True stripes
WHEN JACK WHITE WAS 14, HE WAS ALL set to become a priest. “I’d been accepted at the seminary and everything,” he grins, and it’s not too hard to imagine Father Jack White preaching with missionary zeal, even with his hair dyed blue, as it is today. “But something happened to me in that summer. The priests seemed really old and I thought, ‘Who’s gonna speak for my generation?’”
White was raised a Catholic, and his conversation is still peppered with words such as “sinner” and “judgment” – but that didn’t stop him changing his mind about holy orders. “To be fair, they don’t turn anyone into a priest unless they really want to be one,” he says. “I never got the calling.” Instead, of course, he found music.
Born Jack Gillis in downtown Detroit, to a Polish mother and Scottish Canadian father who both worked for the church, he was the youngest of 10 siblings. They would subject him to the usual indignities, such as knocking down
