Bestowing the title "World's Most Interesting Man" upon any mortal should not be done without heavy thought. The poseur we regularly see on the commercials is just an elaborate hoax to make you think these tales could never be lived, but we beg to differ. Below is one amazing story on an adventurer that knew no boundaries. For his efforts, bravery and manhood, we should all take up glass or bottle of our finest liquor cabinet delight and salute one of the great ones. Rest in peace John Fairfax. Read the original article on the New York Times
John Fairfax is a hero to men everywhere. After fighting everything from pirates to jaguars, he is a true demi god
"He crossed the Atlantic because it was there, and the Pacific because it was also there.
He made both crossings in a rowboat because it, too, was there, and because the lure of sea, spray and sinew, and the history-making chance to traverse two oceans without steam or sail, proved irresistible.
In 1969, after six months alone on the Atlantic battling storms, sharks and encroaching madness, John Fairfax, who died this month at 74, became the first lone oarsman in recorded history to traverse any ocean.
In 1972, he and his girlfriend, Sylvia Cook, sharing a boat, became the first people to row across the Pacific, a yearlong ordeal during which their craft was thought lost. (The couple survived the voyage, and so, for quite some time, did their romance.)
Both journeys were the subject of fevered coverage by the news media. They inspired two memoirs by Mr. Fairfax, “Britannia: Rowing Alone Across the Atlantic” and, with Ms. Cook, “Oars Across the Pacific,” both published in the early 1970s.
The world is small in his mind so he rowed across two oceans
Mr. Fairfax died on Feb. 8 at his home in Henderson, Nev., near Las Vegas. The apparent cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Tiffany. A professional astrologer, she is his only immediate survivor. Ms. Cook, who became an upholsterer and spent the rest of her life quietly on dry land (though she remained a close friend of Mr. Fairfax), lives outside London.
For all its bravura, Mr. Fairfax’s seafaring almost pales beside his earlier ventures. Footloose and handsome, he was a flesh-and-blood character out of Graham Greene, with more than a dash of Hemingway and Ian Fleming shaken in.
At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle.
At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé, which lately included a career as a professional gambler.
Mr. Fairfax was among the last avatars of a centuries-old figure: the lone-wolf explorer, whose exploits are conceived to satisfy few but himself. His was a solitary, contemplative art that has been all but lost amid the contrived derring-do of adventure-based reality television.
The only child of an English father and a Bulgarian mother, John Fairfax was born on May 21, 1937, in Rome, where his mother had family; he scarcely knew his father, who worked in London for the BBC.
Seeking to give her son structure, his mother enrolled him at 6 in the Italian Boy Scouts. It was there, Mr. Fairfax said, that he acquired his love of nature — and his determination to bend it to his will.
On a camping trip when he was 9, John concluded a fight with another boy by filching the scoutmaster’s pistol and shooting up the campsite. No one was injured, but his scouting career was over.
Jaguars nor Caiman's pose a threat to the manhood of John Fairfax
His parents’ marriage dissolved soon afterward, and he moved with his mother to Buenos Aires. A bright, impassioned dreamer, he devoured tales of adventure, including an account of the voyage of Frank Samuelsen and George Harbo, Norwegians who in 1896 were the first to row across the Atlantic. John vowed that he would one day make the crossing alone.
At 13, in thrall to Tarzan, he ran away from home to live in the jungle. He survived there as a trapper with the aid of local peasants, returning to town periodically to sell the jaguar and ocelot skins he had collected.
He later studied literature and philosophy at a university in Buenos Aires and at 20, despondent over a failed love affair, resolved to kill himself by letting a jaguar attack him. When the planned confrontation ensued, however, reason prevailed — as did the gun he had with him.
In Panama, he met a pirate, applied for a job as a pirate’s apprentice and was taken on. He spent three years smuggling guns, liquor and cigarettes around the world, becoming captain of one of his boss’s boats, work that gave him superb navigational skills.
When piracy lost its luster, he gave his boss the slip and fetched up in 1960s London, at loose ends. He revived his boyhood dream of crossing the ocean and, since his pirate duties had entailed no rowing, he began to train.
He rowed daily on the Serpentine, the lake in Hyde Park. Barely more than half a mile long, it was about one eight-thousandth the width of the Atlantic, but it would do.
On Jan. 20, 1969, Mr. Fairfax pushed off from the Canary Islands, bound for Florida. His 22-foot craft, the Britannia, was the Rolls-Royce of rowboats: made of mahogany, it had been created for the voyage by the eminent English boat designer Uffa Fox. It was self-righting, self-bailing and partly covered.
John Fairfax would surely give Blackbeard a run for his treasure chest
Aboard were provisions (Spam, oatmeal, brandy); water; and a temperamental radio. There was no support boat and no chase plane — only Mr. Fairfax and the sea. He caught fish and sometimes boarded passing ships to cadge food, water and showers.
