Chapter 1
The White Stripes
The White Stripes was how we all fell in love with Jack White.
The two-piece, which he shared with ex-wife/fake sister Meg White, were in the right place at the right time with their brash, tuneful and bluesy garage rock. Rock was back, remember?
But they were also really, really great at what they did. Jack White wrote brilliant songs, Meg kept things strong and simple. They both played with passion and gusto.
They marketed themselves brilliantly too. The band rarely appeared publicly in anything but matching red, white and black costumes. Dapper, but
“We're always centred on something. We're always unified. If we're working on something together, we try to constrict ourselves,” Jack White explained of their clothing when speaking with triple j's Mel and Charlie in 2003.
It's sort of like a uniform at school; you're concentrating on your work rather than competing with your friends.
Jack White - triple j, 2003
“It was all about peppermint candy, that's where it came from originally. It was about boxing the band in and keeping us constricted all the time. Keeping it centred.
"Sort of like a uniform at school; you're concentrating on your work rather than competing with your friends.”
Such aesthetics led many naysayers to write The White Stripes off as a novelty act. Jack White had no concerns with that kind of attitude, he welcomed the criticism. If you couldn't look past the clothes, you didn't deserve to love the music.
“The way we present ourselves aesthetically and things like that, it is all a great litmus test,” he said.
“If you look at the White Stripes and you say, ‘This is a brother and sister band, they're a two-piece, they dress in red white and black, it's all a gimmick' that's fine with us. It weeds people away who don't want to dig any deeper into what the music is about.
“It's a test – if you can't get past that then don't even bother opening the door.”
While the costuming was clearly a very calculated side of the band, White was insistent that the songwriting wasn't.
Him saying Elephant is the greatest album ever made pretty much makes me not want to buy it.
Jack White - triple j, 2003
“We just do our best to break it down to something primitive,” he said. “Sometimes we luck out, I guess.”
This means no writing to themes. No preconceptions about their next creative direction.
White just wrote songs and, when they were done, tried as hard as he could to make them all stick together as one.
“I just have a lot of songs sitting around and I like to sort of force them into the same kind of box when we're working on it,” he said.
“I try not to premeditate the album too much.
"I don't say ‘We're gonna make a rock'n'roll record' or ‘We're gonna make a real quiet record'. I don't like to have a big thought in my mind – that's one restriction I don't like, I guess.”
Ryan Adams was a famous naysayer, calling White a ‘little girl' and ‘a fucking ponce' in NME back in 2002. But he changed his tune after the band's brilliant 2003 album Elephant, saying it “may be the best rock'n'roll record ever made”.
White's response?
“He's trying to use us to get some attention,” he told triple j. “No thanks. It's all attention – I'd appreciate him not commenting at all. Him saying Elephant is the greatest album ever made pretty much makes me not want to buy it.”
He also wasn't fussed on topping the NME's ‘Cool List' in 2002.
“It doesn't mean anything to me,” White said. “I really don't know what the deal with that. Those magazines make lists up all the time – it doesn't really mean anything.”
There was one group of people he wanted his music to appeal to though.
“When small children like the music we make, you know they're not lying about it,” he said. “That feels the best.”
Chapter 2
The Dead Weather
The White Stripes went on hiatus in 2009, which turned into a fully-fledged split in 2011.
Between commitments with his main band, White had busied himself with The Raconteurs (legally known as The Saboteurs in Australia), a group formed with Nashville songwriter Brendan Benson with whom White would share frontman duties.
It was on a tour with that band that White's newest musical project would germinate, essentially by accident.
He introduced The Dead Weather to triple j's Tom and Alex back in 2010.
“We got the best female frontperson out there, Alison Mosshart on lead vocals and guitar,” White said. “She's pretty incredible. She's quite the firecracker.
“Dean Fertita on lead guitar, he plays in Queens Of The Stone Age and sometimes with The Raconteurs and Brendan Benson.”
“Then you've got little Jack Lawrence on bass. He's sort of been my right-hand man for years. He played on Loretta Lynn's album with me, he played in the Greenhornes, he was in The Raconteurs. He's incredible.
“Then you've got me on drums.”
White had just started expanding his Third Man Records label and saw an opportunity to make a single with some friends. But, as these things do, it quickly became something far more substantial.
“We've all known each other for a long time,” White explained to Tom and Alex. “It was just an accident really.
I'm glad I'm in a position where I can do things I wanna do, instead of what I have to do.
Jack White - triple j, 2010
“The Raconteurs played a show with The Kills warming up for us in Atlanta. The next day we had a day off and I said, ‘Why don't we record a single?'. Me and Little Jack and Allison.
"I said, ‘I've got this new record label starting, it'd be nice if you came over and did a 7” with us'. She said ‘sure'.
“Dean just happened to be staying at my house. He just came in the studio and pretty soon we had five or six songs written.
We thought ‘Wow, this is sort of what happened when The Raconteurs started.' It just sort of came out of nowhere. I had no plans to be in a new band, but the songs came out so powerful I just had to let it happen.”
