The story of The White Stripes

Two Detroit kids

The White Stripes story begins with a boy named John Anthony Gillis, born in Detroit on the ninth of July 1975. He was the youngest of ten children and was named after John the Baptist. Both his parents worked for the Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit, his father in building maintenance and his mother as a secretary in the cardinal's office. The family lived in Mexicantown in southwest Detroit, and stayed when many white families moved away. His siblings were so much older that they did a lot of the raising. Three of his brothers had a band, and when they left home, young John inherited the instruments they left behind. He started on a drum kit he found in the attic in first grade, and later took the bed out of his room to make space for his gear, sleeping on a slab of foam instead.[1] [2]

Music was not the obvious path. He was an altar boy, which even landed him an uncredited part as one in the 1987 film The Rosary Murders, shot at his own parish. He was accepted to a seminary in Wisconsin, but at the last moment chose public school, partly, he later said, because he had just got a new amplifier and doubted he could take it with him. At fifteen he began a three year upholstery apprenticeship with a family friend, Brian Muldoon, who played him punk records in the shop. Muldoon was a drummer, so the teenager picked up the guitar to jam with him. Around then he discovered the Delta blues, and Son House became a lifelong hero. He has called House's Grinnin' in Your Face his favorite song of all time.[1] [2] [3]

Megan Martha White was born on the tenth of December 1974 in Grosse Pointe Farms, a comfortable suburb east of Detroit, and grew up in nearby Grosse Pointe Woods with her parents and her older sister Heather. She was a quiet, artistic kid who liked drawing and roller skating, and she collected records with her mother and sister, above all the Beatles and Bob Dylan. Dylan became her favorite artist, and Jack would later admit her record collection was twice the size of his. After Grosse Pointe North High School she tended bar and went to culinary school, hoping to become a chef. By her own account she was painfully shy and had little sense of direction. She and the boy from southwest Detroit met at a coffee shop, in either Ferndale or Hamtramck, while they were still in high school.[1] [2]

They started dating and spent their time in the coffee shops, clubs and record stores around Detroit. On the twenty first of September 1996 they married, and in a reversal of custom, John Gillis took his wife's surname and became Jack White. By then he was a familiar face in the city's underground. At nineteen he had landed his first real gig as drummer for the cowpunk band Goober and the Peas, and he also played with the Go, the Hentchmen and the country band Two Star Tabernacle. After his apprenticeship he opened his own shop, Third Man Upholstery, decked out in yellow and black with a yellow van and the slogan Your Furniture's Not Dead. He admits it never made money, partly because he wrote out bills in crayon and hid poems inside the furniture.[1] [2] [3]

A band born on Bastille Day

In 1997, Meg sat down at Jack's drum kit, just on a lark as he later put it, and something clicked. Jack said her playing felt liberating and refreshing, and that it opened something up in him. According to the Guardian, the first song the two ever played together was David Bowie's Moonage Daydream. Barely two months after Meg first picked up the sticks, on the fourteenth of July 1997, Bastille Day, the still unnamed duo played their first show at the Gold Dollar bar in Detroit. Meg struggled to hold the tempo, and Jack would coach her through songs by counting out loud. The first song they played was St. James Infirmary Blues, which they had found in an old Betty Boop cartoon, and the set included an original called Jimmy the Exploder.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

They toyed with calling themselves Bazooka or Soda Powder. Then they thought about Meg's love of peppermint candy and the name the Peppermints, and since they shared the surname White, they became the White Stripes. The candy gave them a look too. From the start they dressed only in red, white and black, and Meg's bass drum was painted with a peppermint swirl, an idea Jack had after spotting a bag of the sweets in a drugstore. Jack later said the colors kept the focus on the music, and drew attention away from the fact that they were young white musicians playing music rooted in black traditions. He built everything around the number three, a fixation he traced to three staples he once found in the back of a couch he was upholstering.[1] [2] [3]

Before long, they told the press something else. They said they were brother and sister, the two youngest of ten children, and that the band began when Meg climbed into the attic of their parents' house and started playing Jack's drums. It was not true, but it was widely repeated. They played around Michigan with garage bands like the Dirtbombs, the Hentchmen and Rocket 455. In 1998 Dave Buick, who ran the tiny Detroit label Italy Records, approached them in a bar and offered to put out a single. Jack said no at first, assuming it would cost too much, until he realized Buick was paying. Let's Shake Hands came out in February 1998 in a pressing of one thousand copies on vinyl, followed in October by Lafayette Blues.[1] [2] [3]

