Have You Checked Out The Lineup For The Nashville Boogie Yet?
Have You Checked Out The Lineup For The Nashville Boogie
Yet? This is going to be one hell of a shindig and with the amount of
bands lining up to make this a great time, you best bet it will be
talked on for years to come.
Whiskeydick with David Berryman, President of Gibson
Whiskeydick continues to conquer and today added one more notch to their Texas sized belt of achievements. On their day off they were asked to stop in to the Gibson offices in Nashville to play some tunes. not only did they win over the staff but Gibson President David Berryman enjoyed them so much he signed Rev Johnson's guitar and Fritz was also given a full Epiphone Guitars endorsement! Quality music, great attitudes and a work ethic like no other, Whiskeydick may be the Bastard Sons of Texas but they are now on the path to bring Heavy Metal Honky Tonk to the world!
"Every good girl secretly wants a bad boy, or so the story goes, but when Hellbound Glory showed up at CMT’s Nashville office recently, they turned out to be nice enough fellows. Still though, singer Leroy Virgil and his band out of Reno, Nev., are a bunch of late-nightin’ honky-tonkers with trouble on their minds. “I’m not a flashy guy, but I like showing off,” he says on the band’s website. Prior to a Nashville gig with Kid Rock, the band showed off their gritty West Coast sound on “Lost Cause” in the CMT studio. In this traditional country tune, Virgil warns his own good girl not to get too close. Since they’re already married, I guess that advice could have come sooner. Check out Hellbound Glory’s exclusive performance of “Lost Cause” on CMT Edge." Link to original post on CMT Edge
This past week, Hellbound Glory has been busy recording some new tracks over in Nashville with Shooter Jennings. Cannot wait to hear the new material and the overall sound. Also included is a video clip of them playing Waylon Jennings birthday bash show in Nashville with Shooter Jennings and Jamey Johnson in attendance.
Leroy Virgil of Hellbound Glory recording in Nashville with Shooter Jennings
Worn the hell out after recording for hours on end
J.D. Wilkes of the Legendary Shack Shakers and Leroy Virgil of Hellbound Glory
Leroy Virgil channeling Waylon Jennings in the studio
Jack White might very well be the greatest guitarist of our generation, but that is just one sliver of the character he exudes at any given time. Entrepreneur, label executive, curator and upholsterer are all equally refining in their depiction of the virtuoso that is Jack White. One of the biggest reasons we respect what he does is the simple fact that he is confident in his ideas and doesn't give a rat's ass what anyone thinks.
He could have been laughed at for producing a track for the Insane Clown Posse or called pompous for his recordings with Loretta Lynn but that is just it, the dude understands character. Pop culture, adoration and the "hip" factor come and go like the tide, but to see and understand resilience in your core ideas and continue to put a fresh perspective on all things you touch, now that is a stroke of genius.
Photo of Jack White by Jessica Dimmock/VII, for The New York Times
By JOSH EELLS
Published: April 5, 2012
"In an industrial section of south-central Nashville, stuck between a homeless shelter and some railroad tracks, sits a little primary-colored Lego-block of a building with a Tesla tower on top. The inside holds all manner of curiosities and wonders — secret passageways, trompe l’oeil floors, the mounted heads of various exotic ungulates (a bison, a giraffe, a Himalayan tahr) as well as a sign on the wall that says photography is prohibited. This is the home of Third Man Records: the headquarters of Jack White’s various musical enterprises, and the center of his carefully curated world.
“When I found this place” White said one day last April, “I was just looking for a place to store my gear. But then I started designing the whole building from scratch.” Now it holds a record store, his label offices, a concert venue, a recording booth, a lounge for parties and even a darkroom. “The whole shebang,” White said. It’s a one-stop creativity shop as designed by an imaginative kindergartner — a cross between Warhol’s Factory and the Batcave.
White, looking like a dandyish undertaker in a black suit and matching bowler, was in the record store, which doubles as a tiny Jack White museum. He is most famous as the singer for the White Stripes, the red-and-white-clad Detroit duo that played a stripped-down, punked-up take on Delta blues; their gold and platinum records adorned the walls. Albums from Third Man artists, including White’s other bands, the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather, filled the racks. The décor reflected his quirky junk-art aesthetic: African masks and shrunken heads from New Guinea; antique phone booths and vintage Victrolas.
