You had your black bands, and you had your white bands, and if you mixed the two, you found less places to play.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The problem is the following, black music is increasing encumbered by white elements, often pleasant but always superfluous, easily and advantageously replaced with black elements.
But between sets I'd sneak over to the black places to hear blues musicians. It got to the point where I was making my living at white clubs and having my fun at the other places.
If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.
Rock and roll and swing never quite mixed. Rock and roll came in and just blew everything out of the water. Big bands were dead.
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.
I don't know if they were all functioning, but I did play in a bunch of bands.
The music field was the first to break down racial barriers, because in order to play together, you have to love the people you are playing with, and if you have any racial inhibitions, you wouldn't be able to do that.
When we started, a lot of bands sounded really different from one another.
That's because we did not set out to make black music. We set out to make quality music that everyone could enjoy and listen to.
I was trying to establish an identity in music, and black and white had nothing to do with it.