![]() ![]() The White Stripes’ primal, two-piece M.O. “I didn’t know you could do that, just singing and clapping,” an awed White said to Jimmy Page and U2 guitarist The Edge in the guitar-summit film It Might Get Loud.“It meant everything. With just his ravaged preacher’s voice and hand-clap beats, he already had everything he needed. Although Son House had inspired even a virile young Robert Johnson, it was the shaking, booze-wrecked House of the Father Of Folk Blues LP (1965) that Jack heard. Investigating further, Son House’s Grinnin’ In Your Face, its lyrics describing how this troubled adolescent felt the world treated him at times, pierced his heart even deeper. It was in the unlikely setting of a 1993 Radiohead gig, though, that Jack heard Son House’s John The Revelator played as intro music, and was truly transformed by blues. He was also a Nirvana fan when MTV Unplugged in New York was released in 1994, and the 19-year-old White heard Kurt Cobain’s bloody evisceration of Lead Belly’s Where Did You Sleep Last Night? (itself an epochal, enduring transmission of blues values). James Infirmary Blues) and Led Zeppelin, the latter influence so obvious, as his solos in later Stripes shows threw off their punk straitjacket and went squalling, Page-like, into the stratosphere, that he has felt compelled to studiously ignore it. His own path to the music was a twisted one, including study of the Gun Club, Captain Beefheart, Bob Dylan, Betty Boop cartoons (where he and Meg heard St. White has become both custodian and salesman of America’s blues legacy. He has also set Beck, Laura Marling and others to work making often blues-based seven-inch singles in his Nashville Third Man HQ’s studio. This was a march into the heart of the charts so redolent with mystery that it already seems a historic product of an almost pre-internet age, when a woman’s ex-husband could turn her into his sister and the world chose to believe it, falling for a brazen smoke-and-mirrors deception that brought the blues songbook’s incestuous voodoo to life every night that his White Stripes partner Meg faced down Jack’s bitter guitar sallies from behind her drum kit.Īnd yet in 2020, his label, Third Man Records, has not only been fundamental in the equally archaic vinyl format’s revival, it is also reissuing old blues gold for a new generation, pressing up the complete works of the Mississippi Sheikhs, Blind Willie McTell and the early, Detroit John Lee Hooker, in stylish editions designed to snare generations too young even for The White Stripes. As I discovered on trips to Detroit and Nashville researching my biography of him, Jack White: How He Built An Empire From The Blues, he has in fact made a thriving music business materialise around him, through The White Stripes’ campaign of blues evangelism. ![]()
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