The Bronx

[This ran in Kerrang! in Summer 2006; one of my favourite ever trips to LA, even though I'm still aching from the bucking bronco]

Punk is dead, and it’s been dead for a pretty long time.

It’s a wild claim to make, and not one you’d expect coming from the group who have recorded the most incendiary punk album of the year. But that’s what Bronx guitarist Joby J. Ford believes.

“’Punk’ doesn’t mean anything,” he spits, down a late-night transatlantic phone-line from the apartment he shares with his wife in San Fernando Valley. When Joby talks, it’s in a dry, acerbic monologue, a venomous train of thought you don’t want to interrupt. “‘Punk’ is something that happened in Britain for a period of about two years, in the mid-seventies, something that’s been totally romanticised. The American groups you British people call ‘punk’ are like the Backstreet Boys, teeny-bopper bands. ‘Punk’ groups panhandle for food, they give blowjobs and hand-jobs for spare change. Do I do that? No. Am I in a ‘punk’ band? No.”

You can understand Joby’s ire. The first ‘punk’ groups wore the word as an insult they’d reclaimed with pride; now, any kid with a passion for loud guitars and goofy clothes calls themselves ‘punk’, without taking the lumps to earn it. Love or hate Panic At The Disco, something strange has happened when they share the same genre as genuine subversives like X, The Germs, or, indeed, The Bronx themselves.

Joby left his native Colorado for California back in 1994, when he was 19, gaining a Graphic Design degree at Biola University and going on to work as a sleeve designer at Vagrant Records. He played in a slew of groups: one, Jack Ruby, featured transplanted-Canadian James Tweedy on bass, a role he now fills in the Bronx. Another, The Drips, featured Vince and Dave Hidalgo – sons of David Hidalgo, of venerated Tex-Mex rock legends Los Lobos – as their rhythm section, and Joby’s best buddy’s goofy younger brother, Matt Caughtran, on vocals (their much-delayed debut was finally recorded this year, the perfect melodic compliment to The Bronx’s fierce attack).

When Joby and Matt began writing songs that didn’t quite fit the Drips’ Descendents-on-steroids sound, they formed the Bronx with Tweedy, bringing Seattle native drummer Jorma Vik onboard. Soon, they were recording their self-released debut album with ex Gun Gilby Clarke, and embarking on a never-ending tour across the world, including a stint touring with unlikely soulmates Aveneged Sevenfold and lostprophets (“Ian Watkins is insane,” says Matt, approvingly. “They’re totally self-aware,” adds Jorma. “They know they’re a fuckin’ ‘boy-band’ and they don’t give a shit, they revel in it.”)

Their new album finds the Californian quartet signed to a major label but still rocking like the bastard offspring of QOTSA and Black Flag, railing against the sort of ‘Shitty Future’ a life on the poverty line has bred them to expect. A group delivering powerful anthems, crackling with a palpable sense of danger and chaos.

“For us, it’s about the spirit of it,” avers the group’s gregarious bassist James Tweedy, sharing brunch with Matt, and Jorma a couple of days earlier. The night before, The Bronx played a heroic homecoming show at legendary rock venue The Roxy. This morning, the group are chasing away hangovers with bloody marys and shots at the Saddle Ranch, a bar’n’grill on Sunset Strip. “It’s about doing something you wanna, because you believe in it. People struggle to make a living off their music, they compromise. We were asked to do a Burger King commercial, offered a quarter of a million dollars. Its tough making those decisions, during the dark days when you’re broke… But we’ve done this on our own terms.”

“I sold all my CDs so I could afford to travel to our practice space,” grins the irrepressible Caughtran. “You get to a point where you just have to laugh at it all. I mean, fuck, it’s not cool, but it’s all part of the experience. Recording the album, Jorma and I were so broke we’d sleep in the studio. And it was haunted, man… We had to get drunk every night and pass out to get to sleep, because we were all so weirded out. But it’s cool, man. Everything’s a great story, it’s great to have an ‘eventful’ life!”

You sense that these guys relish every tiny detail of being The Bronx, making the best of every opportunity.

“We look at being on tour as a chance to party, but also to experience the world,” smiles Matt. “We take fishing poles in the tourbus – America has so many beautiful bodies of water, and it’s a trip to visit them. That’s what we love – playing music, travelling, hanging out with friends, and doing stupid things, like jumping off rocks into freezing cold water!”

Another of their favourite ‘tour-sports’ is Beer Jousting. We’ll let Matt explain…

“We played the Hultsfred festival in Sweden, and our buddy Ryan from the Distillers was there, wasted, dressed up like some sort of a pirate. I slapped him across the face with one of his gloves, challenging him to a duel, so we ‘Beer Jousted’: you stand back to back, take ten paces, drink half your beer and then throw it at the other guy! Half a can of beer can do some damage, so we were all aiming at our bellies or arms, whatever. But then Ryan slapped Joby – uh oh! Cuz Joby went to college on a baseball scholarship, he was a pitcher. They squared off, and Joby hit Ryan in the face with the beer! BOOM! Blood everywhere… It was the funniest thing I ever saw.

“You reach a point where you’re on the road for so long, you just go insane,” he grins. “I’m looking forward to it, actually. I’m glad, as a band, we’re all on the same page. Loving touring so much, because we’re such adventurous and outgoing people that its so much fun., The memories we have, of playing music and goofing off and stupid shit, you can’t trade that for anything.”

If punk is dead, picture The Bronx as righteous zombie torch-bearers for punk’s spirit. Their second album finds them signed to a Major label, but that hasn’t dulled their attack any – they’re only using ‘The Man’ to get their resolutely uncompromised music marketed to all those kids who honestly think Fall Out Boy are ‘punk’.

“We have a drive to do things, artistically and musically, that are different to everybody else,” explains Joby. “If things do ‘happen’ for us, that’s fine. We’ll keep doing the same thing, which is blasting other bands off the fuckin’ stage. My favourite bands have always been the ones you either love or hate, like The Icarus Line… I’ve seen them clear venues, because the audience didn’t ‘get’ what they were doing. I love it, because they want a reaction, anything other than indifference or mediocrity. If you’re not up on that stage, causing people to do something, then get the fuck out of the way.”

Back at the Saddle Ranch, the manager has recognised his patrons as nascent rock’n’roll stars, and offered them a ride on the restaurant’s famous Mechanical Bull. Unsurprisingly, Matt’s the first in the saddle, hurling himself onto the Bucking Bronco. With his bandmates and other lunchtime barflies cheering him on, the frontman holds tight on the rein, his free hand proudly aloft, as the hulking beast jerks and lurches. He lasts about thirty seconds, before he’s hurled off again, into the cushions; he falls hard, but the shit-eating grin on his face proves that the ride is worth whatever bruises come along the way.

The White Stripes play Brazil

[this ran as a cover feature in Mojo, Summer 2005]

Manaus Boat Trip

The prone reptile is lulled safely to sleep by the guide who, moments ago, dived into the inky waters of the Ponte Negra river to capture it. A baby caiman crocodile, it measures less than two feet long, though we are reliably informed they can easily grow up to ten feet. Like the snakes, the mosquitoes, the schools of ravenous piranha clouding the waters, it is just one of the predators we were warned of as we embarked upon this boat trip.
The caiman gets its belly gingerly tickled by all the Stripes’ road crew, a ten-person team whose familial relationship with the band is confirmed by their presence on such private, ‘day-off’ excursions. It’s passed around the boat, to the members of the band’s larger entourage, along for this momentous portion of the White Stripes’ first South American tour, to manager Ian Montone, to booking agent Russell Warby, to Phil Rodriguez (promoter of the Brazilian shows), to Meg White, who grabs hearty hold of the reptile, and to Karen Elson, international supermodel and Jack’s sweetheart. Finally, the crocodile makes its way to Jack, tucked at the vessel‘s nose, sporting a pink gingham shirt, straggly bandito beard and wild, wiry hair.
“Jack doesn’t want to hold the alligator,” grins Jim Vincent, The White Stripes’ guitar tech, “He wants to kill it and stuff it.”
The excursion began earlier that Tuesday afternoon, a fine way to kick off five nights touring across Brazil, as part of their South American tour, the first in support of Get Behind Me Satan. The following night, the band will play the legendary Teatro Amazonas, an 600 capacity opera house in Manaus, a city nuzzled in the nape of the rainforest, the grandest venue the Stripes have ever played, and also the smallest audience they‘ve performed to in some time.
For 90 minutes our boat chopped the waters into a fizzy cola-coloured frenzy, speeding bumpily up the Ponte Negra, past trees growing twenty feet beneath the water’s surface (this is rainy season; in dry periods this ‘river’ is a valley many feet deep), fearsome birds circling overhead. Members of an accompanying MTV film crew, here to shoot the Teatro Amazonas gig for later broadcast, shoot ‘background’ footage from the side of the boat. The surrounding scenery does not disappoint, the grandness of this natural beauty, the profound peacefulness of the ancient rainforests, affecting us diesel-breathing city kids.
Soon, however, our boat puttered to an unscheduled stop at Ariau Amazon Towers, a surreal ‘hotel’ built at treetop-level in the Rainforest, composed of catwalks and jetties and dining rooms fashioned from tropical woods (with mobile phone charge-points drilled into the ancient timbers). As we docked, a scantily clad local girl dancing to tribal rhythms beaten out behind her draped hand-fashioned garlands about our necks. We negotiated our way to the dining hall, spotted with stuffed alligators and tanks full of piranha, silently reeling at the accumulating sense of surreality. It soon transpired that this unexpected detour was the work of Phil Rodriguez, the Miami-based promoter for the Brazilian shows, and a veteran of the Rock In Rio festivals, a decidedly old-school rock’n’roll character who relishes his work with a showman’s flair, sporting a pendant of a razor blade with a crucifix inside it. It also soon transpired that this detour was only the beginning of a much more involved excursion than had been planned.
With night already drawing in and the skies melting into red as we set off, the boats crackled with nervous, excited chatter of Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart Of Darkness’, a bleak tale of madness and awful destiny in the jungle. But all that awaits us on this journey is the odd gargantuan dragonfly, the mesmerising treescapes of the rainforest cut against the striking Amazonian skies and reflecting off of the opaque Ponte Negra, and a short visit of some local indigenous people’s living spaces, bereft of electricity, where they live off the berries they pick and the flour they mill. And as the boats cut their engines, and we drifted softly in the silent waters, with only a ceiling of stars for light, fireflies and magic sparking in the darkness, a calm - rare in the White Stripes’ world nowadays - fell upon the party.
Holding the helpless croc in his hands, Jack says it’s time to let it back into the river. The guide tickles the caiman awake again, and it wriggles from her grip, back into the water. We’re not going to meet Jack White, Alligator Hunter or Celebrity Taxidermist, tonight, and he’s not about to live out the lyrics of the Stripes song ’I Fought Piranhas’. It is very quickly apparent, however, that the band’s sojourn in Brazil will be anything but uneventful; before the week is out, Jack White will have started a riot, married a supermodel at the mouth of the Amazon, and played the most challenging, most electrifying shows of his career, for which Mojo will score you only the best seats.
Not bad work for a man who started the year ready to give up on everything The White Stripes had worked for, and whose latest album, the twisted and brilliant Get Behind Me Satan, suffered the most traumatic, cathartic gestation of any Stripes release to date.


