Meg White the Reluctant Drummer Who Shocked the Music World
Jack White pulls his black Ford pickup truck to the curb on a quiet, tree-lined street in his native Detroit and hits the ‘play’ button on the cd player in the cherry-red dashboard. he turns the volume up to deafening and grins proudly as howitzer-fire drumming and squeals of distorted guitar rattle the windshield. There are bursts of marimba, too, which sound like someone shaking a bag of bones. The singing is really just shouting, and the lyrics are kid stuff: “You’re my top special, baby/Top! Top!” But the total effect is elementary, irresistible ecstasy.
Jack is playing “Top Special, ” a new White Stripes track recorded a week earlier with drummer Meg White — who is sitting quietly in the back seat — for a special Japanese single. The chorus, Jack says over the din, is a phrase popular with Japanese teens: “It basically means ‘You’re my best friend.'”
There is no better way to describe the White Stripes themselves. A few days later they perform “Top Special” for an adoring audience at Keller Auditorium in Portland, Oregon, the fifth stop on their current U.S. tour, promoting the Top Five album
In Conclusion: Meg White Wins
Each other. He stands at a mike set at the foot of her kit, his eyes pinned on her as he sings and thrashes his guitar. She looks up at him with the same undivided attention as she keeps steady, thundering time.
It is a perfect picture of a remarkable bond. Publicly, Jack and Meg, both thirty, claim to be brother and sister, even though a Detroit newspaper blew their cover a couple of years ago, revealing them to be ex-husband and -wife (married in 1996, divorced in 2000). But on their five albums as the White Stripes, and especially onstage, there is no mistaking the truth of their relationship. They make music like inseparable kindred spirits. “It will always be us two, ” Jack says of the Stripes over lunch that day in Detroit. “I will never do the White Stripes with another drummer. She’ll never do it with another guitarist.”
Is also their boldest record, combining the Stripes’ whiplash rock and Jack’s passion for vintage blues and country music with a gothic-roadhouse tension scored with grand piano and marimba. “There is an authenticity about everything Jack does, ” says T Bone Burnett, who produced Jack’s solo tracks on the soundtrack to the 2003 film
Best Drum Solos Of All Time
“I don’t know many people under thirty who have done the research Jack has done — and can do a credible Blind Willie McTell cover.”
Drums and devised the band’s peppermint-stripe color scheme. And he does almost all the talking. “I’m just a very shy person, ” Meg confesses at lunch, although she defends the primal quality of her drumming with sweet firmness. “That is my strength. A lot of drummers would feel weird about being that simplistic.”
Born John Gillis in 1975, Jack (who took Meg’s surname when they married) actually started out as a drummer, at age five. But music was not his first career choice. In high school, Jack, a Catholic, seriously thought of entering the priesthood. After graduating, he considered joining the Marines but instead worked as an upholsterer and, for a time, as a gofer on TV carcommercial shoots. “I could see that it was impossible to get your ideas across, with all the people — the soundman, lighting people, producers — you had to go through, ” he says. “I suppose that put me in the direction of a two-piece band.”
Rock Stars Who Disappeared
Jack played drums and guitar in several Detroit garage bands (Two Part Resin, the Go, Goober and the Peas, the Hentchmen) before he and Meg, another Detroit native, made their local live debut in 1997. Jack soon found that underground cool came at a price. “We were everybody’s secret band, ” he says. “Then our second album [
] came out, and it was ‘Oh, they’re not that good anymore.’ When we hit the mainstream, I had to go through that game all over again, on a worldwide scale.”
Jack may be a reluctant star, but he is a fireball in conversation. He speaks at high speed, his brown eyes looking directly at you like derringer barrels, and his laugh is a series of short, sharp bangs, like a string of firecrackers going off. For more than three hours, over two sessions, he goes into excited detail about, among other things, the Captain Beefheart and Gun Club records that blew his teenage mind, the album he produced for his idol Loretta Lynn (2004’sMeg White Is The 21st Century's Loudest Introvert White's drumming made her one of the loudest musicians of this century, yet she's often remembered for being a quiet person — setting a no-apologies template for letting her work speak for itself.
Meg White Drum Set Used In The White Stripes Video 'the Hardest Button To Button' (2003)
It's not enough to make list after list. The Turning the Tables project seeks to suggest alternatives to the traditional popular music canon, and to do more than that, too: to stimulate conversation about how hierarchies emerge and endure. This year, Turning the Tables considers how women and non-binary artists are shaping music in our moment, from the pop mainstream to the sinecures of jazz and contemporary classical music. Our list of the 200 Greatest Songs By Women+ offers a soundtrack to a new century. This series of essays takes on another task.
The 25 arguments writers make in these pieces challenge the usual definitions of influence. Some rethink the building legacies of popular artists; others celebrate those who create within subcultures, their innovations rippling outward over time. As always, women forge new pathways in sound; today, they also make waves under the surface of culture by confronting, in their music, the increased fluidity of woman itself. What is a woman? It's a timeless question on the surface, but one deeply engaged with whatever historical moment in which it is asked. Our 25 Most Influential Women Musicians of the 21st Century illuminate its complexities. —Ann Powers
Comedy lore has it that when Budd Abbott and Lou Costello first started performing together, Abbott was paid 60 percent to Costello's 40 percent. Abbott was the straight man, Costello the kooky comic, and their salary ratios were in keeping with burlesque tradition that put a premium on the straight man's skill. In one of the most famous comedy bits of all time, Who's on First?, it's Abbott's persistence and composure that make Costello's increasing frustration and hysteria funny. No matter how frenetic Costello gets losing his proverbial baseballs, Abbott keeps time. Before finding Abbott, Costello had worked with a number of partners. But it was Abbott who made all the difference in anchoring a scene; according to Costello, A good straight man is hard to find.
How Are We Still Arguing About Meg White And Her Drumming?
Jack and Meg White weren't a comedy duo. But they also kinda were. And Meg was always the straight man. Listen to Girl, You Have No Faith in Medicine as Jack builds towards total vocal and guitar hysteria, challenging Meg's drums in a race to the cliff's edge. Jack's tiptoes are hanging off as he wails, Give me a sugar pill and watch me just rattle down the street. Meg doesn't give in, instead she hits a simple boom crack and then ts ts ts ts ts ts — laughing her high-hat head off watching him rattle. Hear Meg's insistent thwack in the face of absolute frustration followed by the four-beat desperation of bashing her metaphorical head against the wall on The Hardest Button to Button. Hear Jack wail the title lyric of I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself and feel Meg's wry smile as she lets him suffer all alone for just a hair too uncomfortably long before barreling back in. The timing of their dynamic, and the balance between bonkers and basic, is what made The White Stripes stand out among the garage-rock bands who would usher in the 21
Meg White started drumming because of Jack. It was 1997, a year after they got married and Jack Gillis took her last name. At the time, Jack was trying on a lot of different musical outfits. He played guitar and sang lead on songs for Two-Star Tabernacle, played bass with The Hentchmen, drummed in cowpunk band Goober & the Peas and played on the first album by garage-rock band The Go. But one night, Jack asked Meg to play a simple beat for something he was working on, and shortly after, they started a band that would change rock history. I hate to feed into the sexist trope that a woman's worth is framed by a man's story, or that woman's primary purpose is to fill a void for a man. But this is not a trope or an assumption. This is the real origin story of The White Stripes, and to ignore it would be to miss an opportunity to credit Meg for the amount of work she did in forming the backbone of 21
When they burst on the scene, The White Stripes was called the greatest band since the Sex Pistols and the future of rock and roll.
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