Jack White: 3rd Man to 1st Man Issue #43

White has taken the lead in today's music industry just by being himself

By Selena Fragassi
Published: August 12th, 2010 | 2:35pm

It’s really no surprise that Jack White is the first man to grace the cover of Venus Zine. In our opinion, White is quickly branding himself as the “First Man” of modern music and is poised to become one of the most prolific artists of our generation. From his formative days in the White Stripes to night shifts in the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather, influential collaborations with Loretta Lynn, Alicia Keys, and Jay-Z, and a growing role as the head of his own Third Man Records, White caught our attention with his hardworking ethos, hands-on aesthetic, and continued support of female artists. It’s rare to find an artist who is at once so powerful yet so accessible, a side of White we discovered when we spent a day with him in Nashville where he lives and works.

Jack White can’t think of a time in his life when he has ever been bored. Since the birth of the White Stripes in 1997, the 34-year-old guitarist, producer, actor, and label head has been one of the most active figures in the music industry. With each new project, White reflects that every thing he’s done is a conscious effort to see just how far he can push the limits of his artistry.

“I don’t make up busy work because I’m bored. Resting on my laurels or arriving at some sort of pinnacle—those ideals are meaningless and represent failure to me,” he says. “I don’t want to be satisfied in any way when it comes to music. It may be very hard for me to enjoy things, but I’d rather live in that zone than say, ‘Well maybe it’s time to make a greatest hits record’ because I can’t think of anything else.”

Sitting with White in the president’s office of his extensive Third Man Records HQ in Nashville, it’s clear there will be no need (or time) for a greatest hits album in the near future. Opened in 2009, Third Man’s quarters include a photo studio, darkroom, development offices, and distribution center (not to mention a fully equipped fire-engine-red kitchen and curiously large stuffed giraffe in the waiting room). In the vein of the historic Sun Studios or Chess Records, here artists can buy time to record in the “live room” (one of the only places in the world you can record direct to analogue) and leave a few days later with a physical copy of an album that will go on sale within weeks. Third Man’s roster is already heavily attended by the White Stripes, the Dead Weather, country star Wanda Jackson, and White’s wife, Karen Elson, with countless other projects in the works—all with White at the helm.

“I want to facilitate art and not in a pretentious way but in a real, physical, and mechanical way,” he says in a mild Southern drawl, his feet propped on his desk, smoking a sweet-smelling clove cigarette. “I’ve seen a lot of people who get their own vanity label with their second album, but I wanted to put my money where my mouth was and produce something that was hands-on for me. On any day of the week, you’ll see members of the Dead Weather or my mom folding records here and driving them off to shows.”

FIRST DAYS OF THIRD MAN

Third Man, the label, was founded in 2001 on those fundamentals. At the time, the White Stripes had just signed with their first major label, V2 Records, and White was already looking for a way to keep his hands in his own music. “Third Man Records started as an insurance policy,” he explains. “I thought our label was going to drop me and Meg in the first year because I assumed we were a novelty to them. I wanted to be able to protect the music. I figured, when they stop caring about us in a year, at least I can put the record out myself.” A smart move not because people stopped caring about the White Stripes, but because the duo has become one of modern rock’s most successful bands—as The Guardian has said, “the key band of their time.”

All “novelty” of the band aside (“Who would be interested long-term in a brother and sister blues band from Detroit?” asks White. “We dressed in red, white, and black and had a peppermint painted on our bass drum.”), what likely fueled the longevity of the White Stripes was the duo's work ethic—something White learned from his Detroit upbringing and, more specifically, from a figure named Brian Muldoon.

GARAGE SALES TO GARAGE ROCK

Jack White, born John Anthony Gillis, was the youngest of 10 children raised in a lower middle-class neighborhood in southwest Detroit, an area where the local music scene consisted of mariachi bands. When White was 15, Muldoon (who lived close to Tiger Stadium near one of White’s brothers) approached him with a job offer. He had opened an upholstery shop in his backyard, and as business picked up he needed help tearing off fabric from couches and breaking down old furniture. Working alongside Muldoon, White was introduced to local garage rockers like the Stooges and the MC5, bands that would shape his own sound—and to a structured regimen that would shape his work values.

“I really loved that environment. It was a perfectionist environment,” White remembers of his first job that eventually inspired him to open Third Man Upholstery in his early 20s. The tagline was “Your furniture’s not dead,” although bills written in crayon and the poetry he hid underneath the fabric soon led him to give up the gig to pursue other creative outlets. “In upholstery, you can’t really make mistakes because they’re very noticeable. That experience taught me about hard work. I learned that one mistake at the beginning would be a huge mistake in the end.”