The last time I interviewed Jack White it was early in 2001, for the London Evening Standard, his first interview with a UK daily paper. We were talking specifically about Sympathetic Sounds Of Detroit, the compilation he’d recorded, showcasing Detroit’s coterie of homegrown garage-rock talent, and latterly bringing the sweat-beaded party music of groups like The Dirtbombs, the Detroit Cobras and The Von Bondies to a world audience, following The White Stripes’ own meteoric rise later that year. White Blood Cells, The Stripes’ third album and the one that catapulted them from a garage-rock cult to the phenomenon they swiftly became, had yet to hit the shelves, but one lyric on the pre-release promo was particularly intriguing.
‘Little Room’, in its elliptical way, seemed presciently aware of the challenge that would face a humble little band like The White Stripes, should fame come knocking.
“When you’re in your little room / And you’re working on something good / But if it’s really good / You’re gonna need a bigger room,” hollered Jack, warning, “When you’re in your bigger room / You might not know what to do / You might get to wondering how you got started, sitting in your little room”
Aware of the growing industry fascination with the oddball blues-punk duo, but with not an inkling of the media-wide Stripes-mania that would greet their first tour of England in June 2001, I asked Jack whether he thought great success might sour The White Stripes. “We’d never change what we’re doing, we’d never let it affect us like that,” he replied, adding, dismissively, “But we’ll never have that kind of attention. A band like ours would never make it onto MTV.”
Four years and two albums later, and the White Stripes’ unlikely interim success has made a lie of at least some of Jack’s words. While sales-wise they don’t quite trouble commercial behemoths like 50 Cent or Green Day (“Everyone‘s adopted our red black and white colour scheme,” snorts Jack, later, “Green Day, My Chemical Romance, everyone…”), they’re certainly highly visible, thanks to appearances on the covers of magazines and last year’s Grammy Awards, and to Jack’s extra-curricular activities, from recording Loretta Lynn’s recent Van Lear Rose album, to his relationship with Hollywood actress Renee Zellwegger, and his high-profile punch-up with Jason Stollsteimer, singer/guitarist of Detroit band The Von Bondies. And while their Get Behind Me Satan set might seem unlikely to beat the initial sales of the new Coldplay and Oasis albums released on the same date, the latest issue of Rolling Stone, still somewhat influential among music listeners in the US, has given the record a four and a half star review, in sharp contrast to the lukewarm reception afforded the aforementioned acts.
Certainly, their decision to begin touring duties for Get Behind Me Satan in South America, playing countries rock’n’roll groups rarely visit, suggests Jack’s wilful ambition, a desire to play outside the comfort zone, outside their ‘Little Room’.
“We asked our agent to find us some places nobody plays,” offers Jack later, backstage at the grand Teatro Amazonas. “We planned a tour of them, probably the first tour we’ve not made money on, even with our small crew. It doesn’t matter. This is the best tour we’ve ever done.”
The Stripes played Rio once before, in October 2003, for the TIM music festival, sharing the bill with Public Enemy, Peaches and jazz legend Illinois Jacquet. They were in town for one day , the highlight of which was meeting Flavor Flav in the hotel elevator.
“It was Hallowe’en,” grins the excitable Jack, backstage at the grand Teatro Amazonas on Wednesday afternoon, hours before they take the stage. “He asked us what we’d been doing, and we said we’d been to see the art deco Christ, up near Sugar Loaf mountain. And he said, ‘Yeahhh Boyeee, I gotta do that, cuz that’s a famous mountain!’ [laughs] It was a great moment. He didn’t know me from Adam.”
The South American tour began on May 11th, at the Fundidora Amphitheatre de Coca Cola in Monterrey, Mexico, and ends with the Sao Paolo show on June 4th, taking in Guatemala, Panama, Colombia, Chile and Argentina. Jack’s favourite moment so far has been the gig in Panama, where almost nobody clapped as they walked onstage. “It felt like we were the opening band,” he laughs, eyes agape, Meg White grinning demurely in agreement across from him, the band’s appropriately red, white and black touring wardrobes cramped around her in the tiny dressing room. “It was like a challenge. Dustin Hoffman said something recently, that a lot of his motivation as a struggling actor was a sense of proving wrong the people who thought he couldn’t pull a performance off, kind of ‘I’ll show you!’. It’s a good motivation, like walking out in front of an audience hipsters with their arms crossed: when you win them over in the end, it’s the greatest feeling in the world, like winning the toughest chess match.”
Not all of South America has received The White Stripes so coolly, however. Jack and Meg, with Jack’s supermodel girlfriend Karen Elson in tow, were greeted by the flashbulbs of the paparazzi upon their arrival at Manaus airport, and photographers slyly wander about the Tropical Resort hotel where the band are staying. Indeed, in the lobby shortly before our boat trip, a snapper dressed as hotel cleaning staff fires a flashbulb directly in Jack’s face, with no warning. Unthreateningly, but with authority, the six foot-plus White ushers the elfin photographer away, saying “Okay, you have to go now…”. In this moment, he seems more the harassed Gentleman of his lyric book, than the fist-friendly troublemaker his episode with Stollsteimer suggested.
The press are much more respectful at the official Press Conference for the following day’s Teatro Amazones show. A hotel conference room swarms and writhes with cables and flashbulbs, journalists with notepads and dictaphones, cameramen teetering in for a closer shot of the duo, a collected, professional chaos. Sat behind a table cluttered with microphones, Jack fills Meg’s glass with water between answering the press’s painstakingly-translated questions, shooting her conspiratorial grins, like, ‘Can you believe we’re getting away with this?’ Out of place, and silently, respectfully bemused at the tumult around them, they have the outsiders’ rapport of desperadoes, of a Butch and Sundance. They seem grateful, however, that the journalists avoid asking the more obvious, well-trodden topics, like whether Jack and Meg are really brother and sister, or questions about Jack’s private life.
Journalist 1: “The new album is being released less than three months after it was recorded… Why so fast?”
Jack: “The longer you take working on something, the more likely you are to ruin it. That‘s how you end up with ‘fake’ music, music for 12 year olds, which is, unfortunately, very popular in the US today.”
Journalist 2: “Meg, was it your idea to sing on the new album?”
Meg: [shyly] “Um, Jack wrote the song and gave it to me to sing. Which I thought was great, because I love singing.” [Meg, with typical politeness, doesn’t point out that she also sang ‘Cold Cold Night’ on 2003’s Elephant]
Journalist 3: “What is the meaning behind choosing Get Behind Me Satan as an album title?”
Jack: “I chose it because it’s my favourite thing that Jesus ever said…”
Journalist 4: “Are you excited to be playing at such an historic venue?”
“Most definitely,” replies Jack, sincerely. He then adds, impishly, “I hope we’re not too loud and no plaster falls from the ceiling.”
Fabiana, the band’s translator for this trip, wisely chooses not to translate the last chunk of this reply into Portuguese for the attendant Brazilian journalists.

Weddings, Riots, Rock'n'Roll

The White Stripes could hardly have chosen a more iconic venue for the start of their Brazilian tour. Shipped brick by brick from Europe in the late 1800s (when three million dollars really meant something), Teatro Amazonas inspired Werner Herzog’s classic treatise on insane ambition, Fitzcarraldo, centred around the titular impresario’s effort to haul a 320 ton steamship over a small mountain (a foolhardy feat Herzog’s hundreds of native Indian extras had to recreate without the aid of special effects). The Stripes could be accused of using the movie as a metaphor for the similarly Herculean task of touring these odd venues in South America, shipping their gear from venue to venue at great expense, even installing whole new electrics set ups for the more poorly-appointed venues. Only, as Meg shame-facedly admits, “We‘ve not managed to see it yet. It was out at the video-store the whole time before we left.”
The White Stripes are the first rock’n’roll band to play Teatro Amazonas, an event auspicious enough for the Brazilian Culture Secretary Roberio Brasa to attend, his teenaged daughters in goggle-eyed throe. The venue itself is breath-taking, a puce-shaded folly of faux-Renaissance splendour and opulence, surrounded by graffiti-strewn houses with wrought-iron window-guards and piles of discarded corrugated tin that pass as shanty towns; the opera house is a reminder of the flush of money the rubber barons enjoyed at the peak of their industry, smack dab in the poverty that colours even Brazil’s lushest corners.
A quick guided tour reveals a venue rich in history and robed in fine arts and furniture, the auditorium ringed by balconies, boasting a painted curtain by Brazilian artist Crispim do Amaral, while the ceiling’s four painted pillars depict the Eiffel Tower, so someone in the stalls looking up might think they’re sitting under the tower itself. Some rooms deeper in the opera house are floored with tiles so precious, so frail, visitors have to don fluffy slippers to pad around in and admire the paintings exhibited within.
Onstage, the Stripes road crew struggles to ready the venue for stage-time, setting up their PA system, and pitting their wits against the elderly room‘s many eccentricities, to avoid the band being electrocuted when they walk onstage. Our first location for the interview, a dressing room furnished as it would have been in the Nineteeth Century, luxuriously appointed with all manner of antiques, had to be abandoned, because Meg couldn’t smoke in there. We’re now congregated in the band’s own, less salubrious dressing room, Meg receiving a pre-gig shoulder massage from band manager Ian Montone, dressed in the road-crew’s black suit/red tie/black bowler combo, while Dave Swanson, of Jack White-produced art-punks Whirlwind Heat, films the interview from the corner of the room for a projected documentary on the tour. Reluctantly, Karen leaves the room, saying that she has to try and call her mum again, that she’s had trouble getting through but she has important news for her.
“It’s a surreal life, but the best ever,” beams Jack White, snuggled in the corner on a sofa, ten or so minutes into the interview. “I’ve never felt so comfortable…”
He stops for a second, then dissolves into a helpless cackle. “Why am I so talkative today?” he asks, barely choking the words out between laughter. Then, with the generous bonhomie of a new father handing out cigars in the waiting room, he adds, “I’m having a good day… I got married today! You caught me at a good time… I’ll tell you anything you wanna know!”
They rose before dawn on the morning of Wednesday, June 1st, the day of the Teatro Amazones show, chartering a long boat to take them even deeper up the Amazon than we’d ventured the night before. The spot they chose, the confluence where the Ponte Negra and the Salimones merge into the Amazon, had special resonance for Jack, as he explains, purposefully (Jack seems to do everything purposefully, and gives the impression of entering every interview session with at least an hour or so of pre-researched spiel to share).
“I’d seen photographs of the spot many times, in the National Geographic; the waters are black and white. The guide told us there are three reasons for this…” As he begins his explanation, his brow furrows; he looks like a child trying to explain something he takes very seriously. The number ‘3’, after all, has been an obsession for White ever since he was an upholsterer in his teens, and he realised that a table needed at least three legs to stand, that the number was key in carpentry, and in life (like the 3 chords of rock’n’roll). And so what seems like an impulsive act, what amounts to an elopement, is soon rationalised with the elemental, most earthbound ‘rules’ that govern his every artistic expression. With considerable authority, he continues, “It’s because the waters are two different temperatures, two different ph levels, and running at two different speeds…”
“But eventually they must combine,” giggles Meg. She doesn’t say much in interview, more a result of her own natural shyness than any dictats on the part of her stage-brother (as has been alleged), but, like Silent Bob in Kevin Smith’s movies, what she does say is worth hearing. When discussing their woes back in Detroit later, for example, she quietly cuts to the quick of the matter, when Jack gets lost in all the surrounding issues.
It was “an inevitable thing,” he says, of their marriage. They’d met only three weeks before, on the set of ‘Blue Orchid’, the first single from Get Behind Me Satan. She, a hot and hugely successful supermodel with a willowy figure, alabaster skin, and a shock of striking copper hair, famed for shaving off her eyebrows for the cover of Italian Vogue, played the female lead.
“We just fell madly in love. It was either gonna happen today, or a year from today, some time… It was gonna happen, we knew it was gonna happen. There was no stopping it.”
They gathered at a key point - Jack, Karen, and a handful of their entourage - the sun shining upon them through the trees. A traditional shaman priest, sourced by the ever-helpful promoter Phil, married the couple, and Ian Montone, on hand as Jack’s best man, allegedly shed a tear at the ceremony. Meg was Karen’s maid of honour. Shortly after the ceremony, they repaired to Teatros Amazonas, and then on to the nearby Catholic cathedral Igreja Matriz. Within its grand white and yellow walls, mere feet from the filthy bustle of Manaus harbour market, their marriage was blessed by a Catholic priest. Jack is, after all, a traditionalist at heart. And if the idea of marrying in such haste seems uncharacteristic for the typically old-fashioned Jack White, blame it on a newfound sense of urgency since completing the troubled sessions for the new album. Or blame it on Meg.
“It was Meg’s idea,” grins Jack. “She was the maid of honour.”
“From the first time I met her, I was telling Jack, marry that girl… And he did.”