In 1999 they signed to Sympathy for the Record Industry, an independent label in California. Jack was also playing guitar in the Go, who had been offered an exclusive deal by Sub Pop, and rather than sign away his rights to the White Stripes, he quit the Go. The debut album, simply called The White Stripes, was cut in a matter of days in January 1999, mostly at Jim Diamond's Ghetto Recorders studio in Detroit, on a budget of around three thousand dollars. Meg insisted on drumming barefoot. The album was dedicated to Son House and came out on the fifteenth of June 1999. It did not chart, and the small label could not keep up with demand, but Jack later called it the rawest and most Detroit sounding record they ever made.[1] [2]

Divorce, De Stijl and the road

In March 2000, just as things were starting to happen, Jack and Meg divorced. The White Stripes had a show booked at a local lounge soon after, and Jack assumed the band was over. He asked Dave Buick and his teenage nephew Ben Blackwell to play the slot with him instead. On the day of the gig, Meg talked him out of it. She wanted the White Stripes to go on, and so they did. Remarkably, the two kept living in the house Jack had bought from his parents until 2003. In public, the brother and sister story carried on as if nothing had happened, and for the next few years very few outsiders knew the truth.[1] [2] [3]

Their second album, De Stijl, came out on the twentieth of June 2000. It was recorded in their living room on an eight track tape machine, a few songs at a time over several months, partly to save money. The title is Dutch for the style, after the art movement of Piet Mondrian and the furniture designer Gerrit Rietveld, whose idea of breaking things down to their simplest parts matched what the duo were doing. The cover set them against blocks of red, black and white. The record was dedicated to Rietveld and to the Georgia bluesman Blind Willie McTell, and it included a fierce cover of Son House's Death Letter. While they were recording that song, a drunk stranger who heard them playing wandered into the house and badly frightened Meg.[1] [2]

That year a New Zealand tour manager named John Baker heard their debut at a party in Australia and decided to bring them over. When he rang, Jack and Meg assumed it was a joke. Baker finally reached Jack by calling a bar in Denver during a tour stop, and won him over by offering to pay for the flights. The trip took them to Japan, New Zealand and Australia, their first time abroad, and Baker became their permanent tour manager. Back home, the Rolling Stone writer Jenny Eliscu praised De Stijl and put them on a list of bands to watch in 2001, which helped spark a bidding war. And in Britain, the BBC DJ John Peel was already playing Hello Operator from a copy he had bought in the Netherlands.[1] [2]

White Blood Cells and the breakthrough

For album number three, the band left home. In February 2001 they spent three days, in twelve to thirteen hour shifts, at Easley McCain Recording in Memphis. It was their first time in a twenty four track studio, and Jack kept asking the engineer, Stuart Sikes, not to make it sound too good. The whole thing cost about five thousand dollars. Tired of being labeled a blues revival act, Jack deliberately left out slide guitar, solos and cover songs, and many of the songs dated back to his old band Two Star Tabernacle. White Blood Cells was released by Sympathy on the third of July 2001. Its cover showed the pair surrounded by camera crews, a joke about fame that turned out to be prophetic, and it was dedicated to Loretta Lynn.[1] [2]

The British caught on first. In March 2001 they played an afternoon barbecue in a parking lot at South by Southwest in Texas, and that summer their first UK tour became front page news, with John Peel calling Jack the most exciting guitarist since Jimi Hendrix. Success meant the day jobs could finally go. Jack closed his upholstery shop and Meg left her restaurant job, though she kept her uniforms out of superstition, afraid that throwing them away would send her back to work. Wary of the music industry, they had avoided the major labels, but frustrated with how Sympathy was run, they signed with V2 Records in November 2001. That month Hotel Yorba, a country flavored song named after an old hotel near Jack's childhood home, became the first single.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The song that broke them in America was Fell in Love with a Girl, a frantic love song that lasts less than two minutes. Released as a single in January 2002, it came with a video by the French director Michel Gondry, who turned the band into Lego. The red, white and black look reminded him of the toy bricks, and fifteen animators spent six weeks building it frame by frame. The video won three MTV Video Music Awards in 2002. With V2's reissue behind it, White Blood Cells reached number sixty one in America and number fifty five in Britain, and it went on to go platinum in both countries. A New York Times writer said they had made rock simple and primitive again.[1] [2] [3]

