Third Man Records Slated to Finally Open Vinyl Pressing Plant in Detroit

Another giant leap for vinyl, courtesy of Jack White.

Back in November 2015, word went out that Third Man Records would open a vinyl pressing plant in label boss Jack White’s adopted hometown of Detroit. Just over a year later, the label has released a video teasing its imminent opening.

The Mind Of A Mad Collector Is A Terrible Thing To Taste

The mind of a mad collector is a terrible thing to taste. Or wait a minute, maybe we are just mixing up a new show name and an old Ministry album. Either way we saw this post and it got us thinking about vinyl albums and albums to which we might listen to just shortly.

Check out the original post on Pitchfork

"As shown in Jack White's recent statement on his Record Store Day Ambassador position, his enthusiasm for spreading truth about vinyl knows no bounds. On Thursday, White appeared on the brand new VH1 show "For What It's Worth", discussing the "Triple Decker Record" format he invented in 2010. (The 12" has got a hidden 7" single inside; you must crack the 12" to hear the 7".)

Set at Third Man Records' Nashville headquarters, this was the debut episode of the show, which is hosted by Dell'Abate and Jon Hein (both from "The Howard Stern Show") and explores the value of memorabilia and "the mind of 'The Collector'."

Check out the full episode, and watch Jack White's 2010 clip explaining the Triple Deck format:"

For What It's Worth
Get More: Jack White, For What It's Worth

Ambassador Jack White Enlightens Us About Vinyl Albums For Record Store Day

JACK WHITE: RECORD STORE DAY 2013 AMBASSADOR from Record Store Day on Vimeo.

RecordStoreDay.com

"Years ago someone told me that 1,200 high school kids were given a survey. A question was posed to them: Have you ever been to a stand-alone record shop? The number of kids that answered "yes" was... zero.

Zero? How could that be possible? Then I got realistic and thought to myself, "Can you blame them?" How can record shops (or any shop for that matter) compete with Netflix, TiVo, video games that take months to complete, cable, texting, the Internet, etc. etc? Getting out of your chair at home to experience something in the real world has started to become a rare occurrence, and to a lot of people, an unnecessary one. Why go to a bookstore and get a real book? You can just download it. Why talk to other human beings, discuss different authors, writing styles and influences? Just click your mouse. Well here's what they'll someday learn if they have a soul; there's no romance in a mouse click. There's no beauty in sitting for hours playing video games (anyone proud of that stop reading now and post your opinion in the nearest forum). The screen of an iPhone is convenient, but it’s no comparison to a 70mm showing of a film in a gorgeous theater. The Internet is two-dimensional…helpful and entertaining, but no replacement for face-to-face interaction with a human being. But we all know all of that, right? Well, do we? Maybe we know all that, but so what?

Let's wake each other up.

The world hasn't stopped moving. Out there, people are still talking to each other face-to-face, exchanging ideas and turning each other on. Art houses are showing films, people are drinking coffee and telling tall tales, women and men are confusing each other and record stores are selling discs full of soul that you haven’t felt yet. So why do we choose to hide in our caves and settle for replication? We know better. We should at least. We need to re-educate ourselves about human interaction and the difference between downloading a track on a computer and talking to other people in person and getting turned onto music that you can hold in your hands and share with others. The size, shape, smell, texture and sound of a vinyl record; how do you explain to that teenager who doesn't know that it's a more beautiful musical experience than a mouse click? You get up off your ass, you grab them by the arm and you take them there. You put the record in their hands. You make them drop the needle on the platter. Then they'll know.

Let's wake each other up.

As Record Store Day Ambassador of 2013 I’m proud to help in any way I can to invigorate whoever will listen with the idea that there is beauty and romance in the act of visiting a record shop and getting turned on to something new that could change the way they look at the world, other people, art, and ultimately, themselves.

Let's wake each other up."

Your Turntable Is Not Dead, It Just Craves New Vinyl

In 2013 we will have quite a few new albums coming out on vinyl records. There will be 7" records, 12" records and damn if there won't be some amazing tracks as part of those releases. One important person in the vinyl record resurgence is the one and only Jack White. Third Man Records is now one of the biggest vinyl sellers in the world and below is a really cool write up from Ben Blackwell who heads up the vinyl production within Third Man Records.

