Where is white stripes from

Born and raised in Detroit, Jack White -- then known as Jack Gillis -- began playing drums as a child and picked up guitar in high school.

When he was a senior, he met Meg White at the restaurant where she worked, and the pair struck up a friendship. He and White married in , with Jack taking Meg 's surname. The couple became a band in when they jammed that Bastille Day with Jack on guitar and vocals and Meg on drums. Naming themselves after Meg 's love of peppermints, they made their live debut in August at the Gold Dollar bar, joining an underground garage rock scene that also included the Gories and the Dirtbombs.

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 as a seven-inch with an initial run of 1, copies. That October, the single "Lafayette Blues" followed, and tours with Pavement and Sleater-Kinney helped the duo earn a national following. The duo closed the year by releasing "Hand Springs," a split single with the Dirtbombs that came with the pinball fanzine Multiball.

For their raw second album, 's De Stijl , the White Stripes recorded themselves on an 8-track in Jack 's living room. 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.

It was with their next album, 's White Blood Cells , that the White Stripes established themselves as leaders of the garage rock revival. Recorded in Memphis with renowned producer Doug Easley , it marked the first time the band had worked in a 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.

That year, Jack White also founded his own label, Third Man Records, whose name paid homage to the classic Orson Welles film as well as White's upholstery business.

To accommodate their swell in popularity, the White Stripes moved to a major label. To make their fourth album, the band decamped to London to work at engineer Liam Watson 's Toe Rag Studios, choosing it for its wealth of vintage analog equipment. Recorded in less than two weeks, 's Elephant explored "the death of the sweetheart" and received unanimous critical acclaim and platinum sales in several countries upon its release.

The album won the Grammy Award for Best Alternative Album, while its lead single, "Seven Nation Army," won the Grammy for Best Rock song and later became an internationally popular jock jam at sporting events. While many garage rock revivalists fell by the wayside as the s continued, the White Stripes proved to be an enduring presence. On 's dizzyingly diverse Get Behind Me Satan -- which, in keeping with the band's feverish pace, they wrote and recorded in two weeks -- they experimented with disco-metal and marimba-driven pop.

Jack White continued to juggle his responsibilities as he performed with several bands, produced albums for other artists, and made forays into cinema. My dad was into the big bands: Glenn Miller, Gene Krupa. I found the first Stooges album in a dumpster behind our house, in the garbage of my next-door neighbor Brian Muldoon.

I ended up working at his upholstery shop. What did your parents do? They worked for the Catholic Church, in the same building in downtown Detroit. The church uses a lot of red and white too. When I was an altar boy, we had the black-and-white robes. We only used red-and-white cassocks for special occasions, like Christmas. It was filmed at my church, and they picked a few altar boys to be in a scene. Were red, white and black your favorite colors as a kid? Everything was yellow, black and white.

All my power tools were yellow and black. I had a yellow van. I ran my business like a cartoon. It came from peppermint candy. I also think they are the most powerful color combination of all time, from a Coca-Cola can to a Nazi banner.

Those colors strike chords with people. In Japan, they are honorable colors. When you see a bride in a white gown, you immediately see innocence in that. Red is anger and passion. It is also sexual. And black is the absence of all that. You grew up in a Mexican neighborhood where all the other kids were into hip-hop. How did you become so obsessed with blues and country music? I got into blues in my late teens. I knew about Robert Johnson from the bands that covered him.

And when I heard him, I thought it was OK. That was a transformative moment. It was what I had been struggling through my whole life. I never liked the same music anyone else did. It all exploded for me after Son House. Robert Johnson became extremely beautiful. And I kept digging, to Charley Patton. She has more Dylan records than I do. Nobody accused Dylan of ripping off Woody Guthrie. They knew Dylan was embracing him, that he wanted to become part of that family of songwriters and traveling musicians — the family that keeps handing things down, one to another.

Which White Stripes songs do you think may be handed down, through that family, someday? Oh, man, that would be egotistical.

You recently married Karen Elson in the middle of a tour, deep in the Brazilian jungle, on the Amazon River. There was nothing I could do to stop it. It might as well be today. Does this mean you are a much happier person now than you were a year ago?

Satan is the end of any unhappiness I have. I got the last things out on that record. And I do that with my own life. But how do you define truth, in music or otherwise? The White Stripes are, in many ways, a work of artifice: the color scheme, the brother-sister thing, the two-piece sound. And if you think Ashlee Simpson is the truth, you gotta have your head examined.

I hate to call Rolling Stone on it, but you defended that crap. I got through a lot of confusing times. I have that freedom. And I will never take that for granted. Newswire Powered by. Close the menu. So we were listening to stuff really early. I was talking to his older brother, and asked if Jack wanted to help out — tearing stuff up, doing deliveries — so he started working in my shop.

He told me one day he was starting to play guitar. Within a year, he got really good. At the time we had another kid from Cass Tech — Dominic Suchyta — and we played together.

Then Dominic went off to school in East Lansing, so Jack and I went on as a two-piece, from the fall of '93 through ' It was just the two of us — guitar and drums. Jack always liked the blues.