The wedding is just one reason for Jack’s high spirits today. He has, he says, experienced something of a “rebirth” since the start of the year, following a dark period beset with what Jack and Meg perceive as betrayal, as “Being burnt”.
“A lot of extreme behaviour was going on. I was fighting a lot of losing battles,” White sighs. “It was one of those moments when I felt like giving up. My mistake is, I continued living where I’m from, Detroit, after I got successful.” He laughs, mirthlessly, like he were chiding himself for his naivety. “You’re not supposed to do that. I lost a lot of friends, a lot of people burned us… It seemed like the family of musicians that we’d found, that I’d loved and that had embraced us, had in some cases turned its back on me.
“I just have too big of a heart, you know?” he continues, his face screwed up, like he’s still caught up in the confusion, the self-doubt of those days, trying to size up what the ‘right‘ thing is to do. “I wanted to know why they hated me so much. I couldn’t just blow it off, say, hey, it’s their problem. That seemed egotistical to me. Maybe it is my problem,” he ponders, for a second, before shaking his head. “I was hurting myself too much, being too open to all that. You can’t keep tearing yourself apart.”
The attacks, on his name and on his honour, came from close quarters – firstly his infamous fist-fight with lead Von Bondie Jason Stollsteimer, and then a lawsuit from long-time friend and erstwhile producer, Jim Diamond.
Jack had taken The Von Bondies along as support on an early UK tour, produced their sublimely-spooked debut album, Lack Of Communication, and was dating guitarist Marcie Van Bohlen. What media attention they were enjoying (later parlayed into a lucrative major label deal) appeared to be thanks to The White Stripes affiliation, but Jason was soon bad-mouthing his patron every chance he got, telling this journalist, back in May 2002, that Jack stole his riffs from old blues songs without acknowledging the sources, and that “Jack had little influence on the sound of Lack Of Communication, he ‘recorded’ it, more than produced it.”
Simmering tensions came to a head at the launch party for the debut album of Detroit band Blanche, on December 13, 2003, at legendary local venue The Magic Stick. Following a fracas between Stollsteimer and White in the audience, from which Stollsteimer sustained a well-publicised and photographed black eye, Jack was charged with assault and battery, to which he pleaded guilty in a Detroit court, paying $500 in fines and $250 in fees. He was told not to contact Stollsteimer, and forced to attend anger-management classes.
“People say Jack has a short temper,” insists Meg, “But he went years of being fucked-with by Jason, and not punching him. Jack had been holding himself back, you know? There’s nothing you can do sometimes. The negative people are going to get burned. You have to keep that in mind sometimes,” she muses, with a very old testament logic: “They might hurt you, but they get their ends.”
Jack, if you could have the time over again, would you still have punched Jason?
“Oh yeah,” Jack snaps back. “Very much so. It’s definitely something that should’ve happened. It should’ve happened a long time before that. I don’t know what took me so long. One of the Detroit Cobras told me about this Sean Penn movie, Mystic River, and a line about how, when you’re a leader, sometimes you have to be the janitor too. And that’s true, sometimes you have to clean house,” he concludes
Following the incident with Jason, late last year the band were sued by Jim Diamond, former member of the Dirtbombs and owner of Ghetto Recorders, the local studio where many key Detroit garage records were recorded, including The White Stripes’ eponymous 1999 debut album. Diamond was demanding past and future royalties on the first two albums, and an ‘ownership interest’ in the master-tapes.
“That’s another ridiculous situation,” sighs Jack. “He’s claiming he produced our first two albums, but I recorded our second, De Stijl, in my living room, by myself. It’s a stick-up. He called me up beforehand, and he said, ‘I’m gonna sue you, let’s settle out of court, so the lawyers don’t get all your money’. We would’ve gone back and made another record with him. He’s ruined one of the more beautiful things that’s happened in his life, the family of Detroit musicians he was a part of. He won’t be able to look back on that period and remember the great time we all had, all he’ll see is a lawsuit. I told him, I hope you feel good about yourself, because that’s one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever heard.
“I started to realise, when you fight for the truth in this whole environment we live in, then it’s a lost cause. You can’t win.”
Its characteristic of Jack White to see the pursuit of truth in terms of a battle, specifically one where the chips are stacked against him. As he’s admitted, for him such challenges serve as a powerful animus for creativity, to push him to strive for the best. But how healthy is it to place oneself in such a constantly adversarial position, to fight battles you’ve already admitted you can’t win? The album title, Get Behind Me Satan, seems to suggest a battle of epic proportions, an awful, inexhaustible enemy.
“It’s super-appropriate for everything the album is talking about,” he replies. “It can mean, You’re either for me or against me. And if you’re not going to help me, get out of my way. Or maybe it relates to the Devil’s music, and having the Devil back you up while you’re playing it. Or, perhaps it relates to aiming for the truth, for doing the right thing, and telling the Devil to take his temptations away.”
Are you spiritual people?
“I’m very spiritual. I’ve recently gotten into the cult of the Saints, in the past year. Pushed aside a lot of my musical idols, and put the Saints up there instead. The church defines them as people who have definitely made it into heaven, no matter what path they took. That’s interesting to me. I have statues of various saints sitting on top of my speaker stacks, onstage.”
Are the White Stripes an Old Testament or New Testament band?
“We’re, uh…” stammers Jack White, momentarily thrown. “I don’t know… That’s a good question. Maybe we used to be Old Testament, and this new album is the New Testament?”


It’s early Wednesday evening, June 1st, the day of Jack’s wedding, and of the show at Teatro Amazonas. The crew have pulled off another one of their so-called everyday miracles, and rewired the glorious relic in preparation for the live show. The Stripes play a brief, relaxed sound-check, Jack pounding out Stripes oldie ‘Sugar Never Tasted So Good’ on his newest toy, a red’n’white concert marimba (the only instrument he ever received a formal lesson on), and strumming Get Behind Me…’s ‘As Ugly As I Am’ with Meg cross-legged at his feet, tapping on the bongos and smiling sweetly up at him. Karen Elson - still on a very perceptible high from her wedding that morning, stumbling about the venue as if she might be dreaming, as if it’s not all quite real yet - ducks into the balcony we’re watching from, gazes over at Jack, and conspiratorially mock-swoons, before dissolving into giggles.
“See you in a bit,” she whispers, “I’ve still not managed to phone my mum and tell her... She’s going to go mental!” The next day, her local newspaper, the Manchester Evening News, announces the wedding with the bathetic headline, ‘White Stripes star marries Oldham girl’, which seems an oddly fitting description, given her absolute lack of celebrity or supermodel affectation.
A couple of hours later, and in the bathrooms the Brazilian rock kids slick their thick black hair back into killer quiffs and licks, running excitedly about the venerated hallways and hanging off the ornate balconies, screaming in adulation, looking wild and lusty, like the audience for the Muppet Show crossed with the cast of Richard Linklater’s 70s stoner memoir Dazed & Confused. The stage-lights are shaded by exquisite white porcelain shells, the plethora of red and white instruments - marimba, old vox keyboard, Meg’s drum-kit and tympani, four old amplifiers with Jack’s guitars and mandolin resting against them - scattered across a number of scarlet rugs. The black backdrop is painstakingly stitched with white palms and bushes, an apple glowing white and red at its heart. Jack’s signature, ‘I I I’, spots the stage, on the amplifiers and the guitar monitors.
A strip of white gaffer tape leads the band safely through the cluttered, blacked-out backstage, to Meg’s drumstool (white leather shaped into a crumpled ‘starlite mint’, the peppermint candies the band’s aesthetic favours, an unsolicited gift from Paul Frank, the designer and now a friend of The White Stripes). Cheering from the get-go, the audience, perhaps overawed by the grand venue, keep their seats, even as Jack ditches his black Bandit’s jacket, to reveal a blood-red shirt and black Mariachi pants, causing all the girls to scream in abandon.
They remain riveted, until the very moment Jack hollers at them, “Y’all gonna stand up or what?”. Jack then lurches over to the marimba, hammering at it and kicking his mute pedal to switch the guitar feedback on and off, unleashing an ungodly roar akin to a carnival. Which is how the audience receives it, the din riling them into an ecstatic chaos, swamping the MTV cameramen filming the show. The song is ‘The Nurse’, the first of a suite of songs from Get Behind Me Satan that pepper the set, nuggets like ‘My Doorbell’ swallowed whole by the unfamiliar audience.
Soon, Jack’s whip-sharp slide is snaring in verses of ‘Motherless Children’, and blasts of Son House’s ‘Death Letter’ howled as if Jack were some breathless, hellfire-consumed preacher. The joyful mania rises and rises, until Jack trips over a cable and hurtles strikingly into Meg’s drum-kit, sustaining purple bruises that’ll leave his leg looking like a side of ham. But he staggers back to his feet, pride and adrenaline nulling the pain, strumming the first chords of ‘I Don’t Know What To Do With Myself’, the crowd instantly singing along (the song is apparently the Stripes’ biggest hit in South America), only to break from the song a verse in.
A broad grin pulled across his face, he gazes up at the main balcony, directly opposite the stage, where Karen is standing. If there’s ever a sense that Jack is simply playing a character or putting on a performance onstage, that dichotomy dissolves in this moment, as he soaks up the joy and the romance of the moment, and sings her a deftly-altered version of Neville Fleeson’s 1920s ballad, ‘Apple Blossom Time’ (a different song to Jack’s own ‘Apple Blossom’, from De Stijl). “One day in May, You’ll come and say, Happy is the bride the sun shines on today,” he croons. “What a wonderful wedding there’s going to be, What a wonderful day.” Karen, overcome by tears, blows a kiss to her husband, the audience gazing as one in her direction. Returning finally to the Bacharach/David classic, the Stripes close out the set, leaving to chants of “Come back! Come back!”
“Excuse me,” proclaims a breathless Jack, minutes later, addressing the audience. “My sister and I want to try something special.” With that, and a Zorro-like panache, he takes Meg’s hand and bounds offstage, tearing with her down the aisle and out to the neighbouring square, Praca Sao Sebastiao, followed by a clutch of the Stripes crew, in their red and black costumed frenzy looking like Penelope Pitstop’s Anthill Mob. Like kids following the Pied Piper, the Opera House audience tear after the Stripes, as Jack and Meg set up an acoustic guitar and bongos and play a stripped-bare version of ‘We Are Going To Be Friends’ for the hundreds of kids who couldn’t get tickets for the show, watching it broadcast on video screens in the square.
It’s an electric moment, spontaneous, and not a little dangerous, given the manic fever the Stripes have whipped these kids into. The sliver of a song is cut short a verse or so in, as kids surging up from the square breach the fences keeping them from the opera house. They seep and storm from every direction, grasping at the band, ripping some of Meg’s beads, tearing Jack’s mariachi pants and snatching a couple of the Saint medallions around his neck. Karen staggers about a few feet away, oblivious to the very real threat of being stampeded by all the starry-eyed Brazilian kids hurtling towards her. She calls out to us, tears in her eyes, “This is such a magical day, I’ve married such a wonderful man…”
The duo dash desperately back to Teatro Amazonas, crew again trailing behind, followed by hordes of kids. Security shut and lock the front doors as the venue reaches capacity; the denied patrons kick and punch the doors in anger, but soon disperse and return peacefully to the video screens and the square. Our tour laminates secure us access via the side entrance, and we’re soon onstage with the crew and the band, all ecstatic, wired by the craziness that just occurred, the magic of the day at large. The remaining crowd in the opera house are chanting the riff to ‘Seven Nation Army’, which the band themselves deliver, fantastically raggedly, by way of a closer.
The moments immediately after the show are a blur, backstage swarming with chaos, the Culture Secretary’s daughters dissolving into sobs upon meeting the band, the crew scurrying to dismantle the stage, a battery of police in riot gear waiting outside. Tour manager John Baker bounds out, as fast and forcefully as his crocodile-skin shoes will allow, and barks to the cops, “Who here speaks English?” Within minutes, he has negotiated The White Stripes safe passage out of the venue, back to the hotel, but beyond a few persistent autograph-hunters, their journey isn’t much hassled. The teens still mill about the square, though, dazed and electrified by what they’ve just seen and experienced.
Back at hotel after the show, spirits remain high, and the crew and Meg stay up late into the night, drinking capirinhas (strong local cocktails mixing lime, mint, and local tipple cachacha) and, every now and again, whooping and revelling in the day’s events. Champagne is passed around, and an elaborate wedding cake, topped with fresh strawberries and cream, sits on our table in the bar, both gifts from gregarious promoter Phil.
Before disappearing off to bed, Jack White pauses and reflects on the preceding 24 hours. “That was wild, that was beautiful, in every way,” he grins. “What a great day: it started with a marriage, and ended in a riot.” That riotous atmosphere endures in the bar. Several capirinhas and slices of cake later, John Baker is swapping his gaze between the wedding cake and a minxish-looking Meg. Moments later, the cake has been mischievously smeared over the face and clothes of Mojo photographer Ewen Spencer.

