“We were shocked”: Jack White remembers the first-ever White Stripes gig
Playing your debut show as a band is an intimidating task. It’s not easy to take your songs from cosy, private practice rooms to elevated stages and rooms full of unfamiliar faces for the first time. But it’s a step that every artist has to take at some point in their career. Even the most confident and accomplished performers had to push through that initial stage fright to play in an empty room with trembling fingers, and The White Stripes are no exception.
It’s difficult to imagine a young Jack and Meg White playing a gig for the first time. Over the course of their 14-year existence, the rock duo took to stages of all shapes and sizes, from headlining the iconic Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury Festival in 2005 to a record-breakingly short live set in which they played a singular note before leaving audiences stunned. With each new performance, they honed their live presence further.
By the height of their career, when they were headlining festivals and playing to audiences made up of thousands of people, Jack and Meg White looked as comfortable on stage as they would be in a practice room. Meg sat calmly and confidently behind the drumkit while Jack led the crowd in a tirade of raucous riffs and pure rock. And the frontman is still just as at home on stage.
He has spent 2024 playing in strange venues across the United States, touring his new album, No Name, in tiny clubs and, apparently, backyard fêtes. He even jumped in to cover for Queens of the Stone Age earlier this year after they dropped out of a festival in Memphis. It’s safe to say that White is still a seasoned performer, whether the venue of choice is a back garden or a huge festival stage.
However, the duo weren’t always filling festival fields and playing Madison Square Garden. Like all other bands, they started out playing in rooms that were barely half full. As White recalled during an interview with Rolling Stone, the rock outfit played their first show at a venue called the Gold Dollar in Detroit in the summer of 1997.
Years away from being invited to headline Glastonbury, Meg and Jack stumbled down to the open mic night at the Gold Dollar, where they would play to an audience that the frontman estimates was made up of around 10-15 people.
“We played three songs,” he remembered, “One of which was ‘Love Potion Number Nine’.”
Although their audience wasn’t huge, they were immediately enthusiastic. “We were shocked that people dug what we were doing,” White remembered. And that was just the start. In the years following their debut, The White Stripes played more and more around Michigan, including a couple more shows at the Gold Dollar.
As they cut their teeth in the DIY venues around their home state, The White Stripes honed a sound that would soon be blaring over the airwaves and the fields of festival sites. They continued to work at their performance in between albums, collecting fans with their take on garage rock. And somewhere between ‘Seven Nation Army’ and Icky Thump, they had gone from open mic night patrons to Glastonbury headliners.
But perhaps, without those early DIY venues and small-town shows, The White Stripes might never have become one of the biggest rock bands of their generation.
