top to bottom which tells you he's at least pretty dedicated to the idea funny thing is nobody ever questioned it everybody just got so used to seeing the red and white but it just it didn't nobody ever questioned it so it developed in such a huge way that the white stripes have actually gone beyond their colors not sure how the red and white plays in to their mystique from on their side i mean in my opinion i think it's it's sort of a way of keeping things honest just as their music is as honest as it is and there's a dualistic quality about it too you know that the fact that it's jack and mag guitar drums two colors red and white you know they intermingle they come apart they're you know they can act as lines they can they can mix together they can do all these different things it's just these two colors [Applause] ride [Applause] [Music] [Music] during this phase of the white stripes jack was surprisingly also playing in the country band two-star tabernacle as well as in rock combo the go i first came across uh jack playing in um god there's another band two-star tabernacle and i saw him play live and i said who's the guy with the split ends hair dude which it was a banda who kind of fit into the garage scene and that they were a rock band with you know specific reference points but they were definitely not part of the garage thing and he was the guy who stood out in the band he had a shock of curly blonde hair on the top of his hair superstar tabernacle were this kind of country-esque in the in the broad range of country in a city that's never that's always had a country market but never really seemed to produce that kind of talent so that was really kind of a groundbait groundbreaking very original type of band when he was in two star tabernacle he's like hey this is dan's band i'm just playing guitar i'm just doing this uh when he was played with the go uh it was kind of the same thing yeah we said we set up and just that's exactly what comes out we don't sit down and say oh we're gonna write this song and you know and it should be like this or it should be like that i mean it's just you know what it comes out the goat signed an exclusive contract to the famous trend setting indie label subpop john krautner is the guitarist from the band and has fond memories of those days he had an enormous influence because uh at up till that point we had just be we just turned into a five piece so all of a sudden we sounded bigger we rewrote the songs on the first record to have big guitar solos in him and uh he was perfect for the job because of course we all know a fantastic guitar player to go have always sounded very much like a detroit band you know they could have the go could have been 1969 as much as they could have been 1989 and that's a compliment i mean they were the band that kind of sprung out of nowhere they were the young kids um he wasn't in the band when they first started and they they were kind of a band that had this instant buzz around them in the go he would usually take the high part of a three-part harmony because he could do it so easily and i would take the low part and bobby would take the middle part worked out great so there were some buzz around them and shortly before they got their subpop deal he you know he was playing started playing with them but at the time they were a band that like everybody had played in you know uh marco from paybacks and rocket455 played with them matt smith from outrageous cherry had played with them i mean they just had this revolving cast of characters and jack seemed like when they got in there they solidified as a band and uh he's definitely seemed like the driving force behind what they were doing but you know that many uh stubbornly driven people in one band can't be a good thing rock and roll wasn't meant to be changed it was just meant to like be made better [Music] in march of 2000 jack and meg divorced but after only a brief musical separation they recorded their second album de stilge thanks to local boys kid rock and particularly eminem the nation's attention was now firmly on the detroit music scene in terms of whether we felt like a long time had gone on between the first and second records i'm not not really it you know again it after the first record they were still a local band so local bands kind of you don't you don't hold local bands to the same standards that you hold the national bands i was really impressed though when uh the second record came out and was called the steel because you know that's the with the dutch art movement where you know whoever is all about primary colors and it obviously has you know affected jack and meg's fashion sensibilities a lot it's also was an art movement that was concerned with uh simplicity the second record jack recorded at their home for his home and then we just mixed it here and did like maybe a few overdubs here [Music] we just write songs like the way we have always written songs no there was never any pre-meditation about it you know if we went in and said we're going to make a soul record or we're going to make a country record it'd probably be a failure in many ways you know it would just let the songs come out the way uh they come out naturally one by one a different story each time and then it'll be like it'll be okay it'll be a lot it'll make a lot more sense than if you had saw all this premeditation behind it it was an album that could grab you on the first listen and uh i think my one of my favorite quotes from jack was uh he said i we were pretty angry on the first album but that's gone i think we've we've gone from anger to bitterness [Music] in the spring of 2001 jack white produced sympathetic sounds of detroit the compilation album of up-and-coming