Jack White

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Today, we have friend of the show, Jack White, back on the program, along with a very special visit from one of my favorite artists of all time. If you missed our last conversation with Jack, Brennan Benson and the rest of the Rack and Tours, I highly recommend going back to listen. This conversation, like the one before, is full of fascinating ideas, asides in musical history that lets you know just how deep a cat Jack White really is. It's as if he's tapped into some sort of endless creative energy and inspiration, and some of that inspiration he tells Rick in this conversation is still emanating from his youth. Jack also has a work ethic and a business ethos Unlike most his labeled Third Man Records has a rich roster of artists, with three retail stores in Detroit, Nashville, and London. They also own one of the few fully operational vinyl pressing plants in the US, which has been working overtime lately to keep up with the surging demand for vinyl. Jack also released two full length albums this year that perfectly document his present creative life, and he's on a worldwide tour promoting those records. After a recent two nights stand in La, Jack stopped by Shangar Law to speak with Rick Rubin about the early garage rock scene in Detroit that helped shape him, what makes the Seven Nation Army Guitar Riff one of the greatest earworms of all time? And then Jack treats Rick and a legendary surprise guest to an acoustic performance of his new song A Tip from You to Me, And to cap it all off, we'll hear exclusive details about an exciting new project Rick's been working on that'll be out soon. This is broken record liner notes for the Digital Age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's Rick Rubin and Jack White from Shangar La. Are you on the road now? Yeah? We just did uh these last two nights we played in town and then uh day off today. So yeah, so you said, hey, so it would be a good time because I've been wanting to having excuse to come out here again. And what's the current band situation? So three guys with me drums, bass and keys, and guys who've played with before. Yes, Dominic Davis who's on bass, and we've been playing together since we're like thirteen, we go way back to Detroit and Dary Jones on drums and who's probably I think, really think the most unique drummer around today really, and then Quincy McCrary plays keys and sings harmonies too. I debated going on as a three piece. I always wanted to do that, and I got to try that out on when we did Saturday Night Live year and a half ago or whatever it was. It um that was a good moment because we weren't pushing anything or anything. So we did that, and I felt, oh, well, that would be nice tour as a trio. But but then there's a whole like bank of like forty songs that have keyboards that we wouldn't really be able to perform and that we have to just kind of cross that off. Those feels an obligation to have keyboards in a keyboard song, though, do you basically do a three piece band cover of Yes, I would love that. My my worry was that, you know, I even worried about that in the Noise Chris, which was breaking things up and sometimes playing keys or synth on a song or acoustic on the song. So it wasn't the same. You're not hearing the same tones over and over and over again. That's always my concern, and I don't want things to sound whimpy either, you know. So sometimes I love an acoustic track, but playing it live, you're in that room and it's you just got done playing three very fast rock and roll songs, and you feel like, I'm you can't tell if you're losing them the audience, or or if they're actually just if they're actually listening, paying attention more or something, you know. So it's hard to know, but I like that because it keeps me on edge the whole time. Yeah, what's two relationship to rocking materials versus non rocking material in general? Yeah, I sometimes think that the things that I like more are not as appealing to other people. Like, for example, a great example is I really can would just like to be a drummer, you know, but I know that my drumming is just you know, it doesn't capture people and capture their attention and make them go wow, wait a minute, you know, or you know, or like, I play piano, but no one considers me a piano player by any means. I definitely wouldn't claim that either, but it for some reason. When I play guitar, it connects with people and they come back with feedback, and they give me feedback and want to push me to keep doing that. Where that's the one instrument for the I like that. The last one I would pick was guitar, you know. I mean, just like everybody plays guitar. It's been done a million times, and how do you have your own voice and uniqueness to it? And maybe because of my sort of carelessness about that, maybe by accident there's some uniqueness ended up happening because of me sort of thinking, oh whatever, I guess interesting. It's like if you want to or if you wrote a poem and you could read it out loud and you maybe you could get a few people to pay attention and get something out of it and connect with some other people. If you put it to melody and sing those words are reading, then all of a sudden you get more people paying attention. Possibly, And then if you put music behind it and then a rhythm behind who knows, you could go to a billion people could be interested in. I think that's kind of the way I feel like, Okay, this is the window to if I can tell the story to if I need to use this instrument to do it. Okay, if that's what you want, Okay, yeah, let's do that. Can you imagine with your love of drums, could you imagine playing drums for a band that already connected with people on a different level where it wasn't on you to be the connector, but you could just be the drummer. It'd be great. It'd be great. Yeah. I played drums in my band, The Dead Weather on the drummer in that band, but it's a darker band. It's more esoteric and darker. So it's not really we never intended to have it at hoping it had a large popular reach or anything like that. It sounds like a cynical hipster thing to say, like an on purpose trying not to you know whatever. But it really wasn't that way. I'm saying that because I didn't wasn't expecting. Oh great, the heat's off me. Yeah I can just drump, but um, yeah, I'll be wonderful, you know, it would be wonderful to be that. Tell me about your relationship to success in terms of when you're writing, do you ever think who's going to like this, or what's the right presentation to make somebody respond. I early on, coming on the sort of the de garage rock scene in Detroit, it was a lot of people who were talented, who were keeping themselves down on purpose or boxing themselves in a weird way of not wanting to succeed in any way or to grow in any bigger way. I always thought that's a really strange thing. It's almost like a painter who never puts his paintings up on the wall or puts them in a gallery. I mean, if you're not sharing with other people, I guess what's the point. You know, you're just doing it. You're by yourself. Maybe you should just stay at home or something that's just a hobbying. But if you're going up on stage and you're putting on a record with your name on it or whatever, it feels like you're already in that world anyway, You're already sharing with other people. I guess people always say something like, doesn't it make you mad that they play your seven Nation Army song at sports stadium? So why would that make me mad? I mean, I think krik Combing sort of brought a little bit more of that to the to the surface of punk rock guilt. Where you're he may have felt felt guilty about the attention from what I hear or from it's always gathered about him, And I felt like that was definitely as a vibe in that sort of the hipster garage rock world that we came out of, was that you're almost supposed to be ashamed if something worked out. Well, it's odd and add it's an odd way of thinking about it. I think there's some belief and I do not. I do not subscribe to this belief that if something successful, it can't be good, right, And I don't think that's right. I really don't think that's right. I think a lot of the stuff that's successful I might not like. Yeah, but things do breakthrough that are amazing. Yeah, and those are the revolutionary things. Yes. I mean there'll be times, so there'll be a pop song where you might instantly hear it and be cynical about it and say, oh God, give me a break, you know, or a cliche or it's a pretensists or something like that. And then what what I'll do is I'll realize, you know, that's hard, man, that's really hard. If you want to sit down and write a hit, that's gonna be number one on the charts or whatever, especially nowadays, that's no easy task, and so then you have to give credit for that, Like, hey, even if you don't like it, you gotta give someone credit. They actually made it work. I figured it out. Even if they wanted to do it every single time, they couldn't do it. So you start thinking about that way, and then maybe sometimes like time passes and you start realizing, wow, that was really an important, beautiful thing that happened when that song became pub even novelty songs, yes, Like I think of songs in the eighties that I thought were just you know, these novelty, goofy things that were on the radio. Then now when I look back, I'm like, wow, damn you know take on me by Aha, incredible. Wow. Think about the structure of the melody of that vocal alone, let alone the production of it. And if you would ask me when I was whatever, ten, twelve, I've one whatever. But now I have immense respect for certain things like that, And it's it's funny that those things click with you at times, but I guess it's part of the craft. When you get yourself involved in the craft and you care about it and you're open minded. Yeah, I feel like maybe everyone has a choice psyche as they age, you have a choice to go down this darker road where you become more and more close minded and more cynical and more hateful of anything that's different and and and scarier or imposing or you you you stay down this road where you get more and more open minded, more and more enlightened as you go, because you want to keep experiencing and you want to meet new people and hear new things. It's almost enough some kind of unconscious choice. Yeah. I used to think when I was younger, Hey, you know some old timer musicians coming to town and they're playing this club and we go see you and say, hey, come and talk to us after the show, and they wouldn't want to. And I was like, God, that would be terrible. I wonder why they're so grumpy and grouchy. Well now I can see you're grouchy. Well I can see that. It's like there's been moments in my life where I could definitely have gone down that road, Like why I finished my show at getting a car and go to the hotel and not talk to anybody. I could see someone making that choice and why they would make that choice. But you have to sort of shake that off and like, yeah, but you miss so much And in a way, it's like a giving up for selfish you know, for selfishness. You know. Also it is a grueling I imagine it's grueling on the road, just like having to do it all the time. Yeah, and there's only so much energy, and you want the show to be good every night, so it seems like everything other than the show might suffer for the show to be all but it could be. Yeah. When I see acts that are sort of maybe doing the same set every night and they have the pyrotechniques go off in song three and all that, I get