"Nobody Does It Better," Carly Simon, from The Spy Who Loved Me

A perfectly saccharine 1970s Marvin Hamlisch that has next to nothing to do with spying, but for a shoehorned-in reference to the movie's title in the first verse. It could have been awful--but why'd it have to be so good?

"Goldfinger," Shirley Bassey, from Goldfinger

The haughty pronounciation of "Gold-fing-ah" and the shrieking of "Gold" at the end make this the most manic, and best, of Ms. Bassey's singles.

"The World is Not Enough," Garbage, from The World is Not Enough

Both operatic and weirdly icy, as fit the high-baroque, technology-obsessed Pierce Brosnan era.

"A View to a Kill," Duran Duran, from A View to a Kill

The very opposite of Shirley Bassey's timeless diva-belting, this is about as 1980s as it gets. It also makes the most gleefully nonsensical use of the movie's title out of any of these songs: "All we see is a view to a kill" is a lyric wallowing in how little it's trying.

"Die Another Day," Madonna, from Die Another Day

Sorry, it's true (or at least arguable): this is the best or at least most crazily committed thing that Madonna has done this century, and it gets special dispensation for that alone (most artists' Bond tunes, Paul McCartney, are tossed-off).

DISHONORABLE MENTION:

"Another Way to Die," Jack White and Alicia Keys, from Quantum of Solace

Speaking of just tossing off a subpar single: you can practically hear Alicia Keys counting her money as she sings.

Jack White playing in Australia earlier this summer. (Photo: Getty)

Jack White is playing a pair of shows at Radio City Music Hall this weekend and last night's sold out concert was short on songs and long on drama. The former White Stripes frontman abruptly left the stage after an hour prompting a crowd of irate fans to take to the streets. 

The Observer was in attendance for pleasure rather than business, but once things got weird, we got to work. But, despite our best efforts, we're still not entirely sure what happened.

Mr. White's show began with a rollicking set featuring songs from his recent solo album, Blunderbuss, and tracks from his bands: The White Stripes, The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather. From our seat in the nosebleeds, it seemed as though Mr. White's music was enthusiastically received by the crowd. However, after about 45 minutes, Mr. White suddenly left the stage.

RELATED:  Elephant in the Room: White Stripes Hit New York

Thinking this was the standard concert tease that often occurs prior to an encore, the vast majority of the audience remained, clapping and cheering in an effort to encourage Mr. White to retake the stage. After more than 20 minutes, all of the house lights were turned on and ushers began to make their way through the crowd informing them the show was finished.

"The show is over. We don't know why. You'll probably find out on a blog, MediaTakeOut or some other source," one said.

This early ending clearly did not sit well with the crowd.

As fans, who paid a minimum of $40 to attend the concert, filed out the venue we heard (and may have even participated in) chants of "Fuck Jack White!" and "This is Bullshit!" In the lobby, we witnessed multiple attendees angrily returning merchandise they had purchased at the show.

Outside Radio City, a group of more than 100 people began to gather outside the main backstage exit booing and demanding answers as to why the show concluded so abruptly. Security quickly erected barricades and began pushing the crowd back. In addition to banging on parked cars and the repeated shouts of "Fuck Jack White," we overheard a few more inventive bits of invective.

"Jack White kills puppies," one man yelled.

"I'm going to fuck Meg White," another person said, referring to Mr. White's former White Stripes bandmate.

"Bababooey!" someone else yelled, perhaps inevitably.

The mini-mob became more enraged when deliverymen showed up to bring multiple pizza pies back stage. As Radio City staffers and others left the exit they were barraged with questions from the crowd. Most remained silent, but one man in a Radio City t-shirt was slightly more forthcoming.

"Y'all do me a favor, when he gets out, boo his ass," he said.

In addition to the boos and shouts, rumors flew through the crowd. We spoke to multiple people who claimed Mr. White had several angry exchanges with a shirtless man in the front row. They said the man who provoked Mr. White's ire was subsequently removed by security. Others claimed Mr. White shouted something before leaving the stage. From our seats in the second to last row of the theater, we hadn't seen anything amiss. A post from BuzzFeed Music, seemingly without basis, blamed the situation on Mr. White's rage at scalpers also circulated throughout the crowd.

After about an hour, the group outside Radio City thinned to about 50 angry diehards. Along with the rumors, the situation provoked a flurry of frenzied tweets. One hashtag, #JackWhiteDebacle, which was coined by the inimitable @Blabbeando, quickly generated more than 50 postings.