By the time The Dead Weather started, Jack White was a bona fide rock'n'roll superstar. He had money, resources and connections. The guy who always did things himself found himself with less restrictions than ever before.
“I'm glad I'm in a position where I can do things I wanna do, instead of what I have to do,” he said. “I'm very lucky for that.”
That included playing drums, which was his role in the new group.
“It's nice to be able to play the drums again,” he said. “I used to do nothing but play the drums when I was younger and I sort of got side tracked on this guitar trickery and now I'm back to playing the drums.”
We push each other really hard to come up with the next thing. I've never been in a band like this before.
Jack White - triple j, 2010
With such a renowned bunch of musicians onboard, White was happy to take a backseat when necessary and let the talents of his bandmates shine through.
“It's quite collaborative,” he said. “Everybody is very, very inspired in this band.
“For example, I thought Dean on guitar wouldn't have been writing much when we got together, but he's written half the first album and half the new record.”
White does sing in The Dead Weather as well.
He admitted tensions can get high in the band, but said it's rarely over who takes the spotlight. It's more related to the passion each member has for the work.
“We definitely fight a lot, but it's not over vocals,” he said. “That's never been a problem.
“It's really inspiring to work with her and everybody in the band in the studio. Things come out very, very quickly. We push each other really hard to come up with the next thing. I've never been in a band like this before.”
Like just about everyone else who has ever seen Mosshart perform live, White was in awe of the presence she brings to the band in the live area.
“It's pretty ferocious to watch Alison on stage,” he said. “I think nobody is really commanding the stage like her nowadays. I like playing drums behind her, it's nice to support that. She's putting on the kind of show that I would want to go see.
“Maybe some biker gangs in Australia could come down to the show and realise they have a hero in this angel. She's the one that they've been waiting for.”
Chapter 3
Jack White
Jack White hadn't intended on making a solo record when he was writing songs in 2011.
“For a long time, I thought naming an album Jack White was maybe the easy way out,” he admitted to triple j's Zan Rowe in 2012.
“There's no challenge to that. It's the standard showbiz ‘You were in famous band called White Stripes. Now you will be solo artists for rest of your life',” he joked, robotically.
“I thought, ‘I've got the rest of my life to do that, I don't need to rush into that anytime soon'. But here we are.”
These comments came just prior to the release of Blunderbuss, the first of two Jack White ‘solo' records that are out at present (Lazaretto followed in 2014).
Like much of what White does, the songs for that first record came to him quickly. He was compelled to record them, figuring he'd place them with a band at a later stage.
“Only about six or seven months now,” he said when asked how old the Blunderbuss tracks were. “I had no intention of making a solo record, or a record under my name, when I started recording these tracks. I thought they could be Raconteurs songs, Dead Weather songs, or whatever.
“Six, seven, eight songs in, we started to realise this was turning into an album. It was starting to have a new sound that was growing and growing. By the time it was done I thought ‘I guess it's time to call this Jack White, I guess'.”
White said he doesn't care to put labels on his music, that he sees his catalogue as one, big, fluid group of songs. The band names are for our benefit, more than anything.
When there's a problem at hand, I want to challenge myself to overcome it with some new technique.
Jack White - triple j, 2012
“To me they're all just records I do,” he said. “In a bigger sense, when you're in the studio with other musicians, no one cares what you call it.
"They don't care if you call it The Dead Weather or Allison Mosshart and friends or whatever.
"But the public likes and needs and wants those labels and names to be the way they want them to be.”
Much of Jack White's approach to music is steeped in problem solving. He finds himself in a situation and figures out a new way to get out of it.
“When there's a job at hand, a problem at hand, I want to challenge myself to overcome it with some new technique,” he said. “Sometimes they're real personal things just for me, but the end result is out there for other people to maybe get something from, if they like it.”
Sometimes those challenges are fairly broad.
“Even putting something out under my own name is a risk,” he said. “'Will people not pay attention to these songs because they'll throw it under some other thing?' That was a danger with Dead Weather and Raconteurs, people are gonna say it's a side-project, it's not a real band.
“But, to me, all those challenges make for me something new. That's what I'm trying to get to, a new place every single moment.”
When playing shows following the album's release, Jack White took the opposite approach to his spartan White Stripes days. He toured with two bands – one all-male, one all-female – and utilised them both on different nights.
“It's a really interesting challenge. It came out of the recording style,” he revealed.
“One day, I was recording and said, ‘I'm only going to have female musicians today and see what that does to the energy of the room'. I'd record the same song the next day with an all-male band and see what happened, if anything was different.
“Both bands can play all the same songs, but they play them totally differently. When I'm on stage, I have to remember how each band does it, which is a lot of work for me.
"We also don't use setlists. None of these musicians have ever been in a band where they haven't had a setlist, it's just called out. I can stop a song in the middle and change it and we improvise.
