These guys kick ass for us. You guys look great because you brought him out.

When a band releases an album, the easiest and most common way to measure success is number of records sold.

However, sometimes an album is successful because it accomplishes something behind the scenes.

It makes some sort of connection for an artist or, you know, puts their music in the right place at the right time.

And that's exactly how you could describe the White Stripe's self-titled debut on Sympathy for the record industry.

It didn't light up the charts. It wasn't going to buy them a mansion,

but it would provide the scaffolding for Jack

and Meg White to build something bigger than either of them ever could have imagined.

I'm Sean Cannon from Third Man Records and Nevermind Media.

This is Striped, the story of the White Stripes.

Now, Jimmy.

Whether do you want an explosion now. Yeah, Jimmy, they don't want to explode now.

We left off last time, about a month before the White Stripes debut album came out.

As strange as it might seem, we're going to fast forward a few months past the

album's release into late summer, early fall in 99.

And in case you're wondering why we're skipping all the record release hoopla, well,

there wasn't much in the way of hoopla.

While people were excited locally and it was monumental for the band to say,

we have this album out.

The release itself was pretty inauspicious.

It was kind of just another record on a label that put out a lot of records.

To be clear, though, we're not skipping over the album itself, because having it out there in the wild is what led to some events that would change everything for the band.

...