detroit bands [Music] the paybacks performed the first song on the album at the time that jack recorded that record um the big white stripes explosion hadn't hadn't even happened yet and um white blood cells hadn't come out yet i remember looking at the artwork or at his house and uh and it was just a cool experiment he knew there were a lot of great bands out here in detroit that weren't necessarily going to get a lot of exposure so he thought wouldn't be cool if we put together you know an all detroit comp of like-minded groups now people look at it and they try to ascribe some kind of importance or some kind of design to it but the reality is jack just had the idea that it'd be kind of cool if he invited all his friends to come up and record on the same equipment same amplifiers same drums and everybody give it their best song and see what happens and see what it sounded like which you know they ended up doing and it was you know it kind of was the one of the early salvos of what maybe has come to be known as the detroit sound and so it was really a very innocent attempt to do something creatively interesting hearing about it coming out a lot you know a lot of friends of mine were involved there's this whole buzz about how this thing was going to make detroit it was going to be the next you know make all these bands and i think on some you know on many levels it did you know a lot of bands that had barely been around at all at that point are now more phenomenon because of that compilation jack's intention in making that record was just to get the most clear picture of each band that he could get just something really unaffected and he was very hands-off about it but the interesting thing was if you if you listen there's there are segues in between each song that are just snippets of each band playing off the hook um blues riffs and that was something that he just decided in there he said okay i just want you to play some blues and everyone kind of shrugs their shoulders and looks at each other and just any any kind of blues just make up some silly blues riff and it was a really revealing picture of how individual all these bands are the sympathetic sounds of the of detroit album was it was great it was you know it was one guy's view of hey here's a bunch of cool bands from from detroit and he picked he picked an awful lot of very good bands and it was i remember when i first saw it you the one thing you kind of thought about with g wouldn't it be great if this did come out on a major label so you could flash it in front of people and it would get that kind of distribution [Music] after the distilled album the white stripes became one of the most popular musical attractions on the detroit circuit we opened up for the white stripes and it was our very first show and i love that band i thought they were great and the first thing i said to jack white i complimented him on his red pants i remember you know from the first time they played there and meg just kind of looking confused um she always has that kind of that kind of look kind of going on but not really but she was really looking confused with first setting up the drums you know obviously it's jack setting everything up who knows how to where everything goes and it was clear at the beginning that he was directing every every move on it and it was interesting seeing her actually learn and pick that up while playing a gig at the magic stick for a small audience back when you know nobody knew who they were he stormed off the stage because the light wasn't properly it was it wasn't the way he wanted it you can connect that to something that happened this year at a huge rock festival in california at coachella when in front of about 40 000 people he threw something of a mini tantrum on stage because the mix wasn't perfect on stage so i you know jack's definitely a guy who cares about how the music's coming off he has a microphone in front of the drum kit that has a uh some sort of processing on the on the uh it's an old school head on the mic and then he has another regular microphone facing the crowd and he would leap back and forth between these two mics while like slashing away at his guitar playing these sort of primal you know garage punk blues riffs while you know kind of yellowing in this his voice which has been you know described to be half robert plant half holland wolf i don't know some you know all these different comparisons it was a mix of like uh robert smith and ethel merman or something you know he he would screech and he was doing stuff that i think most people would be totally scared to do you know like you know crazy falsettos and vibrato like at the end of uh let's shake hands and you know holding it all down sans bass player is is meg you know with just sort of you know she's pounding on the drums in a way but and it's not technically efficient but she's keeping the rhythm and and she's watching jack with this wrapped attention and just as he is you know looking at her often more than he's looking actually at the crop it was clear that that jack and meg were very tuned in to each other but in the beginning she used to operate very much off of cues that he would give her and you could see he would make little counts [Music] he would do little gestures that were counting gestures and i remember picking up on that right away and thinking how amazing that was so they have their own individual kind of communication that you you definitely see in concert and you certainly feel in the music you do feel her responding to him and really in the last couple of years you've also started i think to hear jack respond to things that meg does i think meg has developed the confidence to play something you know