The White Stripes
Greatest Hits
scum stats: too crazy to even parse here...or anywhere
So the day is finally upon us where the White Stripes Greatest Hits is unleashed on the entire world...at least in digital form.
For all you die-hards here, the inside scoop is that the demand for the vinyl was so much more than we had initially anticipated that we could not press up copies fast enough to supply anywhere outside of the United States. Hence the delayed release date for the rest of the world.
Even then, we had to enlist the help of an additional SEVEN different pressing plants to be able to tackle this quantity. The etchings in the run-out grooves of the album, with all sorts of recuts and retests and Roman numerals as prefixes and suffixes are just a DOOZY and I'm pretty confident that no one will ever properly decipher it all...if only because *I* haven't even been able to keep track of it all. I am hard-pressed to name any other new release in the past THIRTY years that would have been on the machines across eight different manufacturers.
And in some weird way, I can think of no better metaphor to encapsulate the feeling of a White Stripes Greatest Hits record. Does anyone outside a couple dozen people in Detroit TRULY understand how weird, how outsider, how unpromising of a band this was considered upon their debut back in 1997? For something so unique, so beautiful, so true to actually cut through and emerge and succeed in the mainstream...from my experience, this almost NEVER happens.
Yet here we are, coordinating with the fine folks at Sony/Columbia and their gargantuan worldwide reach and influence and truly hitting new heights of saturation for the band. And as we're just at the start of that relationship, I'm excited to tease that we've got MUCH more coming.
All of this reminds me of something Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney once said about the White Stripes. I'm paraphrasing, but it was along the lines of "The White Stripes are like the Simpsons. It's SO good you feel like it SHOULD be an underground, unknown, cult-like thing. The fact that it actually became wildly popular across the globe is just that fortunate twist of the cosmos."
The idea of a two-piece band from Southwest Detroit still being talked about over twenty years later, arguably more important than they've ever been, nearly ten years after they've ceased to create new work, who had no struggle bouncing from shows at bowling alleys to hockey arenas on the same day, with a band member who literally built his own state-of-the-art pressing plant three blocks away from the collapsing walls of the first club they ever played. All together it's a journey that is both shouting to those a million miles away and whispering someone right next to you. Dispatching records to the farthest reaches of the planet and hand-delivering one to your neighbor. Writing lyrics that feel quintessentially universal and at the same time as if they were specific to you and your life and thoughts that no one else would ever know.
The duality of being both gargantuan large and intimately small at the same time. After all these years...that's what the White Stripes mean to me.
If you've made it this far...great. Post a comment about what the White Stripes mean to you and the best one will get some beautiful gem from my closet or floor or wherever the gems happen to have fallen on that beautiful day.
PS. got stuck at home today with car troubles so I don't have an actual copy of the Greatest Hits for my photo here. So I made my own. Winner can get this jacket maybe with one of the million test presses tossed inside
PPS. I believe the title of the album is, officially "The White Stripes Greatest Hits" as there was initially a concern that having two different titles "My Sister Thanks You And I Thank You" for standard and "Aside From That And Besides This" for the Vault would make it ineligible for chart placement. But a bunch of new chart rules changes made all of that a moot point anyway.
The White Stripes and TMR literally got me back into vinyl recorss and collecting them. As I hre with the White Stripes, so did my family. My love for them is now a love for both of my children. I have also found, hands down, the best group of music lovers and collectors I have ever been a part of. The TMR community is bar none!
The White Stripes have been my home for more than half my life. They’re what grounds me, what i return to when i feel lost,and what opened doors for me (inward and outward) on so many occasions. I can honestly say i wouldn’t be the same person i am today if i hadn’t stumbled on “red bowling ball ruth” at 14. And for that, i will forever be thankful.
The White Stripes are to the U.S. as U2 is to Ireland.
I came on board late. Have not listened to the white stripes until I ran into you guys at the luckreunion. That’s when I bought a white stripes record after third man truck. I didn’t even have a turntable at the time. And that was the only record I owned. I started picking up records are in there at gigs I went to Austin. Just to support the bands. But the more I read about the white stripes and the way they record the more I wanted to hear that record. So finally I started to piece together and I stereo system. so I have the white stripes to blame for my addiction to vinyl .
How do we enter?
how do we become entered for the giveaways?