White is obsessive about color and meticulous in his attention to detail. Inside, the walls that face west are all painted red, and the ones that face east are all painted blue. The exterior, meanwhile, is yellow and black (with a touch of red). Before he made his living as a musician, White had an upholstery shop in Detroit, and everything related to it was yellow and black — power tools, sewing table, uniform, van. He also had yellow-and-black business cards bearing the slogan “Your Furniture’s Not Dead” as well as his company name, Third Man Upholstery. When he started the record label, he simply carried everything over. “Those colors sort of just mean work to me now.”
Roaming the hallways were several young employees, all color-coordinated, like comic-book henchmen. The boys wore black ties and yellow shirts; the girls wore black tights and yellow Anna Sui dresses. (There were also a statistically improbable number of redheads.) White stopped in front of one cute girl in bluejeans and Vans. “Can you guess which Third Man employee is getting fined $50 today?” he asked, smiling.
Some have called Third Man a vanity project, like the Beatles’ Apple Records or Prince’s Paisley Park. But White’s tastes are far more whimsical. He has produced records for the ’50s rockabilly singer Wanda Jackson; the Detroit shock rappers Insane Clown Posse; a band called Transit, made up of employees of the Nashville Metropolitan Transit Authority. (Their first single was called “C’mon and Ride.”) And gimmicks like Third Man’s Rolling Record Store, basically an ice-cream truck for records, show he’s as much a huckster as an artist.
“I’m trying to get somewhere,” White, who is 36, said, reclining in his tin-ceilinged office. He’s an imposing presence, over six feet tall, with intense dark eyes and a concerningly pale complexion. On his desk sat a cowbell, a pocketknife, a George Orwell reader and an antique ice-cream scoop. There was also a stack of business cards that read: “John A. White III, D.D.S. — Accidentist and Occidental Archaeologist.” “The label is a McGuffin. It’s just a tool to propel us into the next zone. There aren’t that many things left that haven’t already been done, especially with music. I’m interested in ideas that can shake us all up.”
White walked back to a room called the Vault, which is maintained at a constant 64 degrees. He pressed his thumb to a biometric scanner. The lock clicked, and he swung the door open to reveal floor-to-ceiling shelves containing the master recordings of nearly every song he’s ever been involved with. Unusually for a musician, White has maintained control of his own masters, granting him extraordinary artistic freedom as well as truckloads of money. “It’s good to finally have them in a nice sealed environment,” White said. I asked where they’d been before, and he laughed. “In a closet in my house. Ready to be set on fire.”
White said the building used to be a candy factory, but I had my doubts. He’s notoriously bendy with the truth — most famously his claim that his White Stripes bandmate, Meg White, was his sister, when in fact she was his wife. Considering the White Stripes named themselves for peppermint candies, the whole thing seemed a little neat. “That’s what they told me,” he insisted, not quite convincingly. I asked if I needed to worry about him embellishing details like that, and he cackled in delight. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
A few days later, White was sitting behind the wheel of his 500-horsepower black Mercedes. Howlin’ Wolf was on the stereo. He wore black sunglasses and a tight black T-shirt, and he drove fast, steering with one hand while ashing an Al Capone cigarillo with the other. “I quit smoking cigarettes like six years ago,” he explained, rolling through a stop sign. “These are just baby cigars. I don’t inhale.”
He pulled into the parking lot of United Record Pressing, the largest vinyl-record plant in the country. United has been pressing records since 1949. The first White Stripes single was made here in 1998, and now Third Man was its third-biggest customer. The label excels at vinyl novelties: glow-in-the-dark Halloween 45s; peach-scented albums; a “triple-decker” record featuring a 7-inch single sealed inside a 12-inch LP. (You needed a Swiss Army knife to get it out.) Third Man’s slogan is “Your Turntable’s Not Dead.”
White walked the factory floor, pausing now and then. There were massive gray bins full of rainbow-colored vinyl pellets (“like the flooring you’d see in your aquarium”), large extruders to melt and shape the raw vinyl into pucks, steel presses that employed 6,000 pounds of steam pressure to flatten the pucks into records. “It’s a really beautiful process,” White said. At the labeling station, an employee handed him a pressing of an old Robert Johnson LP that was being rereleased, and he weighed it in his hand. “That’s killer,” he said. “It’s not as heavy as mine, though. I’ve got the real one.”
