A conversation with Jack White from 2010

Plus: notes on recent shows by cute, Chandra, and Zoobombs!

Nov 28, 2024

Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s to present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars. This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related links).

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THE OPENERS

Meet cute. Over the past two years, they’ve steadily developed a reputation as the most powerful live band in our mutual homebase of Hamilton, Ontario, and last Saturday, they put on a sensory-obliterating display—on the floor, in the round—at east-end grindhouse Vertagogo that confirmed they belong at the vanguard of the post-rock-to-noise-punk pipeline, unleashing pure apocalyptic chaos with militaristic discipline.

Cute can be as grandiose as Godspeed, as pummelling as The Jesus Lizard, and as anxious as early Talking Heads if David Byrne was an actual psycho killer. They wear matching workers’ overalls and perform bathed in dry ice in complete darkness save for headlamps, so when they hit peak five-alarm ferocity, they look less like a band rocking out than a rescue team desperately trying to save someone from a collapsed cave.

The band put out two excellent mini-LPs last year: start with the she EP for a glimpse of their pugilistic prowess, and then surrender to the sprawl of apocalypse/life, which features their 20-minute masterwork “let your mouth digest it,” a song that—like My Bloody Valentine’s “You Made Me Realise,” Mogwai’s “My Father, My King,” and Oneida’s “Sheets of Easter”—everyone needs to experience live at least once before you die. Hopefully the new year will yield more new music, at which point, this newsletter just might rebrand as a cute fanzine. You’ve been warned.

Prior to the cute show, I took in an early-evening in-store performance at Into the Abyss Records from Chandra, who released the cult-classic Transportation EP—a feisty fusion of B-52’s attitude and ESG groove—in 1980 when she was just 12 years old. After reaching new audiences in the 21st-century through famous fans like Bradford Cox and The Avalanches, Chandra is breathing fresh life into these 44-year-old songs with the help of an eight-piece backing band tricked out with violins and melodicas galore. It just goes to show that the best thing about being wise beyond your years is that the songs you wrote when you were a preteen still sound just as cool and vital when you sing them in your 50s.

I first saw Tokyo’s Zoobombs in 1998 at the El Mocambo, the night before I was set to fly out to New York City for CMJ. As much as I was digging their debut album, Welcome Back, Zoobombs!, I remember thinking at the time, “do I really need to go out and see a band right before heading off to a four-day music festival?” But then after the show, I remember thinking, “do I really need to go to CMJ? Because nothing I see there is going to top that.” Last week at The Casbah, they once again proved that, even in their 30th year, there is no such thing as an off-night for this band. Their current Canadian tour wraps up tonight (Nov. 28) in Toronto at The Monarch and Friday night (Nov. 29) in Oshawa; if you can’t make it out, then pick up their new career-spanning compilation, The Best 1994-2024, and reacquaint yourself with the best garage-punk-funk-blues-rap band the Beastie Boys never signed to Grand Royal.