that just comes into her head and then jack will gleefully respond to that intuition with the two of them and the kind of natural exchange has become so so much more natural and it's loose but it's tight at the same time you know which is always when when a band can pull that off that's that's it that's sort of that's sort of what it's all about in rock and roll i was watching him from the stage and the crowd was singing along with the words and i was just in awe i was amazed because i was like wow they're really they're really hypnotizing this town with their music and it's working it sounds great and uh after the show he was i talked to him he was just as amazed as i was he goes i can't believe they were singing the song you know and we were all really happy so it was sort of like good for all of us when that happened because it was like someone is finally getting through to everybody [Music] [Music] the white stripes recorded their third album white blood cells in memphis tennessee in early 2001. although they decided to record the album away from home when it came to the release party there was only one place to go the gold dollar in detroit city it was a three-night release for white blood cells and uh we did the first night of it and uh seeing the place that filled up and i mean they'd done a couple they did that a couple they did a two night once also two nights in a row with gold dollar that was sold out and then yeah that that record release was just amazing white blood cells was actually recorded in memphis uh in a in a big studio on a 24 track board probably didn't use nearly all of those tracks because i think that the mandate from jack to the album's engineer was we still want this to sound like it was recorded in a bedroom the white blood cells album um i would say was probably the most commercial the first three and great and brought them to the mass appeal that they have now i think they would have stayed very much underground if they kept the sound of the original two albums but they started um to have a more commercial but again which is so important keeping that energy and that kind of uh white stripe sandwiches to me is totally unique the white blood cells album of course came along with the setup you know the rolling stone you know one of the 10 bands to watch this year and that that created a whole different aura around that album people people i think certainly and it's especially outside of detroit a were just discovering the white stripes so they they just began listening to it a little closer [Music] to me white blood cells has the sense of confidence that almost oozes off the disc you can you can hear a real sense of sureness in the playing and in the songwriting and in a way it's it's not surprising that that was the album that finally broke these guys it has a real childlike quality in some of the songs but then there's these sort of moments of of you know sonic fury you know it's just slashing away at this guitar and the production's really great in that record too i mean for just a duo they still sound like a duo but there's just a really great roaring guitar sound in that in all jack jack's guitar playing that i think a lot of people latch on to one of the singles that came off that album fell in love with a girl which is just an absolutely brilliant almost like punkish 90-second pop record and um the sort of thing that our dj's put on down here on like friday and saturday nights and people just go absolutely nuts you still get people saying oh god who's that record who's that by but as soon as they know it is you know they become converted like me and go out and buy it's a great great record [Music] in the summer of 2001 great britain caught white stripes fever they were enthusiastically introduced to the british public by influential bbc radio jock john peele who compared their importance on the music scene to that of jimi hendrix and the sex pistols it's hard to know what to to do with a compliment like that your first reaction is of course no it's wrong you know they're wrong and we're being labeled improperly with so much you know hyperbole you know but uh what can you do it's like if your dad patch on the back and says hey you're doing a good job son uh it might be a different story than when you know a hundred thousand people are patting you on the back or something or whatever it is how many people read those things i don't know so it's hard to understand it's hard to enjoy it really i just decided not to enjoy it and don't even think about it really he said if i thought about that too much you know it makes too much pressure on you i can say that when i heard the white stripes were winning the favor of john peel and had done two initial sessions you knew it was going to take off from there well i'd finally gotten high-speed internet at my house and uh so i'm flipping through and i'm going okay internet radio let's see what's on and i'm thinking okay we'll listen to whatever's there and i i switch on to bbc one and it's john peel doing a show detroit special show an entire hour or something about detroit music and they started talking about the gold dollar in the first 10 minutes of my internet radio experience and i thought there really is no escape [Music] [Applause] their first uk gig was at the 100 club on london's famous oxford street the first time i came across the white stripes was when metropolis music called me and asked me to put a date into the diary form and to be honest with you even though i like to think that i've got my nose to the ground i've never heard of them i've never heard of them and then gradually as the date got nearer and nearer and nearer um it was quite obvious that they were going to be absolutely