He professes--somewhat disingenuously--to be nonplussed by his band's eruptive success. "It's funny," he muses about White Blood Cells' unexpected growth spurt and MTV's Buzzworthy rotation of the band's LEGO-maniacal "Fell in Love With a Girl" video. "Either we're doing something right at the right time, or everybody's been tricked."
For all the visceral authenticity of their music, the White Stripes know a thing or two about trickery. From the start, part of Jack and Meg's self-created mythology has been that they are brother and sister. Tell it to the judge. John "Jack" Anthony Gillis and Megan Martha White were married on Sept. 21, 1996, and Jack assumed his spouse's last name. They divorced in 2000. But just try getting them to admit it.
"We had the same parents," smiles Meg coyly, when asked how her folks earned a living. And despite rather persuasive evidence to the contrary and heightening media scrutiny (the hoax was exposed in Time magazine last June, then recently turned to fodder on Page Six of the New York Post, and even in the ultra-ungrungy New Yorker), they're sticking to the sibling story. "We will be brother and sister till the day we die," Jack says, bristling.
Their stubborn refusal to fess up is starting to seem as risibly misguided as a Puff Daddy remake of "Sunshine of Your Love." The stonewalling is all the more puzzling because they saw the media attention coming. The front cover of White Blood Cells shows a nervous-looking Jack and Meg surrounded by menacing, shadowy figures; the flip side reveals those sinister shapes to be jockeying paparazzi. It's all about "what kind of attention is good and what kind of attention is bad," says Jack.
But even if Jack's face winds up as red as the pants he wears on stage (Meg is the candy striper in white), he's less concerned about the threat of career derailment than the backlash from hardcore fans crying sellout. "We've gotten a bit of that from people who've been fans since the beginning," Jack admits. "We were their secret band and they're upset because they're losing us.... People look at things in a weird way. They'll look back on the Rolling Stones and the Who and say, 'Those bands were cool, they were rock & roll, they weren't pop.' But those bands sold millions of records. I mean, it's like if you're on television now, people go, 'Oh, they're selling out.' But the Rolling Stones and the Beatles were on TV all the time, on The Ed Sullivan Show, no less, and it was cool."
Those who fret that the Stripes are changing their colors will be heartened to hear that they're recording their fourth album, Elephant, right now, in typically down-and-dirty fashion. On the recommendation of their new buddy, the prolific British garage-rock cult hero Billy Childish, they've booked time at Toe Rag Studios, an old-fashioned analog facility in London, England.
"I don't like to go [into the studio] and have everything completely figured out," says Jack, who reckons recording probably won't take more than a week. "I like to have it really rushed and figure out everything on the spot. [Toe Rag] has got excellent equipment and a good engineer. It's not computerized or modern in any sense. Just an 8-track studio with all of the things that are good about recording and none of the things that are bad."
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