Too Much Too Soon

The history of the White Stripes is somewhat murky, because of the simple fact that Jack is loath to talk about it. Onstage, he introduces Meg as his sister, which is about as plausible as his claim that she is an android and he is human. The Stripes are, by all accounts, former husband and wife Jack Gillis, 26, and Megan White, 27. Jack grew up in a low-income neighborhood in southwest Detroit, where, he says, he was the youngest of ten children. He went to a mostly black school, out of place as the lone classic-rock lover in a rap world. He began playing drums at age eleven, and later taught himself to play guitar and piano in order to accompany his drumming on a homemade recording. As a fan, he worked his way backward from Bob Dylan to discover the blues artists who inspired Dylan -- Son House, Robert Johnson, Blind Willie McTell -- all of whom served to convince him that the Twenties and the Thirties were the golden age of music. In 1997, Jack encouraged his then-wife Meg, who had briefly played violin around age seven, to take up the drums, and the two named their band after something that captured the simplicity they were going for: striped peppermint candy. He never planned or desired to add anyone or anything else to the band. "Anyone else would be excess," he says. "It would defeat the purpose of centralizing on these three components of storytelling, melody and rhythm."

In Pomona, California, after the MTV Awards, the White Stripes play a club show. In five years together, the duo claims to have never canceled a show. In order to ensure they make this one, MTV provided the Stripes with a helicopter. After the gig, the artist Paul Frank drops by with a red-and-white-striped drum stool and guitar strap he has made for the band. Backstage, Meg tries to do push-ups. She gets through two.

"I can do more, honest," she says when teased for being the weakest drummer in rock.

The show itself a strong one. You can tell Jack thinks so, because he plays "Boll Weevil" as an encore, a traditional folk-blues song, which he generally plays to cap a successful performance. But afterward, Jack admits only to feeling discomfort. "I have a problem with enjoying things at the moment," he says. "I'm too lost in some other thought. I'm scared of actually enjoying things. We could do a great version of 'Death Letter' by Son House on a certain night, and if I was smiling and enjoying every moment of it, I don't think anyone would understand how much that song means to me."

Most of the songs and stories aren't about Meg or himself, Jack says, and if they were, "I'd be afraid to tell people that it was myself."

Why is that? "I think that if I said such and such song is about myself, people would get the wrong idea and not take the idea that they are allowed to relate to that."

Two days later, Jack and Meg squirm in their seats poolside at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. The more the interview touches on personal subjects, the more uncomfortable Jack grows. He says that a sense of history and honesty are the most important attributes of playing music, yet onstage everyday he lies about his and Meg's history. It seems there is a fear of putting himself on the line and exposing himself to misinterpretation or, even worse, ridicule.

"As soon as you say something, people make up their own minds as to what it means," Jack says. "I'm sorry, but I have to pick and choose how those things are presented because I don't want people to think the wrong thing. I think the only focal point should be the songwriting and the music and the live show. The whole point of the band isn't, Are we really brother and sister, are we husband and wife; whether we're really from the city or just pretending, or whether we liked sandboxes as kids or the monkey bars." (For the record, Meg liked the monkey bars.)

But what if, hypothetically, everything about Jack and Meg's personal life was common knowledge? What if everyone knew where they came from, all about their relationship, their favorite color, everything? What would happen? Jack does not hesitate to answer this. He looks straight across the table, and says, as serious as his music, "Then we are completely dead."

[From Issue 903 — August 1, 2002]