Some quick notes on the new arrivals to the stüberman 2024 playlist:
- Father John Misty, “Mahashmashana”: The momentous title-track opener from FJM’s new album sounds like George Harrison’s “Isn’t It a Pity” retrofitted into a closing-credits theme for the end of civilization as we know it.
- Kendrick Lamar, “squabble up”: After the decisive death blow that was “Not Like Us,” this is like Kendrick doing an endzone dance even after he’s already run up the score by seven touchdowns.
- 070 Shake, “Winter Baby / New Jersey Blues”: Eagle-eyed Canadian indie-rock enthusiasts may have noticed the name of former Stills singer/guitarist/drummer Dave Hamelin lurking in the production credits on Beyonce’s country heel-turn Cowboy Carter. But arguably the more radical transformation he oversaw in 2024 occurs on the new album from one-time Kanye/Pusha T collaborator 070 Shake, who reemerges on Petrichor as a psychedelic pop futurist covering Tim Buckley standards with Courtney Love one moment and then, on this mid-album mini-suite, venturing through the Cindy Lee portal that connects The Beach Boys to Lana Del Rey.
- Saya Grey, “H.B.W”: With her first proper full-length album arriving in February, the Toronto-bred session-bassist-turned-art-pop-auteur is clearly looking to go next level—specifically to the Mezzanine.
- Sacred Paws, “Another Day”: Even if you’re not celebrating American Thanksgiving this week, you can be thankful that Ray Aggs of Shopping/Trash Kit and Eilidh Rodgers of Golden Grrrls have rebooted Sacred Paws after a five-year pause. While the duo’s previous releases betrayed their respective pedigrees in danceable post-punk and DIY garage-fuzz, this comeback single is a pure pastoral pop delight, complete with banjos, fiddles, and swooning harmonies. It may have nothing to do with the Paul McCartney song of the same, but the two tunes would fit cozily alongside one another on s Sunday-afternoon countryside road-trip mix.

Click here for the Apple Music version of the playlist.

THE HEADLINER:
A conversation with Jack White

The date: June 17, 2010

Location: Phoner—I was at the Eye Weekly office in Toronto, Jack was at home in Nashville

Publication: Eye Weekly

Album being promoted: The Dead Weather’s Sea of Cowards

The context: Before he became one of the 21st century’s few genuine rock stars, Jack White had a decidedly different career aspiration — to become a priest. He even references his pious past on “Blue Blood Blues,” the first song on Sea of Cowards, the 2010 album by his swamp-rock band The Dead Weather: “Yeah, all the white girls trip,” he boasts, “when I sing at Sunday service.” The line’s delivered with an audible smirk — accentuated even more by the song’s libidinous, stoner-funk thrust — but even if White can laugh at his seminary-school ambitions, his long and winding career suggests he’s taken one piece of god-fearin’ advice to heart: idle hands are the devil’s playthings.

Whether you’ve seen White slip into a scorching, string-busting solo onstage, or watched him quickly assemble a guitar out of a block of wood and some wire in the 2008 documentary It Might Get Loud, or seen the mess he made out of Von Bondies singer Jason Stollsteimer’s face after a December 2003 bar fight, you know Jack White is good with his hands. In light of his various blues-based rock ’n’ roll bands (The Dead Weather, The Raconteurs and, most famously, The White Stripes), his preference for analog-recording techniques and collaborations with yesteryear heroes like Loretta Lynn, White is frequently portrayed as a Luddite traditionalist. But he’s not so much interested in living in the past as simply heeding its most valuable lessons — namely the idea that, whether you’re a musician or an upholster (White’s pre-rock profession), the work you create is more meaningful and rewarding when the results are tangible.

Prior to our phone conversation, White’s publicist informed me that the line of questioning should specifically pertain to The Dead Weather, the band he formed in 2009 with Alison Mosshart of The Kills, keyboardist Dean Fertita of Queens of the Stone Age and Raconteurs bassist Jack Lawrence. However, within minutes it was clear that, for White, The Dead Weather was simply the latest showroom model for something much greater: his expanding Third Man Records empire. After launching the label in 2001 as a means of giving some shine to The White Stripes’ unheralded Detroit peers, White was, by this point, using Third Man to galvanize the music community in Nashville (his home since 2005), basing its operations out of a multi-purpose recording-studio/album-design complex, with a storefront record shop peddling vinyl recordings made within its walls just days before.

Coincidentally, I connected with White the morning after his then-wife, supermodel-turned-murder-balladeer Karen Elson, played Toronto’s El Mocambo in support of her own Third Man release, The Ghost Who Walks. (Noting his house-husband status, he joked, “The tables have turned!”) But just because White was at home didn’t mean he was relaxing; as he reinforced throughout our conversation, all play and no work makes Jack a dull boy.