Many in the crowd speculated Mr. White was displeased with the response he got from the audience.

"Jesus Christ, is this an NPR convention?" Mr. White asked at one point during the show.

However, having seen Mr. White twice before, mocking the crowd to get louder seems to be part of his regular repertoire.

Eventually, a member of the Radio City security team provided us with an answer.

"He wasn't happy with the sound," the man said when we asked if he knew why the show seemingly ended so early. "I don't know why he pulled that."

He added that Radio City staffers expected the evening to last much longer.

Since we had a seemingly credible answer and our companion was very eager to get home, we decided to head to the subway rather than remain at the venue attempting to continue deciphering the reasons for Mr. White's diva-like departure. We sent an email to his publicist asking for an explanation, but, as of this writing, we have yet to receive a response.

'Lawrence Of Arabia'

The Observer Media Group’s Yue magazine has its eyes fixed firmly on the stars! Tonight it will hold a moon-gazing party on the terrace of the David H. Koch Theater. Co-hosted by Chiu-Ti Jansen and the New York City Ballet, the bash celebrates the “Golden Week” following October 1’s Chinese National Day ... Meanwhile, Jack White is to perform at Radio City Music Hall, sans erstwhile bandmate, pretend sister, real ex-wife and iffy drummer Meg White, and Lawrence of Arabia and Jack Nicholson’s Jersey drama The King of Marvin Gardens screen in repertory at the New York Film Festival.

Yue party, Lincoln Center, invitation only; Jack White, Radio City Music Hall, 1260 Avenue of the Americas, 8pm, tickets and information can be found at radiocity.com; New York Film Festival, Lincoln Center, screening schedule and tickets can be found at filmlinc.com/nyff2012.

Mr. Guggenheim, whose last film was the Academy Award–winning eco-doc An Inconvenient Truth, said his new effort reveals how each guitarist developed his unique sound and style. “I spent a lot of time wiping the drool off my chin watching these guys play,” he said. Also there was X-Men Origins star Lynn Collins, who singled out Mr. White as her favorite of the trio. “But I love all three,” she said. “I want to know all about their artistic process.”

Other fans in the audience included actress Kiera Chaplin, New York Housewife Kelly Bensimon, singer-songwriter Peter Cincotti, America’s Most Smartest Model co-host Mary Alice Stephenson, guitarist Petter Ericson Stakee, fashion designers Anna Sui and Rachel Roy, and Courtney Love—who, in true rock-star style, paused only briefly for photographers before dashing into the theater.

Their collaboration on this 22^nd of Bond movies will mark the first time the cinematic franchise uses multiple artists for its theme song. And if the seemingly random team lacks in chemistry, the title of its brainchild – “Another Way to Die” – gives promise that it won’t lack in morbidity. Mr. White, half of the celebrated alt-rock band The White Stripes, provided lyrics, production, and drumming to the song. Soulful piano player and crooner Ms. Keys, creator of songs such as “Rock wit U”, “Butterflyz”, and “My Boo”,provided the beautiful voice.

"It's super dreamy, we're totally going as gypsies, tramps and thieves tonight," said Ms. Flicker—sounding like she was having a bit of a hangover from the famous recent Night of a Thousand Stevies—of the jeweled headdresses she and Ms. Elson were wearing. "It certainly fits into my aesthetic. I collect showgirl headdresses, and when Karen and I perform, we wear stuff like this, except I have a problem and let it filter into my normal life."

"She just has great taste," said Ms. Elson. "It's not just random vintage jewelry, she goes out and finds things that were actually worn by like the ballerinas in Ballet Russe."

"It's for a woman who doesn't want to look like everybody else, that possesses an individuality, which New York girls definitely possess. It's not about fitting in," she added.

Speaking of not fitting in, Ms. Elson told the Daily Transom that she and hubby Jack White are living in Nashville these days.

"We actually got married there, well, legally, I should say. We first got married in the Amazon," said Ms. Elson. "Being nonconformist, we were just like, 'Let's go to Nashville!'"

The couple live there with their two children, daughter Scarlett who's just turned 2, and son Henry Lee, born in August of 2007. "It's beautiful there; we have a gorgeous home and weeping willows!"

