JACK WHITE
Jack’s back, with two albums, blue hair and an – as ever – unique methodology. How starving himself, staring at the sun, and buying Prince albums for 50 grand played a part in a blazing comeback. “I enjoy extreme circumstances,” he tells Grayson Haver Currin.
Once it was blood red and snow white. Now sulphur yellow and electric blue. The livery changes but one thing doesn’t: JACK WHITE does nothing by halves. Touting not one new album but two, he invites MOJO to his Xanadu to talk fasting, trolling and cell phones, Jacko, Macca and the Stones. And the question is asked: is this really a better, stronger, nicer Jack White? “Everything I’m doing right now is all rebirth,” he tells GRAYSON HAVER CURRIN.
WHEN JACK WHITE GOT THE CALL SAYING HE WAS NEEDED on national television, he knew it was time to start fasting again. It was the first full week of October 2020, seven months since the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. After video captured Morgan Wallen partying sans mask and making out with strangers, NBC’s Saturday Night Live – still the US’s marquee musical spotlight – scuttled the young country star’s scheduled appearance at the last minute. What’s more, Eddie Van Halen had died a day earlier. Saturday Night Live needed a guitar hero, and fast. On Wednesday morning, four days before the broadcast, the show’s creator, Lorne Michaels, rang White’s Nashville landline. If the network’s private jet landed there on Friday, could White play on Saturday? He didn’t hesitate.
“It’s like vaudeville – ‘Hey, some guy broke his leg. Get out onstage,’” White tells MOJO, almost jumping out of an overstuffed chair in his Nashville office. “I love scenarios where you’re forced to create. When the chips are down, something inside of me goes with this gut feeling about how to attack.”
As one of 10 children in his family’s crowded Detroit home, White religiously taped Saturday Night Live. He’d appeared on the programme three times since The White Stripes debuted there in 2002, the fresh-faced and mop-haired singer writhing across the stage in shirt-to-shoe red. In the decades since, he says, “They have become a little like family.”
White, then, wanted to try something special, hoping to harness the same energy that made him so memorable 18 years earlier. From the moment Michaels rang until curtain call, White didn’t eat at all.
“You’ve got two days to rehearse. OK, but I’m going to make it even worse – I’m also going to not eat,” he says, eyes bright above a broad smile. “I can’t help myself.”
Flanked by drummer Daru Jones and bassist Dominic Davis, the short-notice set seemed a nearatomic release. Beginning with a version of his 2016 Beyoncé collaboration Don’t Hurt Yourself, he roared into The White Stripes’ Ball And Biscuit, then a rapturous rendition of Jesus Is Coming Soon, a Blind
Willie Johnson standard about the 1918 flu pandemic. He later squealed the solo of Lazaretto, the title cut from his 2014 album, from a blue Wolfgang guitar designed by Eddie Van Halen himself. Social media lit up like fireworks, as if the ecstatic primitivism of those 10 minutes offered notice that neither White nor rock were dead.
Frankly, a revival was overdue. White’s erratic 2018 album Boarding House Reach had flopped. His long-abusive relationship with the media and fellow musicians had turned him into the butt of jokes, or, as he puts it, “easy pickings”. He wanted to start again.
“I enjoy extreme circumstances,” he says. “My brain goes, ‘I’m going to come out of this a stronger, bigger, better person.’”
To announce this phase with a symbol of renewal, his longtime girlfriend, musician/beautician Olivia Jean, dyed his hair electric blue. “Everything I’m doing right now is all rebirth.”
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HE TIMING OF WHITE’S TELEVISED REANIMATION could not have been better. For the first six months of the pandemic, he’d made no new music. He didn’t want to get excited about songs only to have them languish in lockdown or production pauses.
He’d focused instead on the upholstery hobby he assumed would be his career until The White Stripes catapulted. He designed the Texas headquarters of Warstic, the baseball bat company he co-owns. He plotted another branch of his Third Man empire, a canary-yellow storefront near London’s Carnaby Street. “I wasn’t missing for creativity,” White says. “It was happening every day.”