Sea of Cowards arrives less than a year after The Dead Weather’s debut, Horehound, which, by contemporary music-industry standards, is a practically unheard of rate of production. Now that you’re taking more control of your releases, can we expect a more frequent rate of output, like artists had in the ’60s and ’70s?

It’s an interesting question. When we were working on these songs [earlier this year], we thought, “Wow, we’re almost finished, we could put this record out right now.” And then we thought, “If we don’t put it out right now, it’s probably not going to come out until 2012,” because everyone else is busy with The Kills and Queens of the Stone Age and touring. So we were like, “Let’s put it out now!” I’m up against a different thing — people in the ’60s, like you were saying, George Jones put out three or four records a year and no one said nothing. And now, if you do that, people are like, “Oh, him again?” So I don’t really know what the balance is. Nowadays, people are so used to the hype machine of a new movie or a new TV show or a new album coming out — and how many months and months are spent are hyping it — that they assume if you put out a couple of records in the span of a year, you’ve sacrificed quality in the name of quantity. I feel that way too: if I see an actor’s been in six films in a year, I think, “That guy needs to take time off.” But I really don’t know what to do. Van Gogh did one painting a day — it’d be a shame to tell him, “Hey man, take six months off because we need to hype your next painting up.”

That idea shows how disconnected the industry is from the fans. The fans’ response to getting more new music more quickly is: “Great!” Whereas the industry response is: “You’re over-saturating the market with product.”

People always say everyone has a short-attention span nowadays — they see a YouTube clip and they’re onto the next thing in two seconds. And as soon as the album comes out, they’re already bored of it… which you think would give birth to things happening like this, with [artists releasing] two or three records a year and going back to that style. But it hasn’t worked itself out yet.

Well, it sounds like this record — in particular, the first half — was recorded in like one continuous live take. There's a real continuity and flow to it. Was it a pretty quick process putting this together?

It actually wasn't. It was months of recording here and there, when we came home from tour. And a lot of the problem was we couldn't beat the very first demos we did. The first time we came in for a couple of days, we recorded, like, 12 song ideas that we'd had from tour, and we couldn't beat them. The recording sounded so good the way they were done the first time. So we ended up using a second tape machine and playing along with those first demo recordings and turning it into something bigger and stretching the songs out – like some of them were only a minute long, and we turned them into a two-and-a-half minute song by playing along with the old song. “Die By the Drop” was a 45 second song idea, but it just turned into something bigger. I'd never done that technique before. It was the first time I recorded like that.

The thing I find most striking about both Dead Weather albums is the atmosphere, which is very thick and swampy. Is there a particular ritual you partake in to get into the right frame of mind to make this music?

Over the past year, Third Man Records and Studio have taken on its own sound — there’s so much occurring in that space, there are so many artists coming through there making seven inches and producing so much. And that is the sound of it: that swampy, thick sound.

Even on Karen’s record — which is more folk-based than The Dead Weather’s — you can hear it seeping in.

Yeah, very much so. And Wanda Jackson’s record that’s coming out in a couple of months, that has that feeling too, and it’s a great family that’s growing and growing here — we’ve got about 30 musicians that are all playing on these records. It’s the same people making something new that didn’t exist before, and they’re doing it in the same room. That’s something that hasn’t been done in a long time with a record label. Usually, the artists go record all over the place; it’s not like Sun or Chess Records where everyone’s recording in the same room. I want to pursue this more, and showcase this idea.

Where is Third Man located in Nashville? Is it in a residential area, like the Motown house?

No, it’s in more of an industrial part of the downtown area — the homeless mission is across the street and there’s a methadone clinic behind us. There’s a church across the street that was used as a lookout tower for Union soldiers in the Civil War. It’s a really interesting neighbourhood, and when I saw the building, I just had to have it. I didn’t even have an idea about opening a record label, I just thought, “Oh, that building’s just in the perfect spot” and I was just going to store equipment there. But once I got it, I thought, “You know, maybe it’d be good to finally have a physical location for my record label and start re-releasing some of these old records that are out of print.” And that’s turned into this.

