The story of the red, white & blues

It’s another chapter in the story of the blues. The blues is an undiscriminating virus. All it requires of a host body is the capability to recognise its essential DNA; thereafter it mutates to survive. No-one knows for sure where it was spawned, probably somewhere in Central Africa, maybe the Mesopotamian cradle, some long ago place primal and mysterious enough to nurture a Manitou that could lurk in port towns, jump slave ships, negotiate oceans and shape-shift from Homer’s ghost songs or Congolese tribal chants into southern prison hollers and high lonesome Appalachian sounds.

It was a migrant imp that found its way into the blood of shadowy men like Charlie Patton, Son House, Leadbelly and Robert Johnson, moving up through Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee and BB and Muddy, then doubling back to London where it made carriers of The Stones, The Yardbirds, and Cream. The further it travelled the more twisted and unrecognisable it became, until its origins were almost completely masked save for the dark spirit that animated acts like Captain Beefheart and Tom Waits and The Birthday Party and The Gun Club.

It found its way through the cracks in hip-hop into Spanglish-Hispanic-Mexicano acts like Cypress Hill, from there to Beck, and from there again to the banshee wails of Polly Jean Harvey. Then, at the turn of the century, just as it seemed that the bloated, cowed carcass of rock ‘n’ roll had forgotten its existence in all but the most perfunctory lip service, it decamped to Detroit, Rock City. And it jumped into the avid mouths of the White Stripes.

Jack White was born John Gillis and raised Catholic in the predominantly Mexican quarter of south-western Detroit, a wasteland of abandoned skyscrapers uglifying the skyline like the great rotted stumps of capitalism. In the late 60s these buildings were monuments to the city’s thriving motor industry, but by the time John Gillis first learned to beat a drum at the age of five they were overrun with bums, crackheads and vermin. One look at Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mile will tell you all you need to know about this teenage wasteland. When race riots razed the city centre 35 years ago, the affluent fled to the suburbs, things fell apart, the city centre could not hold.

It’s been said before, but it bears repeating: anyone wondering why the White Stripes have an inherent distrust of big business (cock an ear to ‘The Big Three Killed My Baby’ off their debut, or ‘I Think I Smell A Rat’ from White Blood Cells) need only take a look at Michigan Central Station, once the second most important railway station in America, now a decaying hulk. When the motor industry pulled the motor out of out of motor city central in 1972, all that was left was a nightmare surreal estate landscape of gutted mansions, husked out theatres and devalued property.

This was the backdrop to John Gillis’s childhood, a time that remains as integral to his art as it did to Jimmy Joyce and Ivan Morrison. You can hear him hunger for the colours and smells of that childhood in a song like ‘We’re Going To Be Friends’, Jack playing Huck Finn charming his scabby-kneed Meg with six strings to swing a dead rat on. You can hear it in the dappled shadows of ‘Apple Blossom’ from De Stijl or in the Salvation Army Band meets Blonde On Blonde of ‘Hotel Yorba’.

And to this day, the singer attributes his band’s sonic and visual aesthetic – Meg’s drumming, so simplistic it makes Mo Tucker sound like Steve Gadd, the blaring red guitar sound, the infantile pidgin Spanish vocal delivery suggesting Black Francis mimicking Robert Plant – to a child-like vision of all things pared back to their barest essentials.

Jack White comes from the blues school of non-disembodied poetics, requiring strict meters to keep him from spinning off into the seas of possibilities. This is why he has held fast to the core values of guitar and drums (with the odd concession to piano and harmonica), seeing options as the enemy. Which, as anyone who’s wandered down the Alice-like rabbit warren of a 48-track mixing desk will tell you, is not necessarily an unwise approach. The White Stripes, like all great rock ‘n’ roll combos, make virtues out of their limitations.