But in September, a month before Saturday Night Live, White retreated to his other home in Kalamazoo, Michigan, a mid-’50s masterpiece of glinting glass walls and straight lines designed by modernist icon George Nelson. He prowled the music stores, buying a guitar and enough digital gear to muster a makeshift studio. At the start of 2020, White eliminated sugar from his life and shifted to a whole-foods diet. Inspired by The Fasting Cure, a 1911 book (since widely debunked) by American political firebrand Upton Sinclair, White started experimenting with fasting to tap energy reserves that, at 44, he wondered if he even had. His fasts expanded – a day, 36 hours, two days – and combined with oddly timed bursts of physical exercise. “I was riding my bike at five in the morning,” he says – smiling at the image he knows that conjures. “Your body’s telling you to go find food. Your body’s prepared for this.”
In Kalamazoo, for the first time in at least a year, songs began pouring out during a five-day fast, White’s longest. The experience, he recalls, was electrifying, as if he’d unlocked some atavistic essence via starvation. When Lorne Michaels’s call came, White wanted to know how that feeling might work on live television, without a net.
“I had the energy from the fasting and how bizarre everything was,” says White (due to social distancing rules he could only interact with the show’s cast at the end of the broadcast). “It was exhilarating, so inspiring and uplifting after that long break. It still is.” The experience unleashed a spell of
“I HAD THE ENERGY FROM THE FASTING. IT WAS EXHILARATING, SO INSPIRING AND UPLIFTING.”
writing and recording so productive that White will release two ver y different albums this year – the futurist rock manifesto Fear Of
The Dawn in April and the roots-and-blues survey Entering Heaven Alive in July. For White, they represent twin attempts to age with the vim that made him famous while maturing with a depth that might make him more than a punchline.
He flashes back to That Black Bat Licorice, the wicked little love song from Lazaretto in which he daydreams about prison, hospitals, the army barracks, or “any place where there’s a time to clear my vision.” He’s hoping the last few years were exactly that.
“The lockdown was like if someone had broken my leg and I had to be laid up for six weeks,” says White, his deep-set brown eyes now bulging. “Wow, thank you for breaking my leg! Now I’m going to write things down I wouldn’t have ever written down before.”
J
ACK WHITE’S WORLD CAN SEEM LIKE A SERIES OF actualised childhood fantasies. Situated on a gently sloping seven-acre spread 15 minutes from his downtown office, the only Nashville home he’s ever owned suggests an epic adult playground. There’s a bowling alley inside, while two of Harry Bertoia’s Diamond chairs, spray-painted in the White Stripes schema, serve as ad hoc bleachers for an outdoor basketball-and-tennis court. White tried raising four white peacocks on the lawn, but they escaped into neighbouring yards.
On the concrete driveway gather an armada of motor vehicles – including a Jeep pickup truck, an antique red Bronco and a forest-green Tesla. Red pillows dot a white front-porch swing, alongside an enormous pair of nautical binoculars.
For White, though, the property’s prized possessions seem to be a row of small buildings in the back yard, home not only to the studio where he cut his new albums but also Third Man Upholstery. His face radiates as he walks between its yellow tin ceiling and yellow wooden floors, brandishing assorted tools and showing off a sculpture he says he’ll soon finish – a quarter-century after starting. It incorporates three salvaged sewing machines whose individual brand names spell out Famous, White, Singer. He laughs like he’s just told an embarrassing childhood story.
The studios, meanwhile, look like shrines to the success of The White Stripes, with almost ever ything – speaker cases and speaker cables, spools of two-inch tape and shelves of amplifiers – emblazoned in red, white and black. Johnny Cash’s actual mirror ball hangs opposite a spinning speaker, ‘The Spinaphone’, suspended from the ceiling.
Bluegrass musician Chris Thile, who’s recorded here, compares it and White’s overall world to Tolkien or an epic video game. “Every decision is made to invite someone to lose themselves in that piece of art,” he says, “to walk through the looking glass into an alternate reality.”
White points to a Jonathan Exley
photograph of Michael Jackson, shot for Vibe magazine in 1995, that looms over the mixing console. Standing in a field, arms folded, eyes obscured, shrouded in head-to-toe Tommy Hilfiger, Jackson looks like a mystic or, as White puts it, “just an alien”.