Check out original post on Collector's Weekly

Jack White, musican, business man and vinyl record champion for the music fans

"When the White Stripes got signed, Jack White created Third Man Records as an insurance policy. With the White Stripes and, later on, Whirlwind Heat and the Raconteurs, the bands only licensed their music to record companies—the labels didn’t really own it. So in case things went sour, Third Man was a way for Jack and the bands to be able to maintain ownership of their masters and their records.

You hear so many stories about that damning phrase, “in perpetuity,” on contracts. Jack was savvy: he didn’t just jump at the first offer he got. He dictated his own terms and got exactly what he wanted.

Come 2008, the White Stripes’ original deal with V2 Records in North America had expired. They signed for “Icky Thump” with Warner Bros., and Warner Bros. also took on the manufacturing of the White Stripes’ CD back catalog. But the band retained the vinyl rights.

The main impetus for starting Third Man Records in 2009 was getting these White Stripes records—their back catalog—back into print on vinyl. In between the germination of that idea and the actual opening of Third Man, The Dead Weather formed and recorded an album, which redirected us for the first year or so. But now we’re back on point, working on these White Stripes reissues.

Collectors Weekly: What kind of facilities does Third Man Records have?

Blackwell: The store itself is fairly small, maybe about 15 feet by 15 feet, maybe a little bigger. We’ve got a little hallway that leads back to our offices. The offices aren’t open to the public, but the hallway is lined with a display of gold and platinum record awards. Mainly two to three people oversee the store, with a fair amount of help from everyone else.

On June 10, 2010, late-night host Conan O'Brien and the Legally Prohibited Band played a set at Third Man Records. The live vinyl LP features Jack White joining in on Eddie Cochran’s "20 Flight Rock."

The store is in Nashville because that’s where Jack White lives. He’s very hands-on, overseeing everything from artwork to listening to test pressings. When he’s not on tour, he’s here every day, partaking in the running of the label.

Almost all of our releases have been recorded at Jack’s recording studio, which is at a different location than the store and offices. We’ve also done a couple reissues, which obviously weren’t recorded there.

In terms of what we have here at our offices, I think our biggest asset is our performance room, which is called the Blue Room. The covers of the 45s we’ve done from our so-called “Blue Series” were all shot in that room—each has a vivid blue background behind the artist’s portrait.

That’s really the foundation of the building. It’s in the back and holds approximately 300 people. It’s where The Dead Weather played their first show and where they played the live streaming version of “Sea of Cowards” a couple months back.

Dex Romweber Duo has played a show there, as did Conan O’Brien when his band was coming through in June. We also had Karen Elson play, plus a punk band from California called Nobunny.

We also have a fully operational darkroom. We don’t have on-site record pressing, but it’s something we hope to accomplish further down the line.

Collectors Weekly: Where are the records pressed?

Blackwell: United Record Pressing is approximately a mile and a half from our offices, so they’re literally down the street. They’ve been pressing records since 1949, first as Southern Plastics and then under the United name starting in 1971. It’s a really amazing place.

Jack White is the unifying aspect of all our releases. This label is fueled by his energy.

From what I can tell, United seems to be the largest pressing plant in the world, both by capacity and square footage. They can crank out a lot in a day. They’ve got 7-inch, 10-inch, and 12-inch presses. They do 180-gram records, as well as all different kinds of colored vinyl.

For our Texas pop-up store, we had this idea of doing oversized records because everything’s bigger in Texas. So United pressed 8- and 13-inch records for us. I don’t know if anyone had actually done 13-inch records before.

It’s a not-so-secret secret weapon, being in the same town as your pressing plant. I can go over there and see my records being pressed, and I can deal with my customer service rep face-to-face to get answers in real time. You don’t really get that connection with someone when you’re just emailing or placing a phone call, which all ties back to our analog approach in some respects—it’s a more old-fashioned way of doing things.

United works with all kinds of major labels, including Motown back in the day. They do a lot of record pressing for Sundazed Records, the Universal family, and small labels like HoZac. Until the mid-’90s or so, they only pressed 7-inch records. Going in there kind of feels a little bit like stepping back in time.

Collectors Weekly: How are vinyl records made?

Blackwell: First off, vinyl as it is right now has a lead component to it, which is obviously not terribly safe for consumption. You don’t want to eat it. There are moves toward working with a lead-free vinyl, which would be better for everyone.

