Though she just turned 20 in April, Alex White is already a six-year veteran of the local garage-rock scene. Her thundering vocals are as instantly recognizable as her fiery red hair and matching Rickenbacker guitar, and later this month her first solo album, Miss Alex White and the Red Orchestra, comes out on the tastemaking LA label In the Red. But for all the breaks that’ve gone her way, her career has been shaped largely by tragedy: each of her two previous bands ended with the sudden death of a friend. “The last couple years have been tough,” she says. “I’ve definitely had to become thick-skinned.”
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After a short stint singing and playing guitar with a band called the Psychotic Sensations, she formed the duo the Red Lights with her friend Alisa Dymarets on drums. “We were playing bars at 15, 16. My mom and dad were great about it, though–they’d drive me to shows in their minivan.” White still lives at home with her parents on the far north side, and they’re regulars at her Chicago gigs, often with a video camera in tow.
At that first show with Saathoff, another band got its start too–after the set, guitarist Jered Gummere of the Ponys and drummer Matt Williams of the Baseball Furies recruited White for a new trio, the Hot Machines, which would debut in less than a month. She graduated from Northside College Prep a semester early at the end of 2002 and headed straight to DePaul–suddenly her plate was pretty full. But in July 2003, the question of where the Red Lights would fit in was answered in the worst possible way when Dymarets suffered a fatal asthma attack at age 18.
Saathoff’s death devastated White. “I basically decided I’m never gonna play music again. I’m gonna turn my guitar into a birdhouse,” she says. “It wasn’t just music. I had become disenchanted with everything. I was in a state of shock for months.”
Meanwhile White is still in college, on track to graduate with an entrepreneurial studies major next spring and looking to apply to law school. “But I don’t want to be a lawyer,” she says. “I’m doing it just so I can analyze my own contracts and that sort of thing. If I had my way I would play music for the rest of my life–and I will.”
