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By Jim DeRogatis
Guitar World July 2002
During a recent performance on “The Late Show with David Letterman,” the
White Stripes tear it up like few bands before them. Twenty-six-year old
Jack White assaults his cheap Airlines guitar, blasting it through a
100-watt Sears amp as he screams the lyrics of “Fell In Love With A Girl,” a
gold hit in the U.K. recently added by MTV in the States. White’s face turns
as crimson as the band’s stark red-and-white stage set, and the veins in his
neck pop out.
Mid-song, he turns to his older sister, Meg (yes, they’re siblings, and no,
they were never married), who sits high on her drum stool while pounding out
a primal beat. The song nearly falls apart as White rants into an
old-fashioned, reverb-drenched mike, but he pulls it back together again for
one more unforgettably catchy chorus. And the whole thing is over in under
two minutes.
Less than 48 hours later, White is back home in downtown Detroit, watching
The Grapes of Wrath on TV. He’s bemused by the attention generated by
the Letterman gig, just as he’s been pleasantly surprised by all the hype
garnered by the band’s third album, White Blood Cells (V2). “You
know, we’re not gonna be a band forever,” he says. “Maybe another one or two
albums and we’ll probably be done!”
Q. People talk about a “willful primitiveness” in your playing—like
you’re a really good player who just prefers to keep it raw and ragged.
A. When you play guitar, you have the opportunity to go in any
direction you want, if you have some sort of ability. You have the choice of
what particular things mean anything to you, and the only thing that means
anything to me is folk music, blues, and rock ’n’ roll—those aspects of
guitar playing. It’s just something for my hands to do while I’m telling the
story. It’s really the story that’s the emphasis.
A song is just melody, rhythm, and story. Nothing can ever top that; music
will always be those three components. You can translate it and call it punk
or call it rock ’n’ roll or call it country, but it’s all the same—it’s all
folk music, it’s all blues, you know? Those things that relate to that, with
that powerful emotion behind it, are really what I like about music.
Q. In punk or blues, taste is more important than technique. I mean, you
can go to any Guitar Center and see guys with great technique—so what?
A. Going to guitar shops makes me want to vomit! I’ve never had an
easy time there—I always feel like I’m with a car salesman or something.
People get really excited about the newest gadgets or the newest effects
pedals or this amazing guitar that costs $800. They don’t realize that all
the opportunity and all the technology and gadgetry is the last thing that
you want. All that opportunity is going to destroy any creativity!
If you’re got a young kid learning guitar, you could go out and buy him a
Les Paul, and the thing would stay perfectly in tune and it would have great
sustain, but he’s not going to have any knowledge of what his instrument is
doing. If you give him a Diddley Bow or a Japanese guitar from a pawn shop
that only has four strings on it, he’s going to come up with something
because that’s all he has. If you don’t have a lot to work with, you’re
forced to do something with what you have.
I love when my guitar is out of tune; of course, I don’t have other
musicians that I have to stay in tune with, so it’s easy for me to say that!
I don’t really use effects pedals, so I really try to get as much tone as
possible out of the amplifier and the guitar itself, and figure out what’s
the most powerful tone for that particular song. The thing that bothered me
about other bands in Detroit when I’d go out and see shows was that nobody
was very particular about their guitar tone. If the guitar player did a
solo, you couldn’t hear it in the set. It didn’t have anything to project it
above the song for 30 seconds, and I think that’s what needed to happen. I
joined a band called the Go and I played lead guitar and I wanted to do
that, and I was kicked out about six months later.
Q. You’re big on
breaking the songs down onstage. Why?
A. Usually when we play live, I have another mike over by the drum
set with reverb on it for when I want to break the song up and kind of
destroy the song in the middle of it and then bring it back to what we
started with. There’s a lot of reasons, but to me the main one is that it
feels too easy to just play a song the way we recorded it on the album. If
we just did it like that, it’s like, “Why don’t we just come out and play
the CD and stand there?” There should be a difference to it. The only way I
can get in touch with a song every time we play it is to break it up as much
as possible and destroy it and recover it. It’s like we’re doing a cover
version of a song I wrote.
Q. Whenever a young white kid plays the blues, there’s this thorny
question of authenticity. Like, “What right do you have to play this music?”
A. I acknowledge that, too. I’m almost scared to play blues music
onstage, and we don’t really do it that often or that much during the set. I
don’t want it to be taken the wrong way or have people think that this music
that is the most important thing to me, that I’m treating it as a novelty or
a gimmick, because I’m not. It’s very meaningful to me; the only catharsis
I’ve ever had in my life has been to play blues music and slide guitar. But
it’s like medicine—you have to sneak it in the mashed potatoes. You give
people what they want to start off with, but then you sneak that medicine
in, which is the blues and the story-telling.
People can easily say, “Oh, the White Stripes—any time there’s blues-related
rock, it’s just Led Zeppelin.” Or, “It’s the Gun Club that they’re ripping
off.” I don’t know what to say to that, because all I know is I really love
Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson and Blind Willie Johnson. These are people
who really mean something to me, so I’m coming from them directly into what
I have, which is a two-piece band with electric guitar and drums. I’m doing
whatever I can to relate to that and tell my version of the story. Everyone
tries to do their own version of it, but it’s very easy with that to become
a novelty thing and become comical, or become like a Stevie Ray Vaughan/Jonny
Lang thing, where it’s just doing tons of guitar stuff. You have to remember
that blues music is the easiest music to do guitar solos to. It’s probably
the first thing people learn to solo to, so for someone like Vaughan or Lang
to go off and do all these guitar solos and be called guitar gods and
virtuosos, it ain’t no big thing, man! It’s not brain surgery to do solos to
blues music. I’m not saying those guys aren’t talented, but they’re not
Paganini or anything.
Q. When you talk about
hiding the medicine, the sugar-coating in the White Stripes is the
red-and-white imagery and the pop hooks, right?
A. Yeah. Anything involved in presenting yourself onstage is all a
big trick. You’re doing your best to trick those people into experiencing
something good, something they haven’t thought about before or haven’t
thought about in a long time. I’m doing my best to be that vaudeville
trickster, to help that happen. But the image stuff all stemmed from the
music—just the childishness and how it relates to anger and innocence and
these colors and what they mean to us, and us being children together. It
all comes from that childishness, really.
Q. Detroit is a unique place with an odd combination of underdog
mentality and egotism. It’s like, “We’re from Detroit. We’re fucked! And
fuck you, too!”
A. Yeah, there’s a lot of different components top Detroit. For some
reason, it’s just blessed, and good music has always come out of here and
probably always will. It’s never been mainstream enough where it can get
devoured and commercialized. Hopefully it won’t happen again to the rest of
the bands. Maybe the White Stripes is going to have that happen to us, but
it’ll be without our consent. It’s kind of out of my hands. Entertainment
Weekly just called before you did and wanted to talk about, “What are
the cool places to hang out in Detroit?” And I was like, “I don’t want to
tell you because you’re going to ruin them!” [Laughs]
Q. One last question:
What do you think of the New Garage movement?
A. I’m glad; Maybe it will produce something really good. At least
people are listening to more realistic things. It happens every 10 years or
so; I’m just glad we happen to be here at the right time. It’s been about 10
years since grunge, so the time is about right.
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