Mildred of Mildred and the Mice met Jack White in a Kentucky hardware store. She sang a song for him and he signed her on the spot, making her the first non-Jack White artist for Third Man.

That being said, vinyl in its raw form comes in small, gravel-sized pellets. The pellets are packed in boxes, each of which literally weighs a ton.

That raw vinyl is fed into a machine called a hopper, which melts the pellets down and moves them into the extruder. The extruder pushes the vinyl out in strings, which are then formed into what we call a puck or a cake because it looks like a hockey puck or a small, flat cupcake. That cake is very hot, so it’s malleable. Labels are affixed to the cake’s corresponding A and B sides.

A lot of people don’t realize that the labels lend structural integrity to the record itself. Those labels are baked on there. They’re in the press. A lot of people think they’re affixed afterwards or that they’re stickers. That’s not the case.

After the labels are in place, the record is slid into a machine that exerts between 10,000 and 20,000 pounds of steam pressure, depending on whether you’re pressing a 45 or an LP. The puck is pressed against a plate with ridges that correspond to the actual playable audio, which makes grooves on the puck.

The record then slides out of the press and moves toward a turntable that trims off the excess, what I guess you could call the crust of the vinyl. The trimmed crust falls into a bin underneath. The record slides off into a spindle and is then inserted by hand into a paper sleeve.

The Cadillac of record pressing is 180-gram vinyl.

The excess vinyl, the crust or the trim, plus any defective records that are scratched or off-center, are all ground down and used in subsequent pressings. For a petroleum product, an oil-based product, there’s actually very little waste involved—there’s a lot of recycling that goes on with vinyl record pressing.

For a regular pressing, I think the percentage is 90 percent virgin vinyl and 10 percent regrind. United also runs specials—what we call the hippie special or the green record pressing—in which they can press on 100 percent reground vinyl so that you’re reducing your carbon footprint. Top-of-the-line 180-gram records, on the other hand, are pressed with 100 percent virgin vinyl.

Collectors Weekly: What is significant about 180-gram vinyl?

Blackwell: The main indicator of a vinyl record’s quality is its weight. The standard weight of an LP is between 140 and 150 grams. Most records you grab are going to be that. The Cadillac of record pressing is 180-gram vinyl, which is heavier and a little bit thicker. There’s a lot of misinformation about it, though. Some people think 180-gram records have deeper grooves, which is supposed to improve the sound. Not true. Records have a standard groove depth, and your turntable wouldn’t really be able to play anything deeper.

Part of the mission of Third Man Records is to keep LPs such as "Broken Boy Soldiers," the debut album of the Raconteurs, in print on vinyl.

The advantage of 180-gram vinyl is that it’s much less susceptible to warping—you basically have a sturdier record. The old 1970s major-label pressings on Dynaflex were so thin they’d flap in the wind. These 180-gram records just won’t do that.

The second thing is that 180-gram records are less susceptible to feedback between your turntable and your receiver, depending, of course, on what kind of stereo record player setup you have. I believe it cuts down on drag or interference between the actual turntable and the stylus, your needle.

There’s not really an equivalent for 45s, definitely not at United. There’s also GZ Vinyl, which is in the Czech Republic and is probably the second biggest plant in the world. They do a 45 that kind of feels like if you threw it at someone’s neck, it would cut their head off. I don’t know the exact weight of that, but it might be something like 100 grams.

Lots of artists ask me for advice on pressing records. There are approximately a dozen record pressing plants in the U.S. today. I always recommend the record-pressing plant in their town. You’re going to get a little bit better service than if you’re calling someone or emailing someone. You can go there and walk right in. That’s just a fact.

There are plants in places like Detroit, Cleveland, Nashville, and Columbus. Southern California has a bunch. There’s a handful on the East Coast, and I believe there’s still one in Texas. They’re around. So if there’s a plant nearby, use it. Support your local businesses. It’s going to help you in the end.

Collectors Weekly: What is electroplating?

Blackwell: Here’s the short version of how a record comes to be. Let’s say I’ve got a finished recording. I take that to a vinyl-mastering engineer. United doesn’t do that in-house, but the company that does it for them is literally across the parking lot, an independent company called National Record Productions.

Before a record can be pressed, the masters need to be electroplated, as shown here.

The engineer has a really important tool called a lathe. Starting with a blank, empty acetate—or lacquer, as they’re sometimes called—he uses the lathe to cut the physical grooves that will be pretty much the same grooves that are on your playable record.