By 2002 the White Stripes were being hailed as saviors of rock and roll. Rolling Stone put the new garage rock wave on its September 2002 cover under the headline Rock Is Back, and the press grouped them with the Strokes and the Hives. They made their first network TV appearance on The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn and played Saturday Night Live. The image came under scrutiny too. Reporters dug up documents showing Jack and Meg had married in 1996 and divorced in 2000, and in 2002 the Detroit Free Press published the marriage license and divorce certificate. The pair never officially admitted it. Jack later explained that siblings keep people focused on the music, while a couple invites questions about the relationship.[1] [2] [3]

Elephant and Seven Nation Army

The next album was made in London. Over roughly two weeks in April and May 2002 they recorded at Toe Rag Studios in Hackney, an analog eight track room run by the engineer Liam Watson. Jack loved it precisely because it was cold and uncomfortable and kept them focused. The budget was reportedly around four thousand pounds, and the sleeve proudly announced that no computers were used in writing, recording, mixing or mastering. Jack produced it himself and, for the first time, allowed himself guitar solos. Meg took her first lead vocal on In the Cold, Cold Night, a song Jack wrote for her. The unexpected success of White Blood Cells pushed the release back, and Elephant finally came out on the first of April 2003.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The opening track was Seven Nation Army. Jack came up with the riff at a soundcheck at the Corner Hotel in Melbourne in January 2002. He played it for Ben Swank, a friend who later helped run his label, and Swank said it was only okay. Jack had been saving the riff in case he was ever asked to write a James Bond theme, then decided that was unlikely. The title was a placeholder, taken from the way he had misheard the Salvation Army as a child. There is no bass guitar on it. Jack ran a hollow body guitar through a pitch shifting pedal set an octave down. The song is about gossip and the strain of sudden fame, and the labels wanted a different single first, but Jack insisted.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Released in February 2003, Seven Nation Army spent three weeks at number one on Billboard's modern rock chart, though it only reached number seventy six on the Hot 100. Elephant went to number one in Britain and number six in America, and eventually sold more than four million copies worldwide. Promotion had to wait at first, because Meg broke her wrist in New York, and in the video her drums are carefully placed to hide the cast. The band became regulars on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Later singles included a cover of Burt Bacharach's I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself, with a Sofia Coppola video starring Kate Moss, and The Hardest Button to Button. In February 2004 Elephant won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album, and Seven Nation Army won Best Rock Song.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Fame brought friction back home. On the thirteenth of December 2003, at the Magic Stick club in Detroit, Jack got into a fight with Jason Stollsteimer, singer of the Von Bondies, a band Jack had once produced. The two had clashed before over who deserved production credit on the Von Bondies' first album. According to the Wayne County prosecutor's office, witnesses said Jack attacked Stollsteimer and punched him repeatedly, leaving one eye swollen shut, and Stollsteimer was treated in hospital. Jack filed a counter complaint saying he had acted in self defense. He was charged with aggravated assault, and in March 2004 he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of assault and battery. He was fined seven hundred and fifty dollars including costs and ordered to attend anger management classes.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Jack was also branching out. He acted in Anthony Minghella's Civil War film Cold Mountain in 2003, playing a character called Georgia and singing on the soundtrack, and he dated the film's star Renée Zellweger. Jack and Meg also appeared together in Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes, in a scene where Jack shows Meg a Tesla coil he claims to have built. Then he fulfilled a dream. After learning that White Blood Cells had been dedicated to her, Loretta Lynn befriended the band, and Jack produced and played on her 2004 album Van Lear Rose, the most successful crossover record of her career. The band also released a concert film, Under Blackpool Lights, shot entirely on super eight film.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Get Behind Me Satan and leaving Detroit

By 2004 Jack felt betrayed by parts of the Detroit scene that had once been home. On top of the Stollsteimer affair, in October 2004 the engineer Jim Diamond sued the band, claiming he was owed royalties as co producer and mixer of their first two albums. The band countersued. In June 2006 a federal jury in Detroit rejected Diamond's claim after deliberating for about twenty minutes. The band had argued he was simply paid thirty five dollars an hour for studio time. Jack later described the fifth album as a farewell to parts of his own personality that he no longer wanted to see. Both he and Meg left Detroit around this time. Jack eventually settled in Nashville, while Meg later lived in Los Angeles.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Get Behind Me Satan was recorded in about two weeks in February and March 2005 at Jack's house in the Indian Village area of Detroit, with the drums set up on a staircase landing. The sessions felt cursed, with broken equipment and water dripping from the ceiling, until a riff Jack found on a new octave pedal became Blue Orchid, the song he said saved the album. His nephew Ben Blackwell remembers being dragged into the house on Oscars night to hear it. The record swapped much of the electric guitar for piano, marimba and mandolin, and Jack said truth was its main theme. Released on the seventh of June 2005, it reached number three in both America and Britain and won a second Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album.[1] [2] [3]

