GIRL MUSIC 012: THE WHITE STRIPES | MEG WHITE AND JACK WHITE | “HEY LITTLE APPLE BLOSSOM, COME AND TELL ME WHAT YOU’RE THINKING”
“With the White Stripes, we were trying to trick people into not realizing we were playing the blues.”
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Words: Juno Rylee Schultz (she/her)
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“I got into blues in my late teens. I knew about Robert Johnson from the bands that covered him. And when I heard him, I thought it was OK. Then I heard Son House’s a cappella song “Grinning in Your Face” [from the 1965 Columbia album Father of Folk Blues]. That was a transformative moment. There’s nothing there, just that voice. And what he was singing made so much sense to me.”
— JACK WHITE, Rolling Stone, 2005
“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.
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.”
— JACK WHITE, Rolling Stone, 2005
“We grew up in the late ’80s and ’90s, and what was good in rock’n’roll for those 20 years? Nothing, really. I guess I liked Nirvana.”
— JACK WHITE, Rolling Stone, 2005
“I grew up in the 90s in the time of grunge when if you didn’t go on stage in jeans and a T-shirt you weren’t ‘real.’ That seemed ridiculous to me. With The White Stripes we were trying to trick people into not realizing we were playing the blues.”
— JACK WHITE, The Guardian, 2010
“We have to go back. The last twenty years have been filled with digital, technological crap that’s taken the soul out of music. The technological metronome of the United States is obsessed with progress, so now you have all these gearheads who want to lay down three thousand tracks in their living room. That wasn’t the point.” — JACK WHITE
“The point is being a live band.” — MEG WHITE
“WELL, EVERY HIGHWAY THAT I GO DOWN SEEMS TO BE LONGER THAN THE LAST ONE THAT I KNEW ABOUT …”
The White Stripes began with a simple concept, one that was elegantly executed as a conduit for the Detroit duo’s rock-and-blues fusion. The partnership of musicians would dress up and perform as brother and sister, as if they’d dressed themselves up on a Sunday to share songs and theater together
The White Stripes were an equal-forces amalgamation of performance art and theatre, punk rock and blues, and all the loose notes the two kids couldn’t shake from their heads.
Everything was to be defined by the colors red, white, and black — representing anger and passion, purity and innocence, and the absence of everything when necessary — with the number three emphasized as a representation of Meg White, Jack White, and The White Stripes they formed together.
Meg White was a bartender, Jack White was reupholstering furniture, and The White Stripes were about to redefine what garage rock, blues, indie sleaze, and the Detroit Sound meant to the world.
Jack White, born Jack Gillis, grew up the youngest of ten siblings inside a musical family. He idolized the crunchy, street-punk sound of bands like The Stooges, the lyrically heavy blues and storytelling of legends such as Robert Johnson and Lead Belly, and the slick, straightforward riffs of rock bands like Deep Purple.
It was clear to everyone around Jack growing up that he had aspirations for high notes on stage.
He joined his first band, The Catalyst, in early grade school with his brothers and some friends. Even at that young age, it was said that he sang in a falsetto voice about heartbreak, longing, and the search for that special place.
Some of it was perhaps natural — expected, even — given how musical and encouraging his family was with him and all his siblings. But even more of it felt like aspiration and destiny.
“I know his parents were fans of Cole Porter and were always singing songs around the house. It was like any kid whose parents go around singing old songs. Except I think most other kids are like, ‘ah, my parents are being dorks or whatever,’ but I think Jack really appreciated that stuff, and had respect and reverence for it. I think that’s a great thing. He never shuts anything off.”
— Dan Miller, one-time bandmate and frequent collaborator to Jack White
It also didn’t hurt that Jack grew up surrounded by immigrants, diversity, and people who had to fight for what they needed to get by in life.
Jack White isn’t just from Detroit, Michigan, he’s from Southwest Detroit, with neighborhoods made up of people who waved their hands at the National Guard when federal troops were sent in during the late 1960s to silence and quell protesters and people labeled as “rioters.”
It was a blue-collar, rugged part of Detroit, but it was also a cheaper part of town to live in, so there were plenty of artists and musicians holed up in houses creating together.
Gentrification, poverty, and a rugged set of values from a hardworking city like Detroit — and Jack’s equally hardworking but supportive parents — proved to be a good incubator. It taught Jack that he could do anything, so long as he worked hard enough to make it happen.
“His dad was just a quirky dude. I remember his dad as being retired for almost all of our childhood. He had insane one-liners all the time. And it was a pretty Catholic neighborhood, so his dad was always preaching at me and us. Not in a bad way or anything, just preaching. There was a piano in the house, but it wasn’t a musical house. It’s not what you’d call your typical rock ‘n’ roll scene.”
