Meg White Didn’t Attend the White Stripes’ Hall of Fame Induction, But She Edited Jack’s Speech

Meg White missed the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony, which honored the the White Stripes — her iconic duo with Jack White — at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles Saturday night (Nov. 8). But the bookends of Jack’s speech were all about Meg, who’d edited most of it.

“I spoke with Meg the other day,” he said at the podium, sharing, “She wanted me to tell you she’s very grateful to all the folks who supported her through all the years. It really means a lot to her tonight.”

“She checked it for me,” he added of the speech he was about to give on behalf of the pair. “A lot of punctuation corrections, too.”

Though White’s emotion was palpable throughout the speech, it was most felt in the poem he brought to the room, one that he said he was going to send to Meg ahead of time but hadn’t.

Instead, he noted, “I thought I’d read it to you all tonight.”

“One time, a girl climbed a tree, and in that tree was a boy — her brother, she thought. And the tree looked so glorious and beautiful, but it was just an oak tree. And these two so loved the world that they brought forth a parade float, one they built in their garage behind the oak tree with their own bare hands. And the boy looked at this giant peppermint on wheels and felt pride. Pride that it was produced in the Motor City just like in the big factories, but it was just in their garage.

He looked at the girl, his sister, he thought, and like the Little Rascals, they said, ‘Let’s put on a show.’ And they paraded this float through the Cass Corridor, standing atop the Peppermint, pulled by white horses or maybe it was a red Econoline van. And many of the blocks they traveled were empty, but some had people.

And some of those people cheered and some laughed and some even threw stones. And with their bare hands, the two started to clap and sing and make up songs. And some people kept watching and swaying and moving, and then one person even smiled. And the boy and the girl looked at each other, and they also smiled.

And they felt, they both felt the sin of pride, but they kept on smiling, smiling from a new freedom, knowing that they had shared and made another person feel something. And they thought the person smiling at them was a stranger, someone they didn’t even know. But it wasn’t just a stranger, it was God.”

Following White’s speech, Olivia Rodrigo and Feist performed a sweet duet of the band’s “We’re Going to Be Friends” (2002) and 21 Pilots took on “Seven Nation Army” (2003), in tribute to the honourees.

Rodrigo’s been vocal about the White Stripes being her favourite band: “I was so obsessed with Jack White’s guitar, and I made my mom take me to guitar lessons so I could learn how to play all of his songs,” she said in a 2021 interview. “Fell in Love With a Girl” was one of the first songs she learned to play. Rodrigo first met her hero in 2022.

This article was first published by Billboard U.S.