Once the vinyl-mastering engineer has cut the grooves, the finished lacquer, or acetate, is sent over to United to be electroplated, which involves coating the lacquer with a thin layer of silver that’s then delicately peeled off. Next in the process is nickel-bath electroplating, which makes the stampers from the peeled and electroplated silver. The stamper is what you actually affix to your record press to be stamped into the molten vinyl with the 20,000 pounds of steam pressure I was talking about earlier. In other words, electroplating creates the plates you use in the press.

United also has a really big finishing department, where they insert records into jackets, do shrink-wrapping, run the stickering machine, and so on, in addition to a distribution department and lots of warehouse storage. It’s a big operation.

Collectors Weekly: How is multicolored vinyl made?

Blackwell: We’ve done a few color combinations, including the split-color black and blue LPs. Basically, you have two extruders, each one filled with a different-colored vinyl. Those two extruders feed the molten vinyl into something that looks like a cupcake mold, more or less.

"Horehound," the debut album by Jack White's latest band, The Dead Weather, featured two LPs, one in traditional black and a second in white and yellow.

In that cupcake mold, there’s a thin piece of metal dividing it in half so that, for example, all the black fills one side and all the blue fills the other side without becoming mixed. When that cup lifts up, those two different vinyl portions are right next to each other, which is how you get that really well-defined line between colors. You don’t get any marbling because the different-colored vinyls are kept separate until the actual puck is set into the press.

It’s a little bit different for the tricolor 45s that we do in black, yellow, and white because that is not an automated process. All of our tricolor 45s are done by hand—they’re cut by hand, reassembled with the different-colored portions, and then inserted into a manual press. During the whole process, there’s something like a hot plate around it to keep it at a high enough temperature so it doesn’t solidify. Someone has to press a button for every record pressed. It’s way more labor-intensive, but I think the tricolor vinyl has become our calling card.

Collectors Weekly: Has Third Man done any other special, unique vinyl pressings?

"A Glorious Dawn" was found on YouTube and pressed with the permission of the Carl Sagan Estate.

Blackwell: We released a song called “A Glorious Dawn.” We credited it to Carl Sagan, but it’s basically audio taken from his “Cosmos” television series, remixed, rejiggered, and accompanied by a backbeat. We were introduced to it via a YouTube clip, and as soon as Jack saw it, he said, “We have to put this out.” So we contacted the guy who put it together who was really accommodating, and then we called the estate of Carl Sagan. They were very interested and could not have been more helpful.

We did a limited release for that record and called it Cosmos-colored vinyl. It was basically black vinyl with little glow-in-the-dark specks—if you held it up to the ceiling, it didn’t take much imagination for the record to look like the universe or the night sky. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before. To make that, United used raw, glow-in-the-dark vinyl—they just threw a handful in for each record.

When we did a pop-up store in London one Halloween, we took all the 7-inchers that we had pressed up to that point, repressed them on glow-in-the-dark vinyl, and coupled each release with new Halloween-themed picture sleeve artwork. We did 100 each of those titles—the demand far exceeded the supply. People are paying a couple hundred bucks each for them now if you look on eBay.

Collectors Weekly: Where is Third Man’s album art printed?

Blackwell: For our 7-inchers, we use a local printing company called TFS Graphics. They’ve been absolutely wonderful for us. For our LP jackets, we use a company in California called Stoughton Printing. They are the go-to place to get record jackets done right. That’s not the kind of thing that you can do locally. There are only a handful of printing presses that can do all the folding and gluing properly.

Karen Elson's "The Ghost Who Walks" LP was produced in an edition of 300. The vinyl was peach colored and scented.

There are a couple of things that make it, and keep it, a difficult process. The artwork is printed out as a sheet of thin paper, also sometimes known as a flick, and is then cut and glued around a board jacket. I think Stoughton is the only company that still does that old style or “tip-on jacket.” It’s a look that’s become synonymous with a lot of private-press records.

We’ve used that on The Dead Weather’s “Horehound.” Most of our jackets are done with that old-style tip-on sleeve. It’s printed on a solid, sturdy stock that really looks and feels good. Actually, that’s what we’re all about—looking good and feeling good.

I think people can tell the difference when they hold our records—they look at it and they say, “This wasn’t just dashed off in 20 minutes. They worked hard at this.” At least, I hope that’s what people are taking away from it because we do work extremely hard on every release.

