|
Born in July 1975 to a musical family of 10 children in the southwest Detroit neighborhood of Mexicantown, John "Jack" Gillis was already playing drums at age 11. By 1992, he was a 17-year-old music student at the prestigious Lewis Cass Technical High School. But it was during an apprenticeship at Muldoon Studio, an upholstery shop run by a family friend, that Gillis' musical education started in earnest. And it was there that the White Stripes' story really began...
In 1994, still working in the upholstery shop and jamming with [Brian] Muldoon in a band now called Two Part Resin, Jack successfully audtioned--as a drummer!--for Goober & the Peas, a country-surf-punk band with an established following... Jack had become romantically involved with Megan White, who was a year older and had grown up in the affluent suburb of Grosse Pointe, east of Detroit. They would marry in 1996, and, strangely, he would take his wife's surname, becoming Jack White...
"When I first heard about them naming the band the White Stripes, I thought people were going to think they were a skinhead band. Originally, they were tossing back and forth the names Bazooka and Soda Powder, so the White Stripes didn't seem so bad. Meg came up with it, and the story about them getting it from the candy might be true, but they also had some old bricks in front of the house in the garden that said White on them, and that might have had something to do with it." -Ben Blackwell, Jack White's nephew; drummer, the Dirtbombs
"The legendary story is one day Meg just sat down at the drums while Jack was playing guitar, and they started playing "Moonage Daydream" by David Bowie, or something like that. That's the thing. The people making this kind of music-they ain't chops-oriented. It's all about the feeling. So much of the stuff is self-taught; so much of the music they're creating can't be taught. It's people making the music they want to hear. It's raw and intuitive. It's not technical, and it shouldn't be." -Greg Biase, Promotions director, Majestic Theater Center and Magic Stick rock club
In 1997, a garage-rock revival hit Detroit, led by a band called Rocket 455. In addition to the White Stripes, Jack was playing with a variety of bands, including the Hentchmen and a more country-oriented act with [Dan] Miller called Two Star Tabernacle. In August of that year, the Stripes played their first public show, opening for the Hentchmen at the Gold Dollar, a club in the trashed, inner-city neighborhood of Cass Corridor, the center of the burgeoning garage scene.
"We did our first show two months after I started playing drums. [From The Detroit Free Press, 2001]" -Meg White
"I put out the first two singles. That whole first year, every single person misprinted the band name--it was always 'White Stripe' or 'White Strike' or 'White Strikes'. It never got printed right-for a whole year." -Dave Buick, Founder, Italy Records; bassist the Go
"John [Krautner, guitarist for Detroit glam-garage band the Go] and I saw Two Star Tabernacle one night. Jack was laying back playing guitar, singing harmonies with Dan Miller. He just had a great stage presence-he looked really cool, comfortable. He wasn't a phony at all. Later, Jack was over at Dave Buick's house, so John and I went over there: 'Hey, Jack, we've got a question for you.' And Jack said, 'Yes, yes, absolutely. I wanna join-count me in.'" -Bobby Harlow, singer the Go
Within months, the Go became the top band on the Detroit music scene, signing with Seattle's Sub Pop Records, the original home of Nirvana. Jack White would eventually play guitar and sing ont he Go's debut, 1999's Whatcha Doin'.
"It was a matter of whether Jack was going to be on the [Sub Pop] contract. Basically, if Jack had signed, that would have meant Sub Pop would have rights to the White Stripes stuff as well. It seemed like a bad idea. Jack had established the White Stripes as something. He was teetering--'Should I sign, should I not?' He decided no... Jack is one of the most talented guitar players I've ever met, and I have nothing but respect for him. To have a focused vision like Jack does, there's no way he can compromise that. Nobody could step in and say, 'I think you oughta play like this, Jack.' It would be an insult, really." -Harlow
"We never rehearse, she never practices her drums on her own, and I never practice guitar on my own. If I played guitar every day and Meg played drums every day, I think it would take away from the soul of it, the reality of it. If we had set lists and played the same set every night, it would get us into a structure, which is what we're trying to keep away from." -Jack White
By 1999, the White Stripes had recorded their first album, including songs Jack had written back in his days with Brian Muldoon. It was released by the independent Long Beach, California, label Sympathy for the Record Industry.