"I have a bunch of friends in Nashville. I've lived in New York for 10 years and my heart will always be here, but the problem is that New Yorkers think that there is no world outside New York City, but you can find like-minded people anywhere you go," she said. "Sure, I stand out, my husband stands out, we all stand out."

Ms. Elson told us that she will be opening a vintage store in Nashville soon.

"I’m trying to juggle that, being a mom, working, and fashion," she said. "I’m opening it with a friend in Nashville who used to have her own store and has the most amazing pieces from all these old grand dames of Nashville."

"And those country stars, what are they going to do with all their stuff, get rid of it? Give it to us!"

The Raconteurs are Jack White and three other dudes (but does anyone really care about them?) Their first album, Broken Boy Soldiers, was released to a chorus of meh back in 2006. This time they wised up. Consolers of the Lonely is being released with no campaign, and producers would only even confirm the album was in the works a week ago. Could Jack White be trying to let the music speak for itself? And how do his rather anonymous bandmates feel about that?

Speaking of no one knowing your name, Canadian indie-rock artists—more of those? Oui!—Plants and Animals release their first full length album today, Parc Avenue. They're distributed by Secretly Canadian, the arty label that in the past has made such impeccable picks as Jens Lekman and Antony and the Johnsons. Prepare yourself for the Next Big (Canadian) Thing.

It's been 16 years since the last B-52's album. It's been six since the last one for the Counting Crows. As with many old acts that continue to make music long after the din of their initial fame has faded, their "comebacks" are more striking for the visuals than the music. Those dreds on Adam Duritz don't look so cute anymore (O.K., when did they ever?). Same goes for the dreadful things on every member of the B-52's. Without further ado, the B-52's (first) and the Counting Crows (second) in 2008. Enjoy!

Security guards demanded invitations or credentials at the entrance, despite the fact that the Daily Transom had breezed through all week with neither. “There are a few shows that are huge, and everyone tries to sneak in,” said one sentry apologetically. “And everyone tries to sneak in.”)

Inside, the leisurely pace of the daytime shows—posing for photos, grabbing an energy drink—had been replaced by a desperate urgency more befitting the food-rationed Soviet Union. The crowd descended hungrily upon a helpless table of young KCD publicists, and those who made it past were herded in a large mob into the so-called Tent, the largest of the Park’s three venues. At least waiting out the cold in front of the Lexington Avenue Armory for Mr. Jacobs’s show is an expected indignity.

There was a pronounced absence of flashbulbs, and serious, older-looking editors and industry types, rather than young television starlets. Those bearing microphones had only rapper and clothing designer P. Diddy (who will show his Sean John line today), omnipresent stylist Rachel Zoe and actress Joy Bryant, who was seated between Vogue’s Sally Singer and Shelby Bryan, Anna Wintour’s beau, to choose from. (Oh! And beleaguered socialite Olivia Palermo, who, relegated to the third row, sat unmolested by photographers.)

Mr. Posen’s collection, set against a background tableau of falling chairs, had an Alice-In-Wonderland vibe, beginning with costumey black and white tuxedo concoctions in sparkly fabrics and ending with long evening dresses. Each model wore two black pom-poms in her hair. Two tripped mid-walk, and a third, Karen Elson, wife of rocker Jack White, wiped out entirely as she stepped out to close the show in a diaphanous white gown. Diddy and another model came to her rescue, she laughed her way down the runway, and received an extra round of cheers.

Mr. Posen clutched both Ms. Elson and his sister, Alexandra, the brand’s creative director, as he took his turn on the runway—in a tuxedo, of course—at the end.

Afterwards, a stampede for the exists. “This show was a great way to end Fashion Week,” Ms. Bryant said. Still: “It’s a bit madness.”

A certain actress Mr. Benioff has been linked to was noticeably absent. Wondering if he was single, we asked whether there's anyone for whose face he'd launch 1,000 ships.

"My girlfriend, yeah-Amanda Peet," he said. Turns out she's off shooting a film with Ashton Kutcher-no danger there, if recent reports of his marriage to Demi Moore are not greatly exaggerated.

Another cerulean-eyed beauty was very much present. Despite (or perhaps because of) rumors that her marriage is on the fritz, Jennifer Aniston held court in a floor-length black gown with an open back that extended to the tailbone. She couldn't remember who designed it.

"I'm so embarrassed!" she cried, much as the designer may when he or she reads this.