Collectors Weekly: Is Third Man geared specifically toward collectors?

Blackwell: I think we do get accurately pegged as catering to a collector market and to people who are record collectors, but at the same time, the idea behind Third Man Records is that all of this stuff will be in print for eternity. If you want to buy a copy of the first Dead Weather 7-inch—and if you’re not a super-collector who has to have it on tricolor vinyl—you will be able to buy that from us for something like $5 from here until this place falls apart or the world ends.

Jack White plays drums for The Dead Weather, seen here in their first public performance at Third Man Records.

The idea is to make music accessible. We do a limited run of these tricolor or split-color records to cater to the collectors, the people who crave that stuff. But if you’re a music fan, we’re also the place for you. It will always be available.

I’m a music fan first and a record collector second. I think that’s something that we try to keep in mind here. People sometimes complain, saying, “I couldn’t get your 8-inch records in Texas or your 13-inch records,” or “I couldn’t get the glow-in-the-dark records in London.” Those records were made to celebrate an event. The point is that you had to actually be there.

Just because no one’s going to sell one million copies of an LP ever again doesn’t mean that vinyl is dead.

We also get a little bit of a flack for not making this stuff available online to the worldwide market. To those critics, we just have to respond by saying that they are totally missing the point. One of the ideas behind Third Man is that not everything is just available with the click of a mouse. A lot of what we try to do is meant to be a part of a tangible, real experience.

When we started out pressing the tricolor vinyl, we were pressing 100 copies of tricolor 7-inchers, and they were only available at our storefront. People were pissed—some of them are still pissed about it. Seeing how well it went over, but trying to respond to the complaints, we’ve tweaked it a bit. We still make 100 available in our storefront. People line up and wait overnight outside of our store to get them; some will get proxies in there, and people will flip them on eBay, all that stuff. But we also press 50 copies that we insert randomly into mail orders for that title. So you never know.

Collectors Weekly: Does Third Man sell anything besides vinyl?

Blackwell: Yes. The idea was that if you’re a Jack White fan, if you’re just a fan of the stuff that he’s done, it’s kind of a one-stop shop. If you need a Raconteurs T-shirt or a White Stripes CD, you can get it at our store. We understand that our proclivity toward vinyl isn’t for everyone, so we definitely have CDs available if someone wants to buy those.

Collectors Weekly: Third Man Records works with a pretty diverse group of artists. What unifies them?

The Smoke Fairies are an example of a band that has cut a record with Third Man but is not represented by the label in the traditional sense.

Blackwell: Well, I do tend to notice a common misconception about artists and the label. People think that because we put out a Smoke Fairies 7-inch, the Smoke Fairies are on Third Man. That’s not really the case. Most of the records that we put out are one-off deals. They’re lone 7-inch records. We’re not really in the traditional mold of a record label that will sign an artist and help break them or develop them. We do stuff that interests us.

For a band like Dex Romweber Duo, they were coming through Nashville on tour. We thought, “Well, let’s get them in the studio. We’ll record two songs. We’ll take their photo in front of the blue wall and we’ll whip it out as soon as we can.” It’s not like Dex Romweber is calling us and we’re providing tour support.

We’re a label, but not in the way people are used to thinking about. We’re more of an old-style label, just focusing mainly on going from single to single.

The one unifying thing behind pretty much all of our releases is the involvement of Jack White, whether he’s in the band or producing it. In short, it’s his label, and I think his vision is the unifying aspect of all these releases. It is wholly fueled on his energy and what he wants to accomplish.

Collectors Weekly: Are there any other labels out there now with a similar strategy?

Blackwell: There are a lot of labels that do what we do, but they aren’t labels that many people have heard of. The staff here is really into labels like Trouble in Mind or Rob’s House. A label that I really love is In the Red Records. HoZac is another great one. But these all tend to be more independent and underground. For lack of a better term, you could call them hobby labels.

Vinyl still has some lead in it. You don’t want to eat it.

We’re in a special spot. Because we’re Jack White’s record label, we’re afforded a little bit of a higher profile, and we’re able to sell more records because of it. But we think of ourselves as just a larger version of those so-called hobby labels, labels that put out music they love, focus mainly on singles, and think in terms of working from one project to the next. We’ve been open about a year and a half, and I’ve already assigned 55 catalog numbers. That’s a lot of records to put out.