enormous the impact of the show here was huge it's the only show probably other than the oasis one that we've done recently where we could have sold out four or five times over the interest was absolutely phenomenal they were both as you'd imagine a lot of americans to be they're very very um talkative very very interested in the club jack quite obviously knew a lot about the club he'd heard about one of his idol son house plan here in 1970 and recorded an album down here and was very knowledgeable about the club and i got the sense that he was genuinely felt quite honoured to play here now that probably sounds a bit sort of pretentious on our part but jack did seem as if he really didn't want to be here meg was very quiet very shy i didn't you know she was very polite and nice but jack obviously knew the place [Applause] [Music] cause he walked through the door and he literally had two guitars and an amp plonked him on the stage and that was it there's no back line there was no special i think he had an effects pedal but other than that that was it the kick came in for meg and that's how they played the whole gig right the way through which is completely unheard of at the time [Music] the atmosphere was absolutely electric i think the white stripes gig here will go down as one of those were you at gigs kind of thing you know what the stones has done over here the two stone shows that we did the sex pistol show the oasis show i think that the white stripes gig genuinely will go down um as one of those i must have i wish i'd been there shows the atmosphere was fantastic i mean you just felt that there was something magic about this band and this band were going to be absolutely enormous i mean some people have got it and some people haven't and as a front man jack's remarkable really is a brilliant musician but as a front man quite incredible [Music] we're brother and sister we grew up together and that was the only thing only relationship we had besides that before the band so megan never played before when we started playing together it was just sort of a lark it seemed to work out well it was real childish and very primitive so we just kind of continued working on and see if anything good would come out of it any good songs and try to make some seven inch records together and see you know that was just really the most exciting part [Music] jack white still introduces meg as his sister even if we all know they're our ex-husband and wife although jack dismisses media attention on his private life the white stripes have had a love-hate relationship with the press the white stripes have always been good about creating stuff to talk about whether they're husband and wife brother and sister divorced what's they steal why do they wear red and whites you know what's jack jack's hair look like that's one thing they're good at for a group that really doesn't court the attention they've always been good at just creating stuff to talk about and that's that's part of the magic of them too [Music] when the detroit free press revealed publicly the story of megan jack's real relationship which was the fact that they were indeed divorcees and not brother and sister i don't think jack was real happy about it he got up on stage that night and the theme of that show was essentially the detroit free press sucks although the detroit free press were the first organization to announce the real jack and meg relationship the glorious noise website was the first one to announce it to the world i guess the the idea behind putting the wedding certificate online on the site for glorious noise what came about through sort of these email arguments that would transpire between myself and the editor-in-chief and various other contributors trying to decide whether you know it was a good idea to put it on there but we liked the idea of doing it for the same reasons i was just i was talking about that that we wanted to cover the band and their music we also wanted to cover the hype behind the band and the fact that that their wedding certificate was readily available you know in the coleman young building in detroit for 15 or so we could simply go down and get it we figured why not put on the site the brother sister thing has always confused me and it's always hard to tell i have never been able to actually go with that because you know i know meg i know jack through meg and i know meg through her sister um [Music] to me it's it's i mean i don't know it doesn't bother me i think it's kind of funny like everyone has to play some game and i think it actually helps to have some question about it the brother sister mythology was something that seemed to be part of their schtick pretty early on not clear how seriously everyone was supposed to take it i mean around town it was pretty common knowledge what the real relationship was between these two everybody who went to watch white stripes show were white stripes friends you know with the white stripes it was an interesting situation where you had a band that was a really great band you know straight up if you remove all the hype away from the white stripes they're a great great band i really think that it wasn't a big deal for them it was just something fun and people got all been out of shape and blew it all out of proportion and the press seized on it but you know there are people that would try to suggest that jack manufactured that you know for some ulterior purpose and i assure you that is not the case [Music] [Music] towards the end of 2001 jack and meg received a call from v2 records the white stripes agreed to an unusually generous contract that let them retain controlling rights to their past and future work v2 re-released white blood cells and bolstered