Perhaps White's cheekiest idea with this two-band concept was not telling anyone who would be playing any given show until the last minute.
“The great thing is, they don't know who's gonna play until that morning,” he said. “At breakfast I'll say ‘tonight it's gonna be the girls on stage' and the guys get the day off.
“It's a lot better than me just hiring five of the best backing guys I can to just learn it exactly like the record and do this boring set every night.”
Performing as Jack White opened him up to new possibilities in terms of how he could perform when on stage. He didn't have to share the leadership, he could take the show in any direction he wanted, and just hope the band would follow.
“I told the band I need to be that person on stage, the guy you saw in The White Stripes,” he said. “In The Dead Weather I was on drums, in The Raconteurs it was a dual frontman thing with Brendon, a four piece band with solid songs to remember. This is a different scenario.
“In The White Stripes, there was only so much we could do to really change a song. You can change the tempo and the arrangement a little bit, but with two people, it really becomes all about the emotion of the song and the attitude of how we project it. But when we have seven people on stage we can really elaborate and make these into totally new things.”
And it meant he could play what he wanted. Jack White shows were a celebration of the artist's entire career, not just his solo records. It's a freedom he'd never allowed himself before.
“The Dead Weather never played any White Stripes songs, The Raconteurs never played any Dead Weather songs – all those bands were very separate entities,” he said.
Chapter 4
Third Man Records
Third Man Records technically started in 2001, when Jack White was still juggling music with his other career as an upholsterer.
“My upholstery shop was called Third Man Upholstery,” White explained to triple j's Zan Rowe in 2012. “The White Stripes recorded our second record De Stijl in my living room, so I put ‘Recorded at Third Man Studio' on there at the time, because I still had my upholstery shop.”
I see it as a breeding ground for new artists and new activity.
Jack White - triple j, 2012
The logo appeared on The White Stripes' records, but that was about the extent of the label's operation until eight years later.
Jack White decided to make it a thing, and we all know what that means. Things start to happen real quick.
“It wasn't until I bought this building in Nashville, and I was gonna re-release our vinyl records, that I decided to make Third Man Records a real institution,” he told Zan.
“In three years I've produced 140 records and we've sold 600,000 piece of vinyl.
"All stuff that didn't exist before, all stuff that we're really proud of and that we want to be out there in the world.”
He's immensely proud of the work he does with Third Man, which includes releasing new music, issuing old – often forgotten – classic records, making videos, making music and preserving odd pieces of American cultural history.
“The great thing about the record label headquarters is that there's a studio there, you can film videos there, we have a live venue with a recording booth,” he gushed to Tom and Alex in 2010.
“Teenagers can come in in the afternoon and see a band that they can't see at night and we record the live set to analog tape and then release it on vinyl a few weeks later.
“So, you can go see the show, then come back a few weeks later and buy the vinyl of that show. I think it might be one of the only ones in the world where you can play in front of a live audience and record your set to analog tape.”
The decision to put time, money and resources into releasing vinyl records was partly born from White's love of the format, but also because he knew this was part of the way people were going to engage with music in the medium-term future.
“I think people realise it's gonna be vinyl and digital music for the next ten or 15 years, probably,” he told Tom and Alex. “Those are the two formats that are really viable.
“For the people who are really dedicated to music, the sound of it, the experience and the romance of it, I think vinyl is the most viable format. Of course, for ease of use, you want to have digital. I think those are the formats for this next decade.”
The decision to start a label wasn't born from hatred of the majors, either. White acknowledged what major labels have done for music throughout history, but he said he didn't see the future staying in their hands.
“I feel sorry for them,” he said. “I think it's a desperate time. They're pretty much falling apart. I don't know how they're even making any money right now.
“I've never been anti-major labels, I think most of my favourite bands through history have been on major labels – whether it's The Stooges or the Sex Pistols. Most of the great acts have been supported in a pretty good way. I've never been against them.”
In fact, White believes that, in many cases, independent labels are the ones not doing right by their artists. Something he was determined not to do.
“But if you can do an independent label and make it work, not just have it be a hobby, and not rip off your artists, you're onto something good,” he said. “The problem is, a lot of independent labels rip off their artists, because they don't really know the business very well.”
Since the very beginning of Jack White's musical career, everything he has done has been in some way indebted to the blues. The first White Stripes record was dedicated to legendary bluesman Son House, one of White's biggest influences. There are shades of blues in all of his playing, all of his singing and, as he explained to Tom and Alex, in all the artists he works with.
“It has to have soul and some kind of connection to the blues,” he said of selecting new artists for Third Man. “Even if it's punk rock, it still has to have a connection to the blues. I think most of the acts I've worked with and produced do have that.
“It's not the sort of label where we're looking to get a hot new act to sell records and make money, I'm looking for artists who are saying something. That's why we started the record label. I see it as a breeding ground for new artists and new activity.”
Jack White has provided fertile ground for countless musical projects. Who knows what he will come up with next?