“If you’re a painter and you go to an art supply store you can get 700 different colours you can buy,” Jack White told hotpress’s Eamon Sweeney last year. “A long time ago you used to have five colours and you’d have to mix your own paint. It feeds creativity. If you want a certain colour and you just go to a store and buy it rather than coming up with it yourself, where is the creativity in that? It’s just like those two-piece boxes where you can only put in three components – vocals, guitar and drums. Just work with that and see what you come up with.”

The schools Jack went to while growing up were mostly attended by black and Mexican kids whose music of choice was house and hip-hop, which he detested. If Beck Hansen had a similar background in Hispanic LA and learned the value of an open mind, fusing breakbeats with folk song, then White adopted a siege mentality, retreating to his own private universe of distorted snake riffs and arcane blues language.

Even more heretically, he rejected Motown’s production values, instead cleaving to Michigan’s other sons, the Stooges, after he found one of their records tossed in the street. For Jack White, this was the Detroit version of pulling the sword from the stone. From there on in he became a flaming convert to the garage aesthetic – The Sonics, The Monks, The Rats – then discovered the British blues boomers before delving ever backwards into urban electric blues, retracing the half-buried leylines down from Chicago to the Mississippi Delta.

He passed through a few bands in his apprentice years, playing with mid-’90s acts like Goober & The Peas, Two Star Tabernacle and The Go, before meeting Meg White, whose surname he took when they wed in 1996. The marriage didn’t last but the partnership did – Jack discovered his musical foil when Meg picked up the drumsticks and began bashing along to his dirty blues riffs in the house they shared.

The duo began with no aspirations other than to cut a few vinyl 45s, but they were soon offered the chance to make an album for the Californian indie label Sympathy For The Record Industry. In the light of the last couple of years, the most remarkable thing about the White Stripes’ eponymous debut album is that it’s as good as any of their other records. The next thing you notice is that, aside from White’s baby-faced Robert Plant inflections and a certain Bonham-esque wallop in the drum department, it also sounds a lot like their other three records.

De Stijl, perhaps their best work, was released in 2000, and the band got to play a handful of the major American cities on the back of it. A year later they recorded White Blood Cells in three days. You know the rest: ‘Hotel Yorba’, ‘Fell In Love With A Girl’, that Michel Gondry video, the blistering live shows, the cover of Spin.

And now comes Elephant, which like all their other records is a scrappy, gloriously untidy collection of diesel stained punk-blues routines, retreads of their own best moments, country sweetheart songs and one hand-picked cover version. It seems destined to outsell every thing they’ve ever done. In a remarkably short time, the band have far outstripped contemporaries like The Strokes and The Hives, and peers like Make-Up, Royal Trux and Delta 72 are fast fading into late 90s nostalgia.

It doesn’t hurt that the duo are a spontaneous and combustible playing unit. Unencumbered by computerised lighting rigs or even such basic restrictions as having to teach band-mates the chords to a new tune, they can swerve, stand on the brakes and U-turn in mid-set with no pause for consultation, slipping from thrash-out to blues implosion to folk balladry with the merest twitch of an eyebrow.

By the time the Stripes started touring Europe two years ago, they had three albums’ worth of material and a plethora of covers at their disposal, meaning their set-list was never going to be laminated. It’s been a long time since audiences bore witness (or in the case of Irish fans, Witnness) to that kind of ad-hoc, daredevilry on a live stage – maybe not since The Waterboys’ legendary Irish tours in the late 80s, or Dylan on an exceptionally good night. The White Stripes may never have the kind of generational asteroid effect of a Pistols or Nirvana, but they’ve got more stamina.