a little jealous because I don't have a set list in my set. So when I see that, I'm like, oh man, it would be so easy, and it would be so now you just go up there, or say someone who stands still and sort of just can sing, like Willie Nelson doesn't really need to do anything, and you didn't do acrobatics or anything. That voice is it. He's got it. It doesn't even probably require too much energy to push it out of himself. And it's amazing every time you know I don't have that. You know, I don't have a singer's voice. I'm not a singer and I'm not even that kind of the character vocalist of like a Wheelie. I feel like to make something nice a Wednesday night in Poughkeepsie and you want this show to be great as it was, you know, Saturday night in New York City, And well, what am I gonna do? And first you have to care, you know, And there's another fork in the road where you find these moments where like, wow, you can see easily how quickly you'd want to give up and just go stay in the tour buss. I remember someone telling me that they were like, yeah, I used to look at the shows like, you know, two more songs and I get to go watch TV on the tour bus and one more song and wow, get out of here. I'm like, please, God, don't want that happen to me. Yeah, you know that would be I would just I know what I would do. I just wouldn't do her any Yeah, and I can't imagine the shows are very good. If that's the attitude of the performer, campy I get, you know, or say, if what's popular now Vegas residencies are popular now and I can get the repeal of that, you know, like maybe there's artists like they get paid already no matter who shows up, it's the same dressing room every night. You get to take a private jet home to LA every night if you want to, or all these benefits and niceties and stuff. So I could see all that, but then I think, I don't know if it would work for me. I would feel like I gave up, like for my own personal music. No judgment on that. Some people that makes If you're Tom Jones, that's it, man, That's that's the way to go for what he's doing it out. He's he's got the pipes for that. And maybe it would work for a Willy Nelson and in a way in the write environment or something. But maybe for me, I would think, a man, how would how could I do that and not give up and make it a different show every night and have energy to it? That would almost be It's o unchallenging and sounds really fun, like that could be fun. It could be interesting way to do it. Have you ever seen Willie Live? Yes? Yeah, yeah, it's incredible, it's great, It's incredible. Yeah, it's it's not what I expected before, before I'd ever seen him. Yeah, I assumed it was going to be more like a country concert, and it was more like a Ramons concert other than the fact that he the songs that he's singing. But yes, it was song on top of song to a song onto a Yeah, it was relentless and then yeah, they do this like you do, like a little build up that you think would be like that. It's almost like whimpy for a second and it's like no, no, no, no no, no no, no time well scaring Ramon, don't run drop and you're like, damn that that took. He didn't even really he raised his voice, but all of a sudden the energy went bammed like maybe with one little snare hit. Yeah, and so much to learn from that and him as a guitar player, so punk rock, so punk. I mean that guy his guitar solos. If you haven't listened to a Willie Nelson guitar solo, you know, anybody, I always say, god man, just type in Willie Nelson guitar solo on the Internet and listen to what he does. You won't believe it at first, You'll wait what you know, and it is so punk and so carefree and such a rebellious thing that I just kind of can't believe he got away with that, even even in the different environments he's worked in all the time. It's like, damn, that's a real rebellious, outsider way to attack the guitar. And in the instrument he plays, the strange acoustic electric hybrid deck has a matching amp built by like Worltzer or something. I forget what company made it, but it's a bizarre instrument that he shows that nobody else has as well, So very unique. I wouldn't have thought to ask us before, but you talked about a song that plays in soccer stadiums. Have you ever tried to analyze what it is about Seven Nation Army that has transcended not only the rest of your work, but the rest of any rock artist's work of you know, it's like it's it's it has had a really unusual life, bizarre, Yeah, anything that you've noticed, maybe from playing it live, anything in you know, being a someone who studies music, you know, we we we are passion has study music, we love trying to understand why it does what it does. You have any thoughts. I've heard lots of opinions about it over the years, you know, some being really positive and feeling it's groundbreaking. Other people trying to sort of like take it away from me, or or I say I copied something that are on the negative side, and other people thinking that it's possibly you know, I don't know what the word is, but you know, something like when music is a related to a heartbeat, or that it's it has an organicness to it that we that maybe just got accidentally unearthed in that scenario. But I did read an article once about why do we like music at all? From a scientists point of view, and it was, you know, really scientific and methodical, and it was an interesting thing. The theory in this article was the brain is trying to make patterns and make sense of patterns, and that we find a thrill and when we can complete the melody pattern in our head or guess what it's going to be. You know, you can guess if you go, I know the last two notes are going to be you know, maybe that's a pleasantness to that. And then when you don't do that, waiting so we resolve it and then maybe that gets into like why horror films are appealing to be like it shouldn't on paper and be like, well, why would you want to be scared? That doesn't make any sense, But we like it. We find it a thrill and maybe that seven Nation Army with the melodies. There seems to be two moments in there if I were to analyze it, and I'm just taking guys, I have no idea, but this is you know that sounds like you're gonna go up like or something like that, but you go up and then you quickly change direction. No, no, no no, now I'm going back down. That gets you to pay attention. Yeah, so wait, what's how's it gonna resolve? Why did it change direction? Exactly? Why did it change direction? So then you got and then this next one is sort of why I think is maybe like the horror movie thing. Then like whoa, okay, I guess I agree to that. You know it's not an actual full result, so like, yeah, I can, I can. I can deal with that. Your brain can maybe say yeah, I can do with it. I don't know, it's just a y that maybe maybe those two little moments or what is it? The riff? Would you say the song is the riff. Yes, yeah, okay. The funny thing was that I was at the time. I remember saying, to make this will be great. I want to The challenge for me right now is I want to write a song with no chorus and make it something people like that doesn't have any chorus. So that was at that moment the challenge in the studio. Very briefly, we didn't We didn't spend much time on that song, you know, and uh, but I remember that being like, oh, this will be great. I won't write a chorus for this doesn't need one. We'll just keep hammering this and then we'll play off the loud quietness of Maybe the grung era can be part of that. And there's also slide guitar and a two and it's also sort of like a bass, but I'm not really playing bass. I'm playing a D tune guitar. So there was like, yeah, that's enough for the things that I think are interesting, so interesting? Did you play guitar barely like punk rock? You know, like rudimentary guitar who it plays guitar on like the Beastie Boys of I know that the first album. That's okay, I didn't know that. I really I thought you were going to mention, say some studio guys and Gray, what guitar did you use for that? I had an SG Junior fifty six s G Junior nice and that was that was my main guitar. And then I remember I saw a Slayer and I was really impressed with Slayer and um and I met them and carry King got me a carry King guitar, like really like a real metal guitar. Yeah, and I think I might have played one solo on that. I can't I can't remember exactly, but I remember I had that and then I ended up sending the guitar back after using it on me acause I didn't really like it, but just like, oh this is fun for this kind of a thing. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah, but why didn't add Rock play? Why did you play guitar that? I don't really know? Yeah, I don't really know. It wasn't also the concept of the Beastie Boys as rappers, maybe they just did it had no instrumentation. It wasn't supposed to be that because when they played it was more like what the BC Boys the band sounded like, and we were doing something really different than that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I always had a sneaking suspicion, Like when I was like eighteen or another. He was like, I get the feeling after I heard their punk records. I get the feeling like they did this rap thing because they thought it was funny, yeah first, and then it just actually worked, so they stuck with it, and people really does. I think what happened, honestly for all of us was we were all into punk rock, yeah, and then hip hop happened, and it's like hip hop really took over for punk rock for us in real like as fans. Sure, yeah, so it just became more. It seemed disingenuous to keep making punk rock when all we did was listened to and love hip hop, right, And that was the new thing, was the punk rock? Yeah, And you know it was for me, it was heavy metal before before, like I loved heavy metal music or what I call heavy metal music, which is really rock card rock music. You know. I liked AC DC and Aerosmith, Nugent, those guys. Yeah, and then when I heard I guess the Ramones and then the Sex Pistols and then the Clash and then really Black Flag and the Germs, and I listened to much less hard rock once that started. Do you think um like Walk This Way would have worked with and this isn't a god I wish you would have tried. I'm just throwing out a hypothetically. Do you think that that song would have worked with any other band? Like if you had tried that with led Zeppein or A Deep Purple or any other track. So the reason that Walk This Way worked had mostly to do with the vocal phrasing. That was the key. There were two pieces actually, so the one key was the inspiration for that was. I went to dinner in Los Angeles with a head of a record company who was trying to sign you know, sign me. Yeah, And so he couldn't have been more like on good behavior and friendly yeah, And he said, you know, why why do you think people like this rap stuff? Is? I mean, after it's not music? Now he's saying this to me as like, right, yeah, yeah, just completely oblivious. This is not Why would anybody like this thing that's not music? Right? Yeah? And I thought there's some way to bridge the gap, There's some way so that that guy would understand what this is, sure, right, And I just started listening to records and think about, Okay, is there a record that's a familiar record that vocally is not so different from a rap record. Yeah, And the phrasing was and it's not melodic sea, it's really the phrase. It's the phrasing. Yeah. So it could have been, um, what's the Dylan song Subterranean Homes? Yeah, it could have been that. That would have worked too much monkey business? Ye, that