The Blue Orchid video starred the British model Karen Elson. Three weeks after meeting her, Jack married her in Brazil, on the morning of a White Stripes show in Manaus deep in the Amazon, in a ceremony on a boat where two rivers meet. Meg, who had urged him to marry her, was maid of honor, and the band's photographer shot the wedding at a few hours' notice. That summer the White Stripes also headlined Glastonbury. The touring was not easy. Jack strained his vocal cords and Japanese dates had to be postponed, and on the British leg he took to calling himself Three Quid. Meanwhile he had started a new band with his fellow Michigan songwriter Brendan Benson, the Raconteurs, whose debut album arrived in 2006.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The White Stripes' music was finding strange new homes. Richard Russell, head of their British label XL, commissioned orchestral versions of Jack's songs as a gift to the band, arranged by the composer Joby Talbot. The choreographer Wayne McGregor heard them and built a ballet called Chroma, which premiered at the Royal Opera House in London in November 2006 and won an Olivier Award. A limited album of orchestral recordings, called Aluminium, sold out its vinyl edition in less than a day. That September the duo also appeared as themselves on The Simpsons, in an episode where Bart copies the Hardest Button to Button video and crashes into Meg's drums. Meg had once said she would rather be in a Homer episode than a Lisa one.[1] [2] [3]

Icky Thump and the long goodbye

In January 2007 V2 announced it would release no more White Stripes music, and the band, whose contract had already expired, signed a one album deal with Warner Bros. They recorded Icky Thump over three weeks at Blackbird Studio in Nashville, their longest ever session, and Meg, who moved from Los Angeles for a couple of months to make it, was described as on fire. The title came from ecky thump, a northern English exclamation of surprise that Jack picked up from Karen Elson, who comes from Oldham. The album mixed garage blues with bagpipes, a mariachi trumpet and a Patti Page cover called Conquest, and it was dedicated to Jack's father, Gorman Gillis, who had died in 2006.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Released on the nineteenth of June 2007, Icky Thump entered the British chart at number one and the American chart at number two. The title track, which takes aim at hypocrisy over immigration, became their only top forty hit on the Billboard Hot 100, and in Britain it reached number two, held off only by Rihanna's Umbrella. It won the Grammy for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group, and the album won Best Alternative Music Album, their third in that category. To mark ten years together, the band set out to play every Canadian province and territory. Jack said part of the reason was family history, as relatives on his father's Scottish side had spent generations in Nova Scotia before moving to Detroit's car factories.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Canadian tour became the stuff of legend. Alongside the regular concerts, they sprang surprise shows announced on a fan message board, playing a bowling alley in Saskatoon, a city bus in Winnipeg, a pool hall in Halifax and a set for about thirty kids at a youth center in Burnaby. In Nunavut they met Inuit elders and shared raw caribou. On the fourteenth of July 2007, their tenth anniversary, they played Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. Two days later in St. John's, Newfoundland, they walked onto a stage on George Street, played a single note, bowed and left, then gave a full concert that night. The one note show briefly held a Guinness record for the shortest concert. The whole tour was filmed for a documentary.[1] [2] [3]

After Canada came a short run of American dates. Ben Blackwell recalls that before the last one, in Southaven, Mississippi, on the thirty first of July 2007, Meg told him this would be the last White Stripes show. He asked if she meant the last of the tour. She said she meant the last one, full stop. On the eleventh of September 2007 the band cancelled eighteen dates, saying Meg was suffering from acute anxiety and could not travel, and days later they called off the British tour too. Jack later explained that she had gone from a year of stillness straight into chaos, with rehearsal time cut short by the birth of his son. Meg is a very shy person, he said, and the sudden switch was overwhelming.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The band never played another full concert. Jack threw himself into the Raconteurs and, from 2009, a new group called the Dead Weather, in which he played drums. Meg stayed out of view, apart from walking onstage at a Raconteurs show in Detroit in June 2008, tapping a few drums and walking off again. In May 2009 she married the guitarist Jackson Smith, son of Patti Smith and Fred Sonic Smith, in a small ceremony in Jack's backyard in Nashville. On the twentieth of February 2009 the duo reunited for the final episode of Late Night with Conan O'Brien, playing We're Going to Be Friends at the host's request. Nobody knew it would be the last time the White Stripes ever performed.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