“He had this statement about having to let God into the room, because we’re not in control,” says White, wistfully. “You think you’re writing. You think you’re directing. But you’re just an antenna hoping to get a signal. You have to create your own ego death.”
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ACK IN HIS OFFICE, SITTING BENEATH A huge portrait of Charley Patton, White frowns about one thing over which he seems to have little control – public perception in the face of fame.
“Nothing’s free,” he sighs. “Nice things happen. All these freedoms happen.”
“WHEN THE CHIPS ARE DOWN, SOMETHING INSIDE OF ME GOES WITH THIS GUT FEELING ABOUT HOW TO ATTACK.”
He glances around the room, where rows of Third Man products – a Bob Dylan box set; an ornate guitar pedal called the Triplegraph – rest beneath a Third Man-emblazoned record player framed by two McIntosh 275 tube amplifiers (price: around $6,000 each). There’s a stuffed giraffe, named G-Ride, against one wall, a peacock perched on another. Lately, he’s been buying the original artwork from pulp fiction favourites, leaving them on the floor like an unfinished art project. These are the spoils of success.
“But then, on the other side of the scale,” he continues, “there’s things that take away freedoms.”
White is, in part, referencing the backlash that has forever shadowed his rise. Some Detroit rockers lampooned the city’s young star until he fled to Nashville in December 2005. His public feuds – a fistfight with The Von Bondies’ Jason Stollsteimer, repeated bro-offs with The Black Keys – are so fabled that New York magazine once maintained a running list. “White makes a mess whenever he tries to talk about someone,” the piece began.
Of all the faults people find, however, White takes the most umbrage at the notion he’s an asshole who hates you because you have a cell phone (he’s never had one) or disrespects his bandmates, an implication arising from the 2012 tour where White rotated an all-male and all-female backing band, only deciding which one would play on the morning of the show. That idea likely seemed less fun if you were one of that night’s cast-offs.
“People say, ‘Oh, Jack will only record by candlelight,’” he says, his face somehow suggesting both scowl and smile. “Go ahead and think that. I don’t give a fuck if you think that. But if you think, ‘No, Jack treats his band members like shit,’ hold on a second, man. If anything’s said in a negative light, I want it to be true.”
For years, he accepted scorn as the cost of the mission. The last therapist he saw, more than a decade ago now, warned him that having a perspective or expressing an opinion was a surefire way to court disdain.
“People say that I can’t do anything without pretence,” he says. “No arguing with you there, but I would say everything we experience is pretentious. Some would say the Ramones are the most incredible authentic punk band there was. Some others could say they wore uniforms. They had clever stage names that weren’t their real names. I love the Ramones to death. Just saying guys,
Let’s not pretend that’s not a pretence. But when you see people pick on something for being pretentious, they don’t like it to begin with.”
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EN BLACKWELL’S OFFICE AT Third Man is a chaotic reliquary of radical politics and radical rock’n’roll. A Detroit diehard and White’s nephew, seven years his junior, Blackwell long ago devoted an entire lacquered beadboard wall to The Stooges – signed setlists, framed posters, an oil painting of Ron Asheton. Elsewhere, a 1968 photo of the young band in a Michigan cornfield has been enlarged to become wallpaper. Flags, pins, and letterhead from Michigan’s White Panther Party lurk in every nook. When Blackwell says a box contains $10,000 of 45s, you move your coffee cup before realising it was a joke.
Blackwell is one of two minority co-owners of Third Man, having been here since the start after selling merch and taping sets for
The White Stripes as a teenager. The de facto in-house archivist, Blackwell jubilantly expounds on his quest to release every Jack White-adjacent show. When White forgets a song title or date, he invariably concludes, “Oh, Blackwell knows.”
On a Thursday morning, White teeters at the threshold of Blackwell’s office, as if afraid of being absorbed by its ephemera. Bouncing on the balls of his feet, he spins around and grins. “We won the auction!” he announces. “Ben, how about the other good news?”