That was our common ground — stuff like Howlin' Wolf. And Rob Tyner's singing in the MC5 was a real influence for him. That was the stuff we were playing all the time in the shop while we worked. And it wasn't long before Jack was writing his own songs. We were very determined about the way feedback should be, the way things should sound.

He was never just goofing around. The band lasted another year. Jack had also become close friends with Megan White, a Grosse Pointe native still living on the east side. They would marry in in South Lyon, and Jack would take his wife's surname.

Jack was a lot younger than we were. He wasn't the most technical drummer, thankfully — not a Neil Peart-ish drummer. Everybody in the band was like, "Wow!

His instincts were really great. MILLER: I think it was a good thing for him just to see what it was like to be in a band that toured — and probably see what kind of mistakes we made. I do remember the first show when he played drums: For an encore he came up and sang some Elvis song. People were just shocked by his passion for it. He bought "Broad Appeal" and Mick Collins was behind him in line. And Jack was all excited — "Mick Collins was just behind me in line!

Meg lived in the neighborhood and would come in and buy records all the time. One day she showed up with her boyfriend — or fiance. Back then he had blond hair, really curly. They'd come in and do what everybody does at Car City — go through the vinyl bins looking for good records, both popular records and more obscure things as well.

MILLER: It was weird, knowing him at 19, and seeing this person who had all these really clear-cut goals and this real commitment and passion for how he wanted things to go in his life, musically and otherwise. I remember him saying, "I really want to be proud of everything I do. Jack and Meg had just jammed in their attic. That's the thing — the people making this kind of music, they ain't chops-oriented. It's all about the feeling.

Originally they were tossing back and forth the names Bazooka and Soda Powder, so after hearing the other names they had come up with, the White Stripes didn't seem so bad.

Meg came up with it, and the story about them getting it from the candy might be true, but they also had some old bricks in front of the house in the garden that said "White" on them, and that might have had something to do with it. In , a new surge of garage rock was hitting the Detroit underground, led by a band called Rocket With the White Stripes under way, Jack kept busy working with a variety of bands, including the Hentchmen and a country-infused outfit with Miller they named Two Star Tabernacle.

In August , the Stripes landed their first public show: an opening gig with the Hentchmen at the Gold Dollar. Detroit Free Press, She's gotten so much better, but she never needed to. It was really sloppy and stripped down, because Meg really couldn't play. But it was fun and interesting. There was something unique there, because you could tell that the songs Jack was doing stood out.

It was better songwriting. I remember singing "Screwdriver" and "Jimmy the Exploder" over and over. Kind of intense — he always seemed like a very determined person. He seemed to already have his vision. The Rocket fans were like, "Hmm — what are they doing? People saw it as half a band. When you've got a night full of five-piece bands, and then you've got a drummer and guitar player, it's hard to get a promoter to take you seriously.

Jack was bummed out: "We can't headline. We're a two-piece and nobody takes us seriously. I was at the first two White Stripes shows and the majority of the fans were outside the Gold Dollar while they were playing — there were maybe 20 or 30 people inside when they went on.

That first year, they were always the first out of three on a bill , and there'd be hardly anyone there — me and a few people. People would complain about Jack sounding whiny or whatever.

Me and Marcie Bolen of the Von Bondies were there and saw him play and thought, "What is the deal with this guy's voice? Like opera weird.

He whines — it's annoying. They opened for everybody, including the Cobras. At first, you heard this Robert Plant screaming-woman thing. He's really got that honed now. And he was immediately like, "Nah, no, no, I can't afford it," and walked away. He didn't understand at first that I was offering to pay for it. It was this honest, emotional, sweet thing. That whole first year, every single person misprinted the band name — it was always "White Stripe" or "White Strike" or "White Strikes.

Of course, that wasn't as bad as when they played the Magic Bag one night and were billed as the Light Strikes. BAISE: The watershed for so many people — and not just in a destined-for-success kind of way, because it didn't seem like that at all — was the summer of '98 at the 4th Street Fair. One of the greatest days for Detroit music ever. Almost all the great bands played that day, including the White Stripes, who played around 2 or 3 in the afternoon. The sun was still up.

They didn't even have an album out yet, and they already had signature tunes that you learned from seeing them live, like "The Big Three Killed My Baby. I remember Jack getting so mad at the Magic Stick and storming off because the light wasn't the right color on him. Anyone accusing him of getting a big head is wrong, because he's always had a big head.

By , Jack had caught the attention of Bobby Harlow and John Krautner of the Go, a young band hatching a glam-sparked garage sound. Jack was laying back playing great guitar, singing harmonies with Dan Miller. He just had a great stage presence — he looked really cool, he looked comfortable. He wasn't a phony at all. I said to John, "Let's go up front and look at this guy. Dave and Jack were buddies.

Later, Jack was over at Dave's house, so John and I went over there: "Hey, Jack, we've got a question for you --" And Jack said, "Yes, already, yes, absolutely, wanna join, count me in. Whenever we practiced at Jack's house, we practiced upstairs in his room.