The split and the afterlife

In September 2009 Jack and Meg appeared together at the Toronto International Film Festival for the premiere of Under Great White Northern Lights, and watched it together for the first time. The film ends after the Glace Bay show, with Jack playing the song White Moon on piano while Meg cries silently in his arms. Jack kept talking about a seventh album. Instead, on the second of February 2011, a statement on the band's website announced that the White Stripes were finished. It said the reason was not artistic differences or health, but mostly to preserve what was beautiful and special about the band. The White Stripes, it told fans, now belonged to them.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Meg retired from music completely and, as of 2026, has not made a public appearance since 2009. Her marriage to Jackson Smith ended in 2013. Jack's marriage to Karen Elson ended too, and in June 2011 the couple threw a divorce party on their sixth wedding anniversary. His solo career took off with Blunderbuss in 2012, which went to number one in America, followed by Lazaretto in 2014, which set a record for first week vinyl sales. In a 2014 interview Jack called Meg a hermit and admitted her reserve had frustrated him, because she would sit in silence while he celebrated a breakthrough in the studio. Yet he said nothing he ever did would top what she did onstage.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Meanwhile Seven Nation Army took on a life of its own. On the twenty second of October 2003, fans of the Belgian team Club Brugge heard it in a Milan bar before a Champions League match and started chanting the riff. Brugge won, and the chant went home with them. In 2006 fans of AS Roma picked it up in Bruges, and that summer Italian supporters sang it all the way to their World Cup win. It spread to American college football, marching bands, the NFL and the NBA, and at the 2018 World Cup it played as the teams walked out for every match. Jack said nothing in music was more beautiful than people taking a melody into the world of folk music.[1] [2] [3]

The song was also used in ways the band hated. In 2016 they said they were disgusted when it appeared in a Donald Trump campaign video, and they sold shirts reading Icky Trump. In August 2024 a Trump aide posted a clip set to the song, and Jack called the campaign fascists on Instagram. In September, Jack and Meg reunited as co plaintiffs in a copyright lawsuit filed in New York, then dropped it in November 2024. There were gentler moments too. A Greatest Hits collection arrived in December 2020. And when a political reporter tweeted in 2023 that Meg had been a terrible drummer, musicians rushed to defend her, Jack posted a poem in her honor, and the reporter apologized.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In 2025, on their second nomination, the White Stripes were voted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. At the ceremony in Los Angeles on the eighth of November 2025, fellow Detroit legend Iggy Pop inducted them. Meg did not attend. Jack, in a red suit, said he had spoken to her, that she was grateful to everyone who had supported her, and that she had corrected the punctuation in his speech. He read a fable about a boy and a girl who build a peppermint parade float in their garage, and closed the way he used to close their shows, thanking the crowd on behalf of his sister. Olivia Rodrigo and Feist sang We're Going to Be Friends, and Twenty One Pilots played Seven Nation Army.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Meg became only the third female drummer in the Hall of Fame, after Gina Schock of the Go Go's and Moe Tucker of the Velvet Underground. Her reputation has grown enormously since she left. Critics who once mocked her simple style now call her one of the great rock drummers, and Dave Grohl, Tom Morello and Olivia Rodrigo have all sung her praises. In 2026 the Guardian reported that a tabloid article trying to track her down had pursued the wrong woman before it was deleted, a sign of how fascinated people remain. Jack, as of 2026, still plays White Stripes songs in his solo shows, and in July 2026 he quietly put a new solo album, Frozen Charlotte, on sale.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around The White Stripes

Jack White and Meg White. They met as teenagers at a coffee shop near Detroit, married in 1996 and divorced in 2000, and Jack took her surname. The band survived the divorce only because Meg insisted on carrying on. Jack called her the best part of the White Stripes and said her simple drumming was his doorway to the blues, though he later admitted her silence frustrated him. Since the split they have rarely spoken, yet in 2024 they sued together, and in 2025 she helped edit his Hall of Fame speech.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Jack White and Ben Blackwell. Ben Blackwell is Jack's nephew, the son of his sister Maureen. When the Dirtbombs needed a drummer, Jack put him on the phone, and he joined at seventeen. Jack had taken him to his first concert, the Foo Fighters in 1996. Blackwell worked as the White Stripes' roadie, wrote much of their website, became their official archivist and conducted the interviews in Under Great White Northern Lights. He later co founded Third Man Records with Jack and Ben Swank.[1] [2] [3]