by a well-timed marketing campaign sold nearly a million copies worldwide they managed to grab a really nice record deal very unusual kind of contract that they gave jack a control that most artists in that position don't get usually when you sign a record deal you you give up the rights to the master recordings the record label owns them at that point um he he not only kept the rights to his own stuff he managed to get his own boutique record label out of the deal and pretty much retained creative control you know any any good artist would say oh i want to you know retain rights to all the masters and do things like that most people i think most people that i deal with are probably too smart to let these things get away from them they say oh sure you can have the publishing you know it's not like the old days where they'd say oh uh i'm broke give me 50 bucks okay sign away this song well keep in mind you know jack white may may have his bohemian side but he's run his own businesses comes from a good family a smart family he is no dummy he knows how to cut himself a good deal so he essentially to my understanding has a distribution deal through through v2 but third man is its own entity you know third man owns owns what it does the direct creator has creative control over what it does and gives it to gives it to this larger label to take advantage of its distribution [Music] on his previous trips to london jack had met up with liam watson whose band had supported the white stripes in the past the first contact i had with the band was when they played at the 100 club and a group that i am in played with them opened up for them and we met you know when we got there jack and mega there we got introduced to them what had caught jack's eye was liam's unusual recording facilities at toe rag studios which featured an eclectic mix of 70s and 80s equipment as 2002 drew to a close jack and meg returned to london to start work on their next album elephant toe rag studios was their destination the recording of elephant you know was we booked a kind of period of about two weeks of which you know there was some time off during that two weeks to do gigs and stuff um and then there was a a short session sort of um about three or four months before we started doing elephant proper there was a session that we did one evening you know that um where we did the song that ends the album i know that john schmanski our bass player turned him on to liam the guy who runs toe rag jack seemed to be pretty excited you know by uh the way the studio was you know came in saw all the old gear and was like there's nowhere like this in detroit well they like the way the studio set up i mean this studio is a kind of particular type of studio you know the reason being is because you know the way i like to record it and i think the way that best records the best records have been made is with this kind of setup you know which some people might call like limitations or restrictions and i think that's the same way that they feel i think they start to see all the other options available in the world and you want to experiment and try different things and i can never blame an artist for wanting that because i'd probably want to do the same thing sometimes the world's press have been slightly misled by i don't know where there's some press release from somewhere um you know had said something like that all the gear was from like pre-1963 you know well that's like rubbish you know i do have stuff from before 63 like this desk for instance here but i didn't use that on anything you know i use this desk here which is it's a bit of a custom job now this desk because i've kind of like put various different things but you know originally this desk was from like 1981 or something which isn't particularly 1963 you know i think they went to england in the tow rag just out of out of pure adventure you know and jack loved the room he loved all the vintage gear he loved the limited number of tracks and the challenge that that presents and it was just the kind of room that totally appealed to his aesthetic and we'd kind of been settled in for a couple of days and then we were doing ball and biscuit and you know jack's kind of interested in in you know things i'm doing on a desk and i'm sort of showing in various things and because that's got that quite sort of heavy kind of drum beat on it so i was you know when they were kind of running through it and i was in here you know i was kind of playing around with compressors on the desk and making it sound stupid you know and uh that was good fun because then of course they come in and i play it to him like really loud and sounding a bit pretty heavy and oh wow you know they loved that so that was kind of good fun you know elephant is uh the album that finds the white stripes dabbling in a few different musical areas you've got vocal harmonies you've got the sound of a bass um you've got a guest singer you know i got a call from [Music] you know jack saying uh you know we'd like to come in the studio tonight you know would that be possible and you know just luckily enough i wasn't busy so i said yeah sure you know and that was good fun because they came down and holly was with them and bruce you know who's uh a good friend of us all um he's in my group as well and so it was kind of you know a bit of fun really um i think jack had written that song you know earlier on in the day and and then wanted to come in just to try out the studio really so i put them in there and set them in a circle next to each other and then that you know then kind of rolled you know got the sound up and yeah it was good fun and uh that was it then jack added a piano and a bit of cushion or whatever and