The long, empty days spawned a temporary madness. Desperate for female company, he talked ardently to the planet Venus.
On July 19, 1969 — Day 180 — Mr. Fairfax, tanned, tired and about 20 pounds lighter, made landfall at Hollywood, Fla. “This is bloody stupid,” he said as he came ashore. Two years later, he was at it again.
This time Ms. Cook, a secretary and competitive rower he had met in London, was aboard. Their new boat, the Britannia II, also a Fox design, was about 36 feet long, large enough for two though still little more than a toy on the Pacific.
“He’s always been a gambler,” Ms. Cook, 73, recalled by telephone on Wednesday. “He was going to the casino every night when I met him — it was craps in those days. And at the end of the day, adventures are a kind of gamble, aren’t they?”
Their crossing, from San Francisco to Hayman Island, Australia, took 361 days — from April 26, 1971, to April 22, 1972 — and was an 8,000-mile cornucopia of disaster.
“It was very, very rough, and our rudder got snapped clean off,” Ms. Cook said. “We were frequently swamped, and at night you didn’t know if the boat was the right way up or the wrong way up.”
"Are you listenin' to me Paulie? This John Fairfax is a real card playa. Yeah, Ton' I will keep an eye out."
Mr. Fairfax was bitten on the arm by a shark, and he and Ms. Cook became trapped in a cyclone, lashing themselves to the boat until it subsided. Unreachable by radio for a time, they were presumed lost.
For all that, Ms. Cook said, there were abundant pleasures. “The nights not too hot, sunny days when you could just row,” she recalled. “You just hear the clunking of the rowlocks, and you stop rowing and hear little splashings of the sea.”
Mr. Fairfax was often asked why he chose a rowboat to beard two roiling oceans. “Almost anybody with a little bit of know-how can sail,” he said in a profile on the Web site of the Ocean Rowing Society International, which adjudicates ocean rowing records. “I’m after a battle with nature, primitive and raw.”
Such battles are a young man’s game. With Ms. Cook, Mr. Fairfax went back to the Pacific in the mid-’70s to try to salvage a cache of lead ingots from a downed ship they had spied on their crossing. But the plan proved unworkable, and he never returned to sea.
In recent years, Mr. Fairfax made his living playing baccarat, the card game also favored by James Bond.
Baccarat is equal parts skill and chance. It lets the player wield consummate mastery while consigning him simultaneously to the caprices of fate."
A plethora of folks, from the outliers, to the fans and to the music critics are voicing strong opinions about Billboard's decision to shake up the rating system, for which it holds the keys to the kingdom. As far as we are concerned, we totally get that things need to morph and change over time. But what we are trying to understand is this; with such a dramatic shift taking place, why not add even more genre categories due to the broadening spectrum of music being created to reflect all the ways music is being streamed and heard. This is clearly not a perfect system and will hopefully get better over time. As a label that champions the underbelly of grit character within Rock and Country, we hope to see these potential genre categories open up a bit more and have more parameters such as adding Roots, EDM, Metal, Punk, Jam, etc. etc. Ticket sales, streaming music, video plays and social media could all help to add to the way data flows into these charts to be more characteristic of the genres as a whole. Then again for our personal enjoyment of music, we could give a rat's ass about all of these ratings systems. Categorization leads to homogenization and that just doesn't sit well with us. Music, art, design, craftsmanship and truly being an individual, are about striking new ground and following your own path. Let Civ be your guide on this topic and listen to these lyrics of their song, Choices Made. Link to original article on NyTimes.com
Or check more thoughts on this from Spin.com "Three weeks ago, the editors at Billboard, who for decades have defined what makes an American hit, shook up the song charts for various genres. The magazine started counting digital sales and online streams along with radio airplay in its tallies for most major formats. It also created two new charts using the same criteria, breaking out rap songs in one and R&B songs in a second. The results have given stars with a pop-oriented sound and broad crossover appeal an advantage over other artists, upsetting and puzzling some music fans. Take Psy, the pudgy South Korean pop star with the infectious dance moves whose video “Gangnam Style” went viral on the Internet. Since the new rules took effect, “Gangnam Style” has been the No. 1 song on the new Rap Songs chart for the last three weeks, even though Psy does not rap on the track and most American hip-hop radio stations have yet to embrace him as a bona fide rapper.
Still going goo goo for Gangnam Style? - Photo by Getty Images
On the Hot Country Songs chart, Taylor Swift’s pop single “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” has held the No. 1 position for three weeks, even as many country stations have rejected it, and Rihanna’s pop hit “Diamonds“ has remained atop the Hot R&B-Hip Hop Songs chart, causing dismay among R&B purists. Bill Werde, Billboard’s editorial director, said the shake-up was necessary to reflect changes in the way people consume music these days. There was a time when radio programmers — and the record labels who lobbied them — largely defined the charts, using surveys of their listeners and their gut instincts to select hits. Now the Internet gives fans a greater say, as people buy music from online stores, stream it through services like Spotify or listen to it on video sites like YouTube and Vevo.