White rehearsing for a Raconteurs show in Nashville in 2011. Photo by Jessica Dimmock/VII, for The New York Times
White calls LPs “the pinnacle of musical expression.” “I was talking to Robert Altman before he died,” he said, “and I asked him about an interview where he said that he would never switch to videotape, that he would always stay in film. He said: ‘I know what that is. It has a negative. It has a positive. With videotape or digital, I have no idea what’s going on.’ That’s how I feel about vinyl. The left wall is the left channel, the right wall is the right channel, and you’re just dragging that rock through the groove. Watching it spin, you get a real mechanical sense of music being reproduced. I think there’s a romance to that.”
White famously doesn’t own a cellphone, but he isn’t the Luddite he’s often made out to be. He has an iPod; he knows how to Skype. His friend Conan O’Brien says he’ll occasionally e-mail to say he laughed at a tweet. Yet there is a bit of curmudgeon to him. “This generation is so dead,” he said at one point. “You ask a kid, ‘What are you doing this Saturday?’ and they’ll be playing video games or watching cable, instead of building model cars or airplanes or doing something creative. Kids today never say, ‘Man, I’m really into remote-controlled steamboats.’ They never say that.”
White once wrote a song called “This Protector,” about rescuing traditions from the march of progress. In a way, that’s what Third Man is — 21st-century monks of Kells, defending the catacombs against the digital horde.
Back in the car, White played a song he recently produced for Tom Jones. “Seventy-one years old, and he just came in and murdered it,” White said. Then he told a story about the time he was in Transylvania, filming the movie “Cold Mountain” (he played a minstrel). Every morning on his way to the set, the driver would be listening to Tom Jones. Later he went to a local record store, and there were something like 60 Tom Jones records. No one could explain what the deal was, so White asked Jones about it. It turned out that everyone in Transylvania thought Tom Jones was a Gypsy. He insisted that he wasn’t, but they still didn’t believe him.
“What an incredible story,” White marveled, no doubt jealous of a narrative that brought together slippery notions of identity, misleading your audience, dubious Romanians. “They really thought he was a Gypsy, and he was hiding it. He didn’t think that was the answer, but it seemed to me like it was the answer. Even if it wasn’t,” he said, “I’d make it that.”
One day last summer, with the flowers in bloom, White was at home in Nashville having some work done. A few days earlier, he and Karen Elson, his supermodel wife, announced they were divorcing. They claimed they were having a party to celebrate — “a positive swing bang humdinger,” according to the news release. White said that the split was amicable, and that not much would change — but he was keeping the house, and there were a few things he wanted done. At the moment he was in the driveway, leaning up against his cream-colored 1960 Ford Thunderbird, talking to his head carpenter, a Texan named Cowboy, about making sure some cedar planks were being stained the proper shade of green.
White’s mansion is on seven hilly acres in southwestern Davidson County, just down the road from Hank Williams’s old house. There was a barn-red guesthouse out back, but the main house was almost all white — stately columns, a white porch swing and a white veranda straight out of “Gone With the Wind.” Only the front door and the two chimneys were red.
White led the way inside, past collections of Mexican dolls and two stuffed hyenas, into his den. The walls were covered in flocked-velvet wallpaper, and in the stairway hung a portrait of Claudette Colbert. On the floor were two small pairs of jellied sandals belonging to his daughter, Scarlett, and on the kitchen counter sat a red, white and blue toy accordion — it belonged to his son, Henry.
Henry, whom White calls Hank, would be 4 in a couple of months; Scarlett had just turned 5. “They’re little vaudeville kids,” White said. “They’ve been onstage for school plays and stuff, and they’re not nervous at all.” He’d already noticed some differences in their personalities. “You can see in Henry’s eyes that he really watches the creation of things,” he said. “And Scarlett is very much a producer — she likes to tell how it’s going to happen. We were messing around a couple of weeks ago, and she was like, ‘I’m hearing two pianos. . . . ’ ”
White said the kids had formed their own band, which they’d named Coke. “They’ve never had a Coke,” he said. “I think they just liked the syllable.” He opened his MacBook and pulled up an old video of Scarlett drumming along to the White Stripes’ version of “St. James Infirmary Blues,” keeping perfect time while White sang. “Check out the big finish,” he said as she hit the snare for the finale. “She’s 2 here.”
