For their raw second album, 2000's De Stijl, the White Stripes recorded themselves on an 8-track in Jack's living room. The duo closed the year by releasing "Hand Springs," a split single with the Dirtbombs that came with the pinball fanzine Multiball. The album made a fan of legendary BBC DJ John Peel, whose support helped the band gain fans in the U.K. Recorded at Jim Diamond's Ghetto Recorders studio in Detroit and produced by Jack White, the White Stripes' self-titled debut album appeared that June and was dedicated to blues icon Son House. That October, the single "Lafayette Blues" followed, and tours with Pavement and Sleater-Kinney helped the duo earn a national following.Īfter signing to Sympathy for the Record Industry, the band released the single "The Big Three Killed My Baby" in March 1999. The band soon connected with Dave Buick, owner of the Detroit garage rock label Italy Records, who released the White Stripes' first single "Let's Shake Hands" in February 1998 as a seven-inch with an initial run of 1,000 copies. Naming themselves after Meg's love of peppermints, they made their live debut in August 1997 at the Gold Dollar bar, joining an underground garage rock scene that also included the Gories and the Dirtbombs. The couple became a band in 1997 when they jammed that Bastille Day with Jack on guitar and vocals and Meg on drums. He and White married in 1996, with Jack taking Meg's surname. While running his upholstery business, Gillis also played drums for bands such as the country outfit Goober & the Peas, the Go, and the Hentchmen. When he was a senior, he met Meg White at the restaurant where she worked, and the pair struck up a friendship. As they grew from a pair of Detroit kids on 1999's The White Stripes to international rock stars responsible for a trio of Grammy-winning albums (2003's Elephant, 2005's Get Behind Me Satan, and 2007's Icky Thump), they always remained true to their ideals.īorn and raised in Detroit, Jack White - then known as Jack Gillis - began playing drums as a child and picked up guitar in high school. The breadth of their sound and their fondness for mystique - they said the Dutch design movement De Stijl was as an important an influence on them as any musician, and claimed to be siblings even though they were actually a married couple until 2000 - gave the White Stripes more staying power than many of their contemporaries. Meg's straight-ahead, minimalist drumming complemented Jack's freewheeling guitars and vocals perfectly, and their music touched on not only on obvious forebears such as the Gories and the Stooges, but also Son House and Blind Willie McTell's mythic blues, Led Zeppelin's riffs, the Gun Club's unhinged punk, and the timeless storytelling of country and folk legends such as Loretta Lynn and Bob Dylan. Jack and Meg White's clever use of limitations - from their lineup to their instrumentation to their red, white, and black color scheme - maximized their creativity, allowing them to bring a surprising number of facets to their seemingly back-to-basics approach. “Only recently discovered in the basement of Stripes’ archivist, Ben Blackwell, these recordings, many with alternate and unused lyrics, were completely forgotten by White, yet form a pivotal foundation and structure on which the De Stijl album would build from,” Third Man said of the reissue.With their unlikely but fascinating mix of arty concepts and raw sounds, the White Stripes were among the leaders of the early-2000s garage rock revival and helped define the sound of 21st century rock as the decade progressed. The LPs also contains early versions of songs that would appear on De Stijl, its follow-up White Blood Cells and more. The unreleased recordings are spread across the two LPs, with Jack and Meg White’s versions of a pair of AC/DC songs (“Let There Be Rock” and “Dog Eat Dog”) and their cover of Velvet Underground’s “After Hours” among the over 25 unearthed tracks. It also includes an archival booklet filled with previously unseen photos, flyers and more. “The Accompaniment to De Stijl: The White Stripes’ Sophomore Album” boasts two colored LPs (one white, one red) and a DVD housed in a hardcover case. White Stripes will mark the 20th anniversary of their 2000 album De Stijl with a massive Third Man Vault reissue packed with unreleased recordings, two live performances and other ephemera from the era.
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