Perhaps only the Strokes have received more credit for the garage rock revival than have minimalist Detroit duo the White Stripes. But while the Strokes' sound and image hark back to '70s acts like the Velvet Underground and Television, the Stripes' Jack and Meg White dig much deeper for their influences (citing blues greats like Robert Johnson, Son House, and Blind Willie McTell, all of whose songs they have covered), and their carefully cultivated image (centering on their red-and-white, peppermint-swirl matching outfits and headline-grabbing rumors about their personal relationship) is entirely their own clever creation. As a result, they are one of the most original and refreshing bands around today, and the fact that their immense critical acclaim has blossomed into unexpected mainstream attention (thus opening doors for many of their peers) is quite heartening in the current climate of prefabricated pop.
Details about the Stripes' origins are still sketchy at best. When the duo emerged with their self-titled album on indie label Sympathy For The Record industry in 1999, two years after they first started gigging around their native Detroit, they claimed to be brother and sister, the youngest two siblings in a family of seven children. As their profile grew, rumors began to surface that the pair were actually ex-husband and wife. Jack (a former drummer for underground cowpunk act Goober & the Peas) and Meg neither confirmed nor denied such gossip until 2002, when an old marriage license and divorce certificate surfaced on the Internet. At that point it was revealed that the artist formerly known as John Anthony Gillis had supposedly married Megan Martha White in 1996--adopting her surname as his own--and that the two had amicably divorced three years later.
While incest-joke-laden controversy about the Whites' relationship generated notoriety for the White Stripes, ultimately it was their music--a charming and wholly original amalgam of Delta blues, Motor City rawk 'n' roll, backporch country, and punk, all played entirely by Jack on a chintzy, Sears-bought Airlines guitar with his "big sister" Meg pounding away in a most ramshackle and endearingly amateurish manner on the drums--that made people take notice. Their bare-bones live shows were nothing short of incendiary, with howlin' Jack making such a racket it was almost impossible to believe that there were only two people onstage.
The Stripes' buzz built steadily with the release of their sophomore album, 2000's De Stijl, but it was 2001's White Blood Cells that turned them into glossy magazine cover stars. As was the case with the Strokes, the Stripes' success was kickstarted by the British press, who salivated so frothingly over the duo's U.K. gigs that the Stripes ended up with an astounding $1 million record deal with British label XL Recordings. V2 Records then reissued White Blood Cells in the U.S. in 2002, and soon after the Stripes found themselves performing on the MTV Movie Awards (on the same bill as Eminem, yet) as dozens of extras dressed in red and white uniforms danced maniacally onstage. The groundbreaking, Michel Gondry-directed video for the Stripes' raucous "Fell In Love With A Girl" (which was composed entirely of Lego animation) kept the duo's MTV profile high--in fact, it won three trophies at the 2002 MTV Video Music Awards (in a very surreal TV moment, Jack and Meg accepted their Breakthrough Video award from presenters Mary-Kate & Ashley Olsen). The Stripes ended the highly successful year by opening for select Rolling Stones tourdates, Jack being named "Coolest Person In Rock" by British music tabloid NME, and White Blood Cells being declared 2002's "Album Of The Year" by Spin (even though it technically came out in 2001).
While Jack and Meg White were recording White Blood Cells' much-awaited follow-up, Elephant, in London, Jack also kept busy singing backup for XL Recordings labelmates Electric Six on their disco-rock single "Danger Danger, High Voltage"; acting in the film Cold Mountain alongside Hollywood A-listers Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Natalie Portman, and Renee Zellweger; and writing songs for the Cold Mountain soundtrack. By the time Elephant was completed, demand was so high that even V2 and XL's serious attempts to prevent it from leaking onto the Internet--such as issuing advance press copies on vinyl only--proved unsuccessful; the album's street date was moved up two weeks to curb further online piracy. Elephant was finally issued commercially on both CD and vinyl, with six different covers, in April 2003.
