John Anthony Gillis Quotes

With the White Stripes we were trying to trick people into not realising we were playing the blues. We did not want to come off like white kids trying to play black music from 100 years ago so a great way to distract them was by dressing in red, white and black.

When you put something out there into the world, there’s all these words you don’t want to hear, that you hope people don’t say. I don’t like anything that starts with ‘re’ – like retro, reinvent, recreate – I hate that. It’s always like living in the past – copying, emulating.

We were like a white family from the 1920s or something. My parents had this bizarre, different way of looking at things from the people that surrounded us. I went to an all-Mexican grade school and an all-black high school, and not many people in those places liked the same stuff as me.

We have a secret project at Third Man where we want to have the first vinyl record played in outer space. We want to launch a balloon that carries a vinyl record player.

Vinyl is the real deal. I’ve always felt like, until you buy the vinyl record, you don’t really own the album. And it’s not just me or a little pet thing or some kind of retro romantic thing from the past. It is still alive.