Jack White and Brian Muldoon. Brian Muldoon was the family friend who took a fifteen year old Jack on as an upholstery apprentice. In his shop Muldoon played him punk records, and because Muldoon was a drummer, Jack moved to guitar so they could play together. As the Upholsterers they released singles packed with sandpaper and business cards, and hid one whole pressing inside furniture. Muldoon later took the photos for The Denial Twist single sleeve and is thanked on the first White Stripes album.[1] [2] [3]

Jack White and Jason Stollsteimer. Stollsteimer's early band toured with the White Stripes, and Jack produced the Von Bondies' 2001 debut, Lack of Communication. The friendship soured over who deserved that production credit and turned physical twice, the second time at the Magic Stick in December 2003, which put Stollsteimer in hospital and left Jack with an assault conviction. Jack later spoke of feeling betrayed by old Detroit friends, a mood that hangs over Get Behind Me Satan.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The White Stripes and Jim Diamond. Jim Diamond ran Ghetto Recorders, the Detroit studio where most of the debut album was cut and where De Stijl was mixed. He disagreed with Jack over how to capture a live sound, and was unhappy when the band chose to record De Stijl at home. He was also caught up in the Von Bondies credit dispute. In 2004 he sued the band for royalties, and in 2006 a federal jury ruled against him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Jack White and Karen Elson. Karen Elson, a model and singer from Oldham in England, starred in the Blue Orchid video in 2005. Three weeks later she and Jack married on a boat on the Amazon, with Meg as maid of honor. They had two children, Scarlett and Henry Lee, and her northern slang gave Icky Thump its name. They announced their divorce in 2011 on their sixth anniversary, with a party. In 2023 she publicly defended Meg's drumming in no uncertain terms.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Meg White and Jackson Smith. In May 2009 Meg married the guitarist Jackson Smith, son of Patti Smith and Fred Sonic Smith of the MC5, in a small ceremony in Jack's backyard in Nashville. It was one of the few pieces of her private life to become public after the band stopped touring. The couple divorced in 2013, as quietly as Meg has done almost everything since she left music.[1] [2] [3]

Jack White and Loretta Lynn. Jack dedicated White Blood Cells to Loretta Lynn, and the band covered her song Rated X. When her daughter Patsy told her about the dedication, Lynn befriended the duo. Jack then produced her 2004 album Van Lear Rose, playing throughout and duetting with her on Portland Oregon. She was seventy two and he was twenty eight, and it became the biggest crossover record of her career. Lynn died in 2022, and Jack thanked her in the band's Hall of Fame speech.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The White Stripes and Michel Gondry. The French director Michel Gondry shaped how the world saw the White Stripes. He made the Lego video for Fell in Love with a Girl, the wrecked house of Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground, the multiplying drum kits of The Hardest Button to Button and the optical tricks of The Denial Twist. His idea for a morphing split screen video inspired Jack to write I'm Slowly Turning into You, and in 2016 he surprised Jack with a video for the unreleased song City Lights.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The White Stripes and Conan O'Brien. Conan O'Brien was one of the band's great champions. They played a week on Late Night with Conan O'Brien to promote Elephant in 2003, and Gondry filmed The Denial Twist video on his set with Conan making a cameo. On the twentieth of February 2009 the duo returned for his final Late Night episode and, at his request, played We're Going to Be Friends. It proved to be the last White Stripes performance ever, and a piece of the song later opened his podcast.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Jack White and Brendan Benson. Brendan Benson, a fellow Michigan songwriter, was a friend from the Detroit years. The White Stripes covered his song Good to Me as a B side, and Meg once joined him onstage at the Leeds festival. When Jack was unsure about an early mix of The Nurse, Benson told him it sounded like Brian Wilson and he had to keep it. In 2005 the pair wrote Steady, As She Goes together, and that song became the seed of their band the Raconteurs.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Rare facts about The White Stripes