The kids were with Elson in New York. White said the couple would remain close. “I wouldn’t stay in a band if we weren’t moving forward and progressing,” he said. “It’s more like we’re best friends, pals, so we should be pals, and not pretend we’re something bigger.” He was wearing his wedding ring, a black diamond set in ivory, on his right hand.
White said he hated the limitations society imposed when it came to relationships. “I’ve always felt it’s ridiculous to say, of any of the females in my life: You’re my friend, you’re my wife, you’re my girlfriend, you’re my co-worker,” he said. “This is your box, and you’re not allowed to stray outside of it.” I told him it sounded as if monogamy might not be for him, and he laughed. “You think?” he said. “I gave that up a long time ago. Those rules don’t apply anymore.”
White led the way upstairs to the master bedroom, where a man in a Music City Masonry T-shirt was setting dropcloths around the fireplace. “Whoever lived here before built this ridiculous tan bedroom,” White said, spitting out the word “tan.” He was redoing it in green and black — what he termed “rustic art deco.” He was also installing microphones under the eaves outside his window. Thanks to some quirk of acoustics, he said, “I can’t hear the rain.” He wanted to pipe in the noise to speakers in his bedroom and listen to the rain while he fell asleep.
White headed back downstairs, stepping over a blue plastic wagon, and out to the backyard to a yellow-and-black brick building with a sign on the wall that read, “It Pays to Upholster.” “This is my workshop,” he said. There were brown burlap sacks draped over some chairs, and sewing and woodworking equipment scattered on the floor. There were also some tools for welding, which White said he was getting into through his friend Bob Dylan. “I’d never done it before, and he’d been doing it for a while, so he kind of gave me the lowdown,” he said. One day the two of them were sitting on White’s front porch, just enjoying the view, when Dylan turned to him and said, “You know, Jack — I could do something about that gate.” “That would be pretty cool,” White said, laughing. “I don’t know what kind of discount I’m going to get.”
White walked through the backyard and over to his recording studio. He said he’d never taken a journalist there before. “I can’t let you write about some of the things in it,” he cautioned, switching on the lights. (What those things were, he never said.) Inside, every inch of the place was red and white, from the acoustic tiles to the electrical cords. “This is from a South African TV studio in the ’70s,” he said, pointing to the mixing board. “The writing is all in Afrikaans.” Next to it was a large reel-to-reel machine stocked with tape.
White thinks of computer programs like Pro Tools as “cheating.” He records only in analog, never digital, and edits his tape with a razor blade. “It’s sort of like I can’t be proud of it unless I know we overcame some kind of struggle,” he said. “The funny thing is, even musicians and producers, my peers, don’t care. Like, ‘Wow, that’s great, Jack.’ Big deal.”
It’s easy to overlook amid the stylistic trappings, but White is a virtuoso — possibly the greatest guitarist of his generation. His best songs, like “Seven Nation Army,” are firmly rooted in the American folk vernacular, yet catchy and durable enough to be chanted in sports arenas worldwide. That he does it with such self-imposed constraints — for instance, his favorite guitar in the White Stripes was made of plastic and came from Montgomery Ward — makes it all the more impressive.
White was brought up Catholic, and he still feels an affinity for the martyrs and saints. He likes their devotion, the purity of their sacrifice — especially St. Sebastian, the patron saint of endurance, and St. Rita, the patron saint of the impossible. He also admired Simeon Stylites, a Christian ascetic in fifth-century Syria who spent almost 40 years living atop a huge stone pillar, despite frequent entreaties to come down and not a few doubts about his motives.
White seemed to relate. “People were saying, ‘You’re just doing this for show, you’re not really devoted, you’re crazy, you’re self-indulgent,’ ” he said. “So he came down and stood on the ground and said: ‘I’m down here. Now what? Am I proving to you that this is not what it’s about?’ ”
Then, White said, “he went right back up.”
White once said he has three dads: his biological father, God and Bob Dylan. Dylan was the first concert he ever saw — he says he had seat No. 666 — and he shares with his hero a love for manipulating and obscuring his own persona.
Some things we know. He was born John Anthony Gillis, the 10th of 10 children, and — in a rare instance of mythology dovetailing with reality — the seventh son. His father, Gorman, was a maintenance man at the archdiocese of Detroit; his mother, Teresa, was the cardinal’s secretary. They named him after John the Baptist.