The night before, on White’s behalf, Blackwell placed a $49,375 bid on one of possibly 25 known copies of Prince’s Camille, a 1986 album on which Prince indulged androgyny by pitch-shifting his voice into a higher register. He scrapped it just before release. The pair already lost one auction for a copy in 2017 (Questlove nabbed that one), but snagging it now was a business move. “We’re finally going to put it out,” says Blackwell. “Prince’s people agreed – almost too easy.”
Striding the few feet back to his own office, White justifies the hefty outlay: “We had to show we had some skin in the game.”
Releasing Camille is an obvious extension of work Third Man has already done. In 2020, they partnered with the Prince Estate to issue a 7-inch box set for Sign O’ The Times, the classic Camille helped spawn. Whether pressing the complete chronological output of the Mississippi Sheiks or returning out-of-print works by The Supremes or the Melvins to shelves, preservation is paramount to the label’s mission.
With a shrug, White says, “Handing things off to the next generation is probably a good idea, right?”
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HERE’S A MORE INSTRUCTIVE ELEMENT FOR WHITE in a project like Camille, though – it’s a warning against the idolatry that stars demand. Prince scrapped Camille a year before he infamously pulled the much-bootlegged Black Album from stores just as it was about to be released. Now, 13 years into running a business that pursues audacious projects as a matter of course, White expresses sympathy not for the artist, but for the employees. How many people, he wonders aloud, spent time enabling those albums only to watch Prince veto them?
He recounts another anecdote where Prince fired an audio technician for not having fixed the button he happened just that second to press. “I always want to ask people if they think it’s really cool
“I’D LOVE TO SIT HERE AND ARROGANTLY SAY I COULD CARE LESS WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK. THAT’S NOT THE CASE.”
Prince did that, or is that a really humongous asshole thing?” says White. “It’s a straight ego move – ‘This is how much of a badass I am.’”
It’s not just Prince, of course. White talks about Keith Moon’s habit of trashing hotel rooms and the workers who cleaned up his messes, and the assorted exploits of The Rolling Stones. There was even a time, he recounts, when White himself felt cavalierly treated by Jagger and Richards, a period the pair were using his studio on and off.
“They were testing me to see if I could produce the Stones,” White says, laughing nervously as he stares at a Polaroid of Richards from that session, still affixed to the mixing console. “That went on six years, and I didn’t know what else to do.”
This, White agrees, is how he’s sometimes been perceived – a selfish star making everyone play his game by his rules. As a kid, he thought about being a priest, but only if he could have taken it as far as he wanted. “I wouldn’t have been OK if I had not taken a vow of silence, become a monastic,” he says. “There are so many things I can’t be a part of unless I go all the way.”
As an adult, he is beginning to recognise that such extremism can look like trolling, a word he often uses to describe the image he hopes to shed. In some cases, like his decision to produce an Insane Clown Posse album, it was trolling: “My whole thought is, Hey, watch how pissed people are going to be.”
But he knows and regrets that’s how people interpret more sincere efforts, too, including his 2018 demand that ticket holders check their cell phones before entering his shows (“We’re all in this room. We’re communing”). He understands it’s how people interpret his obsession with vinyl and analogue technology, too. Not that he’s in any way penitent about that. “When you have a chance to fight to keep something alive,” he says, “it’s good to be part of that.”
He even thinks that suspicions he was trolling fuelled responses to Boarding House Reach, a record he insists he knew would be divisive but swears will age well.
“The music was so out of my comfort zone that I get so much inspiration from listening to those songs,” he says, his raspy voice hitting a defensive high note. “The stuff is so dangerous.”
Even so, he doubts he’ll make a record like that again, music he feels he has to defend. “That period with Trump,” he says, “the whole world mad at everything, was not a good time to put out anything provocative, especially ‘Jack White’.”
White thinks a lot about how to get more energy – there’s the fasting, and a new trick: staring straight into the sun as soon as he wakes up, which he calls “a bizarre evolutionary thing” for conquering grogginess. And as he nears 50, he is thinking more about how to spend less of it unnecessarily. White knows that caring about others’ opinions and admitting fault may make him less edgy – people expect rock’n’roll to have its egotistical bad boys, its cranks. But those around him are helping him temper the tantrums, mitigate the obsessions. He says the pop culture he often consumes with his children – Scarlett,
15, and Henry, 14 – is teaching him to appreciate art on the surface. Then there are the 100 employees of Third Man, all dependent on him, all earning a living wage. There’s more at stake than ego.