• As a boy, Jack White had an uncredited role as an altar boy in the 1987 film The Rosary Murders. The film was shot mainly at Most Holy Redeemer Church, his own parish in southwest Detroit. That church later stood in for the wedding scene in the Hotel Yorba video, and he worked with the film's star Donald Sutherland again on Cold Mountain.[1] [2]
• Jack was accepted to a seminary in Wisconsin and planned to become a priest, but changed his mind at the last second. He told Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes in 2005 that he chose public school instead, partly because he had just got a new amplifier and did not think he would be allowed to bring it.[1]
• Jack's early duo the Upholsterers pressed just 100 copies of their second single and hid every one inside upholstered furniture. For years it sounded like a myth. Then in 2014 Third Man Records announced that two of the hidden copies had actually been found.[1]
• At his upholstery business, Jack wrote customers' bills in crayon and hid poetry inside the furniture he repaired. Third Man Upholstery had a yellow and black color scheme, a yellow van and the slogan Your Furniture's Not Dead. Jack admits it was never profitable.[1]
• Jack's obsession with the number three began with three staples he spotted in a Vladimir Kagan couch as an apprentice. The fixation shaped the White Stripes, built around vocals, guitar and drums, and it runs through his businesses. He often signs his name with a Roman numeral three.[1] [2]
• The first song the White Stripes ever played live was St. James Infirmary Blues, which they found in a Betty Boop cartoon. They learned it from the animated short Snow White, and opened their first show at the Gold Dollar on the fourteenth of July 1997 with it. It later appeared on their debut album.[1]
• According to the Guardian, the first song Jack and Meg ever played together was David Bowie's Moonage Daydream. Meg started drumming in 1997 at Jack's urging and never took formal lessons. About two months later they played their first gig.[1] [2]
• Meg insisted on drumming barefoot while recording the band's debut album. She was still a beginner, so the sessions at Ghetto Recorders needed many takes, eating into a budget of around three thousand dollars. The cost helped push them to record the next album at home.[1]
• Jack's wedding ring was edited out of the artwork of the White Stripes' debut album. By the time the self titled debut was being made, he and Meg had separated, and the ring was quietly removed from the pictures.[1]
• While they recorded Death Letter at home, a drunk stranger who heard the music wandered into the house and terrified Meg. Their cover of the Son House song became one of their most performed live numbers, and House's family personally thanked Jack for the royalties it earned them.[1]
• Early on, the White Stripes turned down a label because it wanted its green logo on their CD. The Chicago label Bobsled was the suitor. The band's rule was that everything, from album art to stage clothes, stayed red, white and black.[1]
• Meg kept her old restaurant uniforms after quitting, fearing that throwing them out would send her back to a day job. The White Stripes' touring success in 2001 finally let both of them quit their jobs. Jack closed his upholstery studio at the same time.[1]
• The Lego video for Fell in Love with a Girl took fifteen animators six weeks to make. Michel Gondry was inspired by the band's colors and by the cover of the Cure's Three Imaginary Boys. His own son appears at the start, building with the bricks.[1] [2]
• Michel Gondry used thirty two identical Ludwig drum kits to film the video for The Hardest Button to Button. Each new drum appearing on the beat was a separate shot, edited and run in reverse. The kits were donated to a music school afterwards, and Beck has a cameo handing Jack a box.[1]
• The video for We're Going to Be Friends was shot in one take with leftover film, and Meg was genuinely asleep. It was filmed around midnight after a long day shooting the Hotel Yorba video. Jack sits on a couch that had been left out for the trash and wakes Meg at the end.[1] [2]
• The title Seven Nation Army comes from how Jack misheard the Salvation Army as a small child. It was only meant as a working title for the riff, but it stuck. The lyrics were written the night before the song was recorded.[1] [2]
• Jack originally saved the Seven Nation Army riff in case he was ever asked to write a James Bond theme. Deciding that would never happen, he used it for the White Stripes. Five years later he wrote the Bond theme Another Way to Die with Alicia Keys for Quantum of Solace.[1] [2]
• When Jack first played the Seven Nation Army riff to his friend Ben Swank, Swank said it was only okay. Swank, later a co founder of Third Man Records, even told him he could do better. Years later he said Jack had accidentally written a folk song.[1] [2]
• When Jack points to his hand in the Seven Nation Army video, he is showing where he comes from. Michigan is shaped like a mitten, and locals point to a spot on their hand to show their hometown. The same video hides Meg's broken wrist behind her drums.[1] [2]
• Roma captain Francesco Totti said he could not get the Seven Nation Army chant out of his head after hearing it in Bruges. Roma played Club Brugge in February 2006, and the visiting fans picked up the riff from the Belgian supporters. Totti said he went out and bought one of the band's albums.[1]