— Dominic Suchyta, a childhood friend to Jack White
There wasn’t much to do in the neighborhood where Jack, his friends, and his brothers grew up. It was just the suburbs, and they didn’t really want to do much of anything that was available to them.
Speaking about his childhood in interviews, Jack White often says that all he really remembers is playing music and, going off documented accounts from friends, that seems to be accurate.
They would often play at each other’s houses, in bedrooms, or up in Jack’s parents’ attic. Sometimes, they’d make their way into abandoned buildings.
Dominic Suchyta recalls their time together in Chris Handyside’s Fell in Love With a Band:
“We used to play in Jack’s attic at his parents’ house. It had tons of equipment in it. It was funny — since he’s the youngest, only one or two of his brothers were still living there, so the attic was like an abandoned rehearsal space.”
At the time, Jack was playing drums while Dominic played bass, and then Jack would add guitar parts to their tracks later, in post.
“We used to hang out in abandoned buildings, like the Grand Central Station and stuff and none of them ever had any thirteenth floor. When it was just the two of us, we joked that the band was called ‘The Thirteenth Floors.’”
Jack was always into the number three and everything, so it kind of made sense.
“In the train station, we’d throw toilets down the elevator shaft and stuff like that. It was on our way home from school, so we’d do that pretty frequently. We’d take old stuff from those places, like I still have a return address stamp from the Central Station. Cool old Detroit stuff like that.”
Soon, the two boys would start playing blues together as a trio with Jack’s brother, Ed Gillis. The core ideas were in place, and the foundation of what was to come was forming, even if it was still in its early stages.
Dominic Suchyta articulates the passion and messiness in Handyside’s account of the band:
“We called it the Fuck-Ups. Jack and Ed’s singing voices are the earliest singing voices I remember. And Jack’s was nothing to write home about at the time. We didn’t name it the Fuck-Ups — other people named it that. Jack’s the youngest of ten, so I think some of his older brothers called it that.
The only times we performed together was at a party at this brother’s house — like twice. Right in the shadow of Hotel Yorba. Jack wrote a tune with lyrics, a heavy rockin’ blues tune.”
The Fuck-Ups wouldn’t be the band that brought the world the chart-topping “Seven Nation Army” and multiple Gold and Platinum records, but it did lay the foundation.
“After The White Stripes hit it big, one of Jack’s brothers called me telling me he had a royalty check for a band called the Fuck-Ups.”
— Dominic Suchyta, speaking with Chris Handyside for Fell in Love with a Band
Meg White and Jack Gillis would meet toward the end of high school. She was from Grosse Pointe, which was only ten miles away from Jack’s part of Detroit, but a world away from what was happening in his scene.
Jack came from neighborhoods that were predominantly Latino and Black, both socially and culturally. Everyone he knew was broke and had to work hard for what little they managed to scrape together.
Meg White’s family, on the other hand, lived among middle- and upper-middle-class WASP families where parks and neighborhood little leagues were well funded each and every year.
Jack and Meg shared a deep, burning passion for art, music, and creating beautiful things they could put out into the world for everyone to see by tugging at the very corners of the Earth itself.
Everyone who grew up around Meg was shocked to see her drumming with Jack, especially as the band began taking over the world with chart-topping hits and MTV-gripping albums. She was literally the quiet girl who barely spoke in high school.
How were they supposed to believe she was the one making all that noise behind that peppermint-print drum set?
“She was my cousin Diane’s best friend growing up and they were inseparable. She lived across the street from Meg and they were always together. She was always the quiet girl at Diane’s side in junior high. My mom saw her on the cover of a magazine and was like, ‘I can’t believe that’s the little girl that used to do Diane’s hair and makeup.’
She was in a lot of the art classes in my high school. My friends were in classes with her and she was always the quiet, obviously artistic type. Kind of like in the background. You didn’t really notice, because she didn’t really do anything to make you notice her. She just kept very much to herself. I know we used to have art shows at North and I’d see some of her stuff up in those, and she kind of had that vibe to her, like not tortured, but the quiet artist.
It seems like in high school everybody tries their best to have this standout personality, which is kind of pretentious, but that’s high school. And she was cool because she wasn’t like that.
No one knew her. She was just Megan White. I knew her as Megan. And then I started reading that she was now called Meg and I thought, ‘wow, a rock star name.’”
— Matthew Peabody, Meg White’s neighbor growing up, reflecting back on everything in 2005
“I hung out with Jack and Meg maybe a couple dozen times. It was our senior year that they met and that Jack and Meg started hanging out.
Back then, there were only a couple other kids we’d hang out with [at coffeehouses and playing music in Detroit].
I kinda feel bad now [on moving away from Detroit to attend Michigan State University] because they didn’t know anybody. Detroit’s not really set up for folks who are underage.
And they only had each other.”
