White wore me out. I wasn’t prepared. He had a big Mercedes, with a custom sound system, and he drove like hell through Nashville traffic, with Slim Harpo at defcon 1 volume. We pulled into a filling station, he jumped out, gassed up, jumped back in, and tore ass out of the station and made a bad U-turn in front of traffic. He worried me a little. What if he’d left the pump hose in the tank? What then?
Jack White has always fascinated me, and recently The New Yorker’s Alec Wilkinson did a short profile on his seemingly ‘infinite imagination.’ The above was taken from the piece as recounted by Ry Cooder and left me smiling with the mental image of White terrorizing the streets of Nashville with the blues cranked to 11 on his Mercedes’ custom stereo.
Additionally, I love White’s approach to business:
Over the course of any day, White is boss, bandmate, producer, project supervisor, businessman, pragmatist, and idea man. “Mr. American Work Ethic” is how an acquaintance of White’s described him to me. White says that Third Man Records is not in business to make money. (It does.) He wants the company to produce objects and projects he cares about, in the belief that if they appeal to him and his staff, they will appeal to others, even if they appear pointless.
On self-imposed rules & constraints:
With computers you can use three hundred and ten tracks if you want to, but it’s too much freedom. I always have my own rules, and I can bend them if I want. I can see the confines I’m working in, but nobody else knows I’m doing it
Read the full piece on The New Yorker.