could have worked. Yeah, so whi there was something based on the phrasing. And then the extra added benefit for Walk This Way is that the drum break the intro to the record was a drum break that you might hear in a hip hop club in real life. Exact, it was already considered in the hip hop cannon, not because of the song, but only because of the beat, right, So it was this magical combination of a hip hop friendly beat with hip hop friendly phrasing. Yeah, And it really was just to demonstrate, oh look, it's not that different. You know, this is not foreign, right exactly. Yeah, it's funny. Yeah, and whenever were never there's a new style. A lot of the time, as you look back through music history, it seems like the main gripe from the majority of people is this is a lower ring of the bar. This is a Lawrence's punk. All these guys are not how to play their guitars, you know, but something rock and roll compared to the the big band before. I thought that's something they're asked Quincy Jones what the jazz guys thought of the Beatles when they first got to America all that was, and he says something like, those were some no playing motherfuckers, we thought, And everyone got kind of offended when you said, then, I thought I shouldn't be offended by that, because I mean, stop for a second and think about the incomplex chord changes and structures those jazz guys were doing and free flowing off of that and everything. And to hear guys come and play three chords, four chords and sing and everyone's going ape and selling millions of records, it might make you a little bit like, geez, that's not you know, wait a minute, but it's all. It's like that kind of thing where people can walk into a museum and say, oh, I could paint that, Well, no, you couldn't. You got to come up with that idea, and then you got to construct, constructed and the actual painting of at Jackson Park doesn't really matter that the dripping part whatever. It's the same thing with punk rocks, doesn't really matter about the notes of who is the attitude behind it? You had to construct that attitude or or coerci it out of you from nothing, and that becomes more important than a proficiency of the music and all that. But that's usually the same thing, and the same thing with hip hop. We came along and he's not even playing instruments anymore. There'sn't even instruments. The funny thing now is like I kind of feel, like, you know, modern sort of hip pop production and hip hop production. I'm taken back to the eighties. My feeling when I was ten, twelve years old. My feelings then were it bummed me out that my friends didn't know that was led Zeppelin being sampled on the Best Boys album. Yeah, and it pissed me off. And I knew that, and they didn't know that. And then when I tried to educate them about that and play them a led Zeppelin song, they just shrugged their shoulders like I don't care. And I was like, just as a young kid, I was like, if you like it, that's what's cool about it? It's because it's our we already know that riff, and it's it's they're not even real performing me, they're actually sampling it. So that was frustrating to me as a kid that other people didn't or would be like what was like EPMD, I shot the sheriff for now, that's Eric Clapton covering Bob Marley and it's no but he else knew that in my neighborhood and they didn't care. And I struggled with that a lot. Like that bummed me out. I think now, I think it'd be safe to say if you played one hundred teenagers the top ten songs right now and ask them all, what is making this sound at this part of the song? Who is performing this part of the Where does this sound you're hearing coming from? I would I would venture to guess, and no discs on them, because why would they know that They wouldn't know what's making the sound and what is that like? That's sort of like, you know, I guess you could call it. Some people would call gate keeping where you'd say like you must enjoy this the way I enjoy this, or something like that. But I always feel like, oh god, it would be it would be frustrating to come up in the age right now as a teenager as a musician who wants to play music and not know how to make the sound of that moment of this Kanye West song or something like that. But then the plus side of the positive side of it is they can easily look it up on the Internet and find out if they're really resourceful and maybe crecreated themselves. Whereas in our day we would have had to go to the library, go to the music store, ask somebody, hey, what makes an echo? Do this kind of echo? And then you would have to do a lot of work to figure something. Absolutely, that's a dead beautiful right now you can find out really fast for the question that you asked of, like what's in the you know, what's the instrument playing in these you know this sound in the top ten? Chances are the answer to all of that is it's the computer exactly. Yeah. But I know when Reading Against Machine came out, when that was why I embraced that instantly was because I couldn't believe that guitar player was making his guitar sound like that. I even didn't believe it. There's no way he could make the guitar. How is he's making it that sound. It's very rare when you when you hear an instrumentation where you don't know and you know it's not some trick. You knew he's actually playing that at that time ninety two or something. Those are the moments you save or you want, These moments I wish I had once a week, Like the bass is so much of like what we think of the guitar riff is the bass. Yeah, it's like deep purple. We think of these huge guitar riffs that are really organic base exactly. Yeah, it tricks you because, yeah, the sound your ear goes to the sound on top. Yeah, but sometimes the reason it has that scale and the reason you're impressed with it is because you think, yeah, the underneath, the growl underneath. That frustrates me. Now when I listened to earlier recordings I've done, is that I wanted to get that underneath deep growl, and even in a two piece of mount like a white stripes, double tracking or adding something else didn't happen. And I didn't really know about subwaffer a double octave, you know, overdubbing and all these kind of things that now, these tricks I've learned over the years to bring those tones to fruition. But sometimes I think that at that time I was emulating maybe a deep purple sound that was coming from the growl of the Hammond organ and not from the guitar itself. You know, it takes a while to learn us absolutely, and you might find a new sound. You know, you're you're trying to get the deep purple sound, yeah, and you end up creating something new. Right. They were trying to copy Vanilla Fudge and sound like them, and they came up with their own big sound, gigantic sound, which I think sometimes is overshadowed by Led Zeppelin because I underappreciated what some of the suff deep purple did. We'll be right back with more from Rick Rubin and Jack White. We're back with more from Rick Rubin's conversation with Jack White. Tell me about the world of music that you were born into. I don't know much about the scene in Detroit when you were a kid. What's it. Tell me the story. Well, we had um big family, and my brothers liked a lot of rock and roll, and you know Johnny kab and who and Pink Floyd and things like that, a lot of the progressive rock and rock, classic rock and all those stuff. They were really big on all that, and parents were big music lovers of big band music and Nat King Cole and Glenn Miller and Jen Krupa. Yeah, and I was growing up in the inner city Detroit eighties, so that was hip hop and the def Jam early records were all being played as we were playing four Squares, Ella Cool Jay and That's Outside and Mexican music. At the next houseover and the neighbors next door, they all listened to all the boys and their family all listen to, like the punky side of things, that MC five studges and that kind of stuff. Our family didn't really listen to that much. I didn't get into that till I was a teenager bolder. So yeah, that was kind of a lots of different kinds of music going up. But my friends at school didn't listen to any of that stuff. It was only house music and rap and Top forty or whatever. When did you first When did your love of music start? I think pretty early on when I started playing dramas ons five, But my brothers had a drum kit up in the attic, so it was easy to go up there and mess around. And they didn't have a drum. I had a guitar player, bass player and a keyboard player as my brothers already that those instruts were already taken, so you know, drums were obvious for me to play around with. So I did that. In my whole childhood. I only wanted to play drums scoring up. That was it. I used to practice in high school under the desk with my feet, you know, do parododiles with my feet and tips of my fingers on my lap during classes, and yeah, it was. It was something I kind of considered that it would be a lifelong obsession along with whatever job I had, it would be drums and drumming. Yeah. And then what was your first music that was your music, not your family's music, or what was coming from surrounding you? Great question. I think there were these these trickles of things in high school, which was there was a punk you know, got into things like the Cramps and stuff, and it led to this band of flat duo Jets. Was a really eye opened everything. I went to a concert and I he really was like a modern Geen Vincent and that kind of felt like that was my own and then U. But it was also at the same time there was Rage against the Machine was happening, and I felt like that was new, that something my brothers were, you know, maybe it a little bit older and wouldn't have caught onto that and whatever. It was nineteen ninety two or something, so there was things like that. They weren't all the same genre, they were different spots. But I think that was kind of nice about when I came up, you know, I could be very much into Bob Dylan and the band and at the same time being into Rage Against the Machine and the Cramps. What was the first Cramps record you heard? Do you remember? Oh? It was a Human Fly, the song Human Fly from Gravest Tits I think, yeah, Gravest Tits. Yeah, that was a good one. Yes, I mean I still think that might be one of the top ten recordings ever made. That's unbelievable, unbelievable. That was the first punk rock show I went to was the Cramps at Irving Plaza. Oh, wow. When I was in must have been high school, but it might have been junior high school. Wow. And it was mind blowing life who else was on with the original with the original band with with Nick Nick knocks the original crew and uh Brian Gregory, original guitar player. Wow, yeah, fantastic. I don't remember who was I don't even know if there was anyone else on the build. It was definitely a Cramps gig. There may have been an opening act, yeah, yeah, yeah, but it wasn't like a bunch of bands, right right. Yeah. My first punk show was Fugazi. That was another That was another band that I would one was kind of mine. It was a great nation of ulysses warmed up and wait to see him play. Is a Majestic theater which I ended up playing in a couple of years later a few years later with the White Stripes, And there's a bowling alley there and uh, there's a pool hall upstairs. We played the pool hall called the Magic Stick and then the Majestic Theater as well. So yeah, it was a cool little hub there, all in the cast court or And now you know, it's great as a block away. We've built our Third Man Records pressing plant from that zone. It's great to still be in