Rio

The next day, Thursday 2nd June, is mostly occupied by the long flight from Manaus to Rio, where we read up on the press reports of the previous night’s events. The Brazilian press jocularly receives gig’s riotous conclusion with good humour: “The White Stripes rock Manaus!” reads one headline; “The White Stripes’ Delicious Irresponsibility!” teases another. The only downside is the publication of photographs shot without the band’s approval, by a mysterious photographer, of Jack and Karen handling the Caiman during our trip along the Amazon. It seems the paparazzi can even intrude upon the solitude of the rainforest.
By midnight, only Meg and some of the road crew are still standing at the hotel bar, exhaustion taking most to an early bed.
“We’re going over to the beach to get Meg some fresh Coconut juice,” says John Baker, even though we’ve been expressly warned against visiting the beach after dark, due to the local violent crime. There’s something about John Baker that inspires a feeling of safety; that something isn’t, however, the butter knife he slips down his underpants on the way out, for self-defence. It isn’t required, however, as our mission to secure Meg a freshly-chopped green coconut and drinking straw is threatened only by the profound language gap between ourselves and the guys selling the fruit on the beaches, to the assorted hookers, tough looking guys straight out of City Of God, and the few tourists fool enough to traipse by. But getting what the Stripes want, against all odds, is Baker’s mission in life these days.
New Zealand-born Baker first heard the Stripes back in 1999, at a Donnas aftershow party in Australia. However, the Stripes’ music had been taped over another band’s cassette, so he was clueless as to their identity; a little detective work revealed the band’s contact deals, and soon Baker - whose other rock’n’roll pursuits include helping great young Antipodean bands like Mint Chicks, and releasing limited-edition seven inches for the Dirtbombs - was offering Jack a series of shows in Australia. The White Stripes toured down under over a year before setting foot in the UK, though Jack didn’t believe the proposition was genuine until John mailed him the airline tickets for New Zealand.
Like most of the Stripes’ touring crew, Baker has been a part of the band’s ‘family’ since before the ‘madness’ set in, and it’s this closeness, this familial security they encourage with their entourage, that ensures they’re able to operate so efficiently, with such a bare support crew. It’s just another way of keeping touch with ‘reality’, holding everything together. Jack, it appears, is old-fashioned enough to know it’s your family you run to, when everything goes wrong
“I felt kind of lost, I didn’t feel I had anyone to talk to,” he remembers, of his darkest moments at the start of the year. “So I started focusing on my family, the people who gave out love and positivity.”
The very cathartic process of recording Get Behind Me Satan signalled the beginning of his ‘rebirth’. “The ceiling was leaking, the equipment broken, we’d wait days on end for stuff to get fixed,” sighs Meg, eyes turned up to the ceiling, listing some of the maladies plaguing sessions Jack himself describes as “Bizarrely cursed”.
“Just the weirdest stuff started to go wrong,” he continues. “When we were recording ‘White Moon’, Meg’s rack of bells fell over; you can hear it in the background on the album. Nothing was working, everything was broken. And then we wrote and recorded ‘Blue Orchid’, and everything fell together. The riff was so simple, so effective, it cemented the album together. It really rescued our mentality at the time, too, because we were about ready to jack it all in.
“Recording this album relieved so much from me,” Jack adds. “A lot of stuff was filling up my spiritual knapsack, you know? A lot of hopelessness, a lot of ideas that weren’t coming together. It felt good to get those songs, which had been hanging around for a while, on tape and out there. To clear the air, so we could just go out and play.”
Recorded under pressure and flung out to the people less than three months after recording finished, Get Behind Me Satan is The White Stripes’ darkest, heaviest, oddest set yet, paradoxically leavened with some of their most gloriously ‘pop’ moments to date. Like the insanely addictive ‘My Doorbell’, which boils the essence of Led Zeppelin II down to three minutes of bouncy soul-pop with nary a guitar attached, or the vulnerable, dignified balladry of ‘Forever For Her Is Over For Me’. It’s the more unhinged songs that dominate, however: ‘Red Rain’, a monstrous Zeppelin of bloodied blues and swan-diving riffs, revisiting the same slide-scorched landscapes as ‘In My Time Of Dying’; or ‘The Nurse’, a ballad of obsession and betrayal, regularly torn apart by blasts of distortion; or ‘Take, Take, Take’, an epic musing on fame as seen through a rabid Rita Hayworth fan’s eyes.
“That whole album comes from what a lost cause it seems, to fight for truth,” explains Jack. “I had a few weeks there where I didn’t care about the truth at all. And then, one day, uh… I don’t want this to come out wrong, but a miracle happened to me. There was a dictionary on the table, and I picked it up, and at the top of the page I opened was the word ‘truth’.”
“We experience synchronicity a lot,” urges Meg, as if in defence of Jack’s miraculous story. She has a knack of often grounding his wilder theorising. “When coincidences occur, it’s for a reason. That’s happened throughout the whole course of the band. When it happens, you know you’re on the right path to something. When it’s not happening, I worry that something might be wrong.”
The ‘Truth’ is, White admits, one of his ‘obsessions’. “My favourite thing about human behaviour is when it doesn’t revolve around the truth,” he says, slyly. “When people lie to themselves, or are in denial. The ‘truth’ is probably a complex of mine. Irony is so prevalent in our culture now, it’s the easy way out, the easy metaphor. Like, I heard the new System Of A Down single, ‘BYOB’, the other day, and I just assumed its chorus, “Everyone’s going to the party, gonna have a real good time”, was ‘ironic’. Because it seems its all anyone can think of nowadays. I would’ve been more impressed if they’d actually meant it, you know? “Gonna have a real good time!” Yeah! That would be more ‘punk-rock’, to me, to be sincere, rather than ironic.
“Looking back now, on songs that I’ve written, the motivation was always, Why do we do the things we do? What’s the purpose behind them? When it comes to writing about human behaviour, that’s the first thing that pops in to my head: look at what you’re doing. That’s my whole mentality: well, look at what you’re doing. Isn’t that interesting? You could probably rename every one of my songs, ‘Well, isn’t that interesting?’ [laughs]”
Was it your obsession with the ‘truth’ that drew you to the blues?
“Oh, definitely. If you turned on some Charley Patton right now, forget about it man, I’m not leaving the room. I love that so much, it just gets to me. It’s so heavy duty, and it’s so truthful. We romanticise that time period, because we don’t know anything about it - there’s just one photograph of Charley Patton, and he must’ve led a bizarre and romantic life. Of course, he was also a womaniser and a wife-beater, a drunk. But when you really start to dig into what’s going on, the dichotomy of his love for evil and his love for good, and you see the struggle in someone like that. How beautiful is that struggle? Any story is of course about struggle, and the blues gives it to you, in spades…”
Is it a risk, to be sincere?
“Certainly. Because people don’t buy it, you know? I’ve always said, the whole ‘brother/sister’, red-white-and-black aesthetic of the band ensures that anyone who would be put off by these things, who would consider them ‘gimmicks’, wouldn’t buy our records. And I say, good. Because we don’t want to be friends with you, if you aren’t interested in digging beneath the surface.”
The truth is, of course, that for all Jack White’s obsession with the ‘truth’, The White Stripes are a fake, a sham, a big lie. Painted in red, black and white, like a cheaply-printed comic strip, almost everything about them is a fabrication. ‘Jack White’ was born John Gillis, and his ‘sister’ Meg is actually his ex-wife, wedded before the band formed, and divorced before their second album was recorded. This isn’t denied rumour, as it was when the Stripes first hit the UK, back in 2001, but rather fact, backed up with documentary evidence, such as their divorce certificate, available on the internet.
Given this knowledge, almost every aspect of the Stripes’ phenomena gains an extra intrigue - not least the fact that it was Jack’s ex-wife, not his ‘sister’, who urged him to so speedily marry his new girlfriend. The frustration is, of course, that in interview it’s impossible to breach such subjects. The fictional creation that is ‘Jack White’ would disappear in a puff of logic were he ever to acknowledge the existence of John Gillis. Slyly acknowledging that the Stripes’ brother/sister angle might be a fiction is as close as we’ll get to a peek behind this Lone Ranger’s mask, even then accompanied by a gentle chiding for focussing on such trivia.
But it’s Friday night, June 3rd, and the White Stripes are playing Clara Hall, a cold and artificial venue tucked inside a shopping mall in Rio De Janeiro. Before the show, the band were ragged with the head colds that have dogged the tour, Jack’s voice shot, their energies sapped. Also, this afternoon, Karen had to leave for a modelling assignment. Expectations for what we’ll witness tonight are therefore unusually low, and certainly no-one expects a show to rival what we saw in Manaus.
Still, they are magical. Swaggering and seemingly recovered, Jack takes the microphone and sermonizes to his audience, dazed, reefer-smoking Rio teens, electrified by one of the few rock’n’roll bands to play this city. “I tore a page out of the book of cool,” he leers, before delivering the punch line, “It’s a boring book.” Soon, the duo are tearing through a feral set of mostly oldies, mostly crowd-pleasers (“I played ‘My Doorbell’ and just felt all the energy sucked out of the room,” he scowls afterwards, “So we didn’t play any more new songs.”), the kids a sweaty, writhing pit, spectacle-wearing indie boys held aloft by their friends, until the security wade in and they scatter.
The magic and momentum, the sense of danger and occasion of the Manaus show might be absent, but even in such impersonal surroundings, they curate such a sense of communal suspended-belief. It’s akin to churchful of the faithful, every soul in the room implicitly accepting Jack and Meg to be the brother’n’sister troubadours they present themselves as, even in the face of scientific evidence to the contrary. Or perhaps that Lone Ranger metaphor applies here, too. Because, if you somehow discovered the Lone Ranger’s ‘true’ identity, would you really reveal this secret, and bring the legend of the Lone Ranger to a premature end?