Plus, they’ve cracked the Mojo market through a firm grasp of the roots that get your Greil Marcuses and Robert Palmers and Charles Shaar Murrays waxing lyrical. So far the only critical crib levelled at the band has been Jack White’s perceived chauvinism, a hankering back to an era of Carter family values and buckskin jackets, when sweethearts were sweethearts, men wore pants and wimmen bore babies. At its most suspect (‘Girl, You Have No Faith In Medicine’ off the new record) this smacks of the kind of hand-me-down put-downs copped from the elder Blind Lemons by way of The Stones. But giving Jack some slack, you could also say it’s just an affectation inextricably linked to his fondness for old world values. Or to be more precise, the kind of old world values associated with the records he grew up on. Listen to the way he takes hold of Dylan’s ‘One More Cup Of Coffee’ off the debut album and remember this strain of Desire is but one track away from Zim’s equally contentious ‘Oh Sister’. Besides, when you open the Pandora’s box of blues history, you’re gonna get some unpleasant odours.

It’s time we talked about the Threes. If you’re looking for a Eureka moment in Jack White’s career, zone in on one day about six years ago, when he was working in an upholstery shop and one of his co-workers was stapling a piece of fabric to a couch. Three staples. Not one. Not two. Three, the optimum number.

White looked at the perfect minimalist simplicity of it and decided there and then that his art, his sculptures, the colour coding of his van and his overalls, his tools, his business cards, his own furniture maintenance business (Third Man), and most importantly, his rock ‘n’ roll, would all revolve around the number three. Three chords. Three component sounds: voice, guitar and drums. Three colours: black, white and red.

You know this already of course, and I’m not saying I necessarily share the guy’s cabbalistic fetish, but in an age of Good Charlotte and Avril Lavigne, I think it’s intriguing that he at least subscribes to something other than Skateboard Sluts Weekly. Not that I’m knocking Skateboard Sluts Weekly, but it is refreshing to come across a rock star under 30 who can read using both hands. Such arcane interests put White in a long lineage of rock ‘n’ roll crank shamen (most of them from Texas) but they also bring to mind Harry Smith’s elemental colour coding of his Anthology Of American Folk Music.

Deep in the third act of that box set, you’ll find Blind Willie Johnson croaking, “Who’s that writing?/John the Revelator” and one wonders if Catholic Jack’s numerological fetishism hasn’t somehow derived from John’s visions on Patmos – specifically the new single ‘Seven Nation Army’, which sounds like the productions of a particularly agitated fever dream. Like it or not, the Stripes provide a link between Seattle’s anti-corporate upstarts and the Carters’ devotional hymns.

I’ve namechecked the lost Gnostic gospels of Saint Thomas before in these pages, specifically the line: “If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you”, but this maxim also has its brother in the blues, in the gospel according to John Lee Hooker, writ in illiterate Delta muck: “Ya gotta let that boy boogie-woogie/It’s in ’im, it’s got ta come out.” And even John Lee’s defiant rejection of the clerical threat of fire and brimstone in ‘Burnin’ Hell’ sounded like testimony.

In music, as in ecumenical matters, the blasphemers operate shoulder to shoulder with the evangelists, enjoined by passion. It’s the don’t-knows you want to watch out for, the in-betweenies, the lukewarm. Again consult John’s Revelations: “And because you are neither hot nor cold I will spew you out of my mouth.”

Okay constant readers, I realise that this kind of talk will forever guarantee my own private seat on the DART, but you just can’t discuss The White Stripes’ blues without also getting religion.

Don’t forget – how could you? – that in the old Greek of the New Testament, the character for Delta is a three-pointed figure, the same triangle that dominates the ‘Seven Nation Army’ video, the same Delta blues that seeps through every crack in the White Stripes’ red-raw noise.

God must be laughing His balls off at this particular cosmic joke: the latest incarnation of the devil’s music is being codified according to His divine number.

The White Stripes are the kind of band who can mean anything you want them to. They are the parable of the blind men touching different parts of the elephant, thinking it by turns a snake, a worm, a hippo and so on. Jack and Meg’s Elephant is open to equal levels of mis/interpretation, but one of the most interesting non-musical things about the album is how its success has made a failure of record industry wisdom, specifically notions of how to record and market a hot new rock ‘n’ roll combo.