What do they mean to me? Music. Plan and simple. Classic timeless mix of old and new. Cover this artist cover that artist. Basic 2 or 3 chord songs that could be played by beginners or 2 or 3 chord songs that have jimmy page and the edge scratching their heads trying to figure out how to play it right. That’s all WHITE STRIPES amazing
I am so thankful you asked, for just yesterday I was thinking of writing to all of you at TMR for this very reason and to share my appreciation. I enjoy the White Stripes’ music for its purity, but more than that I love I share that enjoyment with my wife and our two sons. We are all big fans, a rarity for four people across two generations and four varying tastes in music. I got one son interested while he was in high school. (He is now 22 and a recent college graduate.) He then took his 13yo brother to Jack’s first Bridgestone show, their first concert together and without a grownup. They went straight from school, took their backpacks, and did their homework while in line on the sidewalk along Broadway. The younger son was excited because when Loretta Lynn asked if anyone had a request, he hollered out “FIST CITY,” she said “aight,” and she sang the song right then and there. (I know I am raising my kids right when one in adolescence can name a Loretta Lynn song on demand and isn’t too shy to shout it while standing in a crowd of predominantly grown-ups rock fans.) So, that experience got my younger son hooked on Jack and Meg’s music. He started asking his mother to play it every morning on the way to school. Soon, she found that she wasn’t changing the music after the boy got out of her car. Now, she was hooked, too! A few years later, when my older son graduated from high school, I gave him matching posters from that first Bridgestone show. They were the first things he put up in his dorm room. (I bet he was the only student at any Southern Baptist school with framed posters of Jack White and Loretta Lynn over his bed, but they were the first thing he put up each of his four years.) Fast forward to last year. My older son was about to start his last year of college. Our younger son was about to go off for his first at a school must further away. I knew that summer was going to be the end of a special time in our lives, that every subsequent time they came home after this each would have increasingly more of his life somewhere else. I tried really hard to schedule a special, big-time trip for us to share, but none of us had a week off in common the whole summer. They were too excited about what was to come to think about what they were leaving behind, but my wife and I knew. We were excited, too, but we were sad. That’s why I was so pumped to find out The Raconteurs would be at a new festival in Kentucky, not far from where some of our family lives. We could all get off work early Friday, visit with family, and see a great show Saturday! Standing in that crowd just a few feet back from the stage was pretty much the last thing all four of us did together before our younger son left for college a few days later and our older son left a few days after that. (BTW when my younger son walked into his dorm room for the first time, the first thing he put over his bed was the graduation gift given to him by his brother – a completely different poster from that Jack and Loretta show they attended together years ago, the Hatch Show Print.) I am so happy that road trip and show gave us such a powerful memory and milestone! But next week brought me my only, albeit mild, regret. I was taking my wife on a trip to NYC officiality to celebrate the empty nest, but mostly to keep her mind from dwelling on how empty it was. We each had stepped into a restroom at BNA before our flight, but I stepped out a mere moment before she did. And standing right there in front of me, in the middle of the concourse for that mere moment was Jack White! A small part of me wanted to yell into the women’s room, “Laura, come quick!” and a larger part of me wanted to personally tell Jack dad-to-dad thank you for that weekend he gave my family. But all parts of me are unicorn, a local who isn’t a germ. I like that I grew up knowing that no matter how famous a friend or neighbor is, their fame shouldn’t stop them from being able to buy groceries, watch their kids’ soccer games, and even go to the airport in peace. We don’t want to talk business during those times, so why should they? Still, the same family and community that taught me that lesson also taught me to find and express gratitude. While I pondered my choices, and before my wife came out to join me, Jack walked away. The part of me that wanted to tell Jack thank you remains, so I’m still going to write that letter, but I wanted to tell you, too. Thank you.
the white stripes are an ode to infinite possibilities. maintaining their roots in rock or garage or punk (or whatever you like to align with) by giving the preverbal middle finger to the record industry (I.e. recording at Toe Rag and follow up by recording in your house or using a marimba when they try to pigeon hole you a guitar based band). they taught me to play by my own rules. they made me believe it magic. that anything was possible when they started a concert. who knows what they were going to play next? would jack completely change the lyrics or change the solo? they taught me to appreciate the long forgotten rock and roll myths, in this day in age(with technology) everything is recorded and documented, where’s the excitement of hearing a maybe true story about your guitar shredding hero? well I feel the white stripes appreciated it and did what they could to be mythical.
The White Stripes is a gift and a curse to my life. As an eleven year old, I commandeered my older sister’s CD of Elephant, only listening to Seven Nation Army, playing it on a purple boombox I kept on a TV tray by my bed while I played Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 and thinking that was that, this is what they do, not sure about the acorn stuff.
As I grew up they grew on me. I began to mature and the tenderness of Jack’s lyrics about love had me fantasizing about school crushes. His world weary takes on the dark intricacies of human interaction made me feel like I had an edge on everyone else. “When I see my face I want to disappear”…what high school kid doesn’t feel that way.
Learning guitar, I couldn’t get away from their sound. I still can’t. I can’t play an E chord without wanting to launch into a Let’s Build A Home ripoff. I can’t strum an A chord without hearing the opening riff to Same Boy You’ve Always Known. I can’t pick out a record to put on without needing to consciously restrain myself from reaching toward that absurdly long stretch of red and black again.
I’ll always be confounded by the thought that Jack thought it all up…The presentation, the sounds, the intellectualism. Nothing empowers me and inspires me like hearing Jack and Meg thrash through a live set. In my life, they are a finger pointing at a bleeding red moon.