The Raconteurs

It's twenty minutes before the Raconteurs' New York debut, and a tall, round-faced guy in a brown suede shirt is greeting visitors in the band's cramped dressing room. For a moment it's hard to recognize him: He looks like Jack White, but he's missing the Zorro mustache, Candy Land wardrobe and inscrutable scowl. Then he makes it easy. "Hi, I'm Jack," he says, smiling and offering the right hand that cranked out the riff to "Seven Nation Army."

White won't be playing any White Stripes tunes tonight. In the Raconteurs, he's traded in his drum-bashing ex-wife for three old buddies: power-pop cult fave Brendan Benson, who shares frontman duties, plus drummer Patrick Keeler and bassist Jack Lawrence from Cincinnati garage band the Greenhornes. "It all happened by accident," White says. "No one said, 'We're starting a new band.' " The glam-tinged retro rock of their first album, Broken Boy Soldiers, due May 16th, blurs the line between Benson's and White's sounds: The pair is amused that no one seems to be able to tell who's singing at any given moment.

Hanging with his new bandmates in the dressing room, White remains in regular-dude mode, hugging a VH1 programmer and joking about the earplugs his visitors received on their way into the show. Meanwhile, Benson accepts compliments on his thick new beard. "It took me a year to grow," he says. "I'm not kidding."

Fellow Detroit natives Benson and White have been friends since the late Nineties. "I remember meeting Jack for the first time and thinking he was very strange -- in the best possible way," says Benson, who released his major-label debut in 1996, a year before the Stripes formed. To many garage-rock scenesters, Benson's meticulously crafted pop sounded as alien as Tuvan throat singing -- but White adored it. Once, in a display of "I wish I could quit you"-level devotion, the pair played a club show in which they each only sang the other's songs. "I wanted to make a statement to all the garage rockers that this is someone who really cares about song craftsmanship," White says, "that we should all get into songwriting instead of worrying about being cool."

The Raconteurs began with one song, "Steady, As She Goes," back in 2004: Benson had music for it but no lyrics, so he asked White to help out. "It felt just like anything else -- like writing lyrics to one of my songs, or mowing the lawn," says White. After playing around with a couple of other tunes, including the psychedelic "Broken Boy Soldier," the guys called in Lawrence and Keeler, who played with White on Loretta Lynn's 2004 album, Van Lear Rose. They convened in Benson's house and started running an old analog tape deck. "By the third song, it turned into a band," says White. They recorded in fits and starts in Benson's un-air-conditioned attic, where microphones kept catching the sounds of the kids next door playing basketball.

Unlike the White Stripes -- which began with a series of manifestos, not jam sessions -- this is a band without rules. "The White Stripes is this box that I luckily get to work inside of," says White. "This is liberating." In New York, performing for XM Satellite Radio contest winners in the former Hit Factory studios, the band kicks into "Steady, As She Goes." The quiet, bespectacled Lawrence plucks out the catchy bass riff (which the band denies lifting from Joe Jackson), and White smiles -- he finally has a bass player.

"I marvel at these guys," White says a few days later, fiddling with a water bottle in another studio's greenroom. "It's like I went from a three-cylinder engine to an eight-cylinder engine." During the show, as Benson leads a dead-on cover of "It Ain't Easy," from Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, White hangs back, strumming an acoustic guitar. "I can take a drink of water now during the set," he says. "Didn't use to be able to do that."

All four Raconteurs recently moved to Nashville. "We all wanted to be in the same city," says Keeler. "It was important for us to be a band and not just the idea of a band, flying into a posh rehearsal studio every couple of months." Does Jack miss Detroit? "Fuck no," he says, laughing. He laughs even harder at the headline of a recent Onion story: DETROIT SOLD FOR SCRAP.

White's wife, Karen Elson, is expecting a baby soon, and after that, the band is planning a summer tour, with a stop at Lollapalooza. And the group is writing songs for a second LP, though it's not clear when it might come out. "We all want to do more records with all of our bands," White says. Everyone seems confident that the Raconteurs can coexist with their other projects. But of the four, Benson seems least eager to return to his previously scheduled solo career. "I got sick of myself," he says, looking around the room at his friends. "This is the band I always wanted."

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