If you play it, they will come
Singular career supports his theory that a passionate approach will be met with a passionate reaction
How many artists out there would bypass all the gushing praise and place a damning review front and centre on the home page of their website?
Only one comes to mind. That would be Jack White, whose entire career to date appears to be based on contrarian choices that must have music-biz types tearing their hair out.
“His songs are often little more than de-fanged blues, lacking the passion and grizzled realness that makes the genre speak to so many people,” reads the critical assessment by freelance writer Linda Leseman. It’s the first thing you see at www.jackwhiteiii.com.
How else does White try to buck the trends? Let us count the ways.
Getting his name associated with two or three bands at the same time and launching a parallel solo career for maximum marketplace confusion? Check. Taking two backup bands on the road and deciding which one to play with on the day of the concert? Sure, why not? Going after the rawest possible sound as a producer while the rest of the music world gets in line for hot knob-twiddlers? Absolutely.
And what about White’s Nashville-based Third Man Records label, which specializes in lovingly and artfully packaged vinyl, issuing weird and wonderful Whiteproduced recordings by the disparate likes of Tom Jones, Beck, Insane Clown Posse, Conan O’Brien and Laura Marling?
Beck’s unsettling single I Just Started Hating Some People Today, and its flip side, Blue Randy, must be heard to appreciate its utter strangeness. A spoken-word single by auctioneer Jerry King has two separate grooves, allowing the listener to hear King preside over different auctions, depending on where the needle is dropped. The company is about to reissue a compilation by the ultra-obscure late-’60s garage band Public Nuisance.
None of this is exactly a bid for Billboard record-breaking.
But for White, success has simply been a case of letting the right people find him. It seems to be his only business model, and his artistic journey has followed the same plan. It’s been that way since he started his own upholstery business in his youth. Foreshadowing a signature of his career, the business was called Third Man Upholstery.
“When I first opened my upholstery shop, I was worried about people knowing I existed — that I wasn’t going to get any work,” White said during an interview with The Gazette at the Olympia theatre, a few hours before his sold-out show there Tuesday night. “Someone told me, ‘Just open your shop and the business will come to you. Watch and see.’
“I didn’t believe them,” he said. “But they were right. As soon as I opened, I was never out of work. I always had people bringing me chairs and couches to work on. And it didn’t make any sense. I never advertised my company. But I think if you do what you love to do, and you’re passionate and you create your own little world, the people who are interested will come. Like-minded people out there, when they walk out the door of their house, they’re looking for like-minded people as well.”
White was similarly surprised when his garage blues band — a little unit called the White Stripes, consisting of White and his ex-wife, Meg — started drawing converts at the turn of the millennium. The duo were easily identifiable by their red-and-white colour-coded look.
“It came as a shock to us when we started to play and people were really con- necting with it,” he said. “We kept looking at each other, like ‘We assumed nobody was going to be into this!’ The presentation of the band was to throw people off — to give us permission to play the blues, almost like ‘People won’t really notice that’s what we’re doing.’ ”
As anyone who has followed White’s music — as a solo artist and as part of the White Stripes, the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather — will know by now, blues, in either structure or feel, is never far beneath the surface. White has loved the genre since he the Beatles. He was once famously quoted as saying that you can’t trust people who say they don’t like the Beatles or Bob Dylan. These people, he said, do not like music. Reminded of the quote, White laughed.
“If someone said they don’t like the Beatles, you’re like ‘Wow, man, what kind of car would you drive? What kind of shoes would you buy? How are you going to raise your kids?’ It brings up all of these questions,” he said. “Man, it’s almost like someone tells you they don’t like ice cream. I have to say, ‘Really?
“(The blues) has romance and mystery to it that is so compelling and so scary.”
JACK WHITE
was exposed to it.
“I just think it’s the truth,” he said. “I think it’s the foundation of everything. It has romance and mystery to it that is so compelling and so scary. Some people have songs that can bring them to tears. Some people have songs they sing along and dance to. The blues, being the foundation of all that — all of modern popular music — has every one of those moments, in its simplest form. It’s like table salt, the blues.”
Also not up for debate, as far as White is concerned: Well, damn, what else don’t you like if you don’t like ice cream? Can we still communicate with each other?’ It’s funny. I think some things are just that good. And the Beatles are that good.”
White’s 6-year-old daughter, Scarlett, is on board, too. In responding to a question about whether the lack of historical context in an iTunes world is a hindrance to this generation of music lovers, White brought up a recent exchange he had with Scarlett. White said he agreed to play a Beatles recording for her and selected Fixing a Hole. She then asked for Lady Madonna instead because she likes the piano, White said.
“She knew the difference in instrumentation, the elements inside the song. She’s not old enough to know what years those came out, or why, or whatever, but that gives me hope that people who love music, they’ll always dig deeper. In our modern generation, where things are sound bites and Twitter sentences, it’s harder and harder for people to know the big context unless they dig deeper,” he said.
White has offered that option by turning Third Man Records into a music geek’s paradise: its headquarters now has a stage where bands like the Shins and the Kills (whose Alison Mosshart is White’s bandmate in the Dead Weather) can be found playing live. Hotdogs are served on the patio and a vinyl-cutting mastering lab behind the stage is visible to those attending the shows. A camera on the cutting process allows people to watch while live albums are being recorded during the performance. There’s also a record store on the premises, with an online equivalent and a mobile version that travels to live events.
White became animated as he spoke about the rise of his favourite music format. “Vinyl’s exploded. We’ve pressed, in three years, almost 700,000 pieces of vinyl,” he said. “These are vinyl records, man! And (White’s solo debut) Blunderbuss is the No. 1 vinyl-selling record of the year right now, with 50,000 copies so far. I think the romance of the vinyl will never die.”
As a Sony Music Canada rep entered the room to signal an end to the interview, White spoke of the two groups he brings on the road: the allmale Los Buzzardos, who would back him that night at his Montreal show, and the Peacocks, made up entirely of women.
“I’ve been pleasantly surprised at every turn — almost show by show — how things change,” White said. “It doesn’t come down to the gender or the group or the band that night. It comes down to individual players. It’s amazing, man, because I was scared that things could become robotic and not be as invigorating as I was hoping they’d be. And it’s been amazingly inspiring. It’s not just a boring nostalgia set. Everything’s alive and happening right here in the moment — and no set list!”
bperusse@montrealgazette.com Twitter: @bernieperusse