— Dominic Suchyta, reflecting back on the beginning years of The White Stripes
” … AND THEY ONLY HAD EACH OTHER … ”
Jack Gillis was sixteen years old and had just found his first day job, one that was fulfilling for an artist in a backdoor screen-porch sort of way. He was constantly working on music, art, and his various aspirations, but needed something on the side to latch onto in the meantime.
Jack’s brothers introduced him to Brian Muldoon, a neighbor who was nearly thirty years old, and had been as involved with reupholstery as Jack had been involved in music.
Jack was drawn to it from an artistic and creative standpoint. It gave him money while teaching him skills he would later use as an artist. Brian did more than teach Jack about reupholstery, though.
Muldoon would also show Jack, Dominic, and any friends of theirs who happened to be tagging along, the ins and outs of the Detroit garage and punk rock scene — turning them onto what came before them, as well as what was currently happening.
MC5. The Stooges. The Flat Duo Jets. The Gories.
All names and sounds that filled Jack’s ears and imagination with ideas and aspirations beyond what anyone in that room could conceive of at the time.
In an era where the internet was still in its infancy, this was like being plugged into local Facebook groups and deep Reddit threads brimming with knowledgeable comments, all at the same time.
Muldoon also let Jack and Dominic play and record music inside the upholstery shop after hours — giving Jack yet another unique location to crank amps and pop speakers, while putting what worked on tape, and laughing together with friends at what didn’t.
“We’d play in the upholstery shop and Brian gave us MC5 records and Stooges records. We recorded the MC5’s ‘Looking at You’ with just Jack.
One thing about Jack’s guitar playing was that he was always loud. His amps are loud. We could never get him to be quiet. I remember blowing stuff up plugging amps into amps to get a louder sound.
I distinctly remember taking the four-track over to the upholstery shop and recording that and getting a really good recording.
And Jack was way into the Flat Duo Jets early on. That was one of the first bands that I remember that I hadn’t heard of.
And it was like, wow, you really didn’t need a bass player. We were around sixteen. So I guess that’s when we both started engineering.”
— Dominic Suchyta
If The Fuck-Ups were the foundation for The White Stripes, then 2-Star Tabernacle was the stage and curtains that Jack and Meg would soon weld Detroit Garage Rock and the blues of Leadbelly and Bob Dylan together with.
It didn’t last long, and was formed from the wreckage of a past project, so it was like most things in Jack’s life. No matter what happened around him, he’d always find a way to play music and sing the blues.
In the summer of 1993, Jack spotted a flyer at one of his favorite coffeehouses. It was for Goober & the Peas, a Detroit punk/alt-country band, looking to hire a new drummer.
Everyone around Jack thought him auditioning for the gig was a wild notion, even if it came from a good place. This was a professional band, with booked gigs and shows. Hell, they had just opened for Bob Dylan at Detroit’s Fox Theatre.
“We had a real problem with drummers. We went through fifteen official drummers, and after each of those fifteen, we had auditions. So I just put up flyers for what would be our last drummer. As it turned out, Jack was the last Goober & the Peas drummer.
He called and left messages while we were on tour, and he just sounded interesting. There was something about his voice, even on the answering machine. I wondered, ‘where’s this guy from?!’”
— Dan Miller, Goober & the Peas frontman, reflecting back in 2005
Even though Jack was eighteen years old at the time and had never been to an audition before, everyone in the band agreed he’d passed with flying colors after just a few songs.
Goober & the Peas were already on edge before Jack joined, but his boredom with playing someone else’s songs every night led to him adding his own flourishes, twists, and changes — which led to further tension.
While Goober & the Peas ultimately proved to be a short-lived experience for Jack, it was galvanizing in many ways. Jack even appeared on the band’s only album, 1995’s The Jet Age Genius of Goober & the Peas.
2-Star Tabernacle was Dan Miller’s next project and a way for him to distance himself from the theatrics of Goober & the Peas. 2-Star Tabernacle’s style and sound were meant to be an exercise in dynamics, with two guitarists bending strings and rock-and-blues notes center stage, backed by the band’s drummer.
The lines of The White Stripes were moving closer into focus.
2-Star Tabernacle played their first show in December 1997 at St. Andrew’s Hall as part of a fundraiser for Orbit magazine, a local pop culture publication. It may not have been a major show to anyone at the time, but it would be important in retrospect.
Jack had been writing and preparing music for the show, which would feature the debut of three future staples from The White Stripes’ repertoire: “The Union Forever,” “Hotel Yorba,” and “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground.”
2-Star Tabernacle came to an end by the spring of 1999, essentially the result of Jack finding more confidence as an artist, combined with Miller wanting to write different kinds of music. By then, Jack had acquired the right amount of jet fuel as an artist to continue launching himself into space after he and Miller parted ways.
Leading up to the recording of The White Stripes’ first album, Jack began captivating audiences with a series of small, intimate concert appearances at Detroit’s Garden Bowl.
It was the winter of 1998, and everyone was taming their restlessness with the warmth of Jack White and other Detroit musicians cooking up music — from covers of Bob Dylan and Robert Johnson to White Stripes originals that would appear on albums as late as 2003.
The scene was combusting with all sorts of blues and rock ’n’ roll music.
It couldn’t be contained; and in the end, it wasn’t.
It was a lot like an NPR Tiny Desk Concert, but consisting almost entirely of musicians and friends of musicians, and anyone who stumbled in because they’d heard music from outside.
It was rugs and chairs pulled together, healthy amounts of local Stroh’s beer, and musical performances situated halfway between rehearsals and concerts.
These were legendary concerts in retrospect, but at the time, it really was just art and community combining in spaces where it was allowed to do so.
The “Living Room Sessions” started winding down in November 1999, and Jack decided to host an anniversary show to celebrate what it meant to him before moving on.
Even with him being billed as a secret guest, under a different name, word got out fast and crowds began to gather outside the Garden Bowl.
“‘The Big Three Killed My Baby’ is three chords, three verses, and we accent threes together all through that. It was a number I always thought of as perfect, or our attempt at being perfect. Like on a traffic light, you couldn’t just have a red and a green. I work on sculptures, too, and I always use three colors.”
— Jack White, Rolling Stone, 2005
It was January 1999 — within the span of just four days, amid the quiet isolation and frozen winds of winter — that Meg White and Jack White walked into Jim Diamond’s Ghetto Recorders. The studio, formerly a chicken meat processing plant, had been transformed into a minimalistic, punk-rock recording space.
Essentially, Ghetto Recorders was a giant cement room with an out-of-order freight elevator in one corner, and a recording studio tucked behind a windowless door.
Ghetto Recorders owner and operating engineer, Jim Diamond, sets the scene quite well inside Chris Handyside’s 2005 book:
“Somewhere between three and four thousand dollars. For everything. I was probably charging thirty-five dollars an hour. I said, ‘I’ll give you guys a deal if you book more than two days!’ So I think we booked off three or four days in a row.
It took a while because Meg had never been in a studio and she had just started playing drums.
I don’t know if he was counting off to her because I don’t have a window on the control room. All I know is that all of a sudden I’d hear some sticks drop. So she got frustrated. So I’d just talk through the talkback, ‘no, it’ll be fine, just do it again. Just don’t drop your sticks at that one point.’
I remember right before they recorded the first record that they played ‘Astro,’ and it was just an instrumental at the time. And Jack just came up with the lyrics while they were in the studio.
It was cold and this is a cold cement floor and there was broken glass everywhere because we broke a bunch of bottles during [the recording of another band prior to The White Stripes], so I told her, well, I wouldn’t go barefoot. She insisted. But she was cold the whole time. Of course you’re cold, you don’t have shoes on!
I remember I set him up with some mic, covered with a Crown Royal bag, an old RCA mic from the ’50s. I was like, ‘Here, use this, it’ll sound older.’ And he said, ‘no, it sounds too much like we’re in a studio.’
And I said, ‘well, you are in a studio!’
So we ended up putting all the vocals through a tape recorder from 1953, like singing through a 1953 tape recorder and miking its little built-in speaker. So that’s why everything sounds trashy. It was made to sound that way purposefully.
Jack always wanted it really loud when we were monitoring and mixing stuff, and I’d say, ‘God, you’re gonna go deaf, son [laughs].’”
This was their first album, recorded shortly after securing a deal with Sympathy for the Record Industry, often shortened to Sympathy. Based in Long Beach, California, the label specialized in garage rock, punk, and D.I.Y. sounds. It gave artists plenty of freedom, though not necessarily much money or promotion.
The deal with Sympathy came about through the momentum of previously recorded singles and the growing buzz surrounding Jack White — and all the noise he’d been making across Detroit.
Detroit musician Tom Potter (bassist and backing vocals for The Dirtbombs) recalling Jack White feeling anxious about the decision to sign with Long Gone John at Sympathy in Fell in Love With a Band:
“I remember talking with Jack when The White Stripes were thinking about doing something with Sympathy. The thing with indie labels is that they’re kind of frustrating because they’re run by people who love music. They love your music so much that they want to put out your record. That doesn’t necessarily make them good business people. It doesn’t necessarily make them bad ones, either. The White Stripes had sent stuff to Crypt and to In the Red, and other labels, and they weren’t interested. Jack sounds too much like Robert Plant, or this thing, or that thing. They’re indie labels, they’re not in this to make money, so their reaction is what it is. But John dug it. So he put it out and he was more than willing to take a chance.”
For Jack and Meg, a big goal had been getting signed to a label and putting out their first album, and the amount of creative freedom afforded by Sympathy made it a dotted line worth signing.