Sao Paolo

The Sao Paolo show, Saturday June 4th, the last date of the Brazilian tour, brings a deluge of guests, invited and uninvited. Of the former party, a young Peruvian girl and her family are the most honoured. The teenager’s name is Claudetta, and last year she emailed the Stripes’ organisation, begging them to play South America. Her plea was a very real influence on the band’s current touring plans, but logistics demanded the band miss Peru off their itinerary. Though poor, Claudetta’s family scraped together enough cash to take a short holiday in Sao Paolo, and the four of them are now seated side of stage, as the band stride out and greet the audience of the imaginatively-named Credit Card Hall.
You can tell the uninvited guests, the parasites. They’re the ones who still hover around the dressing room door while the band are playing, laying in wait for their prey. Like the guy with the video-camera, filming a documentary of his nomadic experiences for MTV, toting a vintage Lou Reed album he wants to give to Jack. Actually, make that ‘wants to be filmed giving the album to Jack, for his documentary’. Via John Baker, the film-maker’s self-serving offer is denied, but this doesn’t stop him offering one of the production crew cash to pose as Jack’s hand ‘receiving’ the album on-camera.
“Some kids chased us down the street a few blocks, in Panama I think,” muses Jack, in the bar of the Unique Hotel, Sao Paolo, where the White Stripes are staying the night of the show. “Once they caught us they said, ‘hey, we just wanted to say thank you, we saw you play the other night’. They gave to us, they didn’t take from us.”
The most intriguing of a very enigmatic clutch of songs on Get Behind Me Satan, ‘Take Take Take’ was inspired by an autograph by Rita Hayworth that he once saw, her lip-print on a handkerchief, next to which she’d written ‘My heart’s in my mouth’. “It blew my mind,” he remembers. “For her to have written something so metaphorical, as an autograph.”
‘Take Take Take’’s drama unfolds over dramatic dustbowl strum, the awestruck protagonist demanding first an autograph, then a photograph, and then finally a kiss from a passing Rita Hayworth.
“Give me a little credit,” White protests, pointedly. “I can think of something more interesting to write about than how terrible it is to be famous. It’s more about how kids today aren’t taught how to be humble, or when enough is enough. Like the other night, this kid asked us for an autograph; then, five minutes later, her friend asked for an autograph, and, five minutes later, she asked for a photograph, and then her friend asked for an autograph. We’re not at the zoo here, you know, we’re trying to eat dinner. But I’m not whining about celebrity; I’m whining about parents not teaching their kids manners.”
We meet many Jack Whites during our stay with the band: Jack the giddy newlywed, Jack the uncomfortable celebrity failing to elude the paparazzo’s flashbulb, Jack the young rocker stung by cynics who snickered at his collaboration with Loretta Lynn and his work for the Cold Mountain soundtrack, who felt he had to use his newfound fame to direct a new generation to the music he loved, but who now says “We’ve done too much paying respect to the past, we can’t move forward on our knees anymore.”
We meet the offended, old-fashioned boy griping about reality TV shows called Are You Hot?, “Where they bring out people onstage, and judge them. The presenter has a laser pointer,” he elaborates, shaking his head. “Parents tell their children not to make fun of other kids in the playground, and then they watch garbage like that. What are they teaching these kids? What kind of a role model is someone like Paris Hilton, dressed, basically, like a slut, and behaving stupid, because it worked for Ozzy Osbourne…
“I’m not some old fuddy duddy,” he adds. “America suffers, because they have this stupid, ridiculous, Conservative viewpoint on everything, they’re so mixed up about right and wrong. Seeing as they voted in that President, Americans obviously have no interest in the Truth. They only know what they’re told, and reality television’s telling them to judge everything around them. It’s really ugly. I think we should be ashamed of ourselves.
“You know you’ve matured when ask yourself, why do I bother?” he continues, darkly. “The politicians, they’re doing anything they want to do, taking whatever they can get, making themselves happy, and they don’t care who gets hurt. And when you reach that point and ask yourself, ‘why bother?’, that’s when you really turn into an adult. Because you make the decision, yes, it is worth bothering. If only for it’s own sake.”
There’s a common thread to all these Jack Whites, a stoic indignance, a forth-rightness, an old-fashioned sensibility that’s unafraid to express itself, to argue it’s case. A grounded common-sense that, you imagine, they share with John Gillis, so key is it to all their characters.
Like his alter ego, John Gillis has another obsession, one closely related to their shared passion for the truth. A hankering for a musical purity, a sonic fidelity with the ’truth’ of the music as was played. Asked about the proliferation of unusual instruments like the marimba on Get Behind Me Satan, he’s quick to point out that it doesn’t contradict the Stripes’ ongoing spartan aesthetic, “As we can only be playing two instruments between us at any one time.” And talking about modern music, his lip turns up in disgust, discussing lazy modern production methods, the reliance on cheap effects, the way clumsy application of something like artificial reverb can ruin his enjoyment of a whole song.
“If I can not even pay attention to such things, if I can listen to the song and not even think how it was done, then I love it a lot more,” he decides. “It becomes more beautiful at that point.
Like any illusion, once you know how the magician does it…
“…Then it’s ruined, yes,” he nods. “That’s exactly true.”
Jack White and John Gillis were both born in a poor, mainly-black area of Detroit. ‘Rock’n’roll’ meant nothing there, the kids were only into hip-hop, and sub-cultures like ‘punk’ or ‘goth’ only existed in the suburbs. Spending his spare hours obsessing over the Who, picking apart all their myths and trying to make sense of grand opuses like Tommy or Quadrophenia, he was entirely alone.
“It was the best feeling in the world,” he says, brightly, “To feel like you ‘owned’ a band. I guess, in America now, it’s not the ‘coolest’ thing in the world, to be a teenager who’s into The White Stripes. Most kids are probably into 50 Cent or Green Day.”
Perhaps, to those kids, the White Stripes mean as much as The Who meant to you, as a teenager.
“That would be amazing,” he stammers, again lost for words. “I wouldn’t be able to believe it… Women are always telling me, ‘My son loves your band, you’re his favourites’, and I usually think, that means he’s got a record of ours, maybe he likes us. I can’t imagine their son could love our band as much as I loved the Flat Duo Jets as a kid.”
But that’s exactly what’s happening, on a small but profound scale. Their record sales might not match the column inches they enjoy in the rock press, and the band’s red’n’white’n’black aesthetic might struggle against the Green Day tees and 50 Cent merchandise as the couture of choice among most American teenagers. But The White Stripes are a burgeoning cult in mainstream America, certainly in a commercially and culturally stronger position than contemporaries The Strokes. And like Jack with his Who obsession, those kids who manage to find the White Stripes, to make that connection, will have a much deeper connection with their music. Minority passions are like that and, besides, a group as rich with myth and innuendo are always going to win a more rabid fandom than anything the mainstream could easily clasp to its chest. You reckon that Jack White, the man who doesn’t like to play venues where he can’t feel the audience’s energy coming back to him, likes it that way. The White Stripes, thriving far outside their ‘little room’, but never losing touch with what fired their ambitions in the first place.
“It was just too big of a deal,” he reflects, on the media frenzy that greeted The White Stripes’ arrival in the UK as feted unknowns, only four years ago. “Our way to ‘handle’ it all was to dig deep, and push real hard against all the bullshit. We knew, once we broke through that barrier, we could always get back to where we used to be. And look where we are now, right back where we used to be. We were playing Panama the other day, to people who’d never heard of us, and we were playing music and winning people over.”
He smiles, newly married to one of the most beautiful women in the world, a man who has rediscovered his creative spark, who feels, in his own words, “reborn”. “You can’t beat that, that felt good to us - that’s a better success than selling millions, than getting the platinum records.”

(c) Stevie Chick, 2005

Madlib / Quasimoto

[have been struggling to write my definitive piece on Madlib and his music, a quest begun for the first issue of Loose Lips Sink Ships, four pages strung together from a five minute photo shoot and a ten minute garbled phone interview. Spring of this year, 'Lib came over to the UK to promote his second Quasimoto album, The Further Adventures Of Lord Quas, and I got to meet him in person. i still don't feel i've quite done his trippy swarm of ideas justice yet, but this piece for Plan B was a genuine attempt...]



In Jeff Jank’s loopy, cut’n’paste mind, Quasimoto is a Kool Aid-red space-alien with pointy ears like a squirrel, a big-assed snout halfway between a hippo and a pig, a doobie perma-glued to his sneering lip, his eyes heavy-liddedly gazing at the ass that passes his brownstone palace of paranoia. Across Jank’s sleeve artwork of Quasimoto’s two albums to date, 2000’s The Unseen and this year’s The Further Adventures Of Lord Quas, the luminous blob (at different points red, snot-green and ice-blue) nonchalantly tosses demo tapes out the window of a speeding motorcar, his victim tied helplessly between the fins on the trunk; sprays graffiti on a wall while dressed like a member of Run DMC; split’s a 40 and a spliff with his producer Madlib in the back of a grotty taxi-cab; stabs an enemy in the spine with a trident after bashing his face n with a brick and/or hammer; and stares up the skirt of a young girl, gazing blankly at her white-pantied undercarriage.
You’ve got to forgive Jank; Quasimoto’s music stirs up such visions, a rich and shimmering mess of twisted samples and tweaked verses that pieces together a vile and virulently alive caricature of the mean streets of America. Through Quasimoto’s verses stroll a menagerie of the forgotten, winos and street people, whores and pimps, criminals and their victims. Fringed and laced with dope-paranoia, it’s a colourful and profane nightmare, all-consuming and overwhelming, hilarious and terrifying, bleak and strangely affectionate.
Its like plugging into the lurid, neon-toned world of Corky McCoy, the illustrator whose psychedelic street paintings housed Miles Davis’s ‘On The Corner’ albums, and who helped translate Bill Cosby’s Fat Albert character for Saturday Morning Cartoons - and wouldn’t Quas make a fine subject for a show on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim strand, in the vein of Aqua Teen Hunger Force or the masterful Harvey Birdman, Attorney At Law? Like McCoy’s paintings, Quasimoto’s music bleeds with a sense of acidic heightened reality, Quas twisting his gritty world into comical shapes for his own jaded, morally-blank entertainment.
The Unseen opened with ‘Welcome To Violence’, a 49 second skit stolen from some obscure spoken-word album, setting the tone for the album, preaching menacingly of the evils of sex and violence. Promo copies for The Further Adventures opened with this exact same track in its entirety (it’s cut short for the official release), which this writer merely ascribed to producer Madlib’s legendarily off-kilter creativity; its message still holds true for the latter album, which similar inspects the grime underneath its guilty fingernails with an obscene and infectious relish. But this is no sleazy faux-gangsta thrill-by-proxy trip; there’s ugly sex and uglier violence in Quasimoto’s world, because that’s the way it is. Batman had his Gotham, Homer Simpson has his beloved Springfield, and Quasimoto has the swarming mess of sin and avarice he lives in.
What they also have in common is, every single one of them is a fictional character.

Deep in Madlib’s lair, The New Loopdigga’s Hideaway - a studio tucked modestly away somewhere in San Francisco - the day’s creativity has begun. Within these cramped walls, the producer - christened Otis Jackson Jr, son of an R&B singer and his main songwriter, grand-son and nephew to legendary jazz musicians - has recorded hours of music under a plethora of alter-egos. The Loopdigga. The Beat Conductor. One-man perv-jazz instrumentalists, Yesterday’s New Quintet. Jaylib (with Slum Village producer Jay Dee). Madvillain (with fellow rap psychedelicist MF Doom).
Today, however, is a Quasimoto session. Perhaps you can tell, by the clouds of weed gathering near the gloomy ceiling, or the scattered records - from treasured rarities to mysterious thrift-store acquisitions - piled next to the turntables, where ‘Lib is slamming the needle deep into the vinyl with slapdash inspiration, chipping nonsensical slivers of soul, jazz and comedy away to flavour his own concoctions. The giveaway, however, comes when ‘Lib steps up to the mic, to give voice to his most beloved creation, stink-fingered ghetto tearaway Quasimoto. His beats slowed down to quarter speed, the producer/MC delivers the lines like his lips were dragging through molasses. This is how Quasimoto gets his trademark pitch, a couple of notes higher than Eminem, like he’s still giddy after huffing on a cocktail of helium and laughing gas.
There are so many ‘Madlib’s out there, the Madlib who produces records for Lootpack, the Madilb who records as Yesterday’s New Quintet, the Madlib who pretends he’s Quasimoto… Which is the real Madlib?
“I’m Madlib The Loopdigga, I’m Madlib the Beat Conductor, I’m Madlib the asshole, if you want,” he slurs with a chuckle, chowing down on chicken in a London Nando’s during a whirlwind press trip. “I wanna be Madlib the Sleepin’ Guy right now, huh huh huh.”
Otis Jackson Jr is a tired man right now, though I know from experience he’s not the world’s greatest interview subject at the best of times. Otis spends almost every waking hour thinking up beats and tracks, toying with his turntable and writing lyrics; its just what he does. He estimates we’ve heard barely 10% of the music he’s made, and he’s similarly reluctant to offer much of himself up in interview. Not that he’s holding anything back - facts are surrendered willingly, and he demystifies what he can of his various working practices. He even swears weed isn’t as crucial to the Quasimoto sound as the albums’ constant hosannas to the herb would suggest: “It’s not important, but it’s what I like to do,” he says, “I can make music with or without weed, it’s nothing special. Back in the days it used to help, but now I’m used to weed; it doesn’t really phase me now. My mind’s so open already it doesn’t even matter.”
And the constant references to weed and its creativity-enhancing powers on the records?
“It’s just comedy. For people who are barely smoking, and the people who know what we’re talking about.”
Comedy is a key character of Quasimoto music. Not only are Quas’s various adventures mostly ludicrous and hilarious - albeit of a very Furry Freak Brothers/National Lampoon Radio Hour wit - many of the wild, vagrant voices heard on the album are excerpted from old Laff Records, comedians like Redd Foxx and Moms Mabley.
“It’s about having fun,” says ‘Lib. “A lot of people are too serious right now, things are getting’ crazy. I’m just trying to keep the fun coming, throw up a little comedy.
“I’m, like, basically toned down,” he continues, sounding for a moment like the thirty-something family man he actually is. “My shit’s not all out there like Quasimoto’s. I’m chillin’, he’s crazy. If I’m in a room full of people, I’ll probably just sit there and say nothing. Quas ain’t like that.”
Though he treads a very solitary path, Quas has some homies who ride with him. There’s MF Doom, ‘Lib’s partner in Madvillain. “Doomsday was my favourite album for a long while,” remembers ‘Lib. “I called him up, sent him some stuff. He wanted to rap over Yesterday’s New Quintet, but I told him I had another idea. He’s a cool cat. He’s complex, he’s not simple. He’s hard to explain. Our lifestyles are kinda the same, except for the stuff that doesn’t matter. We don’t even have to talk, we could work together all day and not say a word, and it will be cool.”
Quasimoto has another partner in Crhyme, a croaky voice from the dawn of Blaxploitation, yelling his wisdoms and his madness into the uncaring din like Quasimoto’s own Mudbone. Melvin Van Peebles is the godfather of rap, after his soundtrack for his pioneering and self-financed slab of Blaxploitation cinema, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Infamously, he recorded his teenaged son Mario - now a film-maker himself - losing his virginity to a prostitute and set it to music. Madlib is now working on Van Peebles’ next album.
“He’s crazy, man,” laughs ‘Lib at the thought of Van Peebles. “The first time I met him he grabbed me and told me, ‘I’m gonna kill you, motherfucker!’ He was all in my shit. He’s legendary, I like him…”