“Over whelmingly, I involve myself in how things affect people around me now,” says White. “I don’t think Third Man could exist if I didn’t. I’d love to sit here and arrogantly say I could care less what other people think. That’s not the case.”
“JACK’S A REAL MENSCH IN THE STUDIO, CHASING A DRAGON OF INSPIRATION AND CREATIVITY.” Q-TIP
Stop press: White is even considering getting a cell phone, since he’s tired of being a burden to friends doing him digital favours and he needs one to organise a Covid test. He mar vels at his 91-year-old mother, Teresa, who walks around her home listening to Catholic Mass on Bluetooth headphones. Resisting modernity, once a selling point for White and Third Man alike, has just become a nuisance.
“I made those brave points in the past. I used to feed off that,” he says. “You get soaked in negative energy, and you have to be able to keep walking through that rain. It’s not really something I’m going to be interested in doing for the rest of my life.”
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OON AFTER WHITE RETURNED TO NASHVILLE FROM Kalamazoo in late 2020, he started asking friends to stop by. One of the first was Ben Swank, not only the other Ben at Third Man but also its other minority co-owner. White first met Swank when he was the drummer for Ohio’s hard-charging Soledad Brothers, but Swank laughs off any suggestion he is “much of an accomplished musician”. When Swank visited, White said he needed basic rhythms for first takes of new songs. They cut three numbers in a day. One of them, a ramshackle torch song called A Tip From Me To You, opens Entering Heaven Alive, the gentler of White’s two albums. That’s Swank on drums.
“I thought he just needed someone to get ideas on tape,” Swank tells MOJO today. “He liked it enough to keep working.”
Almost a year later, in September 2021, Duane Denison, the former guitarist of post-hardcore safety hazards The Jesus Lizard, got a similar call. White’s daughter Scarlett had befriended Denison’s daughter Francesca. When White dropped by to pick Scarlett up one afternoon, he realised it was that Duane Denison. Discussing fatherhood, hometowns, and baseball, they became friends.
When White called Denison to ask him to play on a demo, Denison took a vacation day from Nashville Public Library. Once again, it wasn’t a demo. Denison’s snarling solo during Morning, Noon, And Night – the classic rock triumph near the end of Fear Of
The Dawn – marks the first time anyone except White has taken a guitar solo on any of his albums.
“I didn’t just show up and overdub stuff,” says Denison, a Nashville session veteran. “It was live, with the amps cranked up and
“PEOPLE SAY, ‘OH, JACK WILL ONLY RECORD BY CANDLELIGHT.’ GO AHEAD AND THINK THAT. I DON’T GIVE A FUCK.”
the drums and vocal mike right there. It went against modern recording. It was reaffirming.”
Such impulsiveness helped steer White’s months of home sessions. He often refused, for instance, to send players actual demos in advance, a way to harness their improvisational energy. They could hear the idea when they arrived. “You’re not an orchestra leader with hired guns,” White says. “You form a little band. You make it work.”
White cultivated another form of energy by finding an idea he liked and pursuing it on his own for hours, scorning to pause and recruit help for fear of squandering his momentum. The first three tracks on Fear Of The Dawn – massive, mauling rock songs all – happened that way. Several tunes on Entering Heaven Alive worked like that, too, with White adding his own drums at the end. “There were the dumb trials and errors of recording all the instruments,” he says. “But I knew the sound I wanted.”
Those competing strategies – inclusion versus isolation – allowed White to stick with songs about which he was uncertain for longer than ever before, to approach ideas from alternate angles. In the past, he would often discard a tune as soon as it stalled; that’s why there are so few unreleased White Stripes relics. “I would just abandon them,” he says without a whiff of regret.