Orlando Bloom disappointed the droves of fans across the street holding homemade "Orlando" posters (which, surprisingly, outnumbered the "Brad" posters) when he failed to turn up. He's currently on location in Morocco shooting Kingdom of Heaven with Ridley Scott. He was there a year ago, when production started on Troy, although hurricanes and the war in Iraq moved the operation to Mexico. Although conditions were hardly favorable (the cast reportedly suffered bouts of food poisoning), director Wolfgang Petersen has fond memories of the secondary set and even brought back a souvenir in the form of a cat.

"She was dying," he explained. "A dog was biting off her little leg. Not leg, tail. And we brought her to Los Angeles and brought her back to life, and now she is a wonderful, wonderful, very lively being called Lola."

Just then Diane Kruger, who plays Helen of Troy, swooped in and kissed the director on the side of the cheek. Swathed in Oscar de la Renta, the comely actress admitted it doesn't take an invasion to win her over.

"Before I met my husband, he tried to date me for quite a few months, and I refused him," she said. "I finally agreed to go on a date with him, and I expected him to, you know, bring out the expensive dinner table and woo me. He actually took me to a movie and to McDonald's-so that was romantic, I thought. It was The Matrix!"

She and the rest of the cast soon settled in for the epic-although, at two hours and 46 minutes, few could stay put for its entirety. Actor Sean Bean-who plays Odysseus here and Boromir in The Lord of the Rings-took a smoke break and watched the remainder of the film standing in the back of the theater. While he watched his onscreen counterpart laying gold coins over the eyes of the fallen Achilles, the woman who launched a thousand haircuts flounced by, her no-name dress and her husband trailing behind.

Making an early exit for the after-party, Mr. Pitt and company accidentally brushed against The Transom.

"Excuse me," he said graciously without breaking stride.

At Cipriani, the couple was joined by various screen gods and goddesses (Will Smith, Chris Noth, Eva Mendes, Snoop Dogg, Anne Heche), the music demigod (U2's Bono), the demagogue (Spike Lee) and the mere mortal (that guy from The King of Queens). Famed twin Ashley Olsen (the blond one who isn't being accused of anorexia) looked nervous, standing with her publicist in a white lacy number by Magda Berliner.

Nearby, actress Gina Gershon was chatting about the movie with a group of male friends. There's more than a little similarity, to The Transom, between Troy and The Lord of the Rings, as Ms. Gershon's conversation proved.

"Let's talk about which of the characters was gay!" she said, sporting a glamorous updo. "That one guy was a little bit more than a cousin, don't you think?"

The cousin in question was Garrett Hedlund, who played Mr. Pitt's protégé onscreen and off. The two trained together to prep for filming. "I was a twig when I started. I was, like, 155, and I jumped way up!"

So did Mr. Pitt, whose signature bonsai leap popped up in almost every battle scene.

"It was a lot of hard work, this one, it really was," he said. "And it shows on the screen, I think. But those are the ones that are worth it, ya know?"

One of the biggest challenges was stunt performance; no doubles were harmed in the filming of Troy, apparently.

"It's all us," confirmed Eric Bana, a.k.a. Prince Hector. "I've gotta say, I was rehearsing in a track suit there, but it was a lot easier in the skirt. There was a little bit more movement, things flow a little easier-you know, nothing gets caught."

Mr. Pitt, on the other hand, got caught with his smarty-pants down. When questioned on his knowledge of Greek mythology prior to filming, he admitted: "Um, I would say iffy at best. No, we didn't cover it in high school, really." Three cheers for the public-school system!

We asked whether he has an Achilles' heel. "I'm passing on that one!" he laughed, and swore it wasn't his well-publicized battle with cigarettes. "War? I have no war! I believe in seasons. I'm on, I'm off, I'm on, I'm off. I'm on right now! There's nothing good about it, but I'm on."

Later, the actor snatched a fedora from co-star Peter O'Toole and perched it on his newly shorn head. Mr. O'Toole paused to reminisce, "When Brad and I had finished doing this very long and difficult scene, we were both absolutely exhausted. Then, in one voice-not rehearsed, nothing-we both said, 'We've done the fucker!'"

-Noelle Hancock

Mean Girls

On Friday, May 7, former Felicity star Scott Speedman was leaning back on a plush couch in the Church Lounge at the Tribeca Grand, recovering from a party the night before for The 24th Day, a film that premiered at the Tribeca film festival in which he played an H.I.V.-positive man who confronts and kidnaps the man who infected him.

