Peppermint Twist

The album artwork for De Stijl — as well as for the White Stripes’ first album, in fact the band’s whole visual aesthetic — uses the red-white-black color scheme, which is the strongest color combination in alchemy and most of the West’s magical systems, as well as in voodoo.

“I’ve never heard about that one. I’ve heard of red, white and black being the most powerful combination. That peppermint candy, that’s where we got the band name from. I thought we’d call the album De Stijl because [the early 20th-century Dutch De Stijl art movement] broke the art form down to the simplest parts, and they had to abandon it because they couldn’t get it any simpler than it was. It was a question of how simple should the White Stripes be, what’s out of bounds for us, and what are we supposed to be doing with this band?”

The White Stripes do a lot of covers — Son House, Blind Willie McTell, Robert Johnson, Dylan, Joe Primrose’s “St. James Infirmary Blues” — and the new Sub Pop single is all choogle-n-yelp Captain Beefheart. Beefheart did the theme song (“Hard-Working Man”) for the Schrader brothers’ 1978 film Blue Collar, starring Richard Pryor, Yaphet Kotto and Harvey Keitel as beat-down workers at one of Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” — a Detroit auto plant. It’s a lost classic.

“I’ve heard the song from that movie, yeah. For the single we did ‘China Pig’ from Trout Mask Replica as an acoustic blues song, and on ‘Ashtray Heart’ and ‘Party of Special Things To Do’ we used different recording techniques, going straight into the board, with fuzz guitar and bass. That was the first time we’ve ever done that. When a song feels like it needs something, I just wanna have it there.

“We want to start working on our new album, I think it’s gonna be called White Blood Cells. We’d like it to be a double album, ’cause there’s enough material. I’m thinking about doing one disc at a real studio and one disc here at home. Just a bunch of country songs and a lot of piano songs that I’ve written.”

All of which are helpful answers. But the main question. It’s something like what people asked Robert Johnson when he came back from his trip to Arkansas, or what Pete Townshend wondered after he first saw Hendrix: How didJack White get those sounds onstage?

“There’s a technique I have where I can put my pick in the palm of my hand and pluck with my free fingers. And I can pull it out whenever I want to switch it back to the pick to play loud again. It just came naturally, I dunno . . . ”

And what about those two guitars: the snazzy red-and-white electric one, and that acoustic guitar that looked like it was made out of paper?

“The red one is an Airline, a guitar that Montgomery Ward sold in the ’60s. And the other one is, yeah, it’s . . . um . . . Actually, I don’t want to talk about that. It’s kind of a personal thing.”

God is in the details, said architect Mies van der Rohe. And sometimes something else lurks there too.

THE WHITE STRIPES l De Stijl l(Sympathy for the Record Industry)