Collectors Weekly: Why are small labels important?

Blackwell: Smaller record labels will always be important because they are the record labels that discover talent. There are certain obvious exceptions to this rule—John Hammond from Columbia Records discovering Bob Dylan, for example. But Bob Dylan was an undeniable talent. Anyone who saw him would’ve known that.

Even though the facilities at Third Man Records in Nashville include a 300-person performance space, the retail space itself is barely 15 by 15 feet.

Independent record labels aren’t really there to nurture careers. Independent record labels are labels that are good for a first release, for putting out a record by someone you’ve never heard of and spreading the word with the hopes of helping that artist reach a larger audience and, if necessary, moving them toward a more traditional record label that can help them in the long-term.

Look at Elvis Presley starting with Sun Records before moving on to RCA. Look at Nirvana starting with Sub Pop and moving on to DGC. Look at the White Stripes starting with a single on a small Detroit record label called Italy Records and then moving up to V2 after three albums. All of these are artists that started out on small, independent labels. That seems to be a proven path to success time and time again.

Not to slight any artist that debuted on a major record label, of course. Three of my favorite bands—the Stooges, the Ramones, and the Sex Pistols—were major-label bands that never did anything on small, independent labels to begin with. It’s just that in the world where I grew up and still operate in, independent labels are where the wealth of my music interest and information comes from.

Collectors Weekly: You don’t seem old enough to have come from vinyl roots.

Blackwell: I’m only 28 years old, but I got into Nirvana really early on. One day, I was at a record store called Desirable Discs in Dearborn, Michigan, and I saw a copy of the “Sliver” 7-inch by Nirvana on the wall.

Of course, if you are looking for a vinyl copy of the latest White Stripes album, Third Man Records has that, too.

Sub Pop has never let that single fall out of print—it’s been pressed since 1990, so it wasn’t an especially desirable or rare record. I think it cost 10 bucks. When I saw it on the wall for the first time in person, I was instantly captivated. “Because I’m a Nirvana fan, I need to get that,” I thought.

At the time, I didn’t even have a record player. I was probably 14. I had a job, and I had money, so I found a record player for 15 bucks or so.

From there, I set off buying what I could of Nirvana vinyl. I got the easily obtained stuff, the LPs and the handful of bootlegs, and I expanded from there, thinking, “The Melvins are kind of like Nirvana; I’m going to look for Melvins records.” Then I got into Mudhoney records. Sub Pop’s 1996 mail-order catalog blew it open for me.

Sub Pop did a poster of its first 370 or so releases. I thought it was so cool that I bought the poster and basically used it as my guidebook. That was my no-turning-back point. I started getting records just because they were on Sub Pop; in time I went from, “Wow, I bought this just because it has this logo on it,” to actually liking the bands—the Fastbacks, Eric’s Trip, and bands I hadn’t heard anything about before.

Collectors Weekly: Where did Third Man’s slogan, “Your turntable is not dead,” come from?

Ben Blackwell takes a call on his analog banana phone.

Blackwell: Jack originally operated an upholstery business in Detroit called Third Man Upholstery. The motto of Third Man Upholstery printed on Jack’s business card was “Your furniture is not dead.” So Third Man and its slogan were an extension of that, both the motto and the company name, obviously.

The overall mindset around here is that just because vinyl records aren’t the medium of choice for the masses doesn’t mean that they’re not viable. Just because no one’s ever going to sell one million copies of an LP ever again—I feel like I can say that as a certain fact—doesn’t mean that vinyl is dead. It’s the format that we believe in.

For example, even though the first music I ever purchased was on vinyl, most of my time growing up was spent listening to music on cassettes and CDs. But vinyl was always in the picture. It’s the format I like most. The 7-inch 45 RPM vinyl single with a picture sleeve is my favorite way to listen to music. It’s quick, easy, and digestible. That’s personally how I like records to be, and how I like listening to music. I like putting down a 7-inch."
(All images courtesy Third Man Records)

Jack White - Freedom At 21

Plain and simple, Jack White is an enigma. The way he approaches his song craft shows restraint and understanding, that a tune is a living entity and needs to be addressed in different capacities per the situation at hand. Take for example this here video for Dead At 21 from his new album Blunderbuss.

