Hasted - Jack White: How He Built an Empire From the Blues

Copyright 2016 Omnibus Press

This edition 2016 Omnibus Press

(A Division of Music Sales Limited, 14-15 Berners Street, London W1T 3LJ)

Source ISBN: 978-1-78305-818-1

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-78323-884-2

Version: 01-12-2016

The Author hereby asserts his / her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with Sections 77 to 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages.

Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders of the photographs in this book, but one or two were unreachable. We would be grateful if the photographers concerned would contact us.

By clicking on the links in this eBook you, the reader, agree to Music Sales Ltd. collecting basic usage information to improve our service. This information is used solely for Music Sales Ltd. purposes and will not be used for marketing purposes or shared with third parties. If you have any questions, please email music@musicsales.co.uk

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

Cover designed by Fresh Lemon

Picture research by Sarah Datblygu

For all your musical needs including instruments, sheet music and accessories, visit www.musicroom.com

To find out more about Omnibus Press visit

www.omnibuspress.com

For my mum, Ann Hasted, who got me to Detroit, and my wife, Deborah Nash

Click below for an interactive Digital Timeline of Jack White's musical life; experience his creative genius with audio and video captured from his first steps into the limelight, through to the giant of modern music that he became...

Click here!

Click below to hear the music of Jack White; his greatest songs, in and out of The White Stripes, in chronological order. Additionally, click the Spotify logo at the beginning of each chapter to hear a curated playlist for that section. Surround yourself with the music of Jack White and all that surrounded him.

Click here!

J ACK and Meg White had something precious in 21st century rock: mystery. Seeing the White Stripes for the first time in 2001 at Londons Astoria, the childlike colours of their costumes red, white, black and the volume and force of the music they thrust from the stage seemed inexplicable. The duos leanness, tension and crayon-bright vividness were almost blindingly exciting.

When the siblings we thought we were watching turned out to be an ex-married couple, the public and media were wilfully slow to believe incontrovertible court documents, preferring the almost forgotten tang of ambiguity and myth. This wasnt the great rocknroll swindle of an earlier era, but a yarn boldly spun by Jack White, a man who valued discretion and discipline over rocks usual currency of excess, and had no intention of giving his own game away.

The man his marriage certificate called John Gillis was born in Detroit in 1975. That citys musical wealth, material devastation and archaic and anarchic character are inseparable from all hes achieved. Travelling to this battered, dangerous, resilient American place, I met veterans of the bohemia where Jack nurtured ideas too eccentric to survive London or LAs glare. Only a few dozen in number, these denizens of Zoots, the Gold Dollar and other now-lost sanctuaries built a community around obscure records, urgent conversation, gigs and booze-laced, haphazard nights, as stimulating and consuming for those in it as Soho and the Bowery were for punks in 1976. We were just a bunch of outcasts making weird music, and felt completely apart from society, Matt Smith, who produced Jack in the band the Go, told me. Detroits streets are changing by the minute from the ones John Gillis walked, ripped up and reformed by new corporate cash of uncertain intent. But almost every musician he knew then still plays, and buzzed with the old days energy when we spoke.

Jack learned his trade and honed the White Stripes in this scene. But the voices of some of those I approached went dead and unresponsive at his name, feeling burned by the international gold rush which followed his bands startling success, the bitter rows when Jack subsequently quit Detroit or the way he still overshadows the city.

Even in Detroits community of outsiders, Jack had, anyway, felt secretly separate. It was the same in his large family, and the school and workplaces where he was bullied. Shy, unreadable Meg supported him for seven years of musical life after married life became intolerable; a unique, quietly loving partnership. But even after a second marriage and divorce, to model and musician Karen Elson, and two children, hes pondered being permanently alone.

The more Jack has gradually revealed of himself, between matador feints of further subterfuge, the more bracingly strange he appears. He grew up crushed by insecurity, yet has approached idols from garage-rockers the Gories to Neil Young with nerveless confidence. Hes scrupulously polite in person, especially to the great swathes of the public who still dont know who he is in rock stardoms dying days. But he struggles to rein in a galloping ego. His ideas of chivalry can explode into violence and stumble into misogyny, but he regularly, fruitfully works with female musicians. His efforts to be one of the gang with the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather only emphasised his prolific power. He once found hip-hop oppressive, but now makes records for Jay Z. If he occasionally seems too interested these days in being a mogul consorting with sometimes-dubious businesses, perhaps its just the demeaned adolescent inside insisting on his adult worth.

Unable to find a place he fitted, he has built his own kingdom in his adopted Nashville home. Third Man Records is, like the Xanadu of the lonely magnate in his favourite film, Citizen Kane, a monument to his pleasures and taste. But instead of hollow hedonism, its a centre for records, films and carnival curiosities, with iron-studded secret doors and crazy-angled corridors. Run with transplanted Detroit friends and family, it offers a colourful, physical world around his sounds as, with initially sparse resources, he always has. The happy reverence for music he shared in the Gold Dollars penniless obscurity has been faithfully maintained in this functional millionaires folly.

Outside Nashville he lives and records in a more private home playground. Probably, he cares most about his young children. But he believes he signed an unbreakable Faustian pact long ago, which gave him other, artistic responsibilities. He rises early each morning to keep up his old skills as an upholsterer, and tirelessly crafts and invent songs and artefacts, fame and fortune simply means to unchanged ends.

The White Stripes began by releasing two 7-inch singles in 1998, and the new centurys journalists derided Jack for his analogue absolutism and conviction that the digital present was a regression. But in 2016, his innovative vinyl albums are champion-sellers of a resurrected format. Its significantly due to Third Man