Marketing first. At the time of going to press, the White Stripes have cancelled all European interviews in the wake of increasingly pithy media coverage, the most notable case in point being the recent cover story by the NME, who’ve been trying to dam their sales haemorrhage over the last year by hyping the Stripes, The Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs for every last devalued penny. Taken as read (or not, in this case), you could interpret this media blackout as another hissy-fit thrown by a young act with notions above their station, the kind of knee-jerk psychotic reaction pulled by every greenhorn band confused by sudden press saturation.

Me, I reckon it’s one of the smartest moves the band have pulled so far. Right now, Jack and Meg remain fascinating characters, not quite as gone-guano eccentric as Brian Wilson maybe, but certainly possessors of the kind of off-kilter stubbornly held principals one might expect of a Neil Young. In short, old souls in pale, pretty heads. But as their nuggets threaten to snowball, the band’s already cartoon-like attributes could so easily be blown up into full pop-art Lichtenstein proportions: Those Jack and Meg characters sure are a hoot with their three colours red garage band inbred lovers routine! What a shtick! What a marketing angle!

But in an industry where the word principle means U2’s management and kids barely out of school are selling their grandmothers for six months of C-list celebrity, you’ve gotta hand it to someone sticking up for Delta blues and modernist minimalist art. There’s something of Dylan in White’s mixture of savvy and shyness, his playing with the gentleman dandy persona, his turn of the century phraseology. One suspects he’ll be making music long after the industry has forgotten him. At the very least, he’s unlikely to go bankrupt.

Last September the NME ran a story speculating that Elephant, then just completed, stood a fair chance of becoming the most profitable album in history. The 20-plus songs from which the final track listing was selected were recorded over two weeks in Liam Watson’s computer free analogue-only Toe-Rag studios in London, where none of the gear dates past 1963 (see panel). Elephant cost roughly ten grand in all, including bed and board. Sales of White Blood Cells are nudging a million: if Elephant should repeat that performance, The White Stripes could be looking at a gross revenue of up to 12 million dollars. Deducting video and touring costs, but presuming an artist-friendly indie royalty rate, they’re due a pretty juicy chunk of the takings.

Ask Liam Watson about charging a million-selling band such a low rate and he says this: “At the time that I met the White Stripes, before I started recording them, I was charging thirty pounds an hour, and I was in a position where I’d been doing this for ten years, just surviving, enjoying myself. And The White Stripes came along, and I’d known them before, so I did it for the same amount of money as everyone else because I wasn’t really in a position to (up the price). I mean, I can now, but then I couldn’t!”

Gentlemanly conduct in a business full of scoundrels, but it’s paying off.

“I’m getting people calling me all the time and I’m just telling people to send me stuff to listen to,” Watson admits. “I don’t have a set rate at the studio anymore, I just see what kind of money people have got, ’cos I’m not going to charge the same to a major record company as I am to a band that are just trying to do a demo.

“You can probably gather that I don’t really care much for contemporary recording techniques. Most big budget major label records to me don’t sound very good.”
Again I’m reminded of Neil Young, specifically his raging against the digital machine, and his willingness to put out drunken, off-key, ramshackle records like Tonight’s The Night that still sound as exuberantly desolate 30 years later.

Elephant went in at number one in Britain, six on the Billboard chart, and also went gold in Ireland within a week. This was before touring, imminent festival appearances and the single ‘Seven Nation Army’ (effectively a promotional tool, as it will be deleted the day of its release) and accompanying video. Impressive stats, but it’s unlikely that The White Stripes can stay this hot indefinitely.

My guess is that the fever running high on the band will subside into background radiation over the next year, they’ll continue to tour and make records and settle into a holding pattern of sales in the upper hundred thousand region. That is, if they don’t renounce the devil’s music, start employing sequencers, go Pro-Tools and capitulate for the sake of a radio hit.
But somehow I think Jack White is too much the antiquarian contrarian for that.

