It’s the spring of 2001, and no one has heard of the White Stripes. Well, not no one: They’ve put out two albums, and they just landed in Rolling Stone, which has featured them as one of the bands worth putting on your radar. But this is a time of Papa Roach, Linkin Park, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Creed — there’s not a lot of mainstream interest (even in the alt-rock world) for an old-school blues-rock duo consisting of a brother and sister. “It seems to be really, really odd to end up in Rolling Stone,” the frontman, Jack White, says. “We don’t have anyone managing us; no one’s sending our records out to press or pushing us with radio or anything. Maybe the songs are just good.”
But the band is working on their new album, the one that might capitalize on that hype. White, who’s 25, doesn’t sound like a guy looking for his big breakthrough, though. “The dream of MTV and playing huge places seems to be like death,” he says. “John Waters said, ‘Success is doing what you want to do, how you want to do it.’ That’s pretty much where we are, and it’s a pretty good place to be.”
Jack White just turned 47 and his fifth solo album, Entering Heaven Alive, comes out on Friday. It’s been a very long time since no one has heard of him, or his old band. If anything, it’s possible you are sick of the guy. Not unlike Dave Grohl, he’s become the one rock guy that non-rock listeners seem to like, which has left him seeming like the normcore representative for a genre way past his prime. “Seven Nation Army,” the opening track off the White Stripes’ fourth album, Elephant, now plays on a loop during sporting events, reducing it to a sonic cliché. It’s not just his love of vinyl and vintage recording equipment that makes him seem a little out-of-touch — although, to be fair, when he was a young man, he loved those things, too. He’s a guy who never aspired to be fashionable who wound up being that for a little while. That third album, released around Independence Day in 2001, changed that — in particular, one song off it.
|