The Gillises lived in southwestern Detroit, in a neighborhood known as Mexicantown, where they were one of the last middle-class white families who hadn’t fled to the suburbs. He remembers looking out his bedroom window one night and seeing an abandoned car on fire in the street. “I suspect it was a neighbor who’d gotten sick of them not picking it up,” he said. “So he waited until the middle of the night and set it on fire — like, Now they’ll pick it up.”
White says he was “tacked on” — his next-oldest sibling was 7 when he was born, and the oldest was 21. He says his parents were “senior citizens” and “pretty tired by that point,” so a lot of the parenting was left to his brothers and sisters. “It could be brutal at times,” he said of growing up with nine older siblings. “I don’t recall hearing the words ‘good job’ very often.” These days, except for White, all the Gillis kids are in Michigan. One is a child psychiatrist, one is a postal inspector, one is a pastry chef. One plays keyboards in an oldies cover band. His brother Leo Gillis is a Buckminster Fuller enthusiast who for a while lived in Detroit’s only geodesic dome.
The upside to being the youngest was a lot of hand-me-down musical instruments. At 11, White taught himself to drum on a kit he found in the attic; later he taught himself guitar and piano so he could accompany himself on recordings. At one point he moved his bed out of his room to clear space for a drum kit and slept instead on a piece of foam.
Near the end of high school, he met a girl from Grosse Pointe named Megan White. They started dating, and by the fall of 1996, when he was 21, they were married. White took his wife’s name and taught her to play the drums. He has said that she didn’t really want to, that he had to push her. But he had an idea for a two-piece blues band, and he thought her untutored style would be perfect.
White says he had the concept for the White Stripes from the beginning: the two-piece, the brother and sister, the red and white. The point was to be as cartoonish as possible, to distract from the fact that they were white kids playing the blues. Ben Blackwell, a nephew of White’s who was also the band’s roadie and their unofficial historian, casts doubt on this official story: he says they also considered the names Bazooka and Soda Powder, and distinctly remembers White inviting a bass player to join at one point. But it’s clear that White was always fiercely devoted to his vision. At one point, the band was close to signing with a tiny Chicago label called Bobsled, but the deal fell apart when the label insisted on putting its green logo on the CD spine. “Red, white and black was a sacred part of what Meg and I were doing,” White told me. “For a label not to understand that meant there were a lot of other things they wouldn’t understand.”
Jack White (right) and his tour manager, Lalo Medina, in the musicians’
apartments at the United Record Pressing plant in Nashville. Photo by Jessica Dimmock/VII, for The New York Times
Meg was the group’s virtually silent partner, a whiskey-drinking, Camel Light-smoking sphinx. Jack would talk over her in interviews and explain how shy she was. There’s a telling scene in the 2009 documentary “Under Great White Northern Lights” in which he badgers her for not speaking up. Loretta Lynn, for whom White produced a Grammy-winning comeback album, says that the first time she met Meg, she worried that something might be wrong. “She didn’t talk,” Lynn told me. “She just kind of gazed into space. She didn’t seem like she wanted to be there.”
In the summer of 2007, when they were at the peak of their fame, the White Stripes staged a Canadian tour featuring a string of unusual side gigs. They played a bowling alley in Saskatoon, a flour mill in Ontario, a senior citizens’ center in Nunavut. In Newfoundland, they played a show that lasted for a single note. (It was an E. The crowd chanted, “One more note!”) Afterward they had a week of U.S. dates scheduled, followed by a break and more shows in the fall. But before their last show, in Southaven, Miss., Meg came to a decision.
“I mentioned this to Jack years later, and he didn’t know anything about it,” Blackwell told me. “But Meg came up to me and said, ‘This is the last White Stripes show.’ I said, ‘You mean, like, of the tour.’ And she was like: ‘No. I think this is the last show, period.’ ”
She was right. The band canceled the rest of the fall dates, citing Meg’s “acute anxiety.” They reunited briefly in 2009, as a favor to O’Brien on his last episode of “Late Night,” performing their song “We’re Going to Be Friends,” with Meg on guitar. (O’Brien remembers watching White teach her the chords during rehearsal.) But they never played in public again, and in February of last year, they released a statement saying they were through.