"It shows more what I can do on some level," he said of his against-type role in the film. "A lot of times I would play nice, passive boyfriend types of characters, like in Felicity, but here I'm pushing the action, in a sense, and kind of running the show."

The handsome 28-year-old actor, wearing a faded green polo shirt and baggy jeans, stretched his arms out and slowly leaned forward to take a sip of water. He looked like he had just woken up on a California beach and spoke with a laid-back surfer's nonchalance. "I don't know what the façade is, but I'm not really that laid-back," he said. "I think it's kind of a protective thing that I do, or a character thing that I can keep in control, but when I'm around my friends I'm anything but laid-back. I'm more neurotic." It was still hard to picture him in the aggressive role he plays in the movie. "Anger's never been something that's been hard for me to tap into."

He said he still kept in touch with Ms. Russell and the rest of the Felicity cast, but was "not good at calling people back. It's more than nice when I see the people. Those people all were good people. Nobody was an asshole."

He now wants to move on from TV shows, but said "if the right thing came along, I would totally do it." Mr. Speedman hasn't worked in a year and a half because he said the right movie role has yet to come his way.

"There's a lot of good writing on TV that I don't see in movies right now," he said. "If I wanted to work, I could find work," he added, "but I want to work at a high level.

"I'm kind of ambitious," he said with a laugh. "I don't really see my way in now, though I don't really see movies that I'm like, 'I can see myself in that.'"

Mr. Speedman found a lot of reasons that there were few options out there for guys like him. He summed them up with: "Preteen girls are kind of dominating."

-Alexandra Wolfe

What The World Needs Now

On May 9, the Tribeca Film Festival officially closed for the year 2004, with a red-carpet-worthy awards ceremony.

And although the little neighborhood that gives the festival its name returned to a state of normalcy after being traipsed through by over 400,000 people in its nine-day run (that's up 50,000 from last year) and accommodating some 80,000 ticket-holders who ventured downtown (up almost 17,000 from last year), the memory lingered on for festival co-founder Jane Rosenthal, along with a raspy throat.

"I've been sick the whole festival," said Ms. Rosenthal on her way to another doctor's appointment. "I'm still sick. I think I'm sick and exhausted. But that said, I feel really good."

The festival was an ordeal to put on. And not without its hitches: A concert with Van Morrison, Steve Winwood, Macy Gray and the Black Eyed Peas only drew half the crowd of last year's free concert with Norah Jones. Some store owners grumbled that the festival wasn't enhancing their bottom line as much as they'd been promised. People waited over half an hour in lines to see films, sometimes not getting in at all. Liz Smith even complained about the chaos at the screening of Dennie Gordon's film New York Minute, starring the Olsen twins.

If this year proved that the Tribeca Film Festival has yet to hit critical mass, it also offered some satisfactions: During the festival, Lions Gate picked up the distribution for House of D, the film written, directed and starring David Duchovny, validating claims that the fest could indeed be a marketplace for independent films. Who still remembers Rocky & Bullwinkle?

"I think that slowly but surely, the film community is embracing the festival," Ms. Rosenthal said optimistically. "I mean, there's still work to be done. It will prove eventually to be a platform to launch pictures."

Like Toronto? Or Sundance? The Transom offered.

"When anyone mentions us in the same breath, I'm flabbergasted," Ms. Rosenthal said. "All I know is that we do what we do." Quod facit, facit?

Well, maybe. But during one of Ms. Rosenthal's many trips to the doctor during the festival, what they do seemed good enough to at least one Tribecan: the doctor's office manager, who had recently gone to the festival to see a documentary.

"She said to me, 'You don't understand. This is like your team being in the World Series,'" Ms. Rosenthal recalled. "And I looked at her. The office manager? Those kind of moments … you just go, 'Wow!'"

These, she said, are the parameters in which to judge the festival's success.

"The world didn't need another film festival," Ms. Rosenthal concluded. "But Tribeca did."

-Jake Brooks

Elephant Men

Indie-film director Jim Jarmusch and White Stripes lead singer Jack White share a fascination with Nikola Tesla. Who? You know-the 19th-century Serbian-American inventor, that contemporary and rival of Thomas Edison apparently inadequately immortalized by the aging hard-rock band Tesla.

