Meg of The White Stripes Photo: Whitney Pastorek

Enter The White Stripes pt.2
by Whitney Pastorek w/ notes from Jeff Towne

11/26/2007

HOLY CRAP: THEY TOOK THE STORY! I AM GOING TO INTERVIEW THE WHITE STRIPES!!

So I'm sitting there at my desk at work, and I'm trying really hard to contain myself as I talk with Sharon, and when she accepts the piece and we schedule a "phone session I hang up the phone and only sort of whoop really loudly, and my co-worker only sort of hides his disdain for my using the office to arrange projects that don't have to do with my actual paying job, but whatever! I am a real journalist now, and I am doing a phone session!

What's a phone session?

The phone session is where Sharon and I brainstorm ideas about the piece and start shaping the line of questioning and so forth. I've got about two weeks before the White Stripes are going to be in NYC, and so I assume I will use that time to really hone my journalistic skills, but for the time being I set up this sort of outline of subjects I'm interested in:

1. Why did the band turn down this huge Gap ad campaign?
2. What does "selling out mean?
3. They just recently switched labels, from Jack's own indie label to a larger British conglomerate - does THAT mean they sold out? (I would later find out that the big Brit label was just for European distribution - research, research)
4. How calculated is the band's image, and why THIS image?
5. What do they think about the whole mp3 battle?
6. They were recently on Letterman - what does that opportunity mean?
7. Talk about the themes of the music (oh, good grief, Whitney.)
8. Who are their influences? How do they pick the covers they play? (again, people, NO JOURNALISM TRAINING)
9. This last bullet point on my list says, "skills Ð simply complex . I have no idea what that means.

I go over all of this with Sharon, and she's got these super smart things to say. First of all, she's so not interested in the issue of "selling out, but way more concerned with their image, the "world they've created, and the sort of burgeoning Detroit rock community. She also really wants Jack to bring his guitar and mentions something about this being a "performance chat, which I took to be a style of NPR piece that I didn't really know about, and then she says, "Great. So this should be about 6 and a half minutes, scene/studio, call Stacey and set up some studio time. Bye! Good lord.

Ok, so once I'd scheduled studio time (Stacey: "How long do you need? Me: "Twenty minutes? Stacey: "It comes in blocks of an hour. Me: "Oh. One of those, then, please. Stacey: "DAT or minidisk? Me: "Oh, hell, Stacey, why don't you just pick for me, hm? ), I got to work on my battle plan for the interview itself.

World's greatest invention: Google. I typed in "White Stripes and started clicking through the links. Luckily, they are the source of a great deal of fascination for the media (even before I busted the story wide open on NPR) and so there were a number of little blurby pieces and fan sites and longer interviews from before they became so famous that they no longer gave interviews. I used those to sort of get a sense for what the band would want to talk about, as well as what I thought had already been run into the ground.

And as luck would have it, the day before I was scheduled to interview them the band did an in-studio spot at KRock, the local angry-15-year-old-boy station here in NYC; since I listen to the angry-15-year-old-boy station while at work, I was sitting there Googling these guys when they started talking on air. The DJs asked a number of buffoonish questions and also managed to comment on Meg's breasts -- and so that turned out to be pretty useful. I came away armed with a couple good ideas following up on some of the things Jack said, the knowledge that Jack was suffering from bronchitis at the moment, and a warning not to mention Meg's breasts.

I decided to write out a bunch of topics and questions on two facing pages of a notebook. I left lots of space between each one, in case one question led me to a follow-up that I needed to jot down and come back to. I also pulled a couple interesting clips from other magazines because I wanted to hear the band's opinion on specific things that had been said about them in the past. I made sure everything was laid out as neatly and clearly as possible, because I know how easily I just abandon things like notebooks in important situations and I thought maybe having everything written VERY CAREFULLY would help remind my brain to focus on the issue at hand and not just start drooling on Jack and in the end, I ended up with two pages that looked like this:

Whitney's Notebook Click Image for Full View

And so, armed only with some fragile ideas (and one of my freshman students from NYU, whose job it was to pat my arm and smile reassuringly whenever I opened my mouth), I headed off to the NPR Bureau (the NPR Bureau!) to meet the band.

"HI, I'M WHITNEY. WHY ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT?"

Let it be said that I do not look my age. In fact, I look a good five years younger than I am, and occasionally act even younger than that. When I walk into the NPR Bureau, the guy at the front desk does a bit of a double take. Then again, I might have been so spastic at that point that he was just reacting to my occasional random fits of giggling. I meet with the engineer, a woman named Manoli Weatherell, and she does less of a double take, and then walks me into the studio.

The room is about the size of a standard bedroom (in NYC), with a big table in the center and microphones popping up all over the place. The walls have that egg-crate padding stuff on them, and there's a number of things I feel like I should perhaps not touch. On the other side of a glass wall is the control booth, where Manoli says she is going to sit, and like 7000 tape and CD and minidisk decks and lots of blinking lights. There is actually an "on air sign. My freshman assistant, Slaney, and I look at each other with big stoopid sloppy grins on our faces, and head back to the lobby to wait.

The entrance of the White Stripes is not accompanied by trumpets or seraphim or even an entourage, really - just Jack and Meg and the publicist and the manager. All of whom give me that same sort of look of disbelief but shake my hand and play along anyway, and then we all go into the studio. No pleasantries, no idle banter to get me used to talking to my favorite band in the entire universe - this interview is happening NOW.

The White Stripes at a Pier on the West Side, 08/2001 Click Image for Full View. Photo: Whitney Pastorek

HOW TO INTERVIEW YOUR FAVORITE BAND IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE, or, STOP STARING, WOMAN! THIS IS FOR NPR!

