By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 29, 2002; Page WE13

EQUALLY inspired by peppermint candy and the Dutch art movement known as De Stijl, the look of Detroit's White Stripes is a splash of functional red and white. The candy motif extends from their basic pants and T-shirt combos to Jack White's guitar (a vintage but cheap Airline, sold through Montgomery Ward in the '60s), sister Meg White's drum kit and even the duo's Leslie speaker cabinet, with a peppermint baffle that revolves at two different speeds.

These days, the duo's stylish look is being reflected by audiences that show up at White Stripes shows wearing a sea of red and white -- not unlike a Maryland Terrapins home game.

"Which is great," says Jack White of this color-coded fashionbonding. "It's a sign of belonging that's a little different than if you were into Goth music or hardcore, where sometimes those teenagers feel like they need to belong to a club because they're being rejected."

"Rejected" is not a word the White Stripes have had to deal with recently, thanks to the rapturous reception attending their third album, "White Blood Cells." A fixture on critics' best-of lists last year, it recently finished No. 4 in the annual Village Voice critics poll.

The most fervent reaction, however, has come from England. The group adorned a New Musical Express cover in August, were dubbed "The Sound of Now" and described as "rock and roll reborn again, nothing short of a punk-rock miracle." The influential Radio One DJ John Peel called them "the most exciting thing to happen since punk or Jimi Hendrix!"

The White Stripes are dirt simple -- Jack thrashing away on his guitar and singing with unbridled passion, pony-tailed Meg bashing away at her drum kit with workmanlike focus. It's a surprisingly full sound, loud and raucous -- like the Carpenters on steroids.

"Now that people are paying attention, it's very interesting to me to show how much you can actually do with just these three elements of vocal, guitar and drums," White says. "When we're writing songs and making records, it's very easy to just rock out or just play two or three chord things over and over again, make every song on the album the same. It feels almost too easy to rock. It's harder to sit down and tell someone a story that they can relate to, that really makes sense to them."

Even as the Whites deconstruct rock with a raw-boned, rootsy garage energy stripped of artifice and excess, Jack White's songwriting is smart, sharp, savvy, whether it's the crunch of "Hello Operator" and "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground" or the McCartney-esque elegance of "Apple Blossom" and "We're Going to Be Friends."

Though some critics tag the White Stripes' stylized minimalism a rejection of corporate rock's bloat, White suggests it's more an embrace of limitations.

"The idea of wearing just these colors, having just the two of us on stage -- these are just boxes that we've cooked up to put ourselves in so that we can create better. If we had five people on the stage, all the opportunity of a 300-track studio, or a brand-new Les Paul, the creativity would be dead. Too much opportunity would make it too easy. We just don't want to be complicated, it seems unnecessary."

The band's germination is a testament to opportunism. According to Jack White, several of his eight older siblings played in local bands, so there were always instruments in the family attic; he started playing drums at age 5. In high school, Jack and a bass-playing schoolmate fooled around with a four-track tape deck. "I taught myself guitar just so we could record something and I started singing so we could have something to play along to."

Eventually, Jack started working at an upholstery shop, apprenticing to a master, Brian Muldoon, who happened to play drums. "After we were done working, we'd set up in the shop and play," says White (as Two Part Resin, they released an album titled "The Upholsterers").

The White Stripes formed in 1997 when Meg stepped into the attic while Jack was playing guitar, sat down at the drum kit and started bashing away, despite never having played before. Something about the spontaneity and innocence of that approach, and the visceral sound it produced, convinced the Whites to make a go of it and they started playing local clubs. Their eponymous debut, released in 1999 on the intractably indie label Sympathy for the Record Industry, was done at low-budget Ghetto Recorders, a studio in a former poultry processing plant.

Attention started being paid a year later upon the release of the "De Stijl" album, which seemed to codify the band's art-school conceptualism. Dutch for "style," the name comes from a post-World War I design movement that advocated a reduction to simple, elemental forms where all surface decoration was eliminated and the emphasis was on primary colors (along with black and white). This certainly seems to align with the White Stripes' simple rock 'n' roll aesthetics, but White insists he and Meg didn't spend a whole lot of time on this issue.

"We walked into a drugstore and saw this bag of peppermint candy and I said 'That should be painted on your bass drum because you've been drumming like a little kid,' " he explains, adding that he became enthralled with the De Stijl movement through his work as an upholsterer. "I was really into furniture design for that and I liked Gerrit Rietveld -- he did a red-blue chair for De Stijl. And it really had meaning to me and to the band and the music and the aesthetic of our live performance."

The White Stripes recently moved from Sympathy for the Record Industry to the larger V2 (and in England, XL Records). Besides reissuing their back catalogue, the deal lets the Whites retain their publishing rights and allows Jack White to sign acts to his boutique label, Third Man Recordings.

White will undoubtedly continue to champion the new wave of bands making Detroit Rock City again. While still at Sympathy for the Record Industry, White recorded (in his living room) "The Sympathetic Sounds of Detroit," featuring upcoming bands like the Dirtbombs, Detroit Cobras and Von Bondies. On tour in Europe, the White Stripes often draped the stage with a huge City of Detroit flag, with its Latin inscriptions "Resurget Cineribus" and "Speramus Meliora," which translate respectively as "It shall rise again from the ashes" and "We hope for better things."

"Which I thought was hilarious," says White, acknowledging a music history that includes Motown and P-Funk, Kid Rock and Eminem, as well as blue-collar rockers like Bob Seger, Mitch Ryder, the MC5 and the Stooges. As for the current garage-rock resurgence: "It's been like this for years, ever since I was old enough to go to shows. When I've gone to other towns, I've never seen rock 'n' roll bands like they have here. It's been amazing and I have no idea why."

"White Blood Cells" features a 50-second track called "Little Room" that seems to anticipate the perils of fame and success that have intruded since the album's release in July. "Well, you're in your little room and you're working on something good/ but if it's really good, you're gonna need a bigger room," sings White, quickly adding "and when you're in the bigger room, you might not know what to do/ you might have to think of how you got started/ sitting in your little room."

"It's very interesting," he muses, noting that when he wrote the song, "none of the other Detroit bands were getting press and we didn't know why [the media] were picking us or why we were this lucky. We were still on the tiniest label in the country, we weren't exactly a huge success story at that point, so it was hilarious how prophetic that was."

THE WHITE STRIPES -- Appearing with Brendan Benson & the Soledad Brothers Monday at the 9:30 club. • To hear a free Sound Bite from the White Stripes, call Post-Haste at 202/334-9000 and press 8101. (Prince William residents, call 703/690-4110.)