then we mixed it in about 10 minutes and the whole thing was done in about two hours or something i thought elephant was a masterpiece from the very beginning of seven nation army that first you know the base tone on his guitar and i just said yeah you could tell for this was this was for keeps not that the other albums weren't weren't approached seriously but i i think they certainly went into the studio if not feeling pressured then knowing that this was an album that was going to be not just looked at and scrutinized by the press but would probably be bought by an audience that had just heard about the white stripes they were quite interested in in the tape editing that i was doing on on the record you know with the razor blade and the pencil and so meg was quite interested having a look you know and i said you can do one if you want you know so i got to edit one of the songs you know and she liked that you know that was good so i showed how to do it so now you can do it you know she did a good job you know i think there's a future for meg in editing you know if she decides not to she decides to give up the drumming you know the album hit the stores in april 2003 to fantastic reviews and massive sales although the white stripes had a record deal with a large record company jack white stayed very much in control of elephant his last record he didn't send out any cd promos he sent out only vinyl promos because as quoted in interview magazine he said that he doesn't want any critics reviewing the record who don't own record players that's the ballsiest thing i've ever heard anybody i first got the elephant album on the two promotional vinyl discs that uh you know just cracked up when it came because it's like oh my god what are we doing here you know i had to take everything off my turntable it was piled up on top of it because i long ago really stopped using it actively [Music] i think you've always been the most comfortable playing live it was just a matter of seeing how we liked uh actually doing festivals and the change between that and doing like more intimate you know kind of atmosphere and clubs so but i mean it's gone so pretty good so far i mean we kind of didn't expect it would but but i mean it's it's pretty good so it's changing our minds on festivals a little bit [Music] the white stripes have always stayed true to their hometown and their friends on their last tour jack asked his old band the go to be his support act this past tour with the white stripes we did six shows they were very regimented everything was timed perfectly jack's whole crew was like dressed to the nines and we were we walked in and we're just we're used to like dropping our equipment in some small crapo club and you know going to find a pizza but you know they had a catering you know unit all laid out i did go to the show a few weeks ago at masonic temple i went with heather and meg's sister and their mom that was fun but it was really neat seeing him at a big venue with you know 14 year old girls screaming for jack white that that was weird it was funny when they opened the doors i thought back i'm like okay there was that one the first night i saw them with just the sound guy now i have to watch myself so i'm not trampled by these 14 year old girls running to get to the front of the stage i was amazed it wasn't pretty incredible [Music] so with worldwide success under their belt what is the future of the white stripes i really don't know what the future holds the white stripes but i suspect that it's going to be it's going to be creatively compelling i think there's probably a limited time that's you know where you can take the duo but i'm sure they'll you know have things to do musically [Applause] i can definitely see jack taking on other projects i see other opportunities obviously open up to meg but i think that regardless of the fame and everything as long as as long as they maintain a good working relationship and it's obvious that they have made it work that there's no reason for them to stop [Music] i came out and said you know another album and we're gone which is funny because he didn't say that and but he was quoted as saying that by mojo and now finds himself reacting to having predicted the demise of the white stripes the problem is you know there's not a lot you can do with just the guitar and just the drought and just the drum kit and vocals i i would think that the white stripes will probably um try to sort of subtly change their music as they have done from the word go [Music] the songs have read have developed they've changed and i think a band can survive just from that alone from changing the white stripes phenomenon has only been with us for the last few years yet their influence on how other bands make music has been enormous i think that jack has this grand plan in his head for this continuum of the band a beginning and an end and maybe their explosion of popularity has sort of thrown a wrench into that plan but i think he'll stick to it it's hard to tell what the future holds for this remarkable duo from detroit city but meg and jack's influence on our lives seems set to continue well into the future

Channel: Amplified

Views: 13,674

Keywords: Amplified, amplified channel, music, pop culture, culture channel, documentaries, music documentaries, pop, film, music interviews, film interviews, jack white, the white stripes, meg white, the white stripes seven nation army, the white stripes band members, the white stripes band, jack and meg white interview, jack and me white relationship, jack and meg white fight, detroit bands, detroit artists, detroit rock city

Id: LLomjbZ9GWY

Length: 61min 5sec (3665 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 06 2021