Former White Stripes Guitarist Earns Four Umlauts
The White Stripes were either the last great rock band of the 20th century or the first great band of the 21st. Perhaps both. I didn't have much access to new music when the White Stripes broke through in the early 2000s. The self-titled debut album was released close to the millennial cusp, in mid-1999, and breakthrough DeStijl, named after an early 20th century Dutch art and architecture movement, came out in 2000. But I heard about the buzz, and I wanted to hear them, especially as they were the hot new thing out of Detroit. I had dedicated my allegiance since Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels, which added heavy guitars and raw emotion to the polished but essential sound of Motown. Levi Stubbs and the Detroit Wheels: Wouldn't that have been something? How about Norman Whitfield producing the White Stripes?
There was a new app by which many people were getting free music. It was called Napster, and one could download almost anything. The labels were calling it piracy until they could find a way to get in on the action. I thought there was something morally compromising about using Napster: it was also illegal, and the labels were actually prosecuting users. So I justified: I used LimeWire, an app much like Napster, but which I thought a little more under the radar. The first, actually the primary music, that I downloaded from LimeWire, was the White Stripes.
Like kids today, I didn't know what album each song was being downloaded from, but the LimeWire list on my iPod showed selections from DeStijl, White Blood Cells, and Elephant. I also knew that White Stripes were a duo of Jack White and Meg White, that they color coordinated in red, black, and white (basic colors of the DeStijl art movement but not the only ones), and that they were either married or brother and sister. I didn't care: I considered it part of the start of viral marketing, giving the band controversy and an air of mystery. What I cared about were the killer riffs, that came at the listener like sharks approaching beachgoers in Jaws.
She played drums; he played guitar and most everything else, especially on these bass-heavy early records. Or it sounds like bass, since the duo didn't use a bass or bass player. I understand that the multitasking Jack White used an octave pedal for that White Stripes thump. The strange aspect of the very heavy new White solo album, No Name, is the absence of bass, yet one doesn't really miss it that much. Maybe a little bit, but I didn't notice the absence until the third full spin. Then I found out there is bass. Please continue reading.
Back to the White Stripes: A bunch of these songs--riffs perfected and extended, really--White Stripes knocked out of the park: "The Hardest Button to Button," "Girl You Have No Faith in Medicine," "I Think I Smell a Rat." Another one, their most famous riff, is "Seven Nation Army," which in fact stayed in park, into the fan repertory of every arena, every stadium, every college marching band, every NFL game: The UK soccer chant perfected for American football.
A little more than 20 years later, Jack White is a one-man army, under the brand Third Man. Based in Nashville, it is a recording studio, record label, production company, merchandise manufacturer. Neil Young has recorded ultra-low-fi songs in White's 1947 Voice-o-Graph booth at Third Man, the kind of thing us boomers might record in a booth in Times Square, or Elvis Presley might have used to record a song for his mother as an audition for Sun Records.
Third Man makes and sells recording hardware and pedals for working guitar players (Third Man Hardware x Coppersound Triplegraph Pedal, $399.00). It publishes books and Maggot Brain magazine, vinyl recordings, clothes and merch, and has retail Third Man Records stores in Detroit, Nashville, and London, where vinyl pressings of No Name were given out on July 19; streaming services such as Spotify, to which my listening was limited, got it on August 2. It does not sell DVDs (as far as I am aware) of The Third Man, the great 1949 Cold War spy thriller directed by Carol Reed, written by Graham Greene, and featuring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles. But they might!
What strikes me as most essential to White's empire was his teenage apprenticeship as an upholsterer: he could build new stuff, sure, but he was really good at making old stuff seem new; worn stuff look fresh; furniture that has seen better days look and feel comfy again.
This is an excellent talent for the rock guitarist who is not reinventing the world every time he picks up his tool, but making improvements, sometimes cosmetic, sometimes unnoticed, always placing ease and comfort first. As the intentionally generic title No Name indicates, and its blank covers depending on the format, the wheel is not reinvented, but the rock is solid enough you could strike a damp match on it and make some fire.
As I said, it is a heavy guitar record, so much so that it should bear an umlaut: Nö Näme, the international signifier for metal. Did you know that the English word "umlaut" does not require an umlaut? Yet it never loses sight of White's blues-rootedness on tracks like "It's Rough on Rats (If You're Asking)" and "Tonight (Was a Long Time Ago)." The former lands like a good outtake from Cream's Disraeli Gears. The latter, a track from the unrecorded Led Zeppelin XIII. The opening track, "Old Scratch Blues," reminds me of "Communication Breakdown" from Led Zep's 1969 debut album, rewired for the future.
Jack White, No Name, album cover.
Classic rock references continue with "Missionary," which is both about spreading a spiritual message and the sexual position, to the riff from "I Can't Explain" by the Who. By the way, though White does much of the work, he does have a band or side players here, including bass on various tracks. My dog-eared ears don't hear much bass on the Spotify version, yet I don't miss the deeper bottom often.
"Bombing Out" sounds like what the title says, but there are feelings beneath the blitz. It's a song about bombing out with a girl, you know, he keeps calling but she won't answer her phone. One hears it and does not thing of a cell phone; I picture a landline. "What's the Rumpus?" again telegraphs its intentions--but the singer is starting to become concerned about the longevity of his audio equipment: "It won't be long before my stereo breaks 100,000 plays/I'll bring Sansui back from the dead." I don't doubt that Jack White, the upholsterer, keeps his unit in fine working condition.
The most interesting song to me is "Archbishop Harold Holmes." The lyrics, recited with the cadence of a rap-aware prosperity preacher, sound taken from a flier one might find on the street, or placed in your hand on the subway. It's in the form of a letter from the Archbishop himself:
"Dear Friend: If you want to feel better
Don't let the devil make you toss this letter
If you've been crossed up by hoodoo voodoo
The wizard or the lizard
You got family trouble? Man trouble? Woman trouble?
No light through the rubble?"
Which leads me to one of the strange corners of the internet, particularly the Jack White/Reddit page. Some scholar there believes that this song about Harold Holmes is inspired by Harold Hill from the classic musical The Music Man. He hears "76 Trombones" in the song. I don't think it's really a thing. I am open to all reasonable theories, but this is not one of them.
As a postscript, I was listening to this record on Spotify. When it ended, the algorithm kicked in, and a relatively tepid song by the Black Keys came on. Then August 9, The New York Times crossword puzzle offered this clue: "The White Stripes or Black Keys, e.g." I tried all sorts of permutation of "rockblues" or "rockduos" or "bluesrock bands" but none of them fit. It was embarrassing, so I looked up the answer. It was "Indiebands." I thought about it, and decided that it crossed the border from oblique to phishing to just plain wrong, as both acts have recorded for major labels, have been around for many years in the rock mainstream, and headline (or headlined) arenas and festivals. They are not indie bands. One more reason to shout at the increasingly erratic Times: "I don't believe you."
Header image of Jack White courtesy of Big Hassle Media/David James Swanson.
