Jack White Emerges: The White Stripes' Future Star Is Born
He was the youngest of ten children in a Catholic family in Detroit, and his birth name wasn't White—it was Gillis. John Anthony Gillis. He took the name White when he married Meg White in 1996, kept it after the divorce, and built an empire on red, white, and black. The two-color guitar riffs. The peppermint aesthetic. The deliberate limitations that somehow produced "Seven Nation Army," a stadium chant that's echoed from World Cup matches to protest marches in nearly every country on earth. He proved you could strip rock down to drums and guitar—just two people—and make it sound bigger than bands with five members and a symphony behind them.
July 9, 1975
51 years ago
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