“Some people can live their whole lives in limbo,” White told me one morning at his favorite East Nashville cafe. “I’d rather cut the lifeline so we can move on with our lives. There came a point where I said, ‘If we’re not doing this, we need to put an end to it right now.’ And that’s what she wanted to do.”
I asked him why. “You’d have to ask her,” he said. “I don’t know what her reasons are. Having a conversation with Meg, you don’t really get any answers. I’m lucky that girl ever got onstage, so I’ll take what I can get.”
There was always something slightly condescending in the way White talked about Meg, praising her drumming the way you might encourage a promising 5-year-old. He may have had a point — The Onion once ran a headline that read, “Meg White Drum Solo Maintains Steady Beat for 23 Minutes” — but it also seemed somewhat passive-aggressive, especially after she’d been drumming for a decade.
But White insisted he was never controlling — if anything, it was the other way around. “It was more like groveling,” he said. “Even when we were touring 200 days a year, I would have said: Can we do this? Can we do that?” He added: “Meg completely controlled the White Stripes. She’s the most stubborn person I’ve ever met, and you don’t even get to know the reasons.” (Reached through her husband, the musician Jackson Smith, Meg White declined to comment for this article.)
White said if it were up to him, the band would still be together. “I’d make a White Stripes record right now. I’d be in the White Stripes for the rest of my life. That band is the most challenging, important, fulfilling thing ever to happen to me. I wish it was still here. It’s something I really, really miss.”
From the White Stripes to the Dead Weather to his albums with Lynn and Elson, most of White’s success has come working with women. He said he liked their lack of ego. “When you’re in a room of five guys, it becomes a bunch of gorillas in a cage,” he said. “Girls don’t have those hang-ups.”
Then he started telling a long, rambling story about a dream he had the night before, involving a dead body, a basement and a bunch of kids in 1920s newsboy caps. Eventually he came to the crux of the dream, when he came across a beautiful woman. “She was smiling at me the whole time like she knew I was attracted to her,” he said. “And then in front of my eyes she started rising up, turning into this 30-foot giant. As she got bigger, she also got blurrier, like she was going out of focus. And that’s when I woke up.
“This metaphor was haunting me all morning,” White said. “Not only was she becoming larger and more important than me, and able to crush me or destroy me — but at the same time she’s going out of focus, and I’m less in touch with how to connect with her. It’s really interesting.”
I asked him what he made of it. “I don’t know,” he said, seeming perplexed. “I don’t know who that girl is. Maybe she’s all girls.”
At the end of January — almost a year to the day after the White Stripes’ breakup — White announced he was putting out a solo record. He’d been avoiding doing one, mainly because it was what everyone expected. But when the rapper RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan failed to show up for a session at his house last summer, White decided he might as well work on some of his own songs. The album, “Blunderbuss,” grew from there.
One morning at the end of February, White picked me up in the Mercedes. He’d just come from the house, where he and Elson were tending to Henry, who was sick with whooping cough. White stayed up all night working on artwork for the record, and his eyes were red and sleepy.
We headed for Third Man, where White was squeezing in a quick rehearsal. He’d assembled two new bands for the record — one of them all women, the other all men. He was taking both on tour, but only one would perform each night. He wasn’t announcing which until the morning of the show — even the bands would be surprised. He’d barred them from listening to each other, because he wanted them to evolve separately.
He also had a new color palette: blue. There were blue P.A. cabinets, a blue drum kit, blue guitars. He was having some new blue suits made for himself, and a new blue logo. He said the band, meanwhile, could wear whatever they wanted — as long as it was blue.
White plugged in his guitar, and the band launched into a muscular version of the White Stripes’ “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground.” His new drummer, Carla Azar, vigorously pounded away. White looked stoked.
White said he never would have done a solo album if the White Stripes were still together. “I could have made ‘Revolver,’ and people would still say, ‘Where’s Meg?’ ” I asked if it felt weird to play the songs without her. “Maybe it should,” he said. “But it doesn’t. I wrote the White Stripes songs myself. It always felt like the two of us covering my songs.”
White has long organized his albums around a central theme: cowardice, happiness, “the death of the sweetheart.” He said if he had to choose one for “Blunderbuss,” it would be death. “I was writing the liner notes the other day, and it seemed like it had a lot to do with that,” he said. “For some reason, that was overwhelming throughout the lyric writing.”
