Remember Rock?

It’s just past midnight and the capacity crowd at the El Rey Theatre is ecstatic as the White Stripes head into the final encore of a series of stirring shows around town. I’ve seen three of them and am kicking myself for missing the fourth. This Detroit duo plays rock ‘n’ roll as it was meant to be: urgent, witty, sensual, inspiring and defiant.

Jack White, the Stripes’ singer-guitarist who combines the primal power of the Delta blues with a solid sense of songwriting craft and rock dynamics, is ripping through a song with such explosive force that he could fill in for both Jimmy Page and Robert Plant in a Led Zeppelin concert.

The 26-year-old musician follows with a gentle love song whose lyrics convey a nursery rhyme innocence. The audience, which knows the song from the Stripes’ last album, sings along with every word.

As the set ends, I realize it’s the best time I’ve had in a club since ... well, a week earlier when the Hives played at the Roxy.

Despite a temperature in the packed club hot enough to pop corn, the Hives’ music was as refreshing as two episodes of “The Osbournes.” The Swedish quintet’s high-spirited music celebrates the rawness and economy of classic garage rock and punk, and the band backs it with a wonderfully entertaining persona.

“People have called me smug,” lead singer Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist declares on stage. “But we just believe in giving credit where credit is due.”

That was the most fun I’d had at a show since ... a month earlier when the Mars Volta put on a galvanizing performance at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, or maybe three weeks before that when a band by the burdensome name of ... And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Dead mixed a punk-aligned independence and traditional rock sensibilities in a way that would have made the group an ally of the Clash in the ‘70s or Nirvana in the ‘90s.

Sense a pattern here?

More than any time since the arrival of Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails and the Smashing Pumpkins a decade ago, mainstream rock has a renewed passion and creativity.

This flurry of exciting new guitar-driven bands--which also includes such groups as the Strokes from New York, the Vines from Australia and the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club from Los Angeles--is too new and the musical styles too diverse for the slogan-happy rock world to even give it a name.

Don’t confuse these new outfits with emo (the post-punk sensitivity of such groups as Jimmy Eat World and Dashboard Confessional) or electroclash (electro pop-punk). Besides music that is smart and soulful, the chief link between the Stripes, Hives, et al is their fierce independence.

No one is bold enough to claim this wave of bands is the Next Big Thing commercially. Their mere presence, however, is a welcome break from the dreary state of mainstream U.S. rock of the late ‘90s. If these bands start picking up the same kind of enthusiastic response across the country they are now getting on the coasts with their compact, tuneful music, they could reshape the rock landscape.

Gloomy record company executives complain publicly about downloading, piracy and competition from video games as reasons record sales are down 10% this year. But they fret privately about the staleness of today’s music.

“I think there is absolutely something exciting going on,” says Jimmy Iovine, co-founder of Interscope Records, home of Eminem, U2 and Nine Inch Nails. “These young musicians are not shying away from the showmanship of rock music. They are extraordinarily exciting live and pushing as hard as they can.”

Industry taste makers, including MTV and radio station KROQ-FM (106.7) in Los Angeles, are also keeping a close eye on the progress of the Hives, the Stripes and the Strokes to see if they should add more of this new energy to their playlists. A few mainstream pop stations have even begun playing the Hives’ wonderfully raw, energetic single, “Hate to Say I Told You So.”

The Strokes’ album, “Is This It,” has gone gold (600,000 copies) and the Stripes’ “White Blood Cells” is approaching 300,000 sold. In what could be a coming-out party for this welcome new energy and imagination, the Strokes and Stripes will play the 6,000-seat Radio City Music Hall in New York in August. The Stripes’ four sold-out L.A. area shows drew 3,200 fans.

These bands--independent and demanding--may not just change the tone of pop music, but may also alter the way record companies do business. Fearful of being tied up for seven years or more through standard industry contracts, the Stripes and the Hives each entered into limited deals that give them their freedom, if they choose to exercise it, after just one more album.

After years of bands’ dressing down, the Stripes, Hives and Strokes enjoy dressing up--in matching outfits that readily set them apart from the rest of the rock brigade. Some of the bands, including the Stripes and Hives, also seem to delight in creating a bit of mystery about their backgrounds. Trail of Dead includes in its bio a convoluted essay about some guiding philosophical underpinning to the band’s music--which may just be a lot of hokum.

The idea behind all this is to wake up the rock ‘n’ roll audience after years of semi-slumber.

The excitement is evident in the faces of fans at the concerts.