At one point, in fact, Messrs. Jarmusch and White excitedly hatched a plan for the former to direct a music video for "There's No Home for You Here," at the time the first single off the Stripes' second album, Elephant. It would've starred Mr. White as Tesla, against Philip Seymour Hoffman's sinister Edison, "battling to the death" with their inventions. One scene would have re-created the infamous turn-of-the-century electrocution of Topsy the elephant, a Coney Island mainstay. And you thought Britney Spears was bad!

But the idea was scotched due to budget concerns. "It became a half-million-dollar video that was just insane," Mr. White told The Transom during a press junket for Mr. Jarmusch's new movie, Coffee and Cigarettes (in the movie, he wheels a homemade Tesla coil into a coffee shop and discusses the troubled life of the inventor over some C&C). "Just the idea of renting an elephant, electrocuting an elephant …. "

"Not really electrocuting an elephant," put in drummer Meg White, giggling.

"We couldn't figure out how to do it cheaply," Mr. White said.

Coffee and Cigarettes is a series of fictional short subjects about the two titular addictions featuring assorted "cool" people: Bill Murray, Tom Waits, Iggy Pop, members of the Wu-Tang Clan and Life Is Beautiful's Roberto Benigni. The two Stripes were showing their support for the flick in different ways: Mr. White was chain-smoking as if afraid to break with the movie's protocol, while the voluptuous Ms. White sported a black T-shirt that read "squrl," a fictitious band from the film.

"I was going to be Tesla's wife, right?" she said, beaming. The two were married, but have since divorced, even though Mr. White likes to assert that Ms. White is his "Big Sis."

"Tesla's friend," Mr. White said gravely. "Sort of his girlfriend. And she was going to be crying and being pulled away from the dead elephant. The whole thing was set up. But it didn't happen. It would have been great."

-J.B.

Jack White, 27, resembled a punk Lord Byron: ghostly pallor, consumptive eyes, black newsboy cap pulled down over inky locks. Mute, chain-smoking Meg White, 28, looked like an Edward Gorey character with porcelain skin and raven hair. Both wore skin-tight red pants.

Mr. White was explaining why he had dedicated the Stripes' much anticipated fourth album, Elephant , "to the death of the sweetheart," as he put it.

"It seemed to keep coming up lyrically when I was writing the songs for this record. They revolve around this sweetheart or gentleman notion. I was coming to terms with a lot of it being very uncool nowadays, or very dead."

As Ms. White stared silently at her partner, Mr. White complained about 14-year-old girls who are tattooed and pierced, who look like "sailors" and talk the "ghetto" jive of hip hop. "People in other countries make fun of America for that Jerry Springer kind of attitude," he said. He recalled, with similar indignation, a reality TV show he saw on ABC recently- Are You Hot .

"People come on stage to be judged for 10 seconds and get off-'Yeah, I give your face a nine, I give your body a six. Goodbye,'" Mr. White said, a look of disbelief flashing across his pale face. "This whole judgment thing is coming down heavy," he said. There was a little Elvis cornpone creeping into his voice. "I mean, people are really into sitting in their living rooms and just saying, 'Oh, she's terrible, she shouldn't go out with that guy.' It's really getting pathetic. Where is that heading?"

It might seem odd for a band that's been credited with saving rock 'n' roll to be obsessing about the end of courtship in America, but it's not really. For all of their modernity, the White Stripes have always been a little bit old-fashioned, both with their art and their hype. Their music is an utterly convincing aw-shucks-look-what-we-just made-up-style rock, blues and folk that can clang with punk bravado or resonate like a gospel field recording.

Meanwhile, they have maintained an air of mystery and coquettishness that's part Victorian, part Warholian. The media is still not sure whether they're brother and sister, as they claim, or ex-husband and wife, as Time magazine reported as early as June 2001. When The Observer asked the duo if they are related, they both laughed knowingly and said in unison: "Of course!"

It's a pretty smart tack to take when you're dealing with a puritanical media that will judge you a nine one day, a three the next-spin 'em like a pinwheel.

Who's Dave Eggers?

Clearly, Mr. White has a Dave Eggers flair for grass-roots integrity and P.T. Barnum showmanship. The whole concept of a brother and sister who make classic rock with only guitar and drums and who wear only red-and-white uniforms might have seemed hokey, but instead they appear to have split the rock 'n' roll atom: their breakout album, 2001's White Blood Cells , sold 600,000 copies-not too shabby for a former furniture upholsterer and his "sister" from hard-scrabble Detroit.