that neighborhood creating. You gotta be good if you're playing in a place where there's a bowling alley, because forget it, I'll just go bowling. This is no good. I'm bowling if everybody likes the bowl. Yeah, and the music really has to be good to take you away from bowling. It's that you know you're making the perfect point because upstairs as well the magic stick, there was a whole The whole right side was all pool tables. The left side was the people watching the show. And you could tell by if you were doing something interesting or not about how many people were playing pool, Yeah, and how empty the tables were. And yeah, by the time the White Stripes had to get going, it was the tables started to empty out. And then we sold enough tickets where they were filling up with people standing there, not playing, watching us, and that felt like yeah, it was So you're making an interesting point. Yeah, So when you started playing out in clubs, was there a scene of Was there a garage rock scene in Detroit at that time? Yeah? There was, and I was learning slowly about it. It was a band, or the most important band from then was called the Glories. There were a three piece female drummer named Peg who would only had two times, no skin on the kick trump. She put her foot in the kick trump to hold it steady. Two tom's and a tambourine duct taped to the kick trump. That's it. That was the drums and two guitar players, no bass, very cool, black black male singer, white female drummer, white male guitar player, no bass, no kick trum, no bass, no kick trump, and such a unique sound. And they are the kings of the Detroit garage rock scene still are. When you were a kid, did you see them play live? I just had stopped performing when I was old enough to go to shows. I just missed them. And they splintered into these other groups called the Dirt Bombs and a Rocket for fifty five, and I saw those bands and I ended up playing with those bands a couple of years later. How old were you at this time when you just started playing? This is like memory. I'm like fifteen sixteen starting, just just starting to learn about playing guitar. And I only did that because the guy worked in a pulstry shop with He was a drummer too. We were both drummers, so in order for us to jam together, I had to play guitar so that we could play together. So we would move the furniture aside and bring out the drum set and get at the end of the day. Sometimes it's pretty amazing experienced to being an apprentice and also get to play music. I was like, wow, this is great and then getting into this kind of music too. And this was another band that was my own, you know. That felt like I owned this band, you know. And then you know, then we like actually got to meet them. We saw that. I remember seeing a Dan Crow in a coffee shop and oh my god, that's Dan from the Glories. It's uh, it's Will because yeah, so you had that whole scene there with that. And then when by the time I come out with the doing the white stripes in that scene, I was a little bit shocked. They embraced us so quickly and things happened. We made a lot of friends. Pretty fat I didn't have any friends, neither did Meg, and we we uh, all of a sudden, wait, wait a minute, this guy likes the same music we do. I never had this, you see, like I had a one friend in high school who plays bass with me still this day. He liked, you know, the deep purples and the Holland Wolf records and stuff that I liked. There was another kid I knew in the next pocket. He liked BC Boys and we bonded a little bit on that. But mostly everybody around me I went all Mexican grade school, all black high school. They didn't like any of the same music as me. So I wasn't used to like being in a group of lots of people, dozens of people all like iggy pop and all like you know stuff. Growing up. Same for me, Yeah, I was the only punk rocker in my school. It was lonely. Yeah, it's wild as well. It makes you question it at times, but I was always like, well, I like this, and I kind of almost feel like you should have just loosened up a little bit or made some more friends, you know, if you've just been a little bit more. I just said such strong beliefs about what turned me on, you know, musically, artistically and all that stuff. Do you think because of the glories, the idea of having a two person group felt acceptable. Yes, the goryes in the flat to a jets both the made acceptable idea that the white stripes could be a thing interesting. And then I had come from playing with the Supholsters group, the two of us playing, and that was just guitar and drums, no bass yeh, which was you know, say to like my brother's world of music. That was like, whoa, that's weird to have a band with no bass. But there was already two bands, yeah, the Goories and the Flat just both didn't have a bass player, Like the Doors didn't have a bass player, but they still had four people and they had yeah exactly, and yeah sell four people only still had that. And when I think of two person groups before the White Stripes, I think of Suicide, I think of depeche Mode. Yeah, it's always electronic, it's never it's never worth Yeah, those are all the ones that come to mind, all those yes. Yeah. I thought, though what was different about what we were doing was I had become so immersed and in love with the blues at that point that this would be a great way and obfuscation for me to be able to play that music and get inside of it and obfuscate with the red, white and black color ski and the male female thing and they're no bass player and all that other stuff, which I liked all of that, and I loved all of it. And got a lot out of it, and maybe the blend of that with the blues was what we were at the moment. I was like, this is my way of sneakily not getting called white boy blues, tragic, stratic, hester nonsense, which was super uncool in that zone of that garage rock world at that time. Talk a little bit about the colors. When did the idea of the black, red, and white become part of the vision of the band. Yeah, the my polstry shop was yellow, black and white. All the colors came from my tools and my power saws and my hand tool poster, hand tools. And then I had bought a yellow van I was abandoned, like or an old US Detroit Fire Department van, and that's what I was going to do the deliveries from the furniture with. And I started to dress and yellow and black to do the deliveries and then do the bills and crayon and yellow and black crayon, and the artistic side of it took Quote was taking over him. Did you own that company or were you an employee? I didn't know that you owned the company. Yeah. When I was twenty one, I had a mortgage, I had my own business. I was in three bands. Wow. I sometimes wonder like people must have thought I was really maybe crazy or insane or something, because now if you saw, like if you know, if you had a twenty one year old son that was doing all that, Wow, oh my god, how can I help you? Can? I you know, blah blah, we're pat on the back or I never heard anything like that from adults saying, Oh that's great, you're doing that. That's amazing. You're never heard anything like that, and they just paying attention or what do you think? I think maybe they're just kind of falling. He's weird and it means he or he thinks he has a company or something and he probably doesn't really or I don't know, I don't know what they were thinking. Strange. Most upholstery companies don't have colors associated with those that either. What do you think triggered that idea? If I had to pick one moment, there was a moment of I watched this special encounterfeiting, and they talked about this Dutch designer and I don't know how to pronounce his name, it's like oat j Oxenar. But he had designed this currency that the five and the ten and the twenty dollar bills. I don't know the name of the currency there, but it was you know, this was purple was the five, and blue was the ten, and red was the twenty, and you knew exactly what you had in your hands just by looking at it without looking at the number. And I just really that was really inspiring to me, like, oh, instantly, to know what something is instantaneously without having to have it written on the screen or written across a T shirt. So everything I did do with Third Man Upholstery was going to be yellow, black and white, and sent her around the number three as well. The third Man was the name of the upholstery company, a third Man Upholstery. Where did that name come from? Originally for the upholstery company. That's a long answer, but it's it's a I was actually the third upholsterer on my street. There was an old guy named Clump, and then the guy next tour to me, ri, I'm all done, and I was the third one. Also the street was called Ferdinand Streets Ferdinand third Man, and I'm also obsessed with the number three. And also orson Wells was my biggest title at that moment especially, so all of this came around. Yeah the third Man, Yeah, your furniture is not dead was on my business card, was the slogan, which now with Third Man Records, it's your Turntable's not dead and so yeah, so you basically keep retreading the same old, tired ideas from child. Oh yeah, oh yeah, it never goes away. That's great. Yeah, so that got transferred over to the white stripes, which was instead of yellow black, and when it was red black and white, And how did that decision get made? How did it become red black? Oh? Meg said something about peppermint candies. I love I love peppermint candies. And we were at the drug stripes. And now you know that we've been playing this music that should be on your bass drum. That that peppermint you just painted. I said, I'll paint it when we get home. I'll paint the peppermint and bassed trum. That'll be funny. And then once we did that, and the drum set was white, and I thought, and she had black hair and I had black hair, I'm like, oh wow, then I think maybe this is the three colors instead of I have a third Man with yellow black and white. WIST would be red, black and white. Yeah, for some reason, people missed the black part of it a lot. People we should say, oh, everything I do is red and white, red and white or whatever. I don't care. But but it was actually supposed to be three colors. Yeah. Actually it was thought of it as black and white with red. Yeah, just because black and white it always felt it felt monochromatic. Yes, and now every all of my solo albums are all blue, white, and black, and you know, white's all colors, and black is the absence of color, and so he's really is only one color for each of these things, red or blue, yellow. The third man, when did you decide to start the label? That was sort of an accident. When our manager Ian Montone had gotten us. We were getting like this bidding war had started with the band, probably because we stupidly didn't take the first offers that came to us, which were really generous, and we probably should have just yes right right away, sir, we're coming up with an album right away, and we didn't. I thought, Ah, I kept thinking, nobody's gonna like this band in the mainstream. Six months from now, this will sign with these guys they'll put out one record and they'll drop us next year, and then we might have been right, Yeah, that that actually might have been right. It might have been Yeah. So that was my each either very smart or very ignorant way of looking at at the time, which led to a bidding warm and then at that point was sort of we could almost ask for whatever we wanted at that second, which it was very strange because I, well, what do you want? I don't, I don't know. I knew. I