“There was a time when I thought rock ‘n’ roll was dying or certainly being watered down, so I tried to sit down in my bedroom and write songs that I wanted to hear on the radio,” Jack White said before one of the Stripes’ L.A. shows. “It’s great now to have people come up after shows and tell me the music makes them care about rock again.”

There are two paths for young musicians. The easiest is to copy what’s on the sales charts and the radio because that is what’s most likely to catch the ear of record company talent scouts. The alternative is to make music you love, understanding that no one may ever share your enthusiasm for it.

Too much rock since Nirvana has sounded copied. Instead of being inspired to make music as heartfelt and original as Nirvana, musicians came away with the wrong lessons. They heard the pain, anger and aggression in Kurt Cobain’s music and tried to make music with more pain, anger and aggression. The results felt calculated and cartoonish. They also saw Cobain’s anti-show biz attitude and took it to extremes, becoming all but anonymous as performers.

The result was music that was horribly insular--be it the unrelieved darkness of Korn or the lighter, dumbing down sensibilities of Limp Bizkit.

Where the best rock has a depth and range that allow it to be appreciated by adventurous listeners of all ages, the rock of the late ‘90s was so one-dimensional that it was hard imagining anyone older than 15 responding to most of it. There were alternatives--especially a variety of British bands, from the highly accessible Oasis and Verve to arty, ambitious Radiohead--but they were minority forces in the U.S. marketplace.

It’s no wonder Eminem has been embraced by so many young people. The rapper has far more in common, including emotional range and personality, with the classic figures of rock than most hit rock acts of recent years do.

Critics here and in England may be overpraising the acts because of the long drought in mainstream rock. But the enthusiasm is genuine.

John Peel, the London radio-show host who has been a major influence on British rock tastes for decades, calls the White Stripes the “greatest rock band since the Sex Pistols and Jimi Hendrix.”

The New Yorker magazine loves everything about the Hives, from their matching mod outfits to the “Veni Vidi Vicious” album: “Short and sharp, with twelve songs in twenty-eight minutes, it’s the most exuberant and powerful rock and roll in recent memory.” And they’ve been described by England’s Q magazine as “the greatest show on earth.”

Rolling Stone magazine calls the Strokes a “dynamite hybrid of the bedlam, tension and flash that [underscores] the best, seismic New York rock.” The Strokes’ music has the shadowy, sensuous feel of Lou Reed’s work three decades ago with the Velvet Underground--so much so that the Strokes almost seem as tied to that era as Oasis was to the Beatles’ melodic signatures. The group’s look, too, is very New York rock--a black jacket-jeans pattern that stretches from the Velvet Underground through Blondie and the Ramones.

When you talk to members of these bands, the thing you hear again and again is how bored they were with mainstream rock. Whether it was the Hives experimenting with garage rock in Sweden or the Stripes exploring the blues in Detroit or Trail of Dead testing its punk instincts in Austin, these musicians couldn’t imagine being popular, because nothing they liked was popular.

“I just felt like there was too much emphasis on people trying to make money and be famous,” the Strokes’ Albert Hammond Jr. said by phone recently. “It definitely surprised me when we broke through. We certainly didn’t think we were taking an easy path.”

“We always assumed that no one would ever care, so we were free to do whatever we wanted,” the Hives’ Almqvist said recently at Warner Bros. Records in Burbank. “We were so bored by what everyone else was listening to that we made up a bunch of rules about things we didn’t like in music. We ended up with like 28 things--things like no harmony singing or saxophones. We wanted to eliminate everything except raw energy.”

The Hives were just into their teens eight years ago when they started playing together in a small town west of Stockholm. They started getting attention on the local scene after a couple of years and released their debut album through Sweden’s Burning Heart Records in 1997.

The group’s two albums radiate with a primitive, souped-up, ‘60s-rooted mix of the young Rolling Stones and Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels. It’s fast and furious, a throwback to the spirit of the ‘60s and ‘70s garage-rock bands saluted in the much-admired “Nuggets” boxed set.

However, it’s far from mindless energy. The Dead Kennedys, the politically charged San Francisco group led by Jello Biafra, is one of the group’s biggest influences--and there is an underlying slap at social conformity and political corruption in some Hives songs. But the themes never slow down the music. .

The White Stripes’ search for inspiration led them back even further--to the Delta blues of Robert Johnson, the so-called father of the blues who died in 1938. In the music of Johnson and such other landmark figures as Son House and Blind Willie McTell, Jack White saw the “raw dirt” of rock ‘n’ roll, and he aimed for the primitiveness of those old records.

To sweep away the excesses and studio refinement that have smothered the spirit of rock during the last 30 years, he limits the instrumentation on stage and record to just guitar and drums. Major-label bands routinely spend months and well into six figures to record an album these days. The White Stripes recorded their third album, “White Blood Cells,” for about $2,000.