• The White Stripes' one note concert in St. John's, Newfoundland, reportedly consisted of a single C sharp. They played it on a stage on George Street in July 2007, bowed and left, then played a full concert that night. It briefly held a Guinness record for the shortest concert.[1] [2]
• In 2007 Jack discovered he was distantly related to the Canadian fiddlers Ashley MacIsaac and Natalie MacMaster. MacIsaac opened for the White Stripes at the Savoy Theatre in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, on the band's tenth anniversary, the fourteenth of July 2007.[1]
• White Stripes songs became the score of a ballet, Chroma, which won an Olivier Award in 2007. Orchestral versions by Joby Talbot began as a gift to the band from XL Recordings boss Richard Russell. The choreographer Wayne McGregor heard them and made a ballet that premiered at the Royal Opera House in 2006.[1]
• The vinyl edition of Aluminium, an orchestral album of White Stripes songs, sold out in a little under a day. It was a numbered limited edition of three thousand three hundred and thirty three CDs and nine hundred and ninety nine LPs, sold only through its own website.[1]
• A Quebec radio host sued the band over a clip of her voice at the start of De Stijl's Jumble, Jumble. Dominique Payette said the snippet, from an interview with a young girl, violated the child's privacy under Quebec law. She sued in 2008 for seventy thousand dollars, and it was settled out of court.[1] [2]
• The Icky Thump liner notes thank Electra right after God, and Electra was a pet Jack and Meg once had. According to Ben Blackwell, it was not a nod to the radio DJ of that name. The notes also thank drummers including Gene Krupa, Mitch Mitchell and John Bonham.[1]
• The last White Stripes recordings were made in Beck's living room, because he and Meg were neighbors. Three B sides for the Conquest single were learned and recorded there, with Beck producing and adding vocals and slide guitar. At the time the band had no plans to split.[1] [2]
• The mariachi horns on Conquest are really one trumpeter, Regulo Aldama, overdubbed several times. Jack had wanted to cover the Patti Page song for ten years, ever since he listened to her hits while working in his upholstery shop.[1]
• Meg White said her pre show warm up was whiskey and Red Bull. She never had formal drum lessons and called her simple, primal style her strength, saying many drummers would feel strange playing that simply.[1] [2] [3]
• Meg composed a drum theme for Bob Odenkirk's 2006 comedy Let's Go to Prison, but it was cut from the film. That same year she modeled for Marc Jacobs' spring line and appeared in Elle, some of her few ventures outside the band.[1]
• Meg's peppermint painted bass drum from the band's very first show went on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011. It was part of the Women Who Rock exhibition, alongside the Pearly Queen outfit she wore in the Icky Thump cover photos. The outfit returned for the class of 2025 exhibit.[1]
• Ball and Biscuit takes its name from the nickname of an old STC microphone used while making Elephant. At over seven minutes it is the band's longest studio recording. Jack played it live with Bob Dylan in Detroit in March 2004, and a recording was finally released in 2023.[1] [2]
• Jack wrote the Blue Orchid riff on Oscars night 2005, and the single was out about six weeks later. Ben Blackwell recalls playing the new riff himself while Jack tweaked the sound. Jack joked that it made him want to play festivals, which he said he hated.[1] [2]
• The battered upright piano at Toe Rag Studios, heard on several Elephant songs, was auctioned for charity in 2014. Jack and the piano's Polish owner arranged the auction in Sopot. It can be heard on songs including Little Acorns and The Air Near My Fingers.[1]
• Jack's three Gretsch Rancher Falcon acoustics each have a classic film star on the back, and he calls them his girlfriends. Claudette Colbert was the one he used in the White Stripes, Rita Hayworth came along with the Raconteurs, and Veronica Lake joined in 2010 with the Dead Weather.[1]
• At the 2025 Hall of Fame ceremony, Jack passed on Meg's memory that animals used to stop and stare at the two of them. She wanted people to know that even an elephant at the Detroit Zoo once did it. The crowd laughed, and Jack said she had also fixed the punctuation in his speech.[1] [2]
• CBS used a tune resembling We're Going to Be Friends in 2006 ads, and the band was reportedly not pleased. After a trade magazine asked about it, the network switched to a different song. The White Stripes original was first used in a film in Napoleon Dynamite.[1]
• John Peel championed Hello Operator before it was even released in Britain, playing a copy he had bought in the Netherlands. Peel was the band's earliest big British supporter. The single's B side was their cover of Dolly Parton's Jolene, which later reached number one on the UK independent chart as a live release.[1] [2]
• Meg was only the third female drummer ever inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The two before her were Gina Schock of the Go Go's and Moe Tucker of the Velvet Underground, one of the drummers critics most often compare her to.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.