It was during this time that Jack and Meg White officially dissolved their marriage, with Jack keeping Meg’s last name as his performance name. In a way, it must have still felt like a union, but in music and performance art instead of to each other as people.
People in on it locally kept the details quiet as The White Stripes started to build steam through touring and word of mouth. Soon, the mystery became irresistible:
Were they married? Are they married? Wait, are they brother and sister? Who are these people, and why do they share the same last name?
It was the same thing with the local Detroit press, and so it remained a mystery for many years, aided by how murky and long it could take for facts to solidify in the face of rumors during the early era of the internet.
It was all part of Jack and Meg White’s mythmaking blend of rock ’n’ roll, performance art, and the act of hiding behind instruments.
Jack and Meg remained inseparable as The White Stripes continued to build and grow, even if their bond had evolved past a high school sweetheart romance into something that was purely creative.
The platonic love and appreciation of art, and the creation of art, were still shared between the two of them.
THE UNION FOREVER
The next big break for The White Stripes came when their first album found its way into the hands of the road manager for slacker-rock band Pavement, who were about to go on tour for their final record, Terror Twilight.
It was the beginning of The White Stripes’ discography and the curtain call of Pavement’s, and it was a huge honor. Pavement was a bigger and more well-known band at the time, and The White Stripes — while passionately loved — still had a mostly Midwestern fan base.
This brought Jack and Meg from playing crowded bars and community theaters to performing in 500-person venues that were completely sold out.
Things were moving quickly, like notes played by fingers flying across a guitar fretboard.
Within a year, the two-piece Detroit garage-rock duo was opening for Weezer in Los Angeles.
Rivers Cuomo and company were returning from hiatus, testing out new material from their upcoming self-titled Green Album.
The show took place at a club called Spaceland, where Weezer played under the pseudonym Goat Punishment to quietly gauge the crowd’s reaction.
The White Stripes refused to give up their headlining spot, believing it was only fair as they had been booked first. Jack and Meg understood Weezer’s position in wanting top billing, but they didn’t want to be pushed aside either.
The venue ended up resolving the dispute in an interesting way — by paying Jack and Meg the agreed-upon headlining rate, despite changing them to openers in the lead-up to the show.
At the time, The White Stripes had just finished recording their sophomore album, De Stijl, in the living room of Jack’s house. It was a record steeped in free-flowing blues, distortion, and artistic expression packed inside what proved to be the antithesis of the band’s 1999 debut.
The 2000 follow-up from The White Stripes was constructed around a foundation of a Dutch minimalist art movement that started in 1917. The concept was for art to be more centered around the idea of breaking past complicated notions of creation, while searching for the true heart of the emotions being expressed.
“We don’t have anyone managing us, no one’s sending our records out to press, or pushing us with radio or anything. Maybe the songs are just good. Maybe we’re lucky.”
This growing fusion of deconstructed garage rock was now spreading beyond the Midwest, with mixed results. But the blues-dipped flames were spreading all the same.
In San Francisco, California, The White Stripes were welcomed with open arms and sold-out crowds. There was also a lot of crossover success when Jack and Meg opened for Pacific Northwest punk band Sleater-Kinney.
Jack commented on how much the tide was turning in the favor of The White Stripes in 2001, looking back a year later on the period of growth for the duo:
“I was talking to Meg about it the other day, and I said ‘the Pavement crowd really didn’t get us, but a year later, the Sleater-Kinney crowd really took to us. Maybe the timing was right. It seems to be really, really odd to end up in Rolling Stone. We don’t have anyone managing us, no one’s sending our records out to press, or pushing us with radio or anything. Maybe the songs are just good. Maybe we’re lucky.”
After wrapping up 2000’s De Stijl tour with eight shows in seven days across Australia, Meg White and Jack White travel to Memphis, Tennessee to begin recording their third album: White Blood Cells.
“We went down there sight unseen. We just heard the studio was nice. We just wanted to go out of town and get a different sound for the new record. And there’s no blues, no slide, no cover songs, no extra musicians, no bass. It’s nothing but nos.”
— Jack White, speaking about the making of the third studio album upon returning to Detroit in Spring 2001
Stewart Sikes was the head engineer working at Easley when The White Stripes arrived in Memphis to record White Blood Cells in February 2001:
“They were friends with the guys from the Oblivians and those guys recommended that they come down and record here.
I think that they wanted to get out of Detroit and do it. He sent me the first two records so I had a good idea what they sounded like.
It’s not like they needed a whole bunch of mikes and stuff. They have a two-inch 24-track machine there and pretty much to save on tape costs, we used 12 tracks. I sort of split the tape in half. Tracks 1-12 I used that. And when that tape got filled up I used tracks 13-24 for the other songs.
Meg used the studio drums and they wanted a sort of big sound, was how Jack described it. I just tried to reproduce what they were doing on their own.