Like the Hives, the Stripes--whose other influences range from Bob Dylan to Johnny Cash--took years to find an audience. They had a lot of chances along the way to compromise. By the time the duo had released its second album in 2000, major labels in England and America were throwing fat contracts at them, but the Stripes could see the strings attached.

“They were offering a lot of money, but we knew the dangers,” Jack White says. “Everyone came to us with suggestions. They thought the sound would be a little more commercial if we added a bass player or a second guitarist--things like that.

“We figured that once we got tied to a contract, they’d also try to tell us what songs should be on the album and what photo should be on the cover and how we should dress and how we should bring in an outside producer. What they were telling us was they didn’t want the White Stripes. They wanted another band that sounded like everything on the radio.”

The Stripes eventually signed last year with a major label, V2, but the terms were radical. Rather than tie them up for the standard seven years, the pact covers only two albums, including the already released “White Blood Cells.” That means the Stripes will be free agents as soon as they turn in the next album. The Hives’ deal with Warner Bros. Records is similar.

The fact that the Stripes, Hives and Trail of Dead didn’t pick up immediate major-label interest with their immensely promising independent albums points up how far below the radar they were. They slipped by because they didn’t sound like the copycat bands that most label talent scouts were seeking.

The Stripes and Strokes, in fact, had to go to England to be discovered. There, the pop spotlight is much brighter for new acts. (See box on Page 10 for the furor these bands caused across the Atlantic.)

Ever since the conglomerate takeover of the record business in the ‘90s, labels have been under such pressure to show quarterly profits that they have become increasingly cautious in their signings.

Where record companies once sought promising talents that might make three or four albums before finding an audience, they no longer feel they have that luxury. If a band doesn’t have a strong chance to generate sales quickly, there’s always another one out there that sounds enough like Korn or Limp Bizkit or Creed or Blink-182 to stand a good chance of immediate radio airplay.

The Stripes, the Hives and Trail of Dead were finally signed by major labels almost as personal crusades by the heads of the companies. They’re all executives with a history of following their instincts.

Iovine, who worked as engineer and/or producer with such acts as John Lennon and U2 before co-founding Interscope, learned about Trail of Dead from a story in a music magazine. He signed the band after seeing it play in Austin.

Tom Whalley, who worked by Iovine’s side at Interscope for years before taking over as chairman and chief executive of Warner Bros. Records last year, fell in love with the Hives in May after hearing a copy of the group’s second album, “Veni Vidi Vicious.”

“The whole vibe of the album was fun and exciting ... everything that was missing from most of what was going on in America right now,” he said this month.

Within 24 hours of hearing the record, Whalley entered into a one-time partnership with independent L.A. punk label Epitaph Records, which held the U.S. rights to the album and to the group’s next album.

Andy Gershon managed the Smashing Pumpkins in the early ‘90s before starting Outpost Recordings, whose roster included Ryan Adams’ old band, Whiskeytown. Gershon had just taken over as president of entrepreneur Richard Branson’s New York-based V2 Records last summer when he asked someone at the label to put together a tape of some interesting new bands. Listening to the tape in the car, he was struck by a White Stripes number.

“When I found out they had three records out, I went out and got them,” Gershon says. “I was dumbfounded that no major label had signed them. The music felt so original and fresh. Who were they? Where had they come from? A week later I was in their manager’s office in Los Angeles trying to find out.”

What he found out was that Jack White and drummer Meg White--who are either brother and sister (their story) or ex-husband and ex-wife, depending on which report you believe--made their first album in 1999 for Sympathy for the Record Industry, a tiny Long Beach label.

Dylan once complained that the worst thing about contemporary rock is that musicians have lost touch with the blues. The Stripes’ music, he’ll be glad to hear, begins with the blues. But they aren’t blues revivalists. The Whites treat the classic style with enough respect to retain its raw, earthy power, but bring enough of their contemporary sensibilities to give the music a fresh, urgent edge. They also maintain the right to move far from the blues when the spirit hits them.

Besides 14 original tunes, “The White Stripes” featured a radical remake of Robert Johnson’s “Stop Breaking Down” and a raw version of Dylan’s “One More Cup of Coffee” that recalled the eerie obsession of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You.”

The album also reflects traces of Jack White’s love of country music, especially the earthy storytelling of Hank Williams and Johnny Cash.

“We knew that a two-piece band doing blues and country wasn’t a recipe for success, but I still remember the thrill of holding our first single,” says White, a shy, unpretentious young man who seems to save his energy for the stage.

