Jack White was permanently banned from Hotel Yorba
When you see the name of a street or location within the title of a song, the first instinct is to expect that place to be fictional. However, throughout musical history, artists have used very real locations as the basis of their purely creative stories or even used the areas themselves as the focal point of their songwriting. The same can be said for The White Stripes and their mainstream-busting hit ‘Hotel Yorba’.
The duo of Jack White and Meg White operated as the brutal arm of the new garage rock scene that bubbled across the globe at the dawn of the new millennium. While The Strokes were rendered in an effortless shade of cool, The White Stripes were filthier than a mechanic’s floor and just as slimy. Through their blustering blues sound, the band, led triumphantly by White’s incandescent guitar, broke the mould when it came to bone-shaking riffs and fearsome delivery. However, it would take a sweet ditty about a hotel to launch the band into the collective consciousness.
Featuring on their landmark album White Blood Cells, the track was effervescent with an indie charm that the duo would rarely show again. Built out of a folky jaunt that few can pull off with authenticity, somehow, the White Stripes delivered the kind of pop song that their thunderous back catalogue would suggest was way beyond their remit. It gave the band their UK TV debut and would start their domination of Europe’s rock scene in earnest.
The Hotel Yorba is a real spot too. Located on Lafayette Boulevard in the band’s native Detroit, the somewhat rundown hotel was always at the centre of rumours that circulated during Jack White’s upbringing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, thanks to the earthiness of the sound, the song had been in White’s hands for some time, having been previously performed by his pre-White Stripes band Two Star Tabernacle.
Having written the song in their living room and recorded it for $100 (though other reports suggest the track was actually written in the hotel itself), it seems fitting that the group would also aim to grab a cheap video for the track too. However, in trying to do so, they would permanently ban themselves from the object of their song. The duo snuck into the hotel and began recording their video but were subsequently spotted and removed from the hotel, taking a banning order in the process.
The video, which received such heavy rotation on the various music video channels of the day, is said to still house that footage, though it would seem no member of either party seems keen to corroborate the story. Instead, footage of what looks like the hotel is interspersed with clips of White marrying former bandmate Tracee Mae Miller while Meg (who the press still thought was Jack’s sister) was towed behind via a piece of rope attached to Jack’s waist.
Paying homage to a particular spot is perhaps one of the greatest things a rock star can do. Penny Lane in Liverpool is still regularly visited by Beatles tourists to this day. However, if you do write a song about a building, street or city, make sure you don’t get banned from there before it’s released.
