The album eventually went platinum, and the White Stripes appeared on Late Night with David Letterman and the MTV Movie Awards program meanwhile, their music was profiled in Time, The New Yorker, and Entertainment Weekly. Featuring the single "Fell in Love with a Girl" - which boasted a clever, Lego-animated video by Michel Gondry that won the 2002 MTV Video Awards for Breakthrough Video, Best Special Effects, and Best Editing - White Blood Cells was a critical and commercial smash. Recorded in Memphis with renowned producer Doug Easley, it marked the first time the band had worked in a 24-track studio (as well as their first album to be mastered in the studio), but it was recorded in just four days to avoid sounding too polished. It was with their next album, 2001's White Blood Cells, that the White Stripes established themselves as leaders of the garage rock revival. ![]() Late that year, the White Stripes released Party of Special Things to Do, a Sub Pop single featuring three Captain Beefheart covers. Taking the album's name from the early 20th century Dutch aesthetic movement, the band dedicated De Stijl to the style's founder, designer Gerrit Rietveld, and Blind Willie McTell. For their raw second album, 2000's De Stijl, the White Stripes recorded themselves on an 8-track in Jack's living room. The duo closed the year by releasing "Hand Springs," a split single with the Dirtbombs that came with the pinball fanzine Multiball. The album made a fan of legendary BBC DJ John Peel, whose support helped the band gain fans in the U.K. Recorded at Jim Diamond's Ghetto Recorders studio in Detroit and produced by Jack White, the White Stripes' self-titled debut album appeared that June and was dedicated to blues icon Son House. That October, the single "Lafayette Blues" followed, and tours with Pavement and Sleater-Kinney helped the duo earn a national following.Īfter signing to Sympathy for the Record Industry, the band released the single "The Big Three Killed My Baby" in March 1999. The band soon connected with Dave Buick, owner of the Detroit garage rock label Italy Records, who released the White Stripes' first single "Let's Shake Hands" in February 1998 as a seven-inch with an initial run of 1,000 copies. Naming themselves after Meg's love of peppermints, they made their live debut in August 1997 at the Gold Dollar bar, joining an underground garage rock scene that also included the Gories and the Dirtbombs. The couple became a band in 1997 when they jammed that Bastille Day with Jack on guitar and vocals and Meg on drums. He and White married in 1996, with Jack taking Meg's surname. While running his upholstery business, Gillis also played drums for bands such as the country outfit Goober & the Peas, the Go, and the Hentchmen. When he was a senior, he met Meg White at the restaurant where she worked, and the pair struck up a friendship. As they grew from a pair of Detroit kids on 1999's The White Stripes to international rock stars responsible for a trio of Grammy-winning albums (2003's Elephant, 2005's Get Behind Me Satan, and 2007's Icky Thump), they always remained true to their ideals.īorn and raised in Detroit, Jack White - then known as Jack Gillis - began playing drums as a child and picked up guitar in high school. The breadth of their sound and their fondness for mystique - they said the Dutch design movement De Stijl was as an important an influence on them as any musician, and claimed to be siblings even though they were actually a married couple until 2000 - gave the White Stripes more staying power than many of their contemporaries. Meg's straight-ahead, minimalist drumming complemented Jack's freewheeling guitars and vocals perfectly, and their music touched on not only on obvious forebears such as the Gories and the Stooges, but also Son House and Blind Willie McTell's mythic blues, Led Zeppelin's riffs, the Gun Club's unhinged punk, and the timeless storytelling of country and folk legends such as Loretta Lynn and Bob Dylan. ![]() Jack and Meg White's clever use of limitations - from their lineup to their instrumentation to their red, white, and black color scheme - maximized their creativity, allowing them to bring a surprising number of facets to their seemingly back-to-basics approach. With their unlikely but fascinating mix of arty concepts and raw sounds, the White Stripes were among the leaders of the early-2000s garage rock revival and helped define the sound of 21st century rock as the decade progressed.
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