“I had my own upholstery shop at the time, and I figured I would just make these records on the side, which was fine. We didn’t even have enough money to tour when the first album came out, so I was as surprised as anyone when we finally went on tour with Sleater-Kinney after the second album and people in other cities started liking us.”

That interest had mushroomed by the time of last year’s “White Blood Cells,” and White felt the need to reevaluate his recording situation. He was frustrated that fans would often tell him at shows that they couldn’t find his albums in stores. He longed for the wider distribution that a major label would provide, but he was wary of sacrificing control.

Enter Ian Montone, a Los Angeles attorney who made a reputation in the indie rock world for working with such bands as At the Drive-In, one of the most acclaimed punk-edged arrivals of the late ‘90s. White had heard about Montone through the grapevine and called him.

“As soon as the Stripes started getting attention in England last year, we had every major label flying to Detroit or London or Los Angeles to see the band,” says Montone, who now manages the Stripes. “At first, I think people thought we were purposefully being clever by saying we weren’t interested. But we were interested in maintaining absolute creative control--a genuine partnership between the label and the band.”

The breakthrough came last year when the Stripes signed a deal with XL, a hip British label that is the home of singer-songwriter Badly Drawn Boy and techno-rock band the Prodigy. The contract is a short-term, two-album joint venture between XL and the Stripes’ own label, Third Man, under which rights to the master recordings eventually revert to the Stripes. The V2 deal followed.

Labels generally insist on seven-year contracts that call for as many as seven albums over that time, and the labels retain ownership of the master recordings forever. Don Henley, Sheryl Crow and Bruce Springsteen are among more than 100 artists who have joined together as the Recording Artists Coalition to seek industry reform.

For V2, the danger in the two-album contact is that if the next Stripes album suddenly sells 3 million copies, the band could then offer its services to the highest bidder, leaving V2 with little to show for all its promotional work. “There is a lot of faith on both sides in our arrangement with the Stripes,” Gershon says.

Music isn’t the only thing engaging about the Stripes and the Hives. There are the band members’ colorful pseudonyms. Besides Howlin’ Pelle on vocals, the Hives include Chris Dangerous, Vigilante Carlstroem, Nicholaus Arson and Dr. Matt Destruction.

Where the Stripes dress in attention-grabbing red and white, the Hives take the stage in black shirts and pants with white shoes and ties. As with the Stripes, there is a bit of mystery surrounding the Swedish band. In interviews, they have said they were the brainchild of an entrepreneur and songwriter named Randy Fitzsimmons. No one believes a word of it, since no one has ever been able to track down this mystery man.

What is clearly true about the Hives is the joyful energy of their music--and their humor. The songs are so compact--often two minutes or less--that their sets rarely last an hour. At one concert, Howlin’ Pelle said they were ordered to do short sets by the U.S. government because anything longer might be dangerous to the youth of America.

Warner Bros. chief Whalley was at both Roxy shows last month and he went to New York to see them again.

“I think something is changing,” Whalley says. “The thing I like about the Hives and some of these other bands is that they have a real awareness of the roots of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a real breath of fresh air.”

The buzz is definitely building.

“There’s a rawness and a realness to the music that has been lacking in some of the disposable pop and rap-rock of the last couple of years,” says Kevin Weatherly, program director for KROQ-FM, where the Hives’ “Hate to Say I Told You So” has been among the most popular songs for weeks.

Agrees Tom Calderone, senior vice president of talent and programming for MTV and MTV2, “You can definitely feel rock evolving once again.” The music channel is so impressed by the Stripes that they were one of two musical guests (with Eminem) on the recent MTV Movie Awards telecast.

David Fricke, a veteran rock writer at Rolling Stone magazine, believes scores of other outstanding bands are just waiting to be discovered.

“These bands are coming along at a time when it is easier to spot them,” he says. “For years, the industry was caught up in Britney Spears selling 5 million copies or Limp Bizkit selling 6 million or whatever, and they couldn’t see beyond that.

“The sales numbers at the top aren’t as impressive these days, so the success that bands like the Strokes, White Stripes and Hives are having down at the street level is more evident. When you look at the numbers of the Strokes or the Stripes, they may not be Eminem-size numbers, but 500,000 is the size of a large city.

“Twenty years ago, that would have been an enormous achievement in rock. The whole corporate method of accounting for success has distorted what success means in terms of connecting with people in a way that has a lasting effect. People who are into the Hives or the Strokes now are definitely not going to be into something else in a week.”

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Robert Hilburn, The Times’ pop music critic, can be reached at robert.hilburn@latimes.com