“Three weeks ago, the main genre charts only reflected FM radio play,” Mr. Werde said. “Every fan out there in the world knows and everyone in the music business knows that is not the business we are in anymore, that a stream on Rhapsody or Spotify, or a download at iTunes or Amazon — all these different things — are a meaningful part of the fan experience. And to have genre charts that don’t reflect that? I can’t believe anyone would be arguing for that.” Still, some people did. The changes caused a backlash on Twitter and other online forums from some purists among hip-hop, country and R&B fans. A headline on one commentator’s blog was “Billboard Chart Changes — R.I.P. R&B Music.” The Web site Saving Country Music lamented that “these new rules could cause the largest wholesale power shift to superstars that music has ever seen.” Psy’s climb up the rap chart was also criticized. “Trust me when I tell you hip-hop does not consider Psy rap,” said Ebro Darden, the program director at Hot 97 (WQHT, 97.1 FM) the leading hip-hop station in New York. “Billboard has pull, but they cannot make people who live hip-hop believe Psy is rap.” Most of the criticism, however, has come from fan groups with narrow interests. Carrie Underwood fans were furious that her song “Blown Away” was blocked from No. 1 by Ms. Swift’s pop tune, even though Ms. Underwood’s track is being played far more on country radio stations.
Some R&B and hip-hop fans were dismayed that Rihanna’s song jumped abruptly to No. 1 from No. 66, and that it has remained at the top of the chart ever since. Fans of R&B singer Brandy were particularly incensed, because her song “Put It Down,” featuring Chris Brown, which had been in the Top 10, dropped like a stone after the rule change, even though it remains a favorite on urban radio stations. An online petition was started to persuade Billboard to undo the changes and has gathered 625 signatures, a small number for an Internet-based campaign. Mr. Werde characterizes the detractors as a “vocal minority” and has stood firm in the face of the criticism, arguing in columns and online discussions that the definition of a hit has changed and Billboard must keep up with the times.
Although we don't know her music, when we hear about Rihanna, we pay attention for some good reasons
Similar changes were made a few months ago to the Hot 100 song chart, the main chart that measures popularity across genres, and they have been widely accepted by the industry. Some critics have said there is a subtle price to pay for the new rules. For starters, it becomes harder for artists of a traditional bent, or whose work lacks crossover appeal, to attain a No. 1 hit in their genre.
Billboard made one other change to its methodology that rewards crossover hits. Previously, the magazine only counted airplay on country stations for the country chart, and spins on R&B stations for the R&B chart, and so on. Now it is counting all the plays a song receives on 1,200 stations across genres. Kyle Coroneos, who writes a blog for the Saving Country Music site, said Billboard’s decision to count the airplay a country song gets on other formats is important. This means that traditional country artists, whose songs are played only on country stations, will be pushed down deeper into the charts, while pop-oriented stars, like Ms. Swift or Lady Antebellum, crowd the Top 10. Labels in turn are likely to encourage artists to make country records with a pop flavor, he said.
“It erodes the autonomy of the country charts in general,” he said. “I have a theory all the genres of music are coagulating into one big monogenre and this emphasizes that.”
Kyle Bylin, an analyst for Live Nation Labs, a blog about technology and music, said that the new rules also mean artists who enjoy a high volume of online sales or streams can remain at the top of the charts for longer periods, even after radio programmers have taken their songs out of heavy rotation. What’s more, the emphasis on streaming and sales of digital tracks makes it easier for an act with a blockbuster album to dominate a genre chart. One example is Mumford & Sons, the folk-rock group from Britain. Their album “Babel” has sold more than 900,000 copies since it was released a month ago, most of them digital, and it has also broken records for streaming on Spotify.
The first single from the album, “I Will Wait,” has remained in the Top 10 of the rock songs chart all month, mostly on the strength of airplay on alternative rock stations. But when the rule change came, seven more songs from “Babel,” buoyed by streaming on Spotify and digital sales, entered the Top 20 on the rock chart. At the same time, Fun.’s “Some Nights,” which had been sliding down the chart but was still selling well online, surged back to the No. 1 slot and has stayed there. Mr. Werde acknowledged that the new rules may make it harder for artists with little cross-genre appeal to get a No. 1 song, but the new rules also provide a “clearer reflection of what’s actually being consumed in the music space.” Modern charts need to take in more than radio to measure a song’s popularity, he said, and Billboard has plans to go further, folding data from YouTube and Vevo into its charts as well. “A hit doesn’t just look like one thing anymore,” he wrote in a recent column answering critics."
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.”