It would be way too easy to over do the song and all sorts of other instruments and frills. Yet, he keeps it simple and makes us want more. The fills he employs, coupled with the rock solid and sparse drumming, led by an ever so dominating Telecaster guitar riff, make this song potent. Huge props to Hype Williams on the video and a quick cameo appearance by Josh Homme. With a video this powerful, hopefully we can see a part two to this story.

Jack White Releases Balloons With Flexi Disc Album

Jack White gets the big picture when it comes to music and promoting his ideas. Rather than just sit in idle and wait for fans to find out what he is up to next, he brings the action to them. His unorthodox approach in releasing flexi discs attached to balloons is creative and down right awesome. The biggest thing he is making fans do is to seek out the flexi discs and go on the hunt to find them. Most of all he is challenging the norm when it comes to ways to get his music to the masses, bravo!

Check out Third Man Records

Jack White's, Third Man Records releasing flexi disc vinyl record by balloon

Three weeks prior to the April 24 release of his debut album Blunderbuss (Third Man Records/Columbia), Third Man Records has premiered the as yet unreleased Jack White album track "Freedom at 21" exclusively via 1000 flexi-disc records attached to helium balloons launched from the label headquarters in Nashville on April 1st, 2012.

Jack White's, Third Man Records releasing flexi disc vinyl record by balloon

Jack White's, Third Man Records employees inflating balloons with attached flexi disc vinyl record

Envisioned as an experiment exploring non-traditional forms of record distribution and a way to get records in the hands of people who don't visit record shops, the label was sure to use biodegradable latex balloons and all-natural twine in the process.

Accompanying the balloons were custom postcards with instructions for the finders to submit photos, discovery location and the date on which the record was found, all of which will be viewable on the map below.

Statistics for similar balloon launches show a recovery rate of approximately 10% so it's quite possible that less than 100 of the 1000 records launched will ever be discovered. Whatever the numbers, the "Freedom at 21" flexi-disc will surely be a highly sought-after collectible for years to come.

Jack White inflating balloons to be releasing flexi disc vinyl record

Where Will They Go Down

Click on the blue pegs to view locations and photos

Jack White, Johnny Depp and The Lone Ranger

Is Jack White the best musician of our generation? His work ethic and the amount of music produced including the variety of projects just add further weight to his elite repertoire. The song he worked on with Alicia Keys for the James Bond franchise was more proof about how he can add a great track to a film. Really looking forward to what he can do for the whole soundtrack to the Lone Ranger. 

Jack White will be composing the soundtrack to the Lone Ranger film starring Johnny Depp

Link to article on Billboard.com

"Walt Disney Pictures has wrangled Jack White to compose the score for "The Lone Ranger."


The studio announced Tuesday that the Grammy-winning rocker will write, produce and perform the score for director Gore Verbinski's upcoming adaptation of "The Lone Ranger."


"The Lone Ranger" will mark the White Stripes frontman's first time scoring a feature film. The film stars Johnny Depp as Tonto and Armie Hammer as John Reid. It is set to debut May 31, 2013.


White's first solo album, "Blunderbuss," was released Tuesday. He previously wrote and performed the theme song to the 2008 James Bond film "Quantum of Solace" with Alicia Keys.


In other Jack White news, it was announced last night (April 24) that Jack White's Third Man Records Rolling Record Store (i.e. a hopped up step-van) will be distributing concert tickets on the streets of NYC for White's upcoming AmEx Unstaged show at Webster Hall this Friday.

Johnny Depp playing Tonto in the new remake of the Lone Ranger

According to a statement released last night, "White will be giving back to the city that's so warmly embraced his debut album, as his Third Man Records Rolling Record Store hits the Big Apple on Thursday the 26th to bestow upon the citizenry free tickets to Jack White's American Express Unstaged concert at Webster Hall on Friday April 27 … An educational vinyl adventure center on wheels, Third Man Records' Rolling Record Store will be wheeling into locations all over the New York City area, then tweeting (@ThirdManRRS) each location along with instructions on how to claim a pair of free tickets to the show. There are only five pairs of tickets, one pair to be given away at each of five locations."


As previously reported, Jack's American Express Unstaged event will be directed by actor Gary Oldman. The show will be live-streamed and previewed by one new video each day leading up to Friday's performance, which can be seen here."

What Makes Jack White Tick? The New York Times Found Out

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.

Link to original article at the New York Times

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.”