His latest down-home concept was to release 500 advanced copies of Elephant -which will be officially released on April 15- to critics on vinyl only. "Any journalist who didn't own a record player, we didn't want them writing about us," he said. "The first time you listen to it, you couldn't just walk around and do laundry or whatever. Every few minutes you had to flip the side.

"It became an event ," Mr. White said.

At one point, the album was selling on eBay for $399, which generated stories in publications that might not have paid a lot of attention to the White Stripes.

Even Mr. Eggers is interested. Mr. White was also scheduled to be interviewed by the McSweeney's founder for a magazine that Mr. Eggers is launching called The Balloonist -a sort of younger, hipper Harper 's for the winsome set.

Mr. White, however, didn't seem to know who Mr. Eggers was.

"Dave Eggers … ?"

"The guy who wrote A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius ," his publicist told him.

"Oh, O.K.," he said. He still didn't know.

There are some who might say that Mr. White shares something with Mr. Eggers: The desire to be an antidote to the big, greedy, sin-filled world-Jack White is pure of heart! "Storytelling-wise, it's just getting honest about things," he said. "Maybe a lot of artists or writers or poets or whatever, maybe they find humor in the relaxation of rules and ethics. They find some humor in it. I just don't think it's funny. I don't think it's cool to not have morals. I don't think it's cool to just forget everything."

When Mr. White spoke about old-fashioned stuff like morals, he seemed to be going into character, as if he were a preacher or an old blues man-or "Jack White," the self-styled persona he adopts in blues numbers. "People think of how a family was in the 1940's," he said at one point during the interview. "'Oh, it was terrible because of religion and there was an ogre for a father yelling at everybody' or whatever. They're picking out all the bad qualities and saying, 'We've improved, we've advanced.' But perhaps those ways were closer to natural instincts about what it means to be male, what it means to be female, what it means to be a father or a mother.

"When these natural instincts start to get denied too much," he said, "you start saying, 'That's not truth any more. It's just not honest.' What are those things? What is male? What is female? What is natural? Those kind of questions are important."

Blood of the Lamb

On the upcoming record, Mr. White is full of this kind of fire-and-brimstone. The 14 songs on Elephant dig deeper into the epic language of the crossroads-old-school blood-of-the-lamb stuff-to cast out devils, curse enemies, defy gossips and cope with love and women. "It's quite possible that I'm your third man, girl," Mr. White sings on the track "Ball and Biscuit," "but it's a fact that I'm the seventh son."

This might seem like some bad white-boy aping if Mr. White didn't win you over by immediately dropping the heaviest fuzz-rock riff this side of Hendrix while yelling, "Now, lookout!"

The songs on Elephant -recorded in April of 2002 in London, held until now because White Blood Cells was still burning off the shelves-are more sophisticated than Mr. White's past efforts. There are more chords, more guitar solos, more notes , and the results are not as obviously radio-friendly as, say, " Fell in Love with a Girl," the group's punk-pop hit of 2001.

With fewer straight-ahead hooks, Mr. White takes bigger risks with the simple combo. "There's No Home for You Here," the third song, has a multitracked chorus right out of a Queen song, and "I Want to Be with the Boy … " is a white-soul piano ballad that sounds like Small Faces –era Rod Stewart. There's a Johnny-and-June-type song with British folk-popster Holly Golightly and Ms. White that play up the brother/sister/ex-wife conundrum. "Well it's true that we love one another," the Whites sing in unison, to an acoustic guitar and tambourine. Then Ms. Golightly chimes in: "I love Jack White like a little brother."

Ms. White even sings a song, a winsome flower of a song called "In the Cold, Cold Night."

The band's last album adhered to a kind of self-imposed Sharia Law of rock: no bass guitar, no guitar solos, no cover songs. The result was rock 'n' roll with a kind of righteous purity, one in which Mr. White sang of the "Holy Ghost," of wanting to get married "in a big Cathedral by a priest." (Before that, their second album was called De Stijl , after the Dutch art movement that adhered to principles of simplicity.)

On Elephant, however, the first thing you hear on the record is the thudding of a bass guitar and a drum beating out a sort of dance rhythm. What gives? Mr. White said the self-imposed rules came and went from album to album-he's not married to them. "I finally relaxed those rules," he said. "I don't know why."