Do you have to deal with a lot of tourists and gawkers?

There’s a lot. But we have a record store upfront, which is for them. It’s swamped — you won’t believe how many people are coming in and buying vinyl records every day. It’s crazy. And we only sell the records that this label puts out. It’s wild I’m amazed and excited about how people are so drawn to the tangible side of music, still, because we’ve been thinking lately in the past couple of years that it’s gone. But vinyl record sales are the only thing rising in the music industry, and it’s the only thing that’s real, that you can really hold in your hands.

The standard rock ’n’ roll script dictates that, as an artist gets older and more successful, their music becomes more refined and less wild. But in The Dead Weather, it sounds like you’re reconnecting with something very primal — much like what Nick Cave is doing with Grinderman. Is there a specific need this band is fulfilling for you?

As you get into the mainstream and the rest of the world recognizes what you’re doing, you’re given forks in the road. You’re given a lot of choices where you can take the real soft route and start making really plastic music and doing things because you know they’ll sell — that route is presented to you over and over, doing TV commercials, video games and all those things that are offered to you. You can quite easily go down that route; it looks very enticing from a business standpoint. But to really try and stay in touch with where you began, and why you’re attracted to music and art to begin with, and the passion you had from the beginning is very difficult. I wrote a song about that years ago called “Little Room” [on The White Stripes’ 2001 album, White Blood Cells] about staying in that little room. You have to keep creating your own world, and people will roll their eyes as you’re doing it all the time, but you have to keep creating your own environment, your own bubble, to maintain that idea. It’s tough — even if you’re making incredible records, people will still say, “I don’t get it, there’s no hits — it’s not going platinum, so it must be a failure of some kind.” This has happened to so many artists over the years, then we look back after they die and say, “You know, those records were pretty damn good!” It’s so funny how, still to this day, the same things are recurring that have happened throughout music history.

You’ve been successful at dabbling in the pop world — doing Coke commercials and duets with Alicia Keys for James Bond themes — but not having that define you. At the end of day, you still have this body of work that is very much your own. You’ve been able to strike the right balance.

It’s tough. Things make sense to me — I’ve never gone against my principles to do anything. But sometimes you do something, like the Coke commercial — which made perfect sense to me when I saw the visuals and was enraptured by the idea — and then somebody will tap me on the shoulder and say, “You know, some people might not dig that you’re going to do this.” And I don’t care — this means something to me. That’s where courage really comes into play, and people don’t understand that, because they can’t see what goes on behind the curtain, they don’t really know the decision-making process about all those moves. You see modern bands now, they do everything: their tours are sponsored by car companies, they’re on every video game, all that stuff — selling out is becoming invisible, it doesn’t mean anything anymore. But people hold me to a different standard in some ways, though it doesn’t matter to me, because at the end of the day, things will look differently in retrospect.

Ironically, I think you’re held to a different standard because you do go out of your way to maintain a connection to your fans — in everything from The White Stripes touring northern Canada to opening up Third Man in the heart of Nashville. But when you’re appearing in documentaries with The Edge and Jimmy Page, or singing “Hey Jude” with Paul McCartney and Barack Obama at the White House, do you feel comfortable in those situations, where it seems like the old guard are welcoming you into the establishment?

I always go back to working on what I do, and not looking for the easy way out to fund the next trip to the Bahamas. It’s about getting back into the factory and making it happen. All those moments are all things that make sense to me, but I grew up looking at people and thinking, “So-and-so has a record label,” but it didn’t really mean anything. It was just like a vanity thing or something to say that they did, but to me, those words don’t really feel good. I have to be involved in producing things that make sense, that come from a real place and not something to just tell people about at a party.

So what's your unit cost for making vinyl these days? Because there's fewer factories in North America.