"There's definitely a childishness in it. From Meg's standpoint, the drumming is real primitive...and my voice, I think, sometimes sounds like a little kid. You see that approach in a lot of great bands--Iggy Pop throwing tantrums. Everybody's still that same person they were when they were young, at least they still want to be. They still want to have that freedom. [From Willamette Week, 2000]" -Jack White
In March, 2000, for reasons still not clear, Jack and Meg divorced, but they kept the band together (recording a second album, De Stijl). And thanks to Kid Rock and Eminem bringing the music world's spotlight on Detroit, the White Stripes attracted national attention. In the spring of 2001, the traveled to Doug Easley's Memphis recording studio to cut their third album, White Blood Cells, the band's breakthrough, also released on Sympathy for the Record Industry.
"We just set up and they started going. Jack knew what he wanted. Meg didn't think they should be recording-she thought the songs were too new. Jack knows what he wants, has a really good idea what he's going for. Meg is pretty quiet. She drank her bourbon and smoked a lot of cigarettes. I think Meg was a little nervous being in a big studio, bigger than what they were used to. The main thing I tried to do was make them comfortable so they could play well--with Meg, making sure her part didn't totally suck. She was pretty self-concious about it." -Stuart Sikes, Recording engineer
"Meg's quiet, but Meg's power is that she only speaks up when she has to. She very rarely says anything, but when she says something, it holds an awful lot of weight, and Jack always takes what she has to say into serious consideration." -Blackwell
"They came for three days and did most of the songs, then came back for two days, and we mixed the thing the next day. Jack told me more than once not to make it sound too good. I knew what he was talking about--from recording at their house to a 24-track studio. Basically, he wanted it as raw as possible, but better than if it was recorded in somebody's living room." -Stuart Sikes
"You can go back and think about songs that came close to being perfect, like 'Strawberry Fields Forever', and it has tons of tape hiss and surface noise and different room reverbs, things like that. People don't realize that there's a point where that's it. Like with microphones recording the human voice--they reached a pinnacle at some point. Or the Fender Twin Reverb [amplifier]--it's been out for 40 years, and they've never improved on it. And they're never gonna do it, because that's what a guitar sounds like. It's like, 'Why is a violin the shape a violin is,' you know? I mean, couldn't Stradivarius have figured out a different shape to make a violin sound a little better? No. That's as good as it's gonna get." -Jack White
Summer 2001: Enthusiastically introduced to England by influential radio DJ John Peel, the band staged a quick club tour and were hailed by the British music press as the saviors of rock'n'roll... The White Stripes returned for a triumphant homecoming concert at the Detroit Institute of Arts in November 2001--with 3,750 fans in the audience and a Detroit city flag hanging behind the band. As music-industry interest grew, the band signed with V2 Records, a label with hefty distribution and marketing power via the BMG conglomerate. In an extraordinary deal, the White Stripes retained creative control and ownership of their recordings, and V2 agreed to distribute Jack's label, Third Man. V2 reissued White Blood Cells in 2002, and soon the band's video for 'Fell in Love With a Girl' was being played on MTV.
"British bands are so worried about being cool that they have to pretend that they're unaware of any music more than two years old. They're reluctant to admit they've even heard Oasis. I was amazed when Jack was perfectly happy to talk about things from my own childhood, because he knew them and he didn't think it was uncool to know them. So we were talking about some of the great concerts of my life, when I saw Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent play at the Liverpool Empire, four days before Eddie Cochran was killed in a car crash. When the White Stripes played that night, they ended their set with an Eddie Cochran song and a Gene Vincent song. And I though, 'What a nice thing to do, but also incredibly cool'. A British band couldn't do that; they don't have that kind of flexibility." -John Peel, DJ, BBC radio
"One time, me and Jack and Greg Biase, my roommate, went to dinner; we came home and my dag Barkie had chewed my couch-a big hole. Jack was like, 'Hold on, I'll be right back'. And he went to Brian Muldoon's house and came back and fixed the whole thing. The was like, a year and a half ago-he'd already been on the cover of magazines. And he still reupholstered my furniture." -Dave Buick
As the excitement of 2002 wound down, the Stripes headed to London's Toe Rag studio to record their next album. Elephant hit stores in April 2003, debuting at No. 6 on the Billboard 200 chart, selling more than 500,000 copies to date.
"Loretta Lynn invited them to her ranch, and I went with them. It was funny. Her manager was asking, 'So, what's Detroit ilke? Don't you ever want to move anyplace else?' We talked a little bit about the city's shortcomings. It's not the most cosmopolitan place in the world. But as Jack pointed out, we're not leaving--'Detroit's home'." -Dan Miller
Excerpts taken from ©Spin Magazine, September 2003 Issue. Pages 68-74.
|