For White, upholstery’s lessons quickly translated to his ideology for music—the integrity of keeping a part of the past alive, whether it’s your grandmother’s sofa or the traditions of blues, country, and folk. The latter is something White says is especially haunting, as he laments the “disastrous place” the music industry is in right now. It's something he attributes to the creative void of technology, with an advent of more machines that sour his own ideals for perfection. “To me, perfection happens when there’s no interpretation. The point of perfection is to eliminate debate, which is what I try to do when I create something. It’s an impossible task, but there’s beauty in the attempt,” he says, noting that his best work often comes when he walks into a room and plays the first thing in his head on the piano.

“It’s to the detriment of a lot of songwriters and producers that they don’t know when to stop—especially with computers, because you can keep going and going, clicking and clicking. That’s where technology has gone too far. A tool that should have been used as a last resort has become the first resort. For some people that works, but for me, I couldn’t be proud of myself creating something that way.”

Instead, White takes pride in hands-on production work, something he says he’s been doing from day one. “Directing or producing or whatever you want to call it is what I’ve always been doing,” he says. In fact, the only time someone else produced his work was when T Bone Burnett oversaw the Cold Mountain soundtrack. “Even on stage or in writing songs—all that expression feels like I’m organizing. I’m organizing a chord change like I’m organizing this [Third Man] building like I’m organizing another artist’s arrangement of a song. Who knows what suffers from doing it that way, but who knows what suffers from not caring? I have to care.”

PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS

In doing so, White has become a major game changer in the industry. You could say genre crossover took roots through his risk-taking, from his 2008 James Bond collaboration with Alicia Keys to his current unreleased project with Jay-Z. And let’s not forget the phenom of 2004's Van Lear Rose (Interscope) that brought Loretta Lynn’s career back to life and ignited country music’s move from a niche audience to the mainstream.

Of that album—which came to fruition after Lynn invited Jack and Meg to her house for a thank you dinner after the two dedicated their album, White Blood Cells, to the country star—White says, “Listeners received it well, but it came out at a time when people wanted to hate me, and they wanted to hate that record.” White sees that time as the start of a backlash against him, following many years of praise that had come before. He also cites that country music was in a completely different place then. “A lot of people had been so overdosed on ’70s and horrible ’80s country, and they forgot it could sound as good as George Jones and Hank Williams. Van Lear Rose was too good for critics to ignore, and Loretta blew them away,” he says.

White says he tends to find himself more comfortable working with female artists than his male counterparts. “I’m infatuated with the idea of women and men working in the same room together,” he says, pointing to the examples of Keys, Alison Mosshart (the Dead Weather), and most recently Elson. “There’s some balance that happens there that eliminates a lot of the bullshit and you get closer to something more truthful. All of these unspoken elements of biology and sexual attraction and tension and male and female stereotypes come through in the music,” he says. “When you have a room full of five or six guys—with all that male hunter bullshit, all that ego—there’s a sense of something I don’t want to be a part of. … You really have to wonder how much Yoko balanced out the room. There was so much venom, but it was powerful.”

MIXED SIGNALS

With so many music-oriented projects under his belt, White reflects that it may be time to take a break. “Sometimes I think I’ve been too far into music for a decade now. I’ve been so engrossed in music that I haven’t been able to catch my breath and get back into so many other directions I could have gone.”

There’s photography, he says, and acting and directing films—not to mention sculpting, which leads to an interesting aside. “Back in Detroit, they used to have a big garbage day out on the sidewalks. I had just gotten a truck so I could go and pick things up. Later, someone would come into my house and say, ‘Oh my god, you’re a hoarder! You’ve got all this stuff but you’re not doing anything with it.’ And I was like, ‘What do you mean? This is a chair I’m going to work on, and this is a piece of art I’m going to hang on the wall,'” he says.

According to White, his ‘hoarding’ came at a time during his young adult years when he was experiencing a number of confusing signals about where to go with his life, considering even the priesthood before finally taking up art and music. “No one ever sat me down and explained what passion was,” he says, “and it’s taken me a long time to teach myself through art. And now I know that passion, for me, is like a shark—it never stops moving.”

Photos by Chloe Aftel

Stylist: Djuna Bel

Producer: Robin Wallace

Photo assistant: Rory White

Makeup: Megan Thompson using MAC Cosmetics

Hair: Jamie Valentine