But with Mr. White, nothing is as it appears. The bass note heard on the song-"Seven Nation Army," the first single-is actually something called an octave guitar, a plain old six-string with a bass string on it. It eventually unfolds into a heavy slide blues-rock thing, in which Mr. White promises to ditch the scene for "Wichita, far from this opera forever more."

K-Rock Culture

Mr. White said the band's recent fame has brought him in closer contact with the detested Are You Hot minions than he'd ever expected. He said it took some time, for example, to navigate the MTV and K-Rock culture, what with glossy hucksters clawing for a piece of him. "It was a lot of learning," said Mr. White. "It was us jumping into a world that, No. 1, we never thought we'd be in, and No. 2, never wanted to be in, really. So it was a point where we were forced to like, 'O.K., here's all this opportunity and chance and money right here for you, do you want it?'"

As it happens, the answer was yes. White Blood Cells broke first in the U.K., where the music press makes an incredible din. "After our initial anger for having all this press attention in England that we thought was going to destroy us, we said to ourselves, 'Well, we have to embrace it and make it work for us, and manipulate it to our advantage to make it work, because if not it's just going to just ruin the band and we're going to break up in two months.'"

That meant resisting a lot of temptation-including a reported $1 million offer from the Gap to shill blue jeans. "There's been tons of things: beer commercials, video-game scores and movie soundtracks-it just never stopped," Mr. White said. "It starts to get really weird when these money amounts, they start adding up in your brain, you're like, 'This is disgusting.' I mean, I can't believe these corporations are like, 'O.K., what's the hip new band? Yeah, White Stripes, let's get them on the commercial. Give 'em a million dollars.'"

But Mr. White said that he didn't exactly enjoy playing integrity cop either. "I started to feel like a real jerk about it," he said, "because I start thinking, 'Who do you think you are to turn down that kind of money?' or, 'Who do you think you are that you're better than that or you're too good to do this?'"

Ms. White, who'd sat silently smoking-and coughing-for most of the interview, suddenly spoke up. "It just takes constant vigilance to know what you should do and what you shouldn't," she said. "Some things are really obvious. It takes a lot of thought to decide what you should do and what you shouldn't do and still maintain some kind of respect for yourself."

'Garage Rock' Jeans

One thing Mr. White did seem to enjoy about his newfound fame was the power to manipulate the media-or at least watch his influence grow with simple gestures. He recalled seeing some "garage-rock-cut jeans" at a local mall that he said were directly inspired by an interview he gave in England. "That's why it's on there right now," he said. "We were laughing but we also thought it was pathetic. But what are you going to do? Andy Warhol would have thought that was funny."

Mr. White also claimed to have christened the new "garage rock" revival. He said he dubbed it so in an interview in London in the fall of 2001. "All of a sudden, after I said that, everybody was 'garage rock'-the Vines, the Strokes-that was all 'garage rock.' When we came home, us and our friends were laughing because we always thought of garage rock as the Sonics and the Gories. Now it's this global term for anything that's happening in rock 'n' roll now."

If there's one thing that might preserve the White Stripes when the garage-rock revival goes the way of bubble-gum pop-and really, can it be long now?-it's their distinction as genuinely great practitioners of a broader sort of Americana-Mr. White's blues and country and folk and punk and rock are all meshed together by his cheap, fuzzed-out guitar. It's in their simple guitar-drum setup that they keep finding the common DNA that connects styles and sets them into a sort of monochromatic stone. It also helps that Mr. White has a soulful yelp and can tear up on the guitar.

On Elephant, Mr. White said he'd been digging deeper into the same few influences he's always looked to, from early blues to Cole Porter, plumbing them for their traditional "notions." "I always feel like I don't know enough about the songs from the 20's," he said. "I don't know enough about Cole Porter, I don't know enough about Irving Berlin. I always feel that way. Or how much I love Johnny Cash and someone brings up some song that I don't know and I feel like, 'Why don't I know everything by Johnny Cash by heart?'

"But that's good, it keeps me alive," Mr. White said as Ms. White sucked on her umpteenth Camel. "A lot of musicians would just ignore that fact and not care about the past or the tradition they're joining. I like joining this tradition and I like paying my respects and my dues to the people who did it better and not pretend that we exist in a vacuum or that we're completely original-I think it's ignorant."

Then he added: "It's like not thanking God for things that happen."