I opened by trying to sound all professional, but I think that went away really, really fast. I started asking questions, and Jack was very forthcoming, and I just sort of tried to follow his lead. I'd been skeptical going in - of the whole humility thing, this "oh, we never expected any of this line that I'd kept reading in all of their press - and so when he launched right into that, I tried to sort of pick my way around it, but the fact is, he was quite persuasive and I was somewhat preoccupied with having these people "like me. Also, the publicist and the manager were sitting on the other side of the glass window, not smiling. Luckily, Manoli WAS smiling, and nodding, and making encouraging gestures with her hands, and Slaney was doing her job well, too, so I pressed on.

I can't believe I let myself get preoccupied with being LIKED, by the way. I mean, I must have watched "Almost Famous nine times before going in there. Anyway.

So I'm not sure if I got to all my questions. I'm pretty sure I didn't. I knew that I wasn't supposed to care about that, though, and instead just let the discussion go wherever it was going to go. And actually, we hit a good number of the things I wanted to know. A lot of times, I could tell Jack had been asked the same question a million times - but I couldn't feel bad about that because my first question was "What do you want to talk about but never get asked? and he didn't really have an answer. My friend Matt - an even bigger Stripes fan than me - sent me an email that said all he wanted out of this interview was for me to "get Meg to talk, which I tried to do (and actually, I think at one point I accidentally asked about her breasts) but she doesn't really talk, at all, so I abandoned that, too. I asked Jack to play his guitar, which he did a little of but couldn't really sing at all because of the bronchitis so that stopped pretty quick. And when I got to the end and I sort of ran out of stuff to say, anyway, I let Slaney ask a question, which was fun. And then we wrapped it up, and we shook hands again, and Jack didn't make out with me, and we all went home. Slaney and I started giggling again. It felt pretty damn good.

Going back and listening to the tapes later, it would seem that I very much let the band dictate the direction of the conversation. I'm still not sure if that's ok.

But there was one question I simply did not want to ask, which would come back and bite me in the ass: were you guys married?

I knew the answer - yes. The White Stripes were married. In fact, it's not hard to find evidence of that fact, if you look hard enough or talk to the right people. In Detroit, apparently, it's not even an issue. But the national press had made such a big deal out of this - for those who don't know, Jack and Meg claim to be brother and sister - that I knew it was probably my "job as a "journalist" to go down that road and try and get as much info out of them as I could. I didn't do it for two reasons: first, that wasn't the story I wanted to tell. It didn't seem like the most important part to me, not more important than their effect on immediate pop culture, or Jack's contributions to smaller bands in his hometown, or even the sort of vague class issues that undercut the idea of white kids from the suburbs playing the music of blacks from the poor South. And second: I didn't want to piss them off. So I didn't ask anything about it.

If you listen to the final product, though, the subject very much gets brought up. I'll get to that when I talk about editing.

I think that's a good example, though, of how important it is to cast a wide net in an interview, because you never know what's going to pop out the other end when you get right down to it. I'm glad I asked a lot about their image and tried to sort of get Jack to admit to it all being an act, because that worked well with the direction I ended up going. I don't think I could have predicted how this thing would turn out, but the tape I got was perfect.

So that makes me wonder how much you can really plan ahead for this sort of thing, huh?

Notes From TOOLS Editor Jeff Towne Although this isn't per-se a techie "Tools" thing, let me jump in, because I interview lots of musicians... You did the right thing by researching the band on the web, or magazines, or any resources you can find. It's sometimes charming to just have a na•ve chat with someone, just getting to know the interviewee as real person, apart from any fame or artistic pretensions, but when interviewing a band, you must be all set with some well-thought out questions, or you'll be at great risk for getting nothing but some mumbling and a few platitudes about how everything just was totally natural, it just came out that way. You do want to read other interviews, to know a bit about their background, about the references in their songs, about their inspirations, not to just ask the same questions again, but to get the next step down the pike, to get at their obsession with renaissance architecture, or the X-men, or the cosmic relevance of a chili-dog. And sometimes, even if the question has been asked and answered a hundred times, you just have to do it again to get it on tape. It's a bit of show-offy bravado, but I've found that flinging a really obscure fact about the band into the interview right at the top goes a long way toward getting some real answers, as folks perk up, realizing that they aren't about to endure another session with some reporter who got assigned this beat, and will just ask the top-10 generic questions. That being said, you have to be ready to follow threads that are unexpectedly loosened, don't stick to your questions just because you happened to formulate them in a way that would win you points in debate club. I try to listen to a band's recordings repeatedly and read bios or interviews or press kits then write out a list of questions. Not just topics, but real questions, in a logical order. Then I don't try to memorize them, but know them, so when it comes to the interview, I'll hold the paper, but try not to look at it, unless I need a song name, or some specific quote I need to be exact about. Then, I let the interview flow where it flows, and just double check the notes before the end to make sure I didn't leave out anything I really wanted to ask. When working on the final production, you will be very thankful that you remembered to ask a few specific questions about specific songs. This is radio, and you are going to want to cut to music, and it's much better if the answers set up the tunes now and then! It's great to get the final word on truth and honesty, but the story about being out of coffee and writing the lyrics to "Caffeinational Debt" is better radio. Remember, this is going to be edited. It's good to have too much. Very often, the best answers come at the very end, sometimes the second or third time the same question has been asked (in a slightly different form if you know it's there, but they just didn't say it right.) And don't underestimate the power of the uncomfortable pause, still point the microphone at them as if they had more to add. These are things that improve with experience, as one gets used to interviewing, but it is good to remember that you have the safety-net of not being live on the air, you can always cut out the parts that go badly. ~ Jeff Towne

<< PART 1 The Idea & the Pitch

PART 3 >> Working w/ an editor and piecing it all together.