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.
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.
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