What began, for instance, as a potential 20-second interlude built on a sample of swing star Cab Calloway’s anthem Hi-De-Ho Man steadily expanded. Olivia Jean added a Boris-sized wash of feedback, White a bouncy bassline. He dispatched the track to A
Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip, who replied with a pun-rich rap about Jive Records and Chuck Berry.
White says he’s rarely laboured over any song as much as Into The Twilight, a peppy bit of electroshocked rock. A Manhattan Transfer sample, William S. Burroughs cut-ups, cascading keyboards, daughter Scarlett on bass, a rare guitar pedal that translated his signal into the chirpy voice of Japanese “virtual pop star” Hatsune Miku: White crammed it all into five electrifying minutes. “So many moments came out of that,” he says, bordering on breathlessness, “things I’d never done.”
Most of a year passed before White recognised he had nearly 30 songs, most of which split neatly into distinct stylistic categories. He loves albums with extreme swings – The White Album is naturally his favourite Beatles record. But this felt like too much to fit. Some members of his management team encouraged him to pare down, consolidate. Others urged a year at least between releases.
He chose the most difficult and exciting route – to issue them separately but as close together as production schedules allowed.
“None of it felt safe,” he says, pulling together the risks of Third Man, live television, and two disparate new albums into The Unified Theory Of Jack White. “That’s a great space. If you fear it too much, it can eat you alive.”
H
IS HANDS FULL OF COFFEE GROUNDS, WHITE grabs a strand of 16-millimetre film suspended between two microphone stands. He grinds the strip until he sees
“YOU THINK YOU’RE WRITING. BUT YOU’RE JUST AN ANTENNA HOPING TO GET A SIGNAL. YOU HAVE TO CREATE YOUR OWN EGO DEATH.”
scratches. Another Third Man employee, Andrew Najarian, paws at the film with soil stolen from a potted plant. White glances to his left and grins: “Oh, yeah. That’s going to look great.”
When Third Man began making plans to release two records by its founder within a three-month window, they looked for help. But proposed budgets from music-video directors, White thought, seemed inflated, reminding him of the only conversation he had with David Bowie, in 2007, as the end of The White Stripes neared.
“I said, ‘You used to make such interesting videos. I haven’t seen you doing that. Is there some reason?’” White remembers asking. “He said, ‘Oh, it’s not worth the money, because they’re not going to play it.’ Good point.”
So White decided to redirect the funds by directing the videos himself. Third Man, after all, already has an in-house videographer, ex-Whirlwind Heat drummer Brad Holland. White and Holland filmed the eerie video for Love Is Selfish – the shuffling country lament that in January became Entering Heaven Alive’s first single – at a rented American Legion clubhouse in one day.
White recorded Fear Of The Dawn’s title track alone, playing drums, guitars, Theremin and other instruments himself. But he wanted the video to look like a full band. He got Blackwell, Swank, and guitar tech Dan Mancini to sport blue wigs and white masks, pantomiming their boss behind him.
Holland filmed it in one take on one camera in a Third Man hallway on a weekday. He shipped the file to the only filmprocessing company he could find willing to play along with White’s wild idea: put it on film, damage the film until it was almost ruined, and turn the results into the video.
Aside from the coffee, White smears shaving cream into the film and washes away the residue with water. He douses it with bleach and marvels as the emulsion – essentially, the chemicals that make film work – turn a lurid green. He jabs the blade of an X-Acto knife between his hand and the spool, flecking off colour and occasionally slashing gashes that Holland seals with Scotch tape.
“If you walk around here, there’s nothing more independent,” White says, referencing Third Man’s ability to record, manufacture, promote, and sell. “It’s easy to have a vanity label. But that’s not really giving. It’s taking.”
Most fans, White thinks, would be surprised how handson he is at Third Man, how often he’s working in his office. This is a different sort of extremism, a chance for him to funnel the words that have often gotten him into trouble back into action. A way, he hopes, to continue channelling energy into creativity and not empty provocation. No matter the response, he insists he is prouder of this phase of his career than anything else.
“I’ve made better things by balancing the stable parts of life with the unstable, or the ways I did things when I was younger,” he says, his cadence collected and thoughtful. “Can you be an artist in an unstable place? That’s common. But can you be an artist in a stable place?” M