Well, the good thing is United Pressing Plant is just a few blocks away from our headquarters here so they've been very good to us. It's a really good marriage. They’re always up for new ideas. And we've come up with really interesting ideas that, already in the first year, have never been done on vinyl before. And that's exciting to find — these small little things have never been done. That's hard to do. This is a medium that's been around for over a hundred years, and to find things that have never been done before is very difficult. But we've found a couple already and we're still searching for them.

Brian Eno said recently that the act of purchasing music will be less about the music itself and more about the artifact that contains it. Given that Third Man puts a great amount of emphasis on creative packaging for its vinyl, I assume you agree with that logic.

Music has always been a confusing thing. There’s one painting that goes in a museum, and the rest of us look at a picture of it in a book. But music’s always been like, “you can have your own copy that you can keep for yourself.” That’s a strange thing. There was a time when you saw the movie in a movie theatre, and that was it — it was gone! You didn’t see that movie until it had a revival again 10 years later and they showed it again in the theatre. Music’s always been a little bit different, and the internet has completely changed that forever, there’s no going back. So now it’s about catering to people who don’t find the invisible nature of digital music to be enough for them — they really want the tangible side of it, and not in a retro, nostalgic way. It’s about a new album from a person — I want to hold it in my hands, and I really want to feel like I’m a part of that band, a part of that experience. That’s tough nowadays, because people are very “gimmie, gimmie, gimme right now” — they take a digital picture but never print it out. They’ll text somebody, “I’m at the blah blah blah show,” and move onto something else 10 seconds later. But it’s really about being there and feeling something new you’ve never felt before, or holding something in your hands you haven’t heard before. That’s what we’re in business for right here. The digital component makes sense, I understand the portability and we offer [digital downloads] with everything we put out. But we have to be involved in the tangible side first and foremost.

It’s also important for creating a connection through music. The irony now is you have access to everything, but you don't really absorb it in the same way, and you don't build the same kind of connection as when you sat down with a record and really took time to explore it.

Well, you're not really allowed to go and find your own thing, like, “I took a trip to Ohio the other day, and I saw this band warm up for this other band that no one's heard of, and I bought their seven inch, and I'm a huge fan – I’m going to follow them around.” And now that's become a click with your mouse: “I saw their MySpace page — yeah, they're okay, anyway, what else is new?” And so that discovery is harder and harder for people to experience. There’s a new generation of people who may not even understand that way of experiencing music, but it still exists.

So, we’ve reached the point in the interview where I ask the obligatory “what’s going on with the White Stripes?” question.

[Laughs] I don’t know. I never plan anything very far ahead, I definitely never have with The White Stripes. That [2007] Canadian tour we did, for example, it was only a couple of weeks before that idea came up, and then only a few days before we left did somebody say, “Why don’t we take some cameras with us?” And look what that turned into. That could be the same thing two months from now — it could be Meg just takes a visit to Nashville and pretty soon we’re recording an album and we didn’t even realize it. That’s the way it’s always been with us. We never planned any of the White Stripes records — they all just happened.

ENCORES

So, of course, a big reason why I’m resurfacing this interview right now is that White is starting to pop up on a lot of Best of 2024 lists for his surprise summer release, No Name, which was kind of like brat for guitar-rock fans over 40. And even though it’s only been out for a few months, I’ve gone back to it more often than all of White’s other solo albums combined, because it most consistently taps into The White Stripes’ most crucial quality: the eternal tension between White’s feral blues-punk riffs and his flamboyant, vaudevillian sense of theatricality.

The first time I saw The White Stripes was in 2001 at a SXSW backyard-barbecue party at a Sixth Street bar called Fat Tuesday’s, where they went on after Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg’s post-Pavement outfit The Preston School of Industry. This was several months before the Stripes dropped White Blood Cells and became garage-rock superstars, so the amazing thing about this video document of the show—beyond the fact that it exists at all—is that the crowd chatter is often louder than the band.