Last April, White’s oldest brother, Ray Gillis, died unexpectedly at age 54. “Blunderbuss” is dedicated to him. “He was a really interesting guy,” White said. “He was a Redemptorist brother, a priest, for a while. After that he became a private investigator and opened a spy shop in Detroit. We spent a lot of time together growing up. He’d take me to the movies — he was the only person who took me to the movies, as a matter of fact. All the movies that I’ve been involved in since, I always brought him with me to the opening, to pay him back.”
White, meanwhile, said he hadn’t thought about his own death much, but as always, he was mindful of his myth. “I told my wife: If we’re on a road trip, and we pull into a Kentucky Fried Chicken, and I die in the car — can you please drive across the street to the hardware store?”
The next week White was giving a birthday party for Third Man, another swing bang humdinger. There would be cocktails, party favors (a limited-edition LP that played at 3 R.P.M.), a yellow-and-black candy buffet. He had recently bought the building next door and was in the process of expanding. Two days later he was starting his tour, and then he was eager to make another record. He also wanted to open a shop in Nashville specializing in high-end gentlemen’s hats. “I would sleep better at night,” he said, “knowing this town had a store like that.”
But of everything, he seemed most excited about those rain microphones. He’d finally got around to installing them, and they were already paying off. “A few weeks ago, the kids were in my bed,” he said. “Six in the morning — it was still dark. I said to Scarlett, ‘Is it raining?’ and she said no — which goes to show you really can’t tell. She hadn’t seen the trick yet. So I said: ‘Let me see. Let me turn the rain on.’
“And it wasn’t just sprinkling — it was storming. And she said the greatest thing — she said, ‘Can you turn the sun up, too?’ ”
White laughed. “I had a big choice there. Should I keep letting her think I have control of the weather? You want your children to think you can control the weather if you need to. At this point,” he said, “she still thinks I control the rain.”
We are damn stoked to be working with such a station as KNCY Country in Nebraska City, Nebraska and especially their morning DJ and Program Director Patrick Monaghan. In a time when its hard as hell to cut through the clutter, getting the bands we work with to be heard on the airwaves is an uphill battle. Progressive stations such as KNCY are putting artists such as Hellbound Glory and Jay Berndt in steady rotation and proving that great Country and Americana doesn't have to come from Nashville. Thanks to Patrick for believing in the music and playing great acts that are helping to shape the airwaves.
Patrick Monaghan, morning DJ and Program Director of KNCY Country, Nebraska City, NE
If you are a college station, mainstream radio, blogger or podcaster, we are glad to get our music out to ya in any format needed for promotion. The bands we work with are breaking through the clutter, but we need the fans help, to open many more doors which will fill clubs far and wide. Become active and help to promote quality music. Get in touch and we would dig talking with those interested in helping out with our upcoming street team. Whether it be bands in the punk or country genre, Rusty Knuckles is about true grit, get in touch.
Word is circulating online about the shitty way in which Imelda May kicked off The Ettesfrom their US tour that was supposed to start in Boston. If you read the interview in which the Ettes are talking about telling Imelda "To watch her back", it is painfully clear that the band is speaking on some stage competition to help make a better show for both bands.
Who knows whether it was Imelda May herself or the road manager, but they did kick off the Ettes from a tour in which they could have received great exposure. We have posted several times how much we enjoy Imelda May's music, so hopefully with the bad PR her camp can realize their actions look quite shallow and vain. In our minds a high tide floats all boats. Imelda May should ask them back out on the road and even maybe a European tour to offer an apology. Forget talking trash, raise the bar and do it the right way. This goes out to the Ettes and oh yeah, every band better watch their backs as all of the bands we work with are stalking the stages as we speak!
The Ettes, from left, are bassist Jem, drummer Poni and Coco.
PAT HEALY/METRO
BOSTON
Published: September 28, 2011 4:39 p.m.
Last modified: September 28, 2011 4:44 p.m.
Lindsay Hames has always been weird. At least that’s what her
family says. According to the singer and guitarist for the Ettes, who
goes by the stage name of Coco, her father saw her band’s show and found
it in keeping with her character.
“My dad came to see us when we played Asheville, and my dad was like:
‘You’ve always been this way. You are so weird,’” she reveals with an
almost mischievous giggle. “In our house, I painted all the walls black
when I was like 10, and I’d always have the shades down like some crazy
cave den.”
