The first White Stripes single was made here in 1998, and now Third Man was its third-biggest customer. United has been pressing records since 1949. He pulled into the parking lot of United Record Pressing, the largest vinyl-record plant in the country. “I quit smoking cigarettes like six years ago,” he explained, rolling through a stop sign. He wore black sunglasses and a tight black T-shirt, and he drove fast, steering with one hand while ashing an Al Capone cigarillo with the other. Ready to be set on fire.”Ī few days later, White was sitting behind the wheel of his 500-horsepower black Mercedes.
I asked where they’d been before, and he laughed. “It’s good to finally have them in a nice sealed environment,” White said. Unusually for a musician, White has maintained control of his own masters, granting him extraordinary artistic freedom as well as truckloads of money. The lock clicked, and he swung the door open to reveal floor-to-ceiling shelves containing the master recordings of nearly every song he’s ever been involved with. He pressed his thumb to a biometric scanner. White walked back to a room called the Vault, which is maintained at a constant 64 degrees. I’m interested in ideas that can shake us all up.” There aren’t that many things left that haven’t already been done, especially with music. It’s just a tool to propel us into the next zone. Accidentist and Occidental Archaeologist.” “The label is a McGuffin. There was also a stack of business cards that read: “John A. On his desk sat a cowbell, a pocketknife, a George Orwell reader and an antique ice-cream scoop. He’s an imposing presence, over six feet tall, with intense dark eyes and a concerningly pale complexion. “I’m trying to get somewhere,” White, who is 36, said, reclining in his tin-ceilinged office. (Their first single was called “C’mon and Ride.”) And gimmicks like Third Man’s Rolling Record Store, basically an ice-cream truck for records, show he’s as much a huckster as an artist. He has produced records for the ’50s rockabilly singer Wanda Jackson the Detroit shock rappers Insane Clown Posse a band called Transit, made up of employees of the Nashville Metropolitan Transit Authority. But White’s tastes are far more whimsical. Some have called Third Man a vanity project, like the Beatles’ Apple Records or Prince’s Paisley Park. “Can you guess which Third Man employee is getting fined $50 today?” he asked, smiling. (There were also a statistically improbable number of redheads.) White stopped in front of one cute girl in bluejeans and Vans.
The boys wore black ties and yellow shirts the girls wore black tights and yellow Anna Sui dresses. Roaming the hallways were several young employees, all color-coordinated, like comic-book henchmen. The décor reflected his quirky junk-art aesthetic: African masks and shrunken heads from New Guinea antique phone booths and vintage Victrolas. Albums from Third Man artists, including White’s other bands, the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather, filled the racks. He is most famous as the singer for the White Stripes, the red-and-white-clad Detroit duo that played a stripped-down, punked-up take on Delta blues their gold and platinum records adorned the walls. White, looking like a dandyish undertaker in a black suit and matching bowler, was in the record store, which doubles as a tiny Jack White museum. It’s a one-stop creativity shop as designed by an imaginative kindergartner - a cross between Warhol’s Factory and the Batcave. But then I started designing the whole building from scratch.” Now it holds a record store, his label offices, a concert venue, a recording booth, a lounge for parties and even a darkroom. “When I found this place” White said one day last April, “I was just looking for a place to store my gear.
This is the home of Third Man Records: the headquarters of Jack White’s various musical enterprises, and the center of his carefully curated world. The inside holds all manner of curiosities and wonders - secret passageways, trompe l’oeil floors, the mounted heads of various exotic ungulates (a bison, a giraffe, a Himalayan tahr) as well as a sign on the wall that says photography is prohibited. In an industrial section of south-central Nashville, stuck between a homeless shelter and some railroad tracks, sits a little primary-colored Lego-block of a building with a Tesla tower on top.