For his insane sonic creativity, for the mythos he weaves into his tangled records, and for his increasing cult status among clued-in hip-hop fans, Madlib is the genre’s own Lee Perry. It’s another alter-ego, perhaps, a comparison that he likes.
“I’m inspired by Lee Perry, read books on him, watched documentaries. He’s crazy. Legendary. I would love to be like him. I’m kinda productive like him. I don’t have a copy of everything I’ve recorded, but J Rocc of the World Famous Beat Junkies, he has a complete collection, so I’m always hitting him up to hear stuff, and he says I’m trippin’, I’m on some Lee Perry shit.”
Madlib seems most comfortable playing out these alter-egos, the hip-hop Lee Perry, the switchblade-wielding cartoon character Quasimoto, or five dues-paying jazzbo cats called Yesterday’s New Quintet. Quas is still the dominant persona, however.
“He’s mischievous, he’s badly behaved,” ponders ‘Lib. “He’s the reason I don’t have to act shit out, huh huh huh.”
Quasimoto is an archetype in the line of Stagger Lee, a figure of violent, attractive mischief. Is it more fun to be Quasimoto than Madlib?
“My girlfriend don’t like it,” he snorts. “She thinks he’s real. That’s why this is our last album together. He stole my girl.”

(c) Stevie Chick, 2005

Dave Grohl

[wrote this for Mojo earlier this year. the trip was a blast, we got to hang out at Dave's amazing studio, which was a bit of a headfuck for me as it was designed after the blueprints for Abba's Polar Studios in Sweden, where I first met Turbonegro a couple of years before. Dave's studio was awesome, as was Dave. he's called the 'nicest guy in rock' for a very good reason. as a teenaged Nirvana obsessive, interviewing Grohl was a Big Deal.]



When Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones recently visited his friend Dave Grohl’s newly-completed 606 Studios, out in the wastes of Northridge, California, he was struck by the most peculiar sense of deja vu. With a budget of $750,000, Grohl modelled the luxurious wood-panelled rock’n’roll playhouse after Polar Studios, the Abba-owned facilities in Stockholm where Zeppelin recorded their swansong In Through The Out Door in the winter of 1978.
Furnished with state-of-the-art studio equipment and all the high-end entertainment technology a resting musician could desire, 606 serves as HQ for the big Rock’n’Roll Show-business operation Grohl’s Foo Fighters swiftly became, after the release of their 1995 eponymous debut album. But it also betrays a human touch, that of Grohl himself, the incurable music obsessive. “I’m embarrassed when people ask me about my interests outside of music,” he laughs, later, “Because I have none.” Fittingly, the walls are crammed with gold and platinum disks awarded to Foo Fighters and Nirvana, and Grohl’s prodigious session work with buddies like Queens Of The Stoneage, Nine Inch Nails and Killing Joke. They hang alongside framed iconic images of The Who, Led Zeppelin, and Nirvana themselves (sitting with a fitting dignity alongside such canonical legends). The sofas cradle cushions fashioned from Dave’s old Breeders and Black Sabbath tee-shirts (the work of his still-doting mother), while a poster for the Motley Crue reunion tour gazes down upon the mixing desk, vandalised so it’s tagline reads “The band you hoped [substituted for “thought”] you’d never see live again”.
The first album to be completed at 606 is Foo Fighters’ fifth album, In Your Honor; indeed, finishing touches to a last-minute addition song on the album are being administered as we chat to Dave, in 606’s control room. An ambitious double set, divided into one disk electric, one disk acoustic, In Your Honor explores the dichotomy at the heart of Grohl’s music, between the hammering, relentless riffage of the first disk, and the gentler, more melody-driven material of the second. The ideas for the electric set came so fast and so plentifully that Grohl is considering offering them to aspiring rock bands via a website he‘s envisaged, called ‘www.spareriffs.com’; the second album was originally planned as a solo, and includes a beguiling slice of faux-bossanova, accompanied by one Nora Jones (‘Virginia Moon’), and a reworking of ‘Friend Of A Friend’, a song Grohl wrote fifteen years ago, just after he joined Nirvana. Caught between the extremes of Grunge’s vaunted quiet/loud dynamic, Grohl seems to thrive on the contrasts, as you might expect from a man who survived the journey from hardcore’s gritty heartlands to the surreality of rock’n’roll superstardom mostly intact.

I have it on authority that you have John Bonham’s runic symbols from Led Zeppelin IV tattooed in various places about your body…
Well, I didn’t want to get a tattoo of Tweety Pie smoking a joint. [laughs] When I was fifteen or sixteen, my friend got one of the first CD players, and we listened to Houses Of The Holy a thousand fuckin’ times, listening close for the squeak in the bass drum pedal! I was just amazed by Bonham’s sense of feel. He’s still the best rock drummer in the world, no one can touch him. He was such an inspiration. Before that, when I was twelve or thirteen, I gave myself a Black Flag tattoo, prison style, with a needle and pen ink. [Reveals three puny, faded green bars on his left forearm]

There’s only three bars there. The Black Flag logo has four bars.
It hurt.

Thirteen is young for your first tattoo; were you a prodigious concert-goer as well?
My parents took me to the Ohio State Fair when I was 2 years old, in 1971; the Jackson 5 performed, but I don’t remember anything about it. [laughs] I didn’t grow up going to ‘rock concerts’. I saw [Chicago post-punk quartet] Naked Raygun back in 1982, at the Cubby Bear in Chicago. I was 13. I loved the intimacy of it; I talked to the singer and I jumped on someone’s head and I felt completely at ease with the band and the audience. It was just a bunch of people having a good time. That’s where my perspective on rock comes from.
The first time I went to a ‘big’ concert was the ‘Monsters Of Rock’ in 1987, at a stadium in DC: Kingdom Come, Metallica, Dokken, Scorpions, and Van Halen. After five years of going to see Bad Brains, MDC and Slayer at smaller club gigs, seeing this stadium gig and standing far enough from the stage that it was taking four seconds for the sound of the snare drum to hit me made no sense at all.

You always loved drums, then?
I remember being inspired by Edgar Winter’s ‘Frankenstein’. Up until that point I would just listen to whatever my parents or my sister were listening to, the West Side Story soundtrack, Carly Simon, and the Beatles. But when I heard ‘Frankenstein’, I thought, wow, everything about this song stands out, the riffs, the keyboards, and particularly the drums.
That summer, one of my cousins gave me Rush’s 2112, and I don’t know how, but I could tell what each individual piece of the drum kit was doing; I knew which sound was the hi-hat, which sound was the ride cymbal, and so on. I learned about drums by setting my pillows up on my bed and on the floor, and beating along on them with these big fucking marching sticks I stole from a friend. The house I grew up in is really small, and I couldn’t afford a drum set until I was seventeen - I’d wait until the drummer in my band went home after practice and play on his kit.

Did you ever sense a conflict in loving both old skool rock and punk?
My first punk-rock moment was going to see the AC/DC movie, Let There Be Rock. It was the first time I’d felt that energy, like I just wanna fuckin’ break something, I’m so excited that I’m losing my mind! It was dirty and sweaty, fuckin’ beautiful. I liked the more aggressive side of things. So hardcore and punk-rock and thrash metal were like a dream come true, pushing that energy to an extreme. The thing I didn’t like about a lot of rock music was the superhuman pretension - at an early age I was suspicious of it, cynical. I had a Kiss poster, but I didn’t like their music, I liked them as comic-book characters. But I also had an AC/DC poster, Malcolm Young wearing jeans and a tee shirt, hasn’t taken a shower all week, drunk and just fuckin’ playing music for the sake of playing music. I thought, I wanna be that guy.

You grew up in Northern Virginia, spitting distance from Washington DC. Did you get to experience DC’s legendary hardcore scene, bands like Bad Brains and Minor Threat?
When I discovered punk-rock, the only punk rockers I’d seen were on Quincy [1970s TV series featuring Jack Klugman’s titular Pathologist, and a lot of genuine punk extras]. The punk-rock kids out here in LA realised they could get extra work for money, fuckin’ went for it, like Pat Smear [former Germs/Nirvana/Foo Fighters guitarist]. When I found out that hardcore bands was ‘hatched’ right in my backyard, I flipped out. And it took me a while to work out how to find that scene, because it wasn’t in nightclubs, it was in community centres and Knights Of Columbus halls.
Most of the ‘scene’ came from DC and Maryland, not from Virginia, which was right there on the Mason/Dixon line. Though I wasn’t raised a complete redneck, I grew up with duck-hunting and pick-up trucks. The DC hardcore scene was almost impenetrable - it was hard to get into that scene as an outsider. It took me about a year before I finally found it. And then I couldn’t get out of it.

After playing in a number of smaller punk-rock bands, you joined DC hardcore legends Scream in the mid-eighties…
I first saw them was in ‘83; I was still a kid, and they were so fuckin good. And when I discovered they were from Virginia they became my heroes. I walked into our local music store one day to buy some drumsticks, and on the bulletin board it said ‘Scream: Looking for drummer’. I called them up, lied about my age (I was seventeen), and Franz [Stahl, guitarist] reluctantly invited me to meet him at a basement underneath a head shop in Virginia. He was waiting there with his little practice amp set up. He says, okay, you wanna play some covers, some Zeppelin or AC/DC? And I said, no, let’s play some Scream. And we ran through the guys’ whole fuckin catalogue, note for note, front to back. He was really surprised, and they asked me to join.
And I freaked out. I didn’t know if it was time for me to give up High School and do what I really wanted to do or not. But I saw Scream play about a month later and realised, I had to be in the band. And I dropped out of High School, because I now had a tour coming up in two months of the South East, then we were doing Europe in the Fall. I thought, I’ve never travelled further than Ohio.

So you joined what Michael Azzerad described as the Hardcore Underground Railroad.
I fell in love with that scene because it was such a strong community: all fanzines and tape-trading and independent booking agents, stuffing your own sleeves, making your own singles, screening your own tee shirts, stuffing your equipment in a van and sleeping on people’s floors. The motive was so pure. I didn’t even care if I ate, I just wanted to play. It was such a beautiful thing, like living in a commune.
But Scream had had a rough ride. We’d never come home with any money, but while we were on tour, we’d get somewhere to sleep, people would feed us, we’d maybe get a couple of beers at every show. And that was fine, it was enough. But then people would quit because they couldn’t take it anymore, some people started getting fucked up on drugs. I started thinking working at the Furniture Warehouse wasn’t so bad; you can only eat so much Taco Bell.
We hit Los Angeles on our last tour in 1990, and our bass-player quit, so we ended up staying with the guitarist’s sister in Laurel Canyon. She lived with two mud wrestlers at the Hotel Tropicana, so we were surrounded by beautiful girls, we could drink for free at the Tropicana… It was terrible [laughs]. Because we didn’t have the band; if we’d had the music, it would have been heaven.
The Melvins came to town, so I hooked up with my friend Buzz Osborne who said, have you ever heard of Nirvana? Because those guys saw you play in San Francisco, and they’re looking for a drummer, and they were real impressed with your drumming, call them.
We talked about music, we loved everything from Neil Young to Public Enemy, from Black Flag to Black Sabbath. Right off the bat, it seemed pretty compatible. So I went out to the record store and bought a copy of Bleach, and played it ten times and went to U-Haul and bought a big fucking cardboard box. I dismantled my drum kit and telescoped them into a shell, threw my duffle bag in it and duct taped it up, and just flew up to Seattle.
When I showed up there with my one box, nothing else, I was greeted by Chris and Kurt. I really only knew them from the cover of Bleach, and they looked like these dirty fuckin’ biker children. I didn’t expect them to be as sweet as they were; Chris and Kurt were both the sweetest people in the world, they wouldn’t hurt a fly. We jumped into their old van, went up to Tacoma, to Chris’s house, and I started living there.

You were writing and recording music of your own at this point… You released the ‘Pocketwatch’ cassette with Barrett Jones on Simple Machines, in 1992, and one of those songs, ‘Friend Of A Friend’, appears, reworked, on the new album.
I’d written songs before, for Scream, and in my friend’s basement on a four-track, but that was the first time I’d written something that was so naked. I wrote that song when I first moved up with Nirvana. After living with Chris in Tacoma for a month and a half, with Chris, I moved down to Olympia with Kurt. We lived in this tiny apartment that was just an absolute fucking dumpster, and I was on a sleeping schedule where I would go to sleep about 6.30 in the morning, and wake up maybe around 4.30 in the afternoon, just as the sun was going down.
We were doing a lot of rehearsing in this barn out in Tacoma, and we had no television. It was just a small stack of albums and a four track, cigarette butts and corn-dog sticks everywhere; my home was the couch, which was about four and a half feet long, and I’m six feet tall - it was just a fuckin’ nightmare. I wrote the song one night and recorded it while Kurt was sleeping. I was just writing about these people I’d just met, myself included, because I had a lot of time to sit around and think.

Was there a single moment when the mania that surrounded Nirvana, following the success of Nevermind, started to get out of control?
It wasn’t until I came home and had a Gold Record and we were on Saturday Night Live that I realised, okay, now this is fuckin’ crazy. But it still seemed somewhat natural at that point, because we weren’t playing stadiums, we were still playing places that held 2000 people. It hadn’t gotten to that Monsters Of Rock, four-seconds-before-the-snare-hits-the-audience level yet.
The thing I started to notice was, people were starting to pull. People would pull you to an interview, or pull you into the dressing room, and people would push you onstage. And that’s when I thought, okay, this is getting a little weird. There were times where I’d excuse myself from an interview to have a piss, and have an extreme anxiety attack, like, why am I so stressed, so nervous? I was really happy, I didn’t feel down or depressed, I felt elated. But I was pretty overwhelmed. And if you think about it, I was only in that band for three and a half years, so everything happened over such a short period of time. A lot of its kind of a blur.

You were three kids from the underground punk scene; you were hardly prepared for what followed…
I think that’s a cop-out. Anyone could handle what I do, it’s a fucking luxury. I never didn’t want it. I just never expected it. We never had that world domination career ambition, because our kind of music made it impossible that we could be the biggest band in the world. People get fucked up when they have that insane ambition. If music’s not enough, not its own reward, don’t do it. When I worked at Furniture Warehouse and only played music at the weekends, that was my vacation; those weekends meant so much to me. And I still have that feeling.

I‘ve heard stories of drunken Queen-themed Karaoke parties and other shenanigans on the Nirvana tour bus during this era, which contrary to the reputation for misery Nirvana gained after the tragic fact.
People have this idea that the band travelled with a black cloud following us everywhere we went, and it’s absolutely not true. The memories that I revisit are great; we had so many fucking good times, good laughs. A lot of it was dangerous, a lot of it was fucking dark. But not all of it. The way the whole thing ended leaves everyone with a little bit of the black cloud, but honestly, it was so much fun.

You shied away from music, immediately after Kurt’s death.
How can I explain it? If you have someone that’s close to you, a family member or someone that you love, and they disappear or pass away… Imagine walking into their bedroom full of things every day. That’s exactly how playing music felt to me, because that was my whole world. It was difficult to listen to music, whether it was Ry Cooder’s soundtrack to Paris, Texas, or Ride The Lightning. I had to disconnect. And I couldn’t imagine getting up there and playing the drums with someone, and not thinking about Nirvana. I think about Nirvana every time I sit up to play the drums.

You received a postcard from Seven Year Bitch, who’d just lost their guitarist Stefanie Sargent to heroin, that read “We know what you are going through. The desire for music is gone now, but it will return. Don’t worry.” What followed next?
I worked with Mike Watt, for his solo album, Ball-Hog or Tugboat? He’s so inspirational; he’s a ‘lifer’, he does it because he loves it, and he’ll never stop. Then Tom Petty called and asked me to join the Heartbreakers for their SNL appearance. That guy’s one of America’s greatest song-writers. Within two days I felt like a member of that band. They were the sweetest, most welcoming people I’d ever met in my life. And we sounded good. I just did that one performance, played two songs, but it was fuckin’ great. I never asked Tom why he chose me; I think he said something about his teenage daughter being a Nirvana fan and making him do it.

Was this the first example of Dave Grohl, the Hardest Working Man In Showbusiness? Drumming for Killing Joke, QOTSA, Garbage, Cat Power and Nine Inch Nails; your own all-star Probot project…
It seems like after that, the ball started rolling, and it hasn’t stopped ever since. And that was eleven years ago. There’s nothing I’d rather do. Imagine, when a friend of yours who’s in one of the coolest bands calls you up and asks if you want to be on the new record. What, are you gonna say no?

Is there anyone you’re still itching to play with? Mojo could hook you up…
The next project that I’m trying to initiate involves me on drums, Josh Homme on guitar, and John Paul Jones playing bass. That’s the next album. That wouldn’t suck.

Back when you were working on the first, self-titled record, did you have even an inkling of the success Foo Fighters would achieve over the next decade?
Honestly, that album just came from melodies and demos that I’d recorded on an 8 track in my house, which I’d been doing since Nirvana had been a band. A lot of those songs were written while I was still in Nirvana, or just before Nirvana. The idea wasn’t to form a new band and start over; it was to go down to the studio, down the road, and book six days, which is the most time I’d ever spent recording music of my own. To me it seemed so professional. I wanted to start a label on my own, release the album with no names on it, no photos, call it ‘Foo Fighters’ so people thought it was a band, kinda like Stewart Copeland did with the Klark Kent record. The intention was to make music, and knowing I was still in the shadow of this thing that was Nirvana, in order for people to be objective, it had to be completely anonymous. That was the original idea.

Now, of course, Foo Fighters are a ‘proper’ rock band, one of the world’s biggest, and you can do pretty much whatever you wish. Is there anything left for Dave Grohl to achieve?
Every album opens the door to whatever happens next. Every record we’ve made I always imagined being the last. I can’t imagine being any more blessed than I already am. But, for once in my life, I’ve made a record I don’t want to be the last. Whether it’s the sheer volume of music we‘ve recorded, or exploring those two dynamics to their extremes, its opening doors I can see through for ten more years. And that’s never happened.

Did last year’s With The Lights Out box set mark the end of the Nirvana legacy?
That box set was pretty full; I think there’s maybe some demo tapes hanging around from Kurt’s house that we haven’t heard. But there aren’t many Nirvana out-takes, we’d go into the studio with twelve songs, record them, and that would be the record. But I’m sure they’ll find something to dredge up and slap on a disk somehow…

When you think about Nirvana now, what’s your take on the band and what you experienced?
To me, to this day, when I think of Nirvana, it doesn’t seem that different to me to Scream, or Dain Bramage, or Freakbaby or any of the other bands I was in as a kid. Some of them might get platinum albums, some of them might work at a Furniture Warehouse on the weekend, but they‘re just bands, thay‘re just people. Do I imagine the Pope is an angel sent from heaven? No, he’s just a human being. Do I imagine Jimmy Page spawned from a jackal in Egypt? No, he’s just a great guy, a human being, and he got to play music. It’s hard for me to think of things in terms of cultural relevance, because I don’t have that perspective on it. It’s hard to be that objective, when you were in the band. Honestly, it was just a band.
[Laughs] Admittedly, it’s hard for me to accept that Led Zeppelin were ‘just a band’. But I can say it about Nirvana.

(c) Stevie Chick 2005

Zwan

[This cover feature, for Kerrang!, ran early in 2003, and is notable mostly for the risky means by which I entered the US that day, and Paz Lechantin's innovative way of scuppering my whole interview technique with a simple wank joke. I have an iVisa now, as a direct result of this trip, thank you for asking kind INS officer]

Our story begins, as so many rock’n’roll fables do, with a little casual law-bending. Attempting to sneak into the United States without the correct work visa, your correspondent cooks up the falsitude of ‘visiting friends’. My true mission? To interview one of modern rock’n’roll’s few living icons as he embarks upon his long-awaited return to the world’s stages.

A stern customs officer pulls me from the luggage carousel and asks who paid for the flight. A record company, I stammer, with unwise honesty. Sensing my fakery, he asks why a record company would fly me to Chicago to visit my friends. Because, I lie, my friend is Billy Corgan, and he wants my impeccable opinion on his new band, Zwan.

The name of the windy city’s metallic-grunge godhead having been dropped like a huge clanging bell, I am speedily waved through the gates, but not until a couple more customs men, hair dyed black and in their late-20s, have flocked around me.

“Do you really know Billy?” asks one.

“Well,” I deflect, inching my way ever closer to freedom, a film of panic-sweat forming at my temples, “Does anyone really ‘know’ Billy?”

It won’t be long until I discover just how truthfully I unwittingly spoke.

“Billy’s happy now!” mugs the radio jock from Chicago ‘alternative’ station Q101 introducing ‘Honestly’, Zwan’s sunshine-hearted, romantic gush of a debut single. It’s a mantra we’re to hear again and again throughout our time with Zwan, from all corners.

We’re speeding through the snowy streets of Chicago, past legendary Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs baseball team, its neon billboard blinking a sweet, personalised welcome to Billy and his bandmates. Brutal weather conditions – temperatures nearing below 20 – have done nothing to deter eternally-hopeful stragglers hustling for tickets outside the Metro club, where Zwan are playing the last of a five-night stand. It’s a venue heavy with history for Billy: here, in October of 1988, Smashing Pumpkins earned $50 playing their first ever gig, under the watchful eye of friend and venue-owner Joe Shannahan; twelve years later, it was also the location for their legendary farewell show.

We’re hurried through the side-door, to the dressing room where Zwan are chilling out before their show. In one corner, guitarists Dave Pajo and Matt Sweeney and bassist Paz Lenchantin jam quietly. Jimmy Chamberlain, without doubt the most ludicrously talented drummer of his generation, bounds around charismatically, looking happier and healthier than he ever did in the Pumpkins. And then there’s Billy…

So many spiteful things have been written about Billy Corgan over the years, about his appearance, his allegedly tyrannical and tantrum-bound studio behaviour, catty onstage remarks and reports of tetchy interview hijinks, and ex-manager Sharon Osbourne’s infamous departing dictum that Corgan’s company made her physically sick. If you believe everything you read, hanging out and chewing the conversational fat with Billy Corgan should be greeted with the same blatant panic as a years-overdue visit to the dentist. Doubly so if you’re a journalist.

But here he is, relaxed and chatting with fans, signing autographs and joking. Slim, immensely tall (6’ 4”) and more handsome than you’d think, he’s nothing like the goth-grunge Uncle Fester he resembled at the Pumpkins’ demise. Strumming the riff to ‘Whole Lotta Love’ in salute to the entrance of Kerrang! snapper Scarlet Page, he seems charming, pleasant, at ease. Happy, even.

“I love being in a band,” he smiles when asked why he decided to form Zwan, as opposed to taking the solo-artist route.

“It’s a lot more fun, it just is,” he continues, Paz singing a sweet folky ditty in the background. “I can do the solo thing any time I want. I could’ve done it during the Pumpkins, if I’d wanted to. I prefer working with people I’m close to. The best music is made by bands. I think 80% of the greatest music is made by bands, and 15% done by singer songwriter types. But ego-driven solo ‘projects’, they’re neither here nor there. It’s not completely independent, and it’s not completely collaborative.”

He remembers who he’s talking to, grins sharply. “And when I do finally record my solo album, you can be sure that quote will return to haunt me.”

We exit to the auditorium and take our places for the Zwanshow. The startling backstage bonhomie extends onstage, too; Billy’s clearly having the time of his life, grinning, cracking jokes, throwing gonzo guitar-hero shapes and even, at one point, halting the show so he can give each band member a clutch of belated Christmas presents. When he indulges in some reckless Hare Krsna dancing during the epic ‘Jesus, I’, you’re tempted to send this impostor back to whatever Body Snatcher pod he crawled from and find out what he did to the ‘real’ Billy Corgan.

But cock an ear to the gorgeous noise being wrought up there, and Billy’s glee is understandable. Zwan just glow tonight, opening with the crescendo-laden title track to the new album, ‘Mary, Star Of The Sea’, twenty minutes of ecstatic guitar overload, Jane’s Addiction channelling the cultured eloquence of Television’s ‘Marquee Moon’. Then there are the poppier songs, like ‘Lyric’ and ‘Settle Down’, a post-grunge vision of Fleetwood Mac’s 70s soft-rock. Finally, there’s the apocalyptic ‘Jesus, I’, morphing over it’s twenty minutes from mantric post-rock chiming, through Queen-esque pomp and dazzle, to a blistering cover of Hawkwind’s space-rock staple ‘Silver Machine’ and back.

Billy’s happy now, and why not? The blaze of Zwan in full-flight is easily fierce enough to scrub all abiding memories of Smashing Pumpkins from the minds of anyone lucky enough to catch ‘em.

But Zwan is a band, not just Billy Corgan’s second career. A genuine supergroup, weighted more equally than you might imagine. Corgan may have penned the songs for ‘Mary, Star Of The Seas’, but it’s the skills and invention of the musicians of Zwan that make it soar so high.

On drums, of course, is Jimmy Chamberlain, the only Pumpkin making the transition. Not that this was a given. “I was, like, do I really wanna be in another band?” he smiles, two days after the Metro show, at the band’s bustling press day in an ice-cream store in Chicago’s impressive Museum Of Science And Industry. “Of course, I look at it now and it’s like it was meant to be. But I’ve not taken it for granted.”

Bassist Paz Lenchantin met Billy when her band A Perfect Circle supported Smashing Pumpkins back in 2000. When asked why she accepted the invitation to join Zwan, she stares back blankly, like the option of not being in Zwan never occurred to her. “It just made perfect sense,” she states. After hearing her co-vocals on the album, and seeing her yoga-aided starpower onstage, it’s hard to imagine Zwan without her.

Guitarist Dave Pajo’s recordings with Kentucky’s Slint were so influential their propulsive, dynamic rock experiments coined an entire genre, Post-Rock; you wouldn’t have the molten grace of Mogwai without them. “We’re more in the shadow of Slint than Smashing Pumpkins,” argues Billy, later on.

Since then, he’s worked with underground acts as legendary as Tortoise, Royal Trux and Palace Brothers, as well as tending to his rolling ‘M’ project. Infamously, he spent most of the 1990s unaware of the Pumpkins’ existence.

“I guess the music I listen to has always been the opposite of whatever’s ‘happening’,” explains the bashful, diminuitive guitar genius. “At a certain point I only listened to old music; in the early 90s I only listened to Delta Blues. Even now, I’m listening to blackface minstrel music from the 1920s. I couldn’t tell you what’s happening in the rest of the world. But Billy and I grew up with the same obscure metal influences, figuring out the same guitar solos in different cities.

For all his esoteric leanings, Pajo’s as ‘metal’ as any Zwan. “I was asked to join Danzig,” he grins. “My band, Maurice, opened for Samhain on their last tour; I was 16. When Glenn Danzig decided to go solo, he called my parents’ house and left a message with my mom, asking me to join his band. I never called him back. I don’t regret it,” he concludes, thoughtfully, pulling his greasy black bangs forward in approximation of Danzig’s infernal quiff, “Though I’ve still got my ‘Devil’s Locks’!”

Pajo’s route into the band was via Matt Sweeney, playing with him alongside fractured folk-vagrant Will Oldham. Sweeney spent the 1990s in rightfully-acclaimed indie-rockers Chavez, whose 1995 album ‘Ride The Fader’ – all angular twisted riffage and killer emotional gravitas – deserves rediscovery by the emocore generation. It was Sweeney who instigated Zwan’s birth, hooking up with his old friend Corgan shortly after the Pumpkins’ demise.

“I saw Billy at a party,” he remembers. “I respected him so much as a musician, moreover as a friend, and I’d missed him. I asked him what he’d been up to, and he said, ‘I’ve been trying to get out of the shadow of my past’. [laughs] And I was, like, ‘dude, whatever, don’t worry about it’. I think I said something like, ‘Weren’t you in Deep Purple?’!

“Playing with Will Oldham was pretty much my only performing outlet,” he remembers. “After Chavez, I’d gotten myself a day-job, wrote some songs, jammed with James from Chavez, hustled for quarters in bus-stations [chuckles].”

“You weren’t doing anything, were you?” teases Billy.

“Not by your fucked-up standards,” winks Matt, displaying the dry sardonic humour that so often has his bandmates in stitches.

But Corgan is exceptionally driven, and the Zwan era has marked one of his periodic bursts of intense productivity. The last time he was so prolific was the mid-90s, the Mellon Collie years. This time, ‘Mary, Star Of The Seas’ drew from a pool of over 120 songs.

“It’s because I masturbate less now, and take longer walks,” he deadpans. “If you masturbate less, you maintain your ‘chi’. You’re more creative.”

“Aren’t you supposed to masturbate three times a week, or something?” asks Paz, innocently.

“Yeah, for your prostrate health,” answers Billy, authoritatively. “I asked a doctor about it, men need to ejaculate every three days. This is Kerrang!, isn’t it? We can talk about this.”

Paz brandishes her right hand in my face. “Do you know why it’s better to masturbate with this hand?,” she asks, minxishly. “Because it’s my hand!”

And so we segue from self-love to romantic love; to discuss the lyrical content of ‘Mary, Star Of the Seas’, an exceedingly positive, romantic album. It’s a record heavy with love songs, and, what’s more, love songs that don’t always err on the side of heartbreak.

“It’s just an album about trying to have a good time being alive,” he explains. “For Europeans, the idea of living in constant terror of being blown up is not a new thing. But it’s a new thing for us over here; we’re still going through the shock of impending doom.”

The events of September 11^th weren’t so much a specific influence on the record, as the endeavour of making a life worth living after that tragic day. “I remember talking one day to Bono,” continues Billy, “he was talking about how he had schoolmates who were killed by the IRA. His whole philosophy was, Shit happens, the world’s crazy, get on with it and just get out there and live. And I think that was a really healthy perspective for me to get. I know that when we play this music I feel motivated, to live, to eat, to fuck, to jack off… whatever. I just wanna get out there and do something. I don’t feel ‘heavy’, so, if that’s romantic, then I guess so. I want to live.”

He contends that much of the morbid, gothic imagery that enveloped the Pumpkins was “theatrical”, and that Zwan is not theatrical at all. “There’s not a lot of ‘consciousness’ about it. It just is what it is. When the band started, we were all aware of peoples’ expectations after the Pumpkins, but at the end of the day, we decided we really didn’t give two fucks.”

It’s an attitude Billy picked up while playing, after the Pumpkins’ split, as a member of Mancunian indie legends and quintessential second-career band New Order, who formed from the ashes of Joy Division following Ian Curtis’s suicide, and arguably managed to surpass that band’s achievements. The ironies aren’t lost on him.

“It was just a bloody fucking fantastic experience,” he remembers, animatedly. “The Pumpkins was really influenced by them – ‘1979’ is totally New Order. You can’t imagine how those guys think. Their whole world is just about whatever the fuck they wanna do. They’re like military people,” he laughs, “whatever they gotta do to find that groove, that feeling, they’ll go all the way. They’re not reverent about anything, the past, the future, anything. It blew my mind. Joy Division is such a revered thing, to me – they’re the godhead, they’re right up there with the Beatles – and they talk about Joy Division like they were talking about their tea, it’s not a big deal. They haven’t bought any of the hype, they just think they were a good band.”

“That’s the band,” whispers Paz, “That one good band that stopped, and another band as good followed.”

But Zwan is more than just another rock’n’roll band. Their next release is to be a live DVD from their acoustic side-project, Dijalizwan, while, says Matt, “Zwan is a very flexible thing. People in the band can do their own thing under the Zwan name, it could be any combination of members. It’s a very open thing; ‘Zwan’ is an open word.

“I remember when we were tossing around names, I saw that Billy had written down ‘Zwan’ and I thought, that’s a cool name,” says Matt. “I didn’t know what it meant, but it was evocative of certain 60s European bands that would just make up words so they wouldn’t have to have any preconceptions forced upon them. As it turns out, it’s also the name for a very popular canned lunch meat in Europe. [laughter]”

“My favourite is Russia,” offers Billy, “Where ‘Zwan’, phonetically, means the sound of a ringing bell. You know, the ‘diiiiiiing’. But this is all stuff we found out after, we didn’t know any of this. Like, my parents named me ‘Billy’, and I found out later what a cursed, cursed name that is.”

What’s wrong with the name ‘Billy’?

“Look up ‘William’ and you’ll see,” he smiles. “The original origin of the name William is a German word. And it’s so fucking appropriate that it’s stunning. It means ‘he who is without dick’,” he fibs.

Paz: “‘He who is without dick, sucks nothing’.” [laughter]

Billy: “See, it’s only our second interview of the day, and already we’re in full-on dick-joke mode.”

Paz: “You’ll notice how much I talk when we talk about penis.”

Zwan’s release party that night should be a rock’n’roll dream come true – the band rocking out beneath actual 757s and Spitfires suspended from the museum’s ceiling – but, as Matt strolls onto an eerily quiet stage, quipping “It’s like a museum in here” before howling like a mad dog into the silence, it’s apparent something’s not quite right. Perhaps it’s the invite-only audience, a mixture of rabid fans and industry scenesters who don’t quite ignite like the kids Saturday night, who sang every lyric to songs not-yet released. Whatever, Zwan play a fine gig, but never quite unfurl to the glorious heights they’re capable of; which, once you’ve experienced the full Zwan vision, is somewhat crushingly disappointing.

Still, the kids in the first few rows don’t seem too upset. Billy throws out his plectrums to them as the band finish without their planned encore, shaking hands with those nearest him. But the vigour of their fandom – swarming like piranhas toward him, one kid howling to no-one, “I shook Billy’s hand!” at utterly bloodcurdling volume – seems to take him aback, make him uncomfortable.

Afterwards, in the dead, awkward hustle of the Record Company party, I stroll around the museum, wondering about Zwan, and their future. If history has taught us anything, supergroups are ever short-lived things, wrenched apart by the very egos that formed them. For all their protestations, their talk of flexibility and open-ness, their endless dick-jokes, what’s to stop that happening with Zwan? When Matt Sweeney tires of everyone considering Zwan to be just Billy’s band, of answering question after question on the Pumpkins? When Dave Pajo’s restless muse sends him off in wordless pursuit of another obscure, mind-blowing sound? When Billy decides it’s finally time for his ego-driven solo project? Billy’s happy now. But for how long?

I randomly stumble down a mock-up 1950s street, lined with old-fashioned shops, where, as eerie mannequins gaze mutely on, Zwan are being interviewed by French TV channel Musique Plus. It’s late in the evening of a day full of interviews and rock-shows, and the burnt-out Zwan are playful to the extreme. Pajo tootles a harmonica throughout, in lieu of actually talking. Matt wields his acerbic, anarchic wit without mercy. Paz, describing herself as a ‘yoga enthusiast’, stretches her limbs wantonly and obliviously. Jimmy flirts riotously with the interviewer, and Billy tries, through the fog of exhaustion, to elucidate the concept of Zwan one last time. Asked to give one last nugget of rock’n’roll wisdom in closing, he winks, “The band that sleeps together, sleeps together.”

The interview finished, the band clamber up and head back to the party. Billy, spotting me in the shadows, hollers out, “Hey! Did you get everything you needed?”

One last question… Why are you still doing this? I’m not being facetious, but it’s not as if you have to…

“You mean, what’s it like to be rich, famous and still make music?” he replies. “I love it. It’s like breathing to me. If you look at my life as a series of choices, the best choices had to do with music. If you look at my personal life, the sports teams I’ve followed [laughs], they’ve all been disastrous. It’s the one place I feel it won’t kill me. It’s tried, but it hasn’t killed me yet. I just think it’s the greatest thing in the world.”

Without another word he walks away.

We did the research. ‘William’ is descended from the German word ‘willig’; it means ‘willing’, ‘strong-willed’. Maybe Billy sees this as a curse. But maybe he’ll discover it’s just as much of a blessing, too.