The confidence came through in the fact that they were so new, and Meg, I think she was a little uncomfortable just because she hadn’t rehearsed as much as she wanted to. But Jack had no worries about it not coming off as a good take or her not knowing the songs. I think that added to the whole feel of it.
I don’t think we did more than four takes, so it just sounds like a band playing. I think it’s a good way to work because with the age of computers, records sound technically good, but there’s no feel. I mean, listen to a Kinks record and you can tell the difference [between music made after computers].
When I say it was fast, it was like, ‘that one feels good, let’s go to the next one.’
We didn’t sit around and talk about it. We cut almost all but one or two of the songs in two days. Vocals included. We worked about thirteen hours a day. There wasn’t any time for fucking around.
One of the things that was interesting was making Meg happy. If Meg was happy with a song, we knew it was done.
That was the fastest record I’ve ever seen a record come out. It was out within a month and a half after recording.”
“Looking at the door, it’s coming through the floor.”
Fall 2001. Meg and Jack White were back in Detroit, Michigan, outside the Hotel Yorba.
Jack was listening to an NPR review of White Blood Cells on the radio, rolling his eyes and leaving when the host called the singer “a whiny creep,” to check on the status of whether The White Stripes would be allowed to film a music video inside the historic hotel.
Photography director Kevin Carrico remembers the day vividly inside of Chris Handyside’s 2005 book:
“I remember sitting in the van watching Dan Miller and Jack White go back and forth into the lobby, and there’s a guy on NPR going on and on in a really dry voice about the record. There was this really strange contrast between what we were doing and what they were saying.”
The Hotel Yorba didn’t let the band film anything inside, so interior footage was shot at the backup filming location — the Park Hotel, behind the nearby Fox Theatre.
This location proved to be better for what the band was doing, according to Kevin Carrico’s recollection:
“It had the greatest look. The rooms were a little bigger so were actually able to fit our equipment in. Had we gone into the Hotel Yorba it would have been too small photographically. The Park Hotel had a great old-fashioned elevator that had all these great metallic tones.
The one thing we kept joking about is that it should look nicotine stained. I said, ‘Dan, can’t you imagine everything with just that nicotine film that forms on the window of a room with a smoker? And we went not just for the reason for the color, but the reason behind the color.
The exterior shots we used are off the beaten path a little bit, but if you’re hiking around the park you can stumble upon them. Dan had looked at the sites so when we got there we could just unload our equipment and shoot.
The idea was that we didn’t venture more than a few miles from Jack’s childhood neighborhood. I think that’s kind of personal and that’s the idea of the song about him growing up and wondering what went on in the Hotel Yorba.
The whole day really had a spontaneity to it. And I think that really shows. When you overplan something, all your enthusiasm is gone, all the spontaneity is gone, and you end up going with the lowest common denominator.”
Throughout the video, themes of Americana, nostalgia, and lost futures are woven together. Everything is washed in a sepia tone, radiating a warmth that can be sensed whenever Jack and Meg are together in frame.
At the end of the day, with just enough time and film left in the reservoir, Kevin Carrico, Dan Miller, Jack White, and a sleepy, eepy Meg White shot an additional music video, for “We Are Going To Be Friends.”
This video one was completely spontaneous, with no planning at all, taking place just before midnight, according to the memory of Kevin Carrico:
“We got done around 11:30 and I was going to break off what they call the ‘short end’ when I noticed that we had about 200 feet of film left, which is roughly four to five minutes of film. I thought ‘We’ve got enough film for one run-through of a song!’ I remember talking to them saying ‘I wonder if you wouldn’t mind setting up a shot.’
Coincidentally, they had been throwing out this old couch, and it was sitting on the curb, and I was looking at it thinking, wouldn’t it be cool if Jack sits here, Meg sits there, and Jack just plays the song.
We rolled and what you see is what we got. One take, no editing, no rehearsal. I didn’t really want to talk about it and lose the spontaneity. It was just in my head all day long. It was late. Meg actually fell asleep during the take and it was Jack’s idea to look over to see how she responded. She had fallen asleep. I hate the filmmaking to get in the way of the film. To me it’s always been about the story.”
This closeness benefited both of them, and the band itself. This sacred thing the two of them had created together would continue to become so much bigger than both of them as the kids who once played dress-up in the attic became a global phenomenon .
In November 2001, before The White Stripes were about to leave for another tour in Europe, Meg and Jack White performed at the Detroit Institute of Arts for a charity event.
Local residents in attendance still recall Jack waving a Detroit flag above his head during the performance. This local celebration and homecoming came right as The White Stripes were signing with V2 Records, putting them in a relationship with V2 Records for worldwide distribution, in addition to XL Records for distribution and sales in the UK.
The White Stripes chose V2 Records over other offers because of the continued freedom they would enjoy as artists.
