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The title of White Stripes' latest release, De
Stijl, comes from the art movement that puts an
emphasis on simplicity.
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Detroit has always been thought of as a city of influence, a place where musical impact occurs as often as an air wrench torques down the lug nuts on the wheels of a new Ford. For Jack White, the guitar half of the raucous AltBlues duo The White Stripes, it's what Detroit doesn't offer that looms larger in his consciousness.
"It's a good place, because nothing much is going on," says White from his Detroit home on the eve of an East Coast/Midwest jaunt. "Bands don't really get signed here, and a lot of bands don't have much hope for a lot of things, so the music's better. In L.A. or New York, bands have a Web site before they even play their first show. When you don't care about getting signed, you work on your music more."
It's apparent that White has worked on his music more, given the relentless punkish Blues offered on The White Stripes' latest release De Stijl (Sympathy for the Record Industry). But if he's working harder on his music, White is working considerably less hard on making the Stripes fit the conventional model of a Rock band. The only other member of the band is White's older sister, Meg, who keeps the time on a simple kit behind her brother while he lacerates the air with riffs that would have Howlin' Wolf begging for mercy.
White's early love for Rock developed in the usual way, from older brothers and sisters in a large Catholic family. Although their tastes were not particularly exotic, White absorbed all that he heard, and expanded on that base in high school.
"I started listening to the Cramps and Flat Duo Jets," says White. "Then I discovered the old bluesmen, like Son House and Robert Johnson and I just fell in love with that. That was the big revelation for me. That's when I really started to love music."
Perhaps the biggest impact from that exposure to the Blues was White's decision to take up guitar in favor of the drums he'd been playing since age 11. From there, his attempts to record himself and friends at home on a four-track led to tentative band affiliations.
"I was in a two-piece called Two Part Resin, and we only played out one time," White remembers. "We wound up putting out a record called The Upholsters. I was an apprentice in an upholstery shop, and the guy I worked for was the drummer. We did that for a while."
Things began to happen at a furious pace from there on. White began playing at home, with Meg providing primitive drum backing which coalesced into The White Stripes. Around that time, White's love of Country music drove him to join 2 Star Tabernacle, a better idea on paper than in execution. The band's only output was a single recorded with legendary Detroit Blues shouter, Andre Williams.
Almost simultaneously, White was spotted at a 2 Star Tabernacle show by members of the Detroit band The Go, who were looking to expand their ranks. He was invited to join, and accepted, just in time for the band to record its debut for Sub Pop.
"They'd been looking for a lead guitar player," says White of his Go days. "I thought this was the band that I always wanted to be in. It didn't last long for me -- I was only there a few months, but I got to be on the first album."
White's schedule was simplified quickly when The Go began playing out to promote the debut album and noticed a disconcerting trend among its audience.
"The White Stripes were getting pretty popular, and people were coming to see the Go and saying, 'Oh, there's the guy from The White Stripes,'" says White. "It was taking away from the personality of the band. I wanted to do both. So I quit 2 Star Tabernacle, and The Go sort of kicked me out."
Since that flurry of band activity, White has concentrated solely on The White Stripes, releasing a number of wildly cool singles, and the band's eponymous debut, a Spartan affair which garnered them wild universal praise and set the stage for the slightly more produced and equally acclaimed De Stijl.
"We didn't want to make the same album twice, even though the first album went over really well," says White. "We didn't want to try to repeat it. So we recorded the whole second album in my living room. There wasn't any studio influence, so we felt comfortable, and Meg felt comfortable."
Despite the band's very simple presentation, there's plenty of thought behind it. The title of the band's sophomore album comes from an art movement founded in Amsterdam just after the turn of the 20th century, a movement that valued simplicity and deconstructionism. That message is reflected in everything the band does, from its sonic canvas to the cover art on its Web site (www.whitestripes.com).
"The idea behind the de Stijl art movement was that they took it as far as they could, and then had to abandon it because they couldn't get any simpler than primary colors and horizontal and vertical lines," says White. "So that was the challenge for us -- how simple can this band be and still be melodic and still be something people can listen to and feel something."
Of course, with the added production on De Stijl has come the inevitable nay-sayers who bemoan the unnecessary adornments of the second album. White understands the criticism, but he doesn't subscribe to it.
"On this album, we have overdubbed piano and acoustic guitar, just feeling out the differences between us playing live and recording a really good song," says White. "We get that all the time -- 'You can't reproduce that on stage.' Nobody cares when there's four people in the band, and they can't play piano on stage either. With two pieces, people are like 'You can't play that live.' Neither could The Beatles."
White recognizes that he and Meg might ultimately fall victim to the same result as the movement that gives their album its name. The day might come when Jack and Meg White have taken their sound as far as they can.
"I guess that's what we were trying to figure out, and we never answered the question," says White. "We didn't get the mass attention until De Stijl came out. I don't think the production of the songs did that. I think it's the brother and sister on stage, two people working together, and the fact that it can fall apart -- that's the appeal of it. If we added a bass player or somebody else as a permanent member, we'd just be another band, like every other band out there."
While pondering the larger question of their philosophy, White has channeled the energy that had him in three bands simultaneously in order to work on new projects. The biggest of them, of course, is The White Stripes current tour, which has already taken them to New Zealand, Australia and Japan, and which will last for much of the spring. In addition, the band has just returned from Easley Studio in Memphis, where they were recording what will eventually be their next album, to be titled White Blood Cells. White has also just wrapped up a compilation for Sympathy for the Record Industry called Sympathetic Sounds of Detroit, featuring a number of Motor City bands including the Stripes, the Soledad Brothers, the Clone Defects, the Dirtbombs and many others.
"We did the entire thing at my house, on the same mics and the same amps, so it has that consistency to it," says White. "But everyone brought an original song. I'm so happy. I thought everyone was going to bring a bunch of crap, but they all came with the goods."
In the meantime, White will put the finishing touches on White Blood Cells in between dates on the tour to ready it for release this summer, while the Detroit compilation is nearly ready to go. The Stripes will be playing some material from their forthcoming album on this leg of the tour. It's a complicated life for a band that's stripped everything else down to the essentials.
THE WHITE STRIPES perform at the Southgate House on Saturday with Von Bondies and The Shams.
