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 grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood, upholstering furniture as an apprentice before picking up a guitar and channeling the raw energy of Son House and Blind Willie McTell into something nobody had heard before. 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 has echoed from World Cup matches to protest marches in nearly every country on earth. That seven-note bass line, played on a semi-hollow guitar through an octave pedal, became the most universally recognized rock riff of the twenty-first century, adopted by sports fans who have never heard the full song and couldn't name its creator. The White Stripes released six albums between 1999 and 2007, each one stripping rock further down to its bones. No bass player. No overdubs on the early records. Just drums and guitar, two people making music that sounded bigger than bands with five members and a symphony behind them. Their breakthrough, White Blood Cells, arrived in 2001 at the exact moment when guitar rock was supposed to be dead, killed by hip-hop and electronic music. Instead, the Stripes helped ignite a garage rock revival that included the Strokes, the Hives, and the Black Keys. After the Stripes dissolved, White launched The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather, ran Third Man Records out of Nashville, and became the most prolific defender of analog recording in modern music. He pressed records on every format imaginable, including a vinyl that could only be played once before it self-destructed. His insistence on artistic constraints as creative fuel influenced a generation of garage rock bands who realized you didn't need a budget to make something that mattered. Third Man Records grew into both a label and a physical pressing plant, one of the few independent vinyl manufacturers in the United States.