“Every moment was shocking. We weren’t high-fiving each other. It was more like, ‘What does this mean now that the weight is on our shoulders?’
By the time the big labels were offering us deals, we said, ‘If you think we’re giving up our freedom now, you’re crazy. We want this and this, and if you can’t give it to us, we don’t care. We’ll make our own records.’
I told ’em I didn’t want money. I didn’t want big advances. I wanted complete artistic freedom. Nobody is going to tell me what songs are going to be on an album and what should or shouldn’t be on the cover. Also, I never wanted to owe anybody any money. And we don’t. Our albums are made so cheaply that we recoup the day they come out.”
— Jack White, Rolling Stone, 2005
Then it was back to business as usual — touring and playing their peppermint-tinted music on the road to anyone willing to hear the duo sing the blues.
The touring was so non-stop during this time that their biggest hit song “Seven Nation Army” was written on the road during soundchecks.
“That song started out about two specific people I knew in Detroit. It was about gossip, the spreading of lies, and the other person’s reaction to it. It came from a frustration of watching my friends do this to each other. In the end, it started to become a metaphor for things I was going through. But I never set out to write an exposé on myself. To me, the song was blues at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The third verse [“I’m going to Wichita / Far from this opera forevermore”] could be something from a hundred years ago. It won a Grammy for Best Rock Song. [Laughs] Maybe it should have won for Best Paranoid Blues Song.”
— Jack White, Rolling Stone, 2005
The band had built their success on their own though, organically, as observed by Detroit DJ Willy Wilson, in Fell in Love With a Band.
“The White Stripes did exactly what they needed to do in terms of growing their audience. They looked around and saw where their records were doing well and they focused their energies there.
When they realized they had an audience in Boston, they went and played there. The same happened with San Francisco. Then L.A. And on and on. It’s not cynical, it’s practical. The White Stripes, in fact, were doing the exact opposite of selling out. They were taking their music on their terms to fans who appreciated it and giving them their money’s worth.
They knew how hard they had to work to make it happen, and they were willing to do that. And they deserve a lot of credit for that.”
Meg and Jack didn’t have any trouble growing their audience, but it would be easier to distribute records into the hands of fans they’d organically built from touring and word of mouth with the resources of a major label.
The pieces were falling into place.
“The White Stripes’ colors were always red, white, and black. It came from peppermint candy. I also think they are the most powerful color combination of all time. Those colors strike chords with people. When you see a bride in a white gown, you immediately see innocence in that. Red is anger and passion. It is also sexual. And black is the absence of all that.”
— Jack White, The Guardian, 2010
It was April 2002, and “Seven Nation Army” along with the rest of the tracks on the next White Stripes album, Elephant, were being recorded and mixed in the studio.
The sessions took place at Liam Watson’s Toe Rag Studio in London, where, according to Watson, “they’d pretty much rehearsed for Elephant,” all the songs were “done and arranged” before they came in.
Still, Watson would prove instrumental in properly capturing Jack White’s signature guitar effects, along with the full scope and nature of Meg White’s seismic drumming.
“I must admit I was quite surprised at how big ‘Elephant’ has been, I knew it would be a big record and I knew it was going to be the biggest record I’d ever done. That it was going to go in the charts for me was a novelty.
Then it went to number one and then it stayed there.
I knew it was a good record when we’d finished it and I was happy. They’d done three records before. I thought if this record doesn’t do well, who’s going to get the blame? It’s going to be me, isn’t it? But I got a grammy for it [chuckles].”
Everything was moving faster than it had been once Elephant was released. In fact, V2 Records released the record two weeks early, with essentially no notice, because of how much buzz there was over Meg and Jack’s next album.
When it came time for The White Stripes’ SNL debut, Jack stuck with Meg and the sacredness of their art, even in the face of being threatened with having the TV plug pulled on them.
The producers at Saturday Night Live resisted and said they would cut to a commercial if Meg sat on the ground with a tambourine for “We Are Going to Be Friends,” and that they would cut the performance.
As Dan Miller recalls in 2005’s Fell in Love with a Band:
“SNL wanted them to play ‘Fell in Love with a Girl’ because that had been their big song. And Meg and Jack wanted to do ‘Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground’, cause that was their current single.
Jack had also talked about seeing George Harrison on SNL just sitting down and doing ‘Here Comes the Sun.’
He said ‘God, it’d be cool to do something like that where Meg was sitting on the ground with a tambourine and I was playing an acoustic guitar.’
The SNL folks said, ‘Well, if you do ‘We Are Going to Be Friends’ at all, it’ll get cut.”
In the end, SNL didn’t cut the second part of the performance. The producers, moved to tears, let the performance play through. The song’s sincerity and how special it was just outweighed it all. The art was beautiful and real enough to where it simply didn’t matter.
Like everything with The White Stripes, and as Dan Miller puts so succinctly, “The producers weren’t crazy about the idea. But Meg and Jack stuck to their guns.”
