THE WALLACE BROS. UNSEAT THE WHITE STRIPES AS DETROIT’S REIGNING BROTHER-SISTER ACT AFTER EPIC DECADE-LONG BATTLE

For Immediate Release – Only moments after the early February announcement of the demise of The White Stripes, Wallace Bros. fans flooded the streets of Detroit, scattering home-made confetti made from the pages of forgotten best-sellers found in abandoned skyscrapers, and banging out their favorite Wallace Bros. melodies on toy pianos.  

The spontaneous celebration marked the culmination of a decade long rivalry, sparked by the inevitable comparisons drawn between the two Motor City sibling acts, and stoked by the frenzied and often irresponsible reporting of frightened journalists fighting an ever shrinking-news cycle with sensationalism rather than content.

But in public, both acts were careful to distance themselves from the supposed feud, in part, perhaps, due to rumors of Jack White’s history of violence with other musicians. Jason Stollmeister, the now-forgotten lead singer of the now-forgotten Von Bondies, had a brief brush with fame when he claimed to have been involved in a bar scuffle with White in 2006, claims which White insisted were inflated. Stollmeister followed these allegations with the accusation that White had left a threatening letter, laced with obscenities, fastened to his front door with the tip of a hunting knife, a claim White flatly denied. White may have played the rivalry down in order to avoid further bad press; The Wallace Bros. may have played it down in fear for their lives. 

Whatever the case, both parties have been unflinchingly polite in public statements about each other. In fact, a thorough Lexis-Nexis search reveals no mentions of The Wallace Bros. on White’s part at all. And on their side, both Wallace Bros. agree the feud is a media fabrication. “They weren’t even really brother and sister,” Carey points out. “I mean, in so many ways, there’s just no comparison between us and them.”  

Jack and Meg White were, in fact, a recently-divorced husband and wife, while Carey and Mark are in fact biological siblings, as proved recently when a crack TMZ team visited the Yale-New Haven hospital where both siblings were delivered and Mark, for several years, held the distinction of being the largest baby in the hospital’s records. The White Stripes boasted an international following, fans as diverse as Loretta Lynn and Barack Obama, and several Grammys, while The Wallace Bros. released records into the hands of a select but rabidly loyal group of fans, most of whom had never actually paid for an album.   

But after White’s defection to Nashville, The White Stripes’ continuing reputation as Detroit’s reigning brother-sister act must have seemed even more galling. So the celebration surrounding The Wallace Bros.’ ascension to their now undisputed role as Detroit’s premier brother-sister act has more of the feeling of a favorite character actor finally winning a long deserved Oscar than of a second-rate beauty queen taking her rival’s title after the real winner resigned due to an Internet scandal.

“Look, no one loves Jack White more than I do,” says Mark, the Wallace Bros. guitarist, bassist, drummer, and producer, who shares songwriting credits with his sister. “He could have left this city behind the instant ‘Seven Nation Army’ hit. But he didn’t. He stuck around, making other people’s records, starting up more bands with his friends. If I’d been there, I would have totally helped him beat down that punk from the Blonde Vondies.”

“But let’s be honest,” Carey adds. “Mark brought 2000 jobs downtown this year. Jack White might have brought 2000 people downtown some nights. He might have done it a lot of times, in fact. But he didn’t give them jobs.”

The Wallace Bros.

The American History Magazine Interview

AH: Let’s begin with some, shall we say, recent history.  Quite a lot of ink has been spilled over your putative feud with the White Stripes, and Jack White in particular.

MW: Man, we can’t ever seem to get out from under that.

CW: The comparison was always unfair, but I guess it was inevitable.  I mean, it was always there, from our first review..

MW: Our first review!  That was our only review.

CW: You’re right, it was.

MW: Which made it even worse.

AH:  Well, to be fair, for many young acts at that stage in the game, a comparison with The White Stripes might have been seen as a compliment.

CW:  Of course. That’s exactly how we took it.

