The instrument Jack White really wanted to be known for: “All I cared about”
People are constantly asking for a guitar hero to look up to, and while the number of bona fide legends of the instrument seems to have dwindled in modern times, the likes of Jack White still get people excited about the future of the instrument in a rock context.
It shouldn’t come as any surprise that people want a guitar hero; after all, there weren’t any spinoffs to the much-lauded video game franchise that adopted the term called Flute Hero, nor was there Drum Hero, for that matter. Singstar and Rock Band are about as close as you’ll get to people being able to place themselves in the shoes of another band member, and even then, the guitar always seemed to have an allure.
In the context of his first and most famous project, The White Stripes, many were enamoured by the raw and electrifying approach that White took to his instrument, and hearing the roaring riffs of songs like ‘Fell In Love With A Girl’ and ‘Blue Orchid’, for example, would no doubt have turned the heads of impressionable young fans and persuaded them to save up for their first six-string.
It was clear from his style that influences such as Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin played a pivotal role in White establishing the sound he was intent on producing, and his love of older blues guitarists was definitely palpable from the earliest releases by the band, with very few effects being laid over his guitar to achieve a completely organic sound.
Given all of these touchstones, one might assume that White had always dreamed of being a guitarist and shredding on stage, but according to a response he gave during a Q&A at Oxford University in 2025, guitar hadn’t always been his first love, and there was another instrument that he had always wished to be known for playing instead.
During the event, White fielded many questions about the origins of the band and claimed that it was only because he’d found that the guitar connected with people much more easily that he found himself moving away from his first love, the drums.
“The White Stripes was the project I had that was all about simplicity,” he argued. “That happened to be the thing that people related to. When you’re passionate about stuff, you don’t know if the things you’re passionate about will also be something interesting for other people.”
He continued by likening the experience of switching instruments to a wannabe stand-up comedian accidentally finding their audience through the medium of theatre. “You [might] try to do stand-up, and some people laugh, but you don’t get a standing ovation,” he continued. “Then you go and do this play because your friend was in it, then that’s when you got a standing ovation. It’s like ‘Well, I didn’t mean to do that’… That’s how I feel about the guitar.”
Given how he has played drums in other projects such as The Dead Weather, and that the drumming style of his former bandmate and ex-wife, Meg White, was always erratic and placed with equal importance to the guitar, his feelings begin to make sense. “I didn’t care about the guitar,” he concluded. “I wanted to be a drummer my whole life. That was all I cared about.”