didn't want to owe anybody anything, so I didn't take any big advances. I just say, well, I want us to get paid for the records we sold. Yes, so it's on up and up. I don't anybody in favors or anything like that. I still feel that way today, and it worked. It worked out, and Ian got us our own label to sort of protect me and protect us. You know this imprint label name of what are you gonna call? I say, oh, well, third Man Records, and that became we we licensed these people record from my label, third Man Record. So that was Ian's idea at the time as a protective insurance thing. How did Ian see you, guys, first? How did Ian see this? We would talk to somebody at sub Subpop named Craig Aaronson. I think he's no longer with us. I think he started asking questions which every label probably would or should you guys are thinking about getting a bass player and stuff like that, and we thought, see, here we go. You know, this is what we've always heard. They're gonna they're gonna try to change us into a regular band or something. And we didn't get mad or anything. We just thought, maybe it's not for us. And then we would sit there next day and think, oh god, are we so spoiled that we're gonna have an attitude about a really nice opportunity, Like, so maybe we should get a bass player if it means we get to make records and not have day jobs anymore. I don't know. So he would go back and do you like the sound that? Like, did you already know the sound of the two person group that you guys had what you were making felt special to you? It definitely felt special and felt right. It felt good. If someone comes in the room and says, well, we're going to try to take this to the mainstream, yeah, I would have said that's not going to work, right, I know, I'm not going to pretend like I know everything about music or the music business, but my vote would be I wouldn't bet on that. And it still shocks me that that connected with people. I mean, I mean coming home and watching my nieces and nephews watching our video of ours on MTV in the living room and thinking this is not making any sense. It doesn't add up. It's like it's almost like, let's we kind of started justifying by saying, you know what, Maybe it's like why The Simpsons is so good but it's also really popular. Maybe it's like that, Like no, it couldn't be you know or what you know what I mean, Sometimes you just assume when you get into like especially in the Hip Hisstory world that get into really amazing deep records that nobody's ever heard of, you start assuming good things are ignored and and things that aren't very good are popular. You start getting into a rut, which is not really true, but you get into that rut, especially when you're younger. So it was confusing for us because we thought, does this mean we're not any good? If we're if we're getting well known, maybe that means we're no good or what we thought was special is not special? Also interesting that that not only would there really no known two person rock bands in the world at that time, Yeah, there weren't even that many three men, you know, other than it was especially after Jimmy Hendrix. Like Jimmy Hendrix, you'd think broke open the world and cream Yeah, and then after that maybe the police that's maybe, yeah, there's not very money. It's funny, it's bizarre. It should be hundreds, you'd think, yeah, and that and then we saw that was maybe what started to bring us around. And then in the subsequent couple of years after all White Blood Cells came out, there were several two piece bands that could become signed to major labels and the Kills and Fiery Furnaces or YadA, YadA, YadA all donline. And we kept seeing that, Oh, I say, okay, so this is now. I guess we prove we prove something to somebody. We weren't trying to pay really, but it maybe it's it's proved something to somebody that maybe this is a path we could explore some more. It was great because a lot of great music and do you know if any of those bands existed before they heard the White stripes. I'm I'm gonna bet they did. I don't know what they all did, yeah, I mean, yeah, but I'm gonna bet they did. Because there's there's something interesting that happens when when there's a movement which you're part of a movement, that it doesn't just happen one like, it's not one leader and everybody follows. It's like the time is right for this for some reason. Yeah, there's other people in other bedrooms and garages doing similar stuff, and and and now they have a chance to have some attention paid to them and brought out, brought out into the daylight. And if something new that comes out that's novel, you will see maybe maybe people will rush to find other things like it that are also legit, and they might be, and then there definitely will be a second wave of copycat. And sometimes that copycat second wave is ten times more successful than the first wave. Often, yeah, often, and sometimes you see a little bit of copycat happen, and then that copycat morphed into something else. I mean, when I first saw the Arctic Monkeys come on, I thought, wow, that guy is moving around like at the guitar player in the strokes, like he's walking around, he holding his guitar high, the stratig like like Albert and the Strokes as I, well, that's great. I mean they're those kids, you know, they were like, I don't know what they were, nineteen or something. I was like that, that's fine. And then look that Arctic Monkeys morphed into their own thing, you know, very quickly, and their lyrics were so unique on their own. And there's nothing wrong to have that folk process of being inspired and taking it, trying to take it to another level and emulating people. You everyone goes through that of like it's the if to start somewhere to end up finding your own voice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, any way in it's good. Yeah yeah, I think so if you can get in at all. Yeah. Yeah. It seems like if you're inspired to make music, you're inspired to make it by someone. Yeah. And the first method when you're a kid is well, I'm going to play it like that, Like that seems obvious. That's the starting yeah, and then it turns into whatever it's good to turn into. If you were Dylan coming up and you liked rock and roll in the fifties and the folk movement happened and that inspired you, and he got it, seems to get really engrossed in that and abandons the more rock and roll side of him and embraces the folk side of him and gets very into these deep older Blind and Lemon Jefferson songs and all this kind of stuff, and becomes the new king of folk and changes the world. Subsequently, he doesn't lose that love of rock and roll. It's still in there, and it does eventually come back around a few years later. I don't think you could ever suppress something like that. If that kid was inside of you. That's the first taste of something. The first things I really liked, the Deep Purples and led Zeppelin's are going to be with me forever. Doesn't matter how whatever bizarre punk band or strange thing I get into, that's still gonna be down in there somewhere. And sometimes people will say, oh, I can hear that. That sounds like a smoke on the water or sounds like a you know, I was like that. I don't doubt it, you know, I don't doubt it. I don't run to try to copy that stuff, but I don't run away from it either and try to pretend that I don't like it or it's not part of me. But I've never sat down and tried to copy someone else's thing on purpose. I'm gonna do that because that worked for them, So I'm going to copy that and steal that. Yeah, I've never had that devious mustache twiddling thought in my mind of that. I was like, No, there's things I like, and I'll do my own thing. I'll try to do my own thing. And there's going to be moments where people say, oh, that sounds like that, and it sounds like that. I'm like, Okay, well, you can't live in a vacuum anyway. You're already playing an instrument in singing with your own vocal cords. I mean something, say you sound like something, So don't worry about that. Let's just try to dive forward. What were the blues things? He said at the beginning of the band, you were really deeply into the blues. Yeah, what was the blues at the time? That was really speaking Son House and Robert Johnson and Holland Wolf and Charlie Patton. I was just getting into Charlie Patton brief slightly into it, but it was hard for me understand it. And uh, but I felt like that was something that felt real, It wasn't polished. And that's the same old story I suppose people have always said about the blues when they sort of discover it. But then you what's kind of interesting about my time period of embracing that is I got to instantly say, oh, okay, that's why I led Zeppe and then the Yardbirds and then Yardbirds and Jeff Beck and those guys were feeding off that record and them with Van Morrison, they were listening to that blues record. Okay, so these guys resold the blues back to America from England, got it. And then Jimmy Hendrix comes over to England from America black and also plays blues and sells that back to America, and you just start making all that all this compation's like, okay, great, Yeah, well, I guess I'm in good company then, because I feel the exact same way. Maybe thirty years has passed, but I feel like I'm almost doing yeah exactly. I think maybe it was, yeah, it was time for it to be reevaluated or rediscovered in a way when you guys were first exploding. I'll say, what were the other things that would have been on the radio at the same time that you were on the radio. Oh so, like sorry, what was like an alternative radio? What would have been played before you and after you? I remember now. I think it was the like the Limb Biscuits and the New Metals, corn and things. I think that's what's happening late late nineties, early two thousands. I think that's what was going on. Well. I had listened to alternative radio in the early nineties when I was in high school. The Yeah so that was yeah, Nirvana and Pearl Jam and all that stuff in Ragime's machine. So I had all those records and listened to all that stuff. I almost never mentioned that when I talk like this either, which is it's kind of funny. I mean that was actually a big part of my high school was those bands, and I sat listening to those albums. If you like music, you're going to yeah, you have to do. If you're a kid, that would be the rock music of the day when you're growing up. Exactly. Yeah, it seemed like in nineteen ninety. If you said the Beatles did something in nineteen sixtent that seemed like it was fifty years ago. It was only twenty years. It's unbelievable. That's like talking us for talking about now about the records in two thousand and one. I know that seemed like it was five years ago. I don't know why time is so different seeming. I think as you get older, time speeds up. Yeah, and when we're kids, if you know, a year seems like an eternity. Yeah, and now the years just fly by, right right, Yeah, they just fly by. We have a visitor. We didn't know he was sitting down. Yeah, what's going on? Man? Great? You look great. Soon let me come back. We'll have more from Rick Rubin, Jack White, and Neil Ya, plus a special rendition of Jack's new song A Tip from You to Me. We're back with the rest of Rick Rubin's conversation with Jack White and their surprise visit for Neil Young at Shangra La. How cool to see you here. Well, I heard you were here, sit in the middle. Sitting in the middle. Rick told me you were here, and we are cool. That's great. You've been looking around there, haven't been here kind of doing some stuff, you know. Excellent. How has it been going here? It's great? Yeah? We finished, uh what we took us three weeks something like that. I saw the trailer for The Crazy Horse barn Ye that looks really cool. Yeah, it's great. Daryl made a movie about it. It's fun, just great. I mean shit, yeah, the youngest guy in the band is seventy. Fantastic. Well, had a great times. You know, I've been putting on an album, Recince. Everyone keeps asking, you know, these these questions about like, well, so you know where things going to be for you? You You know when you're you know, sixty years old and eighty years old. I just keep saying, like, it's really nice. It's a nice position to be in to have. You know, Bob and Neil and Tom Waits have already proven there's these things that can happen and can continue because I remember, you know, when I was twelve and the Rolling Stones were forty and everyone's like, oh my god, yeah, and it's it's so nice that you guys are able to sort of prove that to what do you think, Rick, what's your opinion about like hip hop guys when when they're eighty, you know, you never know what you people like hearing the songs, you know exactly you're doing something. Yeah, you know, if they got to spirit something exactly. Yeah. You know, what else can we do with it? Right down to it? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, there's really nothing. Everything else fun little relief here and there, But the real deal is to make the music, and you know, whether you know however, you make it. Absolutely. We had a good time. We were in here, had a great time for three weeks. Oh that's great, man, that's great. Yeah, I feel good about it. Did you play acoustic electric both? Or was like I played a little electric? I played electric on one on two songs, oh great? And everything else I played unheard of combinations of instruments. Oh great. Yes, you know has become a kind of a funk pipe pump organ, Oh yeah, pump pump organ, yes, yes, or pump funk. That's what they'll be doing, pump funk. And combine that with a marine band, you know, through an octave divider into a roll bollox. Oh, and combine that with a pump pump funk thing happened? What's cool? We can play stuff this year here if you'd like to hear it, I'd love Yeah, you're then won't we capture you like that? You know you got you got a commitment to Yeah, yeah, it's up to you. It's up to you. But if you want to hear it, you can hear. Yeah. It's fresh. It was a fun experience and and different than certainly for me, different than any than any that I've ever been involved in. Nice. Nice. Yeah. And it's a good vibe here too. Yeah, it's great. Just started off with I was taking a walk in the woods up in Colorado, you know, wintertime, and I was walking along whistling and I heard this. I said, that's the same song I was whistling yesterday. I don't know what it is, you know, So I've got out my flip phone and recorded it. Yeah. Once I've done that, the next day I walked out whistling a whole new song. Oh my god. And I did it like day after day after day. So I had like ten different validies with no instruments. Just yeah, that's great, so cool, don't see the trees and singing into this old you know whatever, what was black thing? Yeah, And and then I put it on my computer and I category I listened to them all and said, well, that's that melody, this is that melody, this is that day and everybody. Because I didn't organize it, yeah, So I got it in there, and then I put them all and I listened to him. I said, ship might be something here, Yeah, you're all here the melodies. Where did this ship come from? I'm telling you, man, that's antenna's. It's like antennas and and and if you're lucky to have a little, tight, little silver antenna for a minute in your life, to just pick up a frequent magic, you know, all we have to do is be there. Yeah. Yeah, you can't ever ignore it for a second. Yeah, you're there. That's your boss. That's true. And it goes fast. Yes, if you don't catch it, it's gone. And it's gone. Yeah. There's you know, so many times where you woke up in the middle of the night and and played something and I'll remember, go back and safe, I'll remember that and never happens. Oh, you gotta jot, you do something, you know, some kind of sound. Yes, So I did that and I wrote I had this combination and stuff, and I was listening to it on the computer and it was like not this last moon, but the moon before that. Right on the moon, I wrote eight songs in two days. Oh great, crazy, And it was cool. And I ended up looking at them on the computer, which I after I spell corrected everything, which is a mass. Yeah, I did it and then and I haven't changed a fucking word, great punctuation mark or greg like direct shot. It just came. That's a good sign already. Yeah, without hearing any of it, that's a good sign. Yeah. I was gonna send you this track the other day. I just got the mixed one recently. This song I thought my maybe you would like it's going to be on this record I'm putting out. Can I play you a an urder? Yeah? Ask yourself if you are happy and then you cease to be. That's a tip from you to me. And it's worked for sure. I don't ask myself for nothing anymore. My piece is freedom from the masses, because the masses cannot see. That's a tip from them to me. And now I know for sure I don't need nobody's help now anymore. Oh will I be alone on the night? Oh? I don't know. Oh, well, lovely me alone tonight? Oh, I don't know. Everywhere he goes someone seems to know the truth about the things he used to do. And that's hard for you. It's so hard to be the one who knows it's true. Walking through the park, my fingers clenchingside. Then I noticed that I'm all alone tonight, and it's hard to tell for sure if I even need to think now anymore? Oh will I be alone to night? Oh? I don't know. Oh, we'll love let me alone to night. Oh, I don't know. Cool. How'd you write it? Thanice? How did it? How did it come to pass? This was um uh as a quote so often um John Stuart mill I said, ask yourself if you're happy, and then you cease to be. Side just said said that, you know, ask yourself if you are happy, and then you'll cease to be, you know, just staying there and then I just ask yourself if you are happy, and then you will cease to be. That's when those moments come where you're like, oh, thanks that happened, Thank you, thank God that happened, and now you can the rest is easier, like school, great man in mind with me some of your things in the past too. So I thought I was gonna send that to you. I'll send to you and get home. You're gonna get back. I love you, know, I love of yours. Um. Besides the record we just did in the boosts. Yeah, there was a mess and that was the best. That was the best. Fund oh man. Yeah, and uh in Jack's booth where you you know, you go and being a fair or something, you put ten cents in or something and in a record or whatever and record a record. Yeah for your girlfriends. Yeah yeah, whatever you Yeah, it's direct to Vinyl, direct to vinyl in the boostyla you can mail it to them. It's funny. We had somebody in the Third Man shop a few weeks back and they were saying, and we were showing them the booth. You're like, yeah, so you can record a record in this booth, and goes, oh wow, that's cool. You know what now to think of it? I saw Neil Young messing around with one of these on TV one. This is the booth. Yeah funny, Yeah, it was great. Oh but what I was gonna say was is that the track you did the Oh Susanna, the version of Oh Susannah you did? I love that man. It really was something. It's got a whole vibe, ton't you. Oginally was the Thorns? Oh really? No Rose okay, yeah, tim Rose. Yeah, so the group that he was from. It was called the Thorns. Okay, it was just part of the Thorns, okay, and the Thorns just folk rock things. So they took classics like that and they did that arrangement. I heard that and I was wow, I check that out now. Yeah, yeah, the Thorns check them out a lot, you know, and then idea, come are on the mountain when she comes actually yeah, yeah, it's a great idea. Yeah. Yeah. There was those wild moments in those sixties of folk bands of the Fairport conventions and the you know, all the different ones that were trying to like final little zone um to uh. But sometimes they were doing this novelty like old uh you know, John Brown would hit the hammer and the blah blah blah and then whatever hammer in the morning and all that stuff and working into like a rock pop song or whatever. But then there's novelty of songs, and then there's ones that actually cracked through that while they actually stumbled out on something amazing. Right, they're like synthesizing two different genres that must have been wild, like when you because you you were there with that with Buffalo Springfield and those early moments of people embracing country and rock and roll and blending them together. Yeh. Was it clear that the folk revival was a revival at the time. No, it was just folk music. It was just folk revival because folk music never really goes anywhere. It is. It's not here and then gone and back. It's just always here. Just depends on if you want to go there. Everybody kind of went there. And then the rock saying was happening. Folk and rock, and it was at a happening time. You could do a lot of stuff. It was cool, cool, be able to you know, I would go and play a little club. And then I read about how it was cliche ridden. Yeah, didn't know about his band that he was in with the Rick James for a minute. Incredible, incredible, amazing an apartment and h on the street just off the Young Street in Toronto. Amazing character. We had a great time. That's what I'm referring to earlier. That's those are those moments where like people are trying to put something together that maybe has like a whole false, fake idea or shitty producer behind it, or some guys like a money guy or something, but there's these amazing moments that that could have turned into the greatest band of all time? Who knows who knows right? And we you know, we tried what we could. We got busted for Jett was a draft and uh then our manager odeed. He was on harow and he odeed. So what happened next? How how long was that period after that finished where we were like, didn't know what to do next? Months or so were springfield? You know, we thought Bruce Palmer and I from the Minor Birds went to went south, still going south. Minor Birds flew south? Yeah? Shit, should we play? Oh man? But yeah, let's play. Are you up for an entire experience? Of course, let's play? You man? Wow? For real? For real? Congrats? Great great songs and great tones. And the vibe is great, and it's it's different. It's like it sounds it sounds obviously like him. But yeah, the songs are different. Yeah, but I think it's just the way they were written. Yeah. It has that, um, it has a feeling like you had a melody like you're talking about. If you hadn't said that, I would say maybe you had melodies first and then added added later to So it makes sense. What a trip. It must be nice to have a band of guys like that. You just keep coming around so much. Yeah, you know, they're they're lucky. That's really great time. I know, I know, I don't know if I caught myself very lucky. It's crazy yours awesome, you know, Ralph and Melody and Nails, it's great, awesome. They really he can't help but sound like themselves, you know, like it's it's completely their trip. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're great. They are great. It's amazing stuff. What is that echo on the guitar? Is it also every once in a while analog MXR analog delay? Yeah? Mostly the echo plax I got four different settings for it. How much echo? The sliding bar? It's a quick thing. Oh wait wait yeah, it's the it's the volume of the effects that I have four levels on. It's just a lot of how much how love goes? Yeah? Yeah, I have a lot of fun with that. Ye yeah, oh baby nice? How long is that last track? That's a that's a that's the album closer yea or something like that, something like that. Yeah, you guys continue on cool vibe? No, no, yeah, I think so. Yeah, it's really nice. It's um, it's it's just I'm just devastated. Like how how clean and clear his voice is yea, and how you know at times I wish, I mean, I feel like I can't get as clean as I was when I was in my twenties at times, and trying to. I had that. I worked with Tom Jones on one Little forty five once and he had gave me that same vibe, which is, like, man, it's almost like there's like a water farcet in the back of your throat cleaning off these vote. Jones's voice is unbelievable, creamy, it's easy. Yeah, people take it for granted. I think it's it's it's it's pretty impressive, especially in person. Absolutely, that's how he sounds like he's twenty five years old there. Yeah, I'm vocally on that, you know, so clean, and I've been trying to get into that lately more often too, like finding some songs where I can hold notes longer and exemplify them more. I always feel like I'm not a singer like just a vote yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, just go go yeah, because it's got to be a new area, right right, Who knows what's at the other end of the note, right right right? You could definitely go there. There's also something cool about when you're pushing the boundaries of your ability that sounds really interesting, like when you can, like when you're sing something that you can't really sing, you can you yeah, and you don't really make it, but there's a there's a honesty in that. Yeah, that just feels I think that's why I like the band. The bands back background vocals. They seem like you always be reaching for notes that they can't really hit, and it's yeah, it's great. It's just great the attempt. You can hear the attempt and you and you and you give it a grace. You you allow it. You know, you don't really need it to actually succeed successfully hit that note, and maybe they go past it, like Neil said, but the yeah, there's a beauty to it, right. And if we listen, you know, to the old records that we love, there's a lot of stuff that's out of tune and at a time, all the time, oh god, all the time. Yes. Well, my favorite Neil vocal is you know tonight's tonight, that that tone and then you know he's tired to be asking you know what Mike and he used and what was going on when when we're working before together and it's you know, whatever circumstances around that, the recording in the room, whatever, there's there's there's mistakes, there's feedback, there's all that. Who cares, nobody cares. Yeah, the feelings in there and since, well, it's great to see you Jack, I take off so great to see you too. Great surprise, great woke up this morning. I didn't think I'm gonna be seeing you. How good is this great? Good walk man? Thank you see you late us there have fun I've probably see him in a couple of days. Yeah, yeah, see was he good man? Sounding good? Thank you all right? I mean that was a nice street. Yeah, those are the It's something funny. There's something funny about like I think people said, you know, when you're uh, like when you can afford it, all of a sudden they start giving your free jeans and stuff like that, when when you you know, they didn't give it to you when you couldn't afford it. That's when you needed the free jeans. It's something funny about that. Like when you get into like um to make it short, like show business or something, you know, anything, I's gonna see you or Neel today, I woke up, Yeah, and here you are. And the other day I was in Vegas and next door to my room, Bill Burrow, the comedian, is next door. If I was just a regular jish, I was still doing a pholster. Bill Burro wouldn't be next to me in the hotel room. You know what I mean? Something about you manifest to the universe and somehow it just kind of makes out. You bump into somebody out of a crowd of fifty thousand people, you bump into the one person you were supposed to bump into, and you're like, how could that happen? So cool, it's amazing. It's like the thing to really hold on to, like to stay positive about it, you know, because I also think that we've manifest our fears. You know, we put out what we're afraid of, and they happen. We make them happen because we stress on them so much. Our thoughts really have tremendous power. Yeah, it was great, man. I'm glad you guys played that for me. That's that's a nice treat. Yeah. Tell me about how you're approach to making music from the beginning to now. How has it changed over the course of your life. Some of the stuff is, Um, I'm still making it as hard on myself as possible as I've always done, you know, trying to not take the easy way out, and you know, sitting in there, when I start feeling like it's going well, either I'll either consciously or subconsciously, I'll throw a monkey wrench in the works and make it more difficult. I'm playing a bass part. Oh I've never played fretless bass. Let's try that. That'll that'll be harder, and it is harder, and then you know, you try it, and then now I'm in a place now I'm if it's good, I can be proud of it because I know that it was a more difficult challenge than it was to take the easier way out. So I still do that all the time. And some stuff you realize, like these records I just made recently, and that you get in there like, oh wow, okay, I knew how to get that kickdrum sound, and we did it, and I bought that microphone and I owned the studio and we made it. And then I bought the studio and bought that microphone so I could make that sound. Yeah, and there I did it. Wow, I actually did it. That whole thing worked. Yeah, And it's because I learned that mic works, and when nineteen ninety eight, and then in twenty twelve, I learned that compressor work. And thankfully those things you can hold onto those and you remember them, and they actually can work on a functional level. Like a carpenter would say, yeah, that's the right saw chop, sawtware, the two by four table sawtware, the applywood whatever, these perfunctory things, and that applies to yeah, compression and EQ and these kind of things. Stuff I could care less about. In the nineties and early I didn't care about any I don't want to know the name of that microphone. I don't even want I like the shape of it, don't even tell me the name. I used to be very much about that, but luckily over time I've held on it those and they actually do work. So if you're okay, that's good. At least, at least if the songs are is there a moment where there's no songs there, or I'm trying and there's nothing's coming out, at least I have some sort of workman like hardware store, workman like things that I can accomplish to put to set the table anything different more philosophically or conceptually. That's different than when you were young. Philosophically, um, well, the sad part of the one sad negative thing I don't like about sort of having writing songs when you're more well known to people rather than when you're just by yourself in an attic or garage is that I at times will give up on a line or a title because I don't want to have to talk about it. I don't want to have to answer questions about it. I don't want to have it. Oh they're gonna assume I'm talking about myself, or they're gonna assume I'm talking about my girlfriend or my ex wife or something like that. And it's like, even though I'm not writing like that, they might think that, well, it's not even worth it. Just scratch it off and write something else. And that's a shame because I shouldn't do that and I shouldn't have to do that. But it's just picking your battles. So that's different from when I was younger. That's interesting since it's a shame. Yeah, we're gonna will right now. We have this opportunity. I am going to give you permission going forward that anything that you write that you like, you can say it without ever worrying about having to talk about it. Than you give you that permission. Thank you. Yeah, and you can do it. Problem solved exactly. It's amazing because it really is. It's like these things, these boundaries we put up for ourselves, they really aren't mindsets, you know. Yeah, society goes through different phases too. There's things people are sensitive about right now that they were not sensitive about ten years ago, and things five years from now that we don't know are going to happen. And as we all know, but you if you're lucky enough to be sharing with enough people that it's a topic of possible conversation to interpret the new Neo Young Record and how it relates to Earth and how what way he might be saying, what message he's trying to say. If you're lucky enough that people find irrelevance in what you're doing, part of you owes it to to to be able to stand behind what you're trying to put out in the world. And you know, I was never I've never been a big fan of people who are like, yeah, I don't know what that means. Whatever, Yeah, I don't care. That's a little too easy, like for me not I'm not saying that good art doesn't come from writing abstract things. You know, do you know what it means? I always hope, I always have hopes. I think, I think I can see where I was thinking of this character and what I was attempting to him to try to figure out or him or her. And then I have hopes that this word can be taken three different ways, and I hope maybe people will take multiple paths with it, and multiple different people take different paths with it. Never been excited about. This is what it means, and this is what I want you to think it means. And that's why I'm not the biggest fan of like sort of a lot of modern singer songwriters. This is about me and my boyfriend breaking up, or me and my girlfriend breaking up, and I want you to know about it. And when you sing it, think of me breaking up with my boyfriend. I mean, why would I want to put you through that? You know, well, why should you relive my thing? It's better for me. It's better to find some kind of neutral zone where these are characters that people can multiple people can get multiple ideas from rather than one thing edged in stone? Were lyrics important too from the beginning, Yes, yeah, even as a fan before you, before you made music, the lyrics as well as the music always from the beginning, Yes, And you know, I remember even being a young kid and getting you know, sometimes you would be um hopeful that something had deeper meaning and thoughts they grew up thinking all that that has such a deeper meaning and then finding out an article later like oh no, that was just a little Richard song we copied or something like that, and you're like, oh, well, okay, I still got some meaning on of it. And maybe that's kind of what I'm just saying right now, like your your hope is that people will get deeper meaning on their own if they can, you know, if it succeeds in some way, I feel like there's there's a and tell me this is right. There's always a traditional theme running through your work where it's like feels like it always has historical roots. Is that would you say that? That's first of all, is it accurate from your perspective? And if so, is it on purpose or is it just by loving so much music over the course of your life. Then it happens that way. It's like it's a that's a compliment, you