AH:  You have a reputation in the press for taking great care concerning your public statements on The White Stripes. Would you say that has anything to do with Jack White’s rumored penchant for violence? There was, as I remember, an incident with a knife… 

CW:  Well, he denied that, you know.

MW:  Yeah, which I never got. I mean, even if that wasn’t true, why would you deny it? That’s awesome. That’s rock and roll legend. That’s only in Detroit. No one’s ever going to deliver a letter by knife in Charlotte. Or Portland.

AH:  And yet, the rhetoric surrounding your ascendancy in the vacuum left by their recent break-up remains just as inflammatory as ever. I saw a headline recently that described you as ‘unseating’ them – after a – oh yes, here it is – “decade long battle”.  

MW:  They wanted to say, ‘defeat.’

CW:  They did.  We asked them to change it to ‘unseat.’  

MW:  That seems more like what really happened. It’s not like we won some game. It’s more like on Friday Night Lights, where the other team’s bus got stuck when the bridge washed out before they could get to Dillon.

AH:  Still, taking on the mantle of Detroit’s leading brother-sister act must be something of a thrill. How have the past weeks been for you?

MW:  I don’t know.  It’s a little lonely.  

AH:  Lonely? Would you care to elaborate?

MW:  I just keep thinking about those two old guys who were both waiting for the other one to die so they’d be the oldest man in their state. And then finally one of them did. And suddenly the other guy realized now he’s the only person in the world who still remembers all that stuff they lived through.

AH: Well, it does seem a little sad to me that all the fracas surrounding the break-up of the White Stripes has overshadowed the release of your 2011 Valentine’s Day single, which in its own way is a very interesting historical document. Now, you’ve released covers on Valentine’s Day before, but they’ve usually been somewhat more, shall I say, classic, or at least obscure, than these recent tracks. Can you talk to me a bit about this new direction?

MW:  It’s all Carey. She totally loves 80’s arena rock. Even back in the day, she used to tell all her boyfriends she listened to The Stone Roses, but at home, she never played anything but Milli Vanilli and Bad English.

CW:  Both of these tracks, I have to say, seemed to me to be solidly in the Wallace Bros. ouvre. They’re literate, melodic, highly sentimental, and with production values that could only be described as ‘unlistenable.’ The rhyme structure in ‘When I See You Smile’ is especially daring: just A, A, A. And then: A, A, A. That’s an artist who’s not afraid to say simple things, simply. He’s got absolutely nothing to prove. And ‘Here I Go Again’ seemed to me to be a timeless standard about the hope and disappointment of love, pleading to be released from the shackles of 1980’s studio recording, which had rendered it little more than a curiosity to modern ears.

AH:  So you feel your version has restored it to a standard that may actually be more classic than the original?

MW:  Listen to it yourself, man. That song has always been begging for a toy piano.

AH:  Talk to me a little bit about the 1980s themselves. How do you think about them as an epoch in history?

MW:  To me, the eighties are all about humility.

AH: Humility?

MW:  Yep. Like: what are we doing, right now, that’s as ridiculous as that? I think about it all the time. Cause every generation, somebody’s doing something that every other generation can tell doesn’t make any sense. Did you know they used to put actual cocaine in Coca-Cola?  

AH: I have heard that, yes.

MW: So what is it? What’s our powdered wigs? What’s our aerosol hairspray?

AH: You’ve struck on one of the great conundrums of historical study.

MW: I think it might be Fox News.

AH: Well, you know, it’s very difficult to tell, in the historical moment, what will be judged—

MW: Or anime. What is all that about, anyway?

CW: Looking back on the history of art always makes me think how hard it is to produce work that lasts, and how difficult it is to guess what will last at the moment it’s produced. I love to buy old bestsellers, especially when they’re by people whose names nobody knows today. 

MW: Or organic food. I mean, no one ever used to pay extra for worms. 

CW: And I’m heartened by what does survive. The self-appointed high culture of the 1980s – does anyone want to remember it? But they’re still playing Whitesnake on the radio.

MW:  That’s because Whitesnake is awesome.

CW:  And it’s not high art that teaches you how to fall in love. It’s a pop song.