The White Stripes Play Us a Little Number

The White Stripes are arguably the most compelling band in rock music today. For all the color-coded spectacle, animated Lego sculptures (Michel Gondry’s video for “Fell In Love With A Girl”), fisticuffs (Jack famously punched out Von Bondies lead singer Jason Stollsteimer in a Detroit bar after their friendship soured) and self-mythologizing (Jack and Meg still claim to be brother and sister, even though a Detroit newspaper reproduced copies of their marriage and divorce certificates several years ago), the band’s mission is disarmingly straightforward. Jack and Meg White value American roots music—the blues, R&B, gospel—and would love nothing more than to forever rid the world of indie rock’s cooler-than-thou, smirking, everything-ironic-all-the-time hipster detachment. Simply put, they believe that caring is cool. And the world has, in turn, grown to care about—even fall in love with—The White Stripes.

On a drizzly, biting-cold London afternoon—just weeks prior to the release of the band’s sixth studio album, Icky Thump, and the onset of yet another world tour—I sit down with Jack and Meg at the K West Hotel in Shepherd’s Bush, London. They’re in town doing a spot of U.K. press and taping the Jools Holland episode.

The band’s sharply dressed road manager (black suit, red tie, naturally) escorts me up to the fifth floor and into the band’s corner suite. The overhead lights are switched off, and Meg has obviously been smoking. The hazy room is faintly illuminated by what little sunlight has managed to penetrate the heavy cloud canopy outside and the sheer drapes covering the windows. Meg sits, legs crossed demurely, in a red floral-print skirt and white scoop-neck top. She rubs her bleary eyes and notes that her jetlag is worse than usual. Jetlag medication is spread out on the coffee table in front of her: a highball of scotch, a bottle of Beck’s and a pack of Camels.

Jack, on the other hand, looks wired and hyper-alert, eyes darting about behind the curtain of stringy black hair framing his face. My tape recorder on the coffee table might as well be a cocked 9mm. He’s shifty, seldom makes eye contact. He leans back into the couch when he talks, crosses his legs and raps his foot nervously on the edge of the coffee table. He gestures broadly for emphasis, eager for you to get his meaning. Even though he clutches a bottle of San Pellegrino the whole interview, he seldom drinks from it, just absently pokes his finger into the top of it while speaking. Jack’s laugh is guttural and fierce, rattling out in short bursts. And in case you suck at remembering names, his die-cast iron “JACK” belt buckle is there to help.

Paste Some of the most influential rock bands to emerge from England during the ’60s and ’70s—Cream, the Stones, Zeppelin, etc.—absorbed the blues tradition and expressed it in a really powerful way. It seems like you’re carrying on that tradition. Do you feel a special connection to this place as a result of those artists?

Jack White All those bands were looking towards the American South. We’re from the North—Detroit—and they’re from very far away from the South. But all of our heads are in that same space. The music coming out of the American South was so real and truthful that you can’t help but have it be a destination in your head.

Considering all the countries in the world and all the different styles of music, it’s so bizarre how many of the dominant ones over the last century have all come from the American South. It’s very interesting.

P The struggle of the slave population in America—that pain was so emotionally universal.

JW There’s something all-encompassing about it because there’s obviously struggle in places like India and China as well. Why is it that the struggle of the American South has captivated so much of the world? The poetry and the emotion of the music have all bled together into something that people can instantly relate to. I’m speaking of the blues, you know. This one-man-against-the-world ideal is almost a selfish notion from a songwriter’s standpoint, but as a listener it’s very easily relatable.

P Speaking of the South, you recorded this album in Nashville at Blackbird Studio. That’s a very different setup from the lo-fi home recordings you’ve done in the past. Did you take any conscious measures to maintain some continuity with your previous work?

JW It was a concern of ours—that it would be a bad move to go into a modern studio, be on a major record label, all those things. For years we always thought those were the things that were going to mess it up, and any rawness and emotional intent in the music could easily be turned plastic if we were in those environments. And we’re probably right about that. I don’t think that it would have been a good idea for us to be on a major or be in a modern studio while recording our first couple albums.

But now is just about the right time for us to try that out because we have enough experience behind us, and people perceive the band differently than they would’ve in 2000 or 1999. We can get away with what we need to get away with.

A lot of times when you’re a youngster it doesn’t matter how good your band is or how great your sound is. You can have the most brilliant ideas in the world, but if you walk into an environment where someone else is the boss and their whole head is in this world of plastic, you’re going to fall under the wheels of that truck.

We were always just trying to figure out ways to get into these little nooks and crannies in these uncomfortable environments and try to work under those conditions and make something beautiful out of it. Every album we’ve done has been recorded in the winter, and usually in studios that don’t have heat. This studio is the first one we’ve recorded in that still has heat.

P It’s also great motivation to stay in the studio and get work done, knowing it’s even less comfortable outside.

JW Yeah, and that’s the thing you have to watch. Blackbird has two lounges and old pinball games, and it wasn’t as distracting really for me and Meg. But I just went in there for three weeks with The Raconteurs—it’s hard to keep four guys in the room at once because someone’s overdubbing a mandolin and what are the other three guys doing? That’s when the other three guys start wandering off and it’s like, “This is why I don’t like being in places like this.” You have to really have willpower. Who wants to hear “Oh hey, they’ve got wireless Internet here?” I mean, we’ve got work to do. So, it’s a toss up.

It’s all about distractions. That goes down to all the technology—the ProTools, the trickery that’s in those rooms. You’ve got all these “opportunities,” but they’re mostly distractions. In a lot of cases, they can be the easy way out. Back in the day people used to say, “If you don’t know how to play a guitar solo, just get a wah-wah pedal.” That kind of thing. It takes a lot of restraint and a lot of discipline when you’re in that environment to try to get something done properly. I just saw a survey that said 60 percent of people think music sucks nowadays.

P What about you? Do you think music today sucks?

JW I don’t know, but I will say this: Gone are the days when you came into the studio and you had your act together and they turned the tape-machine on and it was one track. Some of the greatest recordings ever made were done under those circumstances. And it’s almost like, what do we need all this trickery for?

P You recently moved to Nashville from Detroit after having experienced a lot of jealousy and pettiness from other bands. Do you feel like that ordeal made you gun-shy about participating in Nashville’s music scene?

JW At this point, I don’t think either Meg or I want to be part of a music community in any sense. But I think that if there was one to be around, it would be the country-music community because they’re almost the complete opposite of hipster, underground, cynical garage rock—all that jazz. Country-music people aren’t obscurists in any sense. They’re of the moment. You don’t hear words like “sellout.” To them, it’s an achievement to be on the side of a billboard.

In Detroit, it was so tough to figure out what was happening to us compared to how everyone else was perceiving it. And I think this happens a lot. It happens to the folk artists that broke out—Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary, etc.—their scene. You can’t figure that out. Nobody can figure that out.

Who’s going to sit and decide whether you’re selling out to put your song on a video game as compared to, you know, performing live in front of people and charging them money for it. What’s the difference? Those battles take too much time.

I remember when Get Behind Me Satan was about to come out and we got offered to sell the record at Starbucks, and I remember a couple roundtable discussions with people we knew. It was sort of like, “Well, what do you think of that?” And I was there, and I don’t know. In one sense, I could care less where people buy stuff. What’s it matter? OK, you bought the record at McDonald’s, does that mean it’s no good? I highly doubt anyone in the country-music community gives a darntootin’ about being sold at a point-of-purchase at Wal-Mart. Who cares?

When you’re just trying to create and make music and perform, you shouldn’t have to worry about all that stuff. That just makes your job so much more difficult.