know, that you just gave me in It's a compliment, even if it wasn't true. I think it's a compliment to feel that way. That's how I hear it. I hear it as there's always them. It's it's got roots and I love roots music where it comes from. Well there there's an interesting thing about that. I mean, a lot of the you know, coming up in different rock and rolls, and you talk to other contemporaries and stuff they're working on, and a lot of them artists and writers and guitar players and drummers and stuff. They don't have much depth in their history or love of music or anything, and so what who cares? And then there's people that do. And then there's guys who are like, you know, super nerdy and obscure and way go way too deep, you know, And I have lost the beauty of music because through the minutia of it, you know, I've always try to keep you know, one foot in and out of that world if I can. I like to know a little bit about amplifiers, but not how to fix them. I like to know a little bit about this genre of music, but not enough where it swallows me up and I become obsessed with only that. And so it gets me the ability to do this and that, even engineering and production and stuff. I try not to really get two hands on because I know how I am. I could get in there and become a knob jockey guy who all he does is worry about the levels of compression and stuff, rather than keeping half of my brain in the world being able to create in songs and write and perform them and all that stuff. And it's been a pretty good balance. I've I've kept a pretty good balance over the years of trying not to get too involved in one aspect of it. I get jealous at times where you see being like, oh, wow, he's just a guitar player. That would be nice, or that's just a producer, or just a singer, even though word just a sounds like it's an insult, but it's not. To me. It's like I'm jealous of it because it's like, Wow, it'd be great. You could just concentrate on that one thing. You could get really really good at that. Yeah, you know, if that's your Yeah, if you did one thing. But um, at the end of the day, I'm lucky that my brain wants to be active in these different spots and so I'm happy about it, feel good about it. When did you buy the pressing plant or the Yeah, I started building that in length I think twenty fifteen and then I think it opened in twenty and sixteen. And it's uh, it's wild, it's great. And there was times where I've been like, ah, I shouldn't have done that. There's a lot of work and a lot of like boring economic and you know, making widgets at a factory work and having lots of employees and insurance and all those things that are not that interesting. To tell me about the space. The space and you have how many machines do you have? Um, yeah, I don't know the square footage, but it's pretty giant. It used to be like a parking structure. It used to be where they they made Willie's Jeeps. It was Willie's Jeeps kind of a little assembly place. And we have eight manual machines and I think now coming up on six automatic presses, and we can do about between five and eight thousand records a day, which is great, Yeah, incredible. And the weight period now is you know, eight to ten months for vinyl in the vinyl industry. Yeah, so you know, third Man had a lot to do with this vinal resurgence, making this come to this fruition like this, and right now we're in the mode of, you know, sort of this year has been this last couple of years are like the Taylor Swifts and Paul McCartney's, you know, putting out multiple variants of a record and it's just amazing because it's it's just great. It's it's turning on and yet another generation of kids and teenagers onto this physical format. Are the machines old machines? Um No, they're all brand new and they still they're still being made. When we opened the plant, there were no companies making new vinyl presses. And the first year we opened and started and we were about to start, a couple of companies started up around the world, in Europe and in Canada, and now there are several Now there's five, I think making presses. We're all of the old machines. Do they get scrapped? That was the problem, Like we were about to open a plant and then then the only way you can put presses in was to buy old presses from somebody else, and they're hard to come buy, like hounds teeth, like I need a Usually other giant plants would buy them up if they came available, because you know you're not going to see it again. Yeah, so was it similar to like buying an old mixing desk? Not as peaceful as the mixing desk where you could actually find a few guys to really know how to fix it. It's such a small group of people that know how to work on them. But you know, there's machinists who can work on any kind of machine and stuff. There's those guys. But there was a time when there were many, many of these machines. Oh my god, yes, yeah, so what happened to those? Great question? I think they were junked. You know, it's so wild because you can never get a good square answer about this stuff. I was talking to Martin Scorsese recently about the Technicolor machines. Yeah, well, what happened all those Technicolor machines and heats? Said that they got sold to China and they weren't being used anymore anywhere else, but they were still being used in the film industry in China, so a lot of them went there, but I think a lot of them just get junked. We had talked with Martin mill who runs Beggar's Banquet label in Europe, and he uh was telling me it's interesting thing because we're saying, yeah, we have to wait, you know, eight months now if we want to even at my own plants, I gotta get in line, which is crazy. And he said, yeah, Well, what we'd have in Britain is, you know, we put out a single and by Tuesday we would get that chart number and if it was in the top twenty. If you had a song in the top twenty like he had with Gary Newman and cars and our friends electric and stuff, then you could get on top of the pomps. But that meant you had to have you They would call in an order of twenty five thousand and seven inches that had to be in the stores by Friday morning for the weekend sales. So in two days time they could press twenty five thousand records and have them in stores with record sleeves. Unimaginable at this moment in time, even if there was not a humongous demand that would be very hard to pull off. But they had so many presses and so many plants back then, and are like, it's the vinyl usually available. The pellets, is what it is? I know nothing about it. Tell me it's PBC plastic, the same as in a PBC pipe. Wow. So yeah, so easy to get the materials. It's just the machines, just the machines and the manpower and knowledge to run those machines efficiently. You know, you could turn to a press on and have some guy who knows what he's doing pressing, and that press could break down in six hours. You know something's going wrong. You're using steam and pressure and who knows, there's a bunch of moving parts that can go wrong. Machine it's about the size of a refrigerator, the manual refrigerator laying down, standing up, standing up. Yes, it's an upright machine. Yes. And then they automated are sort of like a giant like car, sized almost wide and tall because they have spaces where the when when the records down pressing, it goes and rests in a yeah, you know, so knowing about supplying demand, we see there's tremendous demand to have these things made yeah, yeah, why have not all the companies who are making all these things, why have they not retooled? And I think it comes down to probably people might guess will be people who are on the boards of those major labels, which I've been pleading to them to be rebuild their pressing plants. Again, I think they really need to do it. It's in their best interest. I think they will make a lot of money doing it and help. There are artists in lots of big ways, But I think what it is it's a little bit in their mind. Like if you were in a board meeting and you want to be the guy to champion this idea we should build a pressing plant, you're taking a big risk of being on a losing team that year if it doesn't work out, and you will lose your job. So I think that's what that's probably the number one problem with corporations is people don't want to be on a losing team and get their evaluation at the end of the year showing you were on team loser and you're gone. So a lot of risks don't get taken luckily, like in a place like third Man, where it's sort of like a sole proprietorship. Yes, we do nothing but take risks all day long. Everything we do is a bad business move, and in the end of the day, somehow it all makes sense and we pay the bills with it somehow based on that bad business move and based on working now, is there no feeling that you can expand drastically and open up pressing plants all over the country and you do what they're not doing. I'm in a debate about that. I mean, right now, at the pace that we're at, with twelve presses that I have, I'm looking at right now probably another eight years before I get all my money back that I put into this place. So every time you get a dollar, you kind of want to put that dollar back into the plant and buy another press. But then it just keeps extending this time period of actually breaking even which I guess who cares on one side of my brand, who cares another side? Kind of feels negative. But I think what a lot of people do is not what I'm doing, where I use my own money to fund all this stuff. They would really just get a lot of other investors and I would just own ten percent of the company or something, and they would all get the profits or something like that. But I don't think it's not that kind of a profitable business, you know, where we're selling pizza or T shirts or something, whereas it easy to sell to some. Yeah, this is something that you're an advocate for. It's different. It's like it's got it's not it's not the beauty is it's not pizza, you know what I'm saying. It's like it's pretty. It's an interesting possibility. Yeah. Interesting. I mean I would and I would like it, and I've I've thought about other things about maybe there's a secondary thing where I I do that with investors and build those plants under and a different company or a different wing of third managements. My first hope would be right now, the people who have a billion dollars where it's just nothing to them to build a plant. I mean, they should just do it. So, but who knows, we'll see super cool nice. Yeah, it's super cool. I'm so glad to did it. Well. It was great man, Rick, thanks for talking my pleasure. Thank you for doing this. This is great. Thanks to Jack White for coming to Schangulad to hang with Rick, and to Neil Young for stopping by as well. You can hear Jack White's latest album, Entering Heaven Alive, along with all of our favorite songs from him, The White Stripes, and a sampling of his many side projects at broken Record podcast dot com. Also be on the lookout for details on Neil Young's new album with Crazyhorse, produced by Rick Rubin very soon. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast, where we can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced help from Lea Rose, Jason Gambrel, Ventaliday, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick Chaffin. Our executive producer is Mia Lobell. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and uninterrupted ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions, and if you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app Our theme musics by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond,