Day After Day #13: Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground

The year 2001 started off normally enough. There was a presidential transition from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush, the FTC approved the merger of America Online and Time Warner and the Ravens beat the Giants in the Super Bowl. 

I was still a newlywed, having gotten married the previous July. Just before we got married, part of a tree fell on and totaled my car, so I was reliant on taking the commuter rail to work in Cambridge at Webnoize, the dot com where I worked. That commute got old pretty quick, but I liked my job, which was writing about the business of entertainment and technology. 

Our office was in Central Square and my co-workers and I would spend most days writing, making fun of the weirdos walking past our street-level window and listening to the MIT radio station WMBR. We mainly listened to Breakfast of Champions, the morning show, which played primarily indie rock that you couldn't hear on commercial radio. One of the bands that was getting regular airplay was a Detroit-based garage rock duo called the White Stripes. We liked what we heard from their 2000 album De Stijl and when we heard about a concert date for the band at the Middle East Downstairs just down the street from the office, a bunch of us made plans to attend. I stayed in town instead of catching my usual 6:45 train home and we grabbed some food and then went over to the club.

It was June 21 and the show featured opening acts Mr. Airplane Man and the Von Bondies, both of which we'd heard on WMBR. After excellent opening sets, the White Stripes proceeded to rip through 28 songs drawn from their first two albums and their upcoming release White Blood Cells, as well as a bunch of covers (Dolly Parton, Iggy Pop, John Lee Hooker and others). With Jack White on vocals and guitar and Meg White on drums, they created a tremendous racket. The newer songs they played showcased the band's move away from blues to a more raw rock sound. 

One of those new songs, "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground," was actually written in 1999, but it's a dark ripper about the dissolution of a relationship, which many assumed was about Jack and Meg's breakup (they were married in 1996 but pretended to be brother and sister in the band; they divorced in 2000). 

The song was the first on the album, and the opening feedback and sludgy riff immediately signaled that this was a new direction for the band. "Dead leaves and the dirty ground/When I know you're not around/Shiny tops and soda pops/When I hear your lips make a sound." 

The band clearly made an impact on me. I bought De Stijl at the show and White Blood Cells when it came out soon afterward. It was released on Sympathy for the Record Industry, but re-released on V2 in 2002. That's when things really blew up for the Stripes. The second single "Fell In Love With a Girl" was accompanied by a Michel Gondry-directed stop-motion video using Legos that became an instant sensation. "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground" was the third single, released in July 2002, over a year after we first heard it. 

This led to a successful rest of the decade, with three more albums, all of which won Grammy awards. The band licensed songs to movies and TV shows, toured heavily and enjoyed immense popularity. But before they could finish work on a seventh album, Meg stepped away from the group, citing anxiety. The band's last performance was on the final episode of Late Night with Conan O'Brien in February 2009, but they didn't officially announce the breakup until two years later.

As for the summer of 2001, it continued on as expected. The dotcom economy went down the tubes and Webnoize was sinking with it, so I started looking for a new gig. Deb and I found out we were going to have a baby in the spring. And then on September 11, well, you know.