At a time when there are few “rock stars” left, Jack White of the White Stripes knows how to make a classic rock-star entrance.
Driving a 1960 Thunderbird, White pulls into the parking lot of an antiques shop in Leiper’s Fork, Tenn., the block-long town near Nashville where he lives with wife Karen Elson and their 1-year-old daughter, Scarlett. He’s dressed head to toe in black, complementing the band’s drummer, Meg White, who wears a black top and a red skirt.
Jack White still believes that smoke and mirrors, the kind of approach that has caused detractors to dismiss the White Stripes as a gimmick, are integral to successful art. He keeps a tight rein on the White Stripes’ image, applying stringent rules to everything from the musical arrangements to the red-white-and-black color scheme.
“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,” the 31-year-old said.
“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 Tuesday release of the 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 many as 2003’s platinum-plus “Elephant.” The new release is the duo’s first for a major label after a decade spent at the vanguard of the garage-rock revival, a movement defined by its outsider attitude.
At a time when the music business is in free-fall and younger 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. While most bands respond to the pressures of recording for a bigger company with a 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 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.”
Some of the band’s fans are skeptical about the move, however. One blog, productshopnyc.com, recently posted two leaked songs from the album; the site quickly received a cease-and-desist order from Warner Bros. and took down the tracks, only to find itself shut down for a day.
“I’m not sure what all this says about the White Stripes if they sign to a label that employs such heavy-handed tactics,” read a comment from one of the site’s users.
The music, however, more than holds up its end of the deal, with songs that continue to expand upon the sources that have always inspired the White Stripes. The usual critical standards of progress and evolution are hard to apply to a band that is so rigorously dedicated to certain simple principles.
“Something that we love about the band is that there’s a huge portion of it that will never change,” Jack White said. “It will always be restricted and constricted and stuck in this box.”
While many artists trumpet their artistic growth from project to project, he proudly notes that “there are songs on this album that could easily have been on our first album.”
White said the Beatles set a near-impossible expectation that rock bands need continually to change to remain creative, and that Madonna upped the ante by making perpetual reinvention the very point of her work.
“I told someone that one of these new songs could be an old 45 of ours,” he said. “And they said, would you want the Beatles to have ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ on the ‘White Album’? And I said, yeah, I would love that — what would be wrong with that?”
Asked if he really believes that listeners hope to hear the same thing over and over from a band, or if such a thing is even possible, he concedes that fans want to hear something new but that they “also want part of it to stay grounded.”
Virtually everything about the White Stripes 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.”
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What’s black, white and red all over?
“Icky Thump” marks a couple of firsts for the White Stripes. It’s the band’s first major-label album and the first recorded in a real recording studio. One thing fans can always count on with the White Stripes, however, is the band’s black, red and white color scheme. Here’s a look at the Stripes’ style through the years. [ REDEYE ]
1999
The White Stripes
2000
De Stijl
2001
White Blood Cells
2003
Elephant
2005
Get Behind Me Satan
2007
Icky Thump