And they did, until the very end.
“WE ARE GOING TO BE FRIENDS”
“A lot of it is evil, and it doesn’t matter how much you know and how much you’ve experienced. You have to keep pushing until you find your niche, your little spot.
You never see me and Meg on a reality-TV show. We don’t go on MTV’s Cribs. We don’t walk down red carpets with our dates, exploiting relationships. We don’t look for any of it. We avoid it.
Meg always says, ‘The more you talk, the less people listen.’ She’s right. She doesn’t open her mouth very much. Meg also reminds me of Rita Hayworth. Rita Hayworth never looked at any of the photos taken of her. She didn’t care what she looked like or what people thought. That’s really something — to be that strong. Meg’s the same way. She doesn’t care about the photos or any of that stuff. She loves music. Her record collection is twice as big as mine.”
— Jack White, Rolling Stone, 2005
The White Stripes would perform together for the last time in 2009 on Conan O’Brien’s final show as the host of Late Night.
Meg White’s “acute anxiety” would be reiterated as the reason why the band went on hiatus after releasing Icky Thump, the band’s final studio album, two years earlier.
Jack was supportive of Meg needing time away, saying he’d be involved in other projects that he was doing, and that The White Stripes remained his top priority — whenever Meg was ready again.
Two years later, the same reason — Meg’s health and happiness, as well as her anxiety from performing — would be given as the ultimate reason for why The White Stripes would be disbanding permanently, in terms of future music. But that, “it can last forever if people want it to,” along with a thank you for “sharing this experience.”
“The reason is not due to artistic differences or lack of wanting to continue, nor any health issues as both Meg and Jack are feeling fine and in good health. It is for a myriad of reasons, but mostly to preserve what is beautiful and special about the band and have it stay that way. The White Stripes do not belong to Meg and Jack anymore. The White Stripes belong to you now and you can do with it whatever you want. The beauty of art and music is that it can last forever if people want it to. Thank you for sharing this experience. Your involvement will never be lost on any of us and we are truly grateful.”
— The statement released on The White Stripes official website announcing the band’s breakup in February 2011
The White Stripes were done, but just because nothing new was coming didn’t mean it was over.
“AT WHICH TIME GOD SCREAMS TO ME, ‘THERE’S NOTHING LEFT FOR ME TO TELL YOU.’”
Twelve years after The White Stripes announced the end of the band, Melissa Giannini at ELLE decided to do everything possible to try to reach out to Meg to give her an opportunity to have the last word. Not just on her legacy with The White Stripes, but on anything the quiet drummer and artist wanted to say.
Giannini was told Meg, “Doesn’t think she feels up for any interviews. She never liked them.” This message wasn’t conveyed by Meg, or even a close friend of Meg’s. Rather, this information was passed along by someone who used to press some of the earliest releases from The White Stripes.
Giannini was never able to get in contact with Meg White.
In conversing with colleagues — other women in the industry — she was ultimately able to observe the combined importance of the visibility that Meg White’s presence gave music during a time that was especially difficult for women, especially in those spaces, and what it’s meant to women in the years since.
Giannini was able to speak with other artists, musicians who are currently trending and touring, about the impact Meg White left for women in music and any girls watching and wishing to join along in playing the notes.
Olivia Rodrigo went on record with ELLE to say that even though she was only two months old when Elephant was released, she still grew up listening to it and had fallen in love with “The Hardest Button to Button.”
“Meg’s drums really shine on that one, and from there I dove into all their other incredible albums and became a massive fan.
I think she’s one of the best drummers of our time. Meg’s drumming provided a huge lesson to me on the value of simplicity in music. They taught me that a truly great song doesn’t need to have crazy production or layers of sound—it just needs to move you. You can sense her passion in every song she plays, and it’s so special. I think she’s one of the best drummers of our time.”
— Olivia Rodrigo, ELLE, 2023
Jack White has continued work on various projects — seemingly unable to stop — including solo work under his own name, as well as work with The Dead Weather, The Raconteurs, and an assortment of other musicians.
“I have so much music inside me I’m just trying to stay afloat. I don’t tend to write for a particular band — you have to just write the songs and then let God into the room and let the music tell you what to do.”
— Jack White, Rolling Stone, 2005
The White Stripes belong to each and every one of us, and when Meg White and Jack White were both inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2025, it was a reminder of the power of a girl, a boy, and peppermint-tinted dreams of pure art and music.
“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.
There is something about the way I attack things and the way she attacks things. She has an innocent personality, but she’s behind the big drum set, pounding away like a caveman. And at times, when I’m supposed to be the caveman, I’m singing something quiet and delicate. When you put those dynamics together, something interesting happens. I’ve played with other guys — and it doesn’t work.”
— Jack White, Rolling Stone, 2005
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