Jack White, the singer-guitarist of the White Stripes, has always kept a tight rein on his band's image, applying stringent rules to everything from the musical arrangements to the black-white-and-red color scheme. His arrival for an interview felt comparably meticulous.
Jack White lives in this tiny, block-long town, a short drive from Nashville, with his pregnant wife, the model Karen Elson, and their 1-year-old daughter, Scarlett. He pulled into the parking lot of an antiques shop in a cream-colored 1960 Thunderbird, dressed head to toe in black. By his side was the band's drummer, Meg White, his ex-wife, wearing a black top and a red skirt. He ambled through the store and settled onto the back porch, a bucolic spot overlooking a creek. He graciously accepted a bottle of water from an associate after the clerk at the grocery store across the street said he had never heard of sparkling water.
It was a classic rock star entrance, at a time when there are very few Rock Stars left. While indie-rock tastemakers tend to champion bands that look like them, Jack White still believes that smoke and mirrors, the kind of approach that once caused detractors to dismiss the White Stripes as a gimmick, are integral to successful art. "Everything from your haircut to your clothes to the type of instrument you play to the melody of a song to the rhythm — they're all tricks to get people to pay attention to the story," he said.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
"If you just stood up in a crowd and said your story — 'I came home, and this girl I was dating wasn't there, and I was wondering where she was' — it's not interesting," he said. "But give it a melody, give it a beat, build it all the way up to a haircut. Now people pay attention."
With the June 19 release of their new album, Icky Thump, the White Stripes hope that more people than ever will pay attention to their bag of tricks. Their last album, 2005's Get Behind Me Satan, sold only about half as much as 2003's platinum-plus Elephant, which boasted the hit single Seven Nation Army. The new release is the duo's first for a major label after a decade spent at the vanguard of the turn-of-the-century garage-rock revival, a movement defined by its outsider attitude.
Jack White, 31, had traveled from the band's former hometown, Detroit (Meg White, 32, now lives in Los Angeles), to places like Memphis and London to seek out funky old analog recording studios, but Icky Thump was recorded in a conventional, modern Nashville studio. The new White Stripes tour will mark the band's first shows headlining at arenas; it is scheduled to play New York's Madison Square Garden on July 24.
At a time when the music business is in free fall and young rock fans seem to lose interest in bands almost overnight, the stakes for the White Stripes are higher than ever with the duo's sixth album. But while most bands respond to the pressures of recording for a bigger company or playing on larger stages with a shinier, more radio-friendly sound, the White Stripes are sticking to their guns. Icky Thump represents a more traditional sound for the band than Get Behind Me Satan, which experimented with piano- and marimba-based compositions. The new songs, spotlighting Jack White's virtuosic guitar noise over the simple, thunderous sound of Meg White's drums, sometimes echo such blues-based rockers as ZZ Top, AC/DC, or — as in the first single and title track — Led Zeppelin.
The album is licensed to Warner Bros, with the band retaining ownership of the master recordings. Jack White said he had no qualms about working with a major label, given some bad experiences with small indies and promoters during the band's early years. "We've been ripped off by so many independent labels and so many people from the underground," he said. "All that stuff left a really bad taste in my mouth."
The film director Jim Jarmusch, who wrote a scene for the band in his 2003 film Coffee and Cigarettes, compared the White Stripes' philosophy to the raw naturalism of film's Dogma 95 movement. "They reinvigorated rock 'n' roll by stripping it down to the point of not even having a bass," he said. "Jack has a meticulous focus on style — what color are the amp covers, all the little details." Jack White said that he wanted to be a filmmaker when he was young and that making a good movie is "the biggest triumph in all creative fields of media." (Hollywood has taken notice; he has a small role as Elvis Presley in the coming biopic spoof Walk Hard, for which Judd Apatow is a writer.) In many ways he approaches the White Stripes project as a director would, creating a whole universe, from the casting to the props.
Virtually everything about the White Stripes, then, is premeditated and strategic — except, Jack White insists, for the music. "Things happen song by song and by accident," he said. "We are slaves to those songs instead of being in control of them, and if you admit to the song that you are not in control, then some good things start to happen."
Two tracks on Icky Thump feature the swirling drone of a bagpipe; another began life as a video treatment before it became a song. Most surprising is a bombastic version of Conquest, a Patti Page song from the early 1950s, complete with mariachi horns. "I'd been wanting to cover that forever," Jack White said, "and the themes of this album seemed to keep pointing to this idea of role reversals and 'who's using who,' which are exactly the topics that song is about."
One song, Little Cream Soda, began life as an onstage, improvised riff: something the band often did in the past, but which Jack White worries is no longer viable. "They'd be out within the hour on YouTube or whatever," he said. "Then at the end of the night, do I have to go get a publishing record of that song? Give it a name? I don't know what happens."
In addition to their big shows in urban areas, the White Stripes will spend a few weeks this summer touring the outer Canadian provinces: barely-on-the-map locations like Nunavut and Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. It's these gigs, like the South American jaunt on their last tour, that get the Whites most revved up. Meg White, who spent much of the interview chain-smoking and listening, interjected enthusiastically, "If you know you're going to a place where people haven't heard you before, it's more exciting on both ends."
They have no idea whether anyone in the Yukon Territory even knows who they are, or if people will just wander into their community theater, grateful to see any music at all; they say that the challenge of the latter scenario appeals to them the most. The tour is a typical White Stripes move. The major-market dates help pay for the little shows, and they get to be both big-league rock stars and experimental artists. It's gimmicky to some and laudably ambitious to others.
"In South America we showed up, like, do we even have any fans here in Chile?" Jack White said with a grin. "And they were sold out — with people who had their own handmade White Stripes T-shirts."
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