Whether she realizes it or not, Coco has actually made a pretty accurate
metaphor for the most recent Ettes album, “Wicked Will.” And just like
“some crazy cave den,” it is dark and creepy, yet there is a playful
energy that might turn into a pillow fight at any moment.
“I like creeping people out, and I like being creeped out a little bit,” says Coco.
Many of the songs on “Wicked Will” have themes of sizing up opponents.
Hames jokes that she doesn’t start fights, but she ends them. “I like
all art forms when it has an air of menace about it,” she says.
Chips fall where they May
The Ettes are currently opening up for Irish rockabilly revivalist
Imelda May. Coco says that May is not necessarily an opponent that she
is sizing up; but still, she had better watch her back!
“We kind of rock the same, whether it’s a tiny club or a massive
stadium, we’re just polite about time,”says Coco. “We’re really good
about that, we just might be better than you, that’s all. We might blow
you off the stage and play a show that you can’t possibly come up
against, but we’ll do it in the time frame.”
The Ettes (and who the fuck is Imelda May anyway?!)
I have heard of The Ettes before. I own a couple of their albums and
enjoy listening to them. I have however never heard of Imelda May. Or I
hadn't until last night anyway... It was my fourth and last shift of
the week at the bar, and I was feeling a little tired and fragile, just
chatting away to my friend in an otherwise empty bar, when in walked
three lovely people who proceeded to tell me the story of their night.
They happened to be The Ettes, and instead of performing in Boston as
they were supposed to that night, were having a drink at 200 Orchard. I
mean, I love my work, and love working in one of my favourite bars in
NYC, but I don't think I would have chosen drinking there instead of
playing a gig... So after serving them few drinks and introducing
ourselves, it appears that The Ettes had been asked to support Imelda
May on her US tour. Just fresh off another tour, they packed up there
gear, rented a van and set out on the road again. Along the way from
Nashville to Boston, a small interview was posted HERE.
A little tongue in cheek, a little playful, but nothing harmful at
all... But apparently Imelda May didn't appreciate it and kicked them
off the tour. Yes, kicked them off the tour while they were already in Connecticut, having driven all the way from Nashville that day for the first gig.
Coco
(Lindsay) explained that the journalist had taken her out of context,
and basically changed her words so they sounded like she was telling
Imelda to watch her back, but even so, the article just sounds playful!
Was it really worth actually kicking them off her tour? What was she
worried about? That they would actually be better than her and literally
blow her off the stage?! Who gets scared of a little fun competition?
Don't you actually want to have a good support band to warm up the crowd
before you go on? And also, does she Google herself everyday and
scrutinize every article that says something about her? Because this
tiny article would never have been noticed if she didn't! And how many
people actually bought tickets for the shows because they wanted to see
The Ettes? What are Imelda's team going to do about that?!
Sometimes
I just wonder what happened to rock n roll. Who cares about image? It's
all about the bloody music... Or apparently it isn't for some
musicians...
To me it all sounds like a big pile of terrible PR
BS on the part of Imelda May and her team. Having had the pleasure to
actually meet the members of The Ettes, and talk to them for a few
hours, I found that they are the most lovely, down to earth and
interesting people, and obviously never wanted to hurt anyone's
feelings. They just wanted to play their music for their fans.
I
just had to write about this as it made me so angry last night. I hope
The Ettes get back to Nashville safely, are able to get some of the
money they spent on all of this back, and are able to forget all of this
crap. They didn't deserve this to happen to them. Even the journalist
who wrote the article is mortified as he never meant it to be taken that
way... I guess some "stars" think way too highly of themselves.
I still don't know who Imelda May is and really don't have any need to find out.
I
hope they make it back to NYC soon - they were an absolute pleasure to
meet and talk to, and made me want to visit Nashville even more now!
We own quite a few posters in our ongoing poster collection from Hatch Show Print and have still yet to walk into their doors. After numerous trips to Nashville and always getting caught up doing other things their magic is still on our minds. You can guess that we are planning on having a custom poster done by them at some point for sure. Now, which band should it be?
If you haven't heard of Hatch Show Print, we know that you have seen them. Dig into their work as it is as iconic as the city of Nashville is to country music.