White lines 1

Words with Liam Watson, Toe Rag owner, Elephant engineer.

You started Toe Rag studios as an analogue reaction to hi-tech recording techniques. Did you think, “If it sounded good for The Sonics, it’ll still sound good now”?

“Totally. There’s too many recording studios around as it is, they’re pretty boring places that are fairly similar, they’ve kind of been standardised. I was interested in, say in the 60s for instance, every studio had their own sound, there was no standardisation, they all had different gear, different acoustics, different ways of doing things, and that’s why people would go there, because they had a unique sound. Nowadays it’s just boring.

How did The White Stripes find out about Toe Rag?

“It was two guys from a band called The Henchmen from Detroit who were on holiday in London, they were sort of friends of friends. One evening we got together and did a kind of fun recording and they really loved the place and told Jack and Meg about it, and they really liked it as well.”

What are their working methods like?

“Same as me. Do what you do!”

Presumably you tracked them live?

“Yeah.”

Vocals and all?

“Sometimes, sometimes not, depending on the song. Sometimes it would just be guide vocal cues. There were two tracks that actually ended up with live vocals on the record, the rest of it was done afterwards. I should think because we never had to talk about anything they were completely compatible with the way I do things. It must’ve been because I’ve been using an 8-track!”

White lines 2

Jack White’s dark fathers

Charley Patton
(1887-1934)
The first star of Delta country blues was a short-tempered rake with an outsized capacity for women and liquor. By the late 1920s, he was a Mississippi celebrity whose voice was said to be loud enough to carry 500 yards at an outdoors dance. An exemplary slide player, he learned how to pop the bass strings 50 years before Bootsy. A major influence on Son House and Robert Johnson.
Recommended: Founder Of The Delta Blues (Yazoo)

Leadbelly
(1888 –1949)
Huddie William Ledbetter was the first blues crossover artist, playing at parties and square dances by the time he was 14, learning slide from Blind Lemon Jefferson as a teenager.
After many years in trouble with the law, in 1930 he was convicted of assault with intent to commit murder and sentenced to 30 years in the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. There he was visited by the Library of Congress researcher John Lomax who helped secure Ledbetter’s release after four years. Approaching middle age, he found success in New York and by the 1940s was revered as a gifted songwriter and precursor to the 60s topical/protest singers.
Recommended: Library of Congress Recordings (Elektra)

Son House
(1902-1988)
A Baptist preacher who lived as a plantation migrant and only picked up the guitar at the age of 25, Son House served two years at Parchman Farm for shooting a man dead. On his release, he hoboed and played the juke joints. A raw, demonic performer and a gloomy individual, his career fell dormant for much of the ’40s and ’50s, but the 1960s folk-blues revival gave him a second life before the onset of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Recommended: Delta Blues (Biograph).

Blind Willie Johnson
(1902-1947)
Johnson was another guitar-playing evangelist possessed of a voice like the devil with a hangover. He also had a wicked hand with the pocket-knife slide and made his first guitar out of a cigar box at the age of five. When his father beat up his stepmother for cheating, she retaliated by throwing lye in seven-year-old Willie’s face, deliberately blinding him. He spent most of his life singing for the Baptist church or playing for tips on the streets of Beaumont, Texas and died of pneumonia in the late ’40s after sleeping on wet bedding following a house fire.
Recommended: The Complete Recordings (Columbia)

Robert Johnson
(1911-1938)
The archetypal doomed genius and father of the blues and rock n’ roll. The legend has it that, as a young man living in rural Mississippi, Johnson took his guitar to a crossroads at midnight and had it tuned by the devil. In exchange for his soul, he became the king of the Delta blues singers – a phenomenal guitarist, haunted singer and writer of unearthly and often apocalyptic blues psalms. He died at the age of 27 having caught pneumonia while recovering from being poisoned by the husband of a woman he’d made advances toward.
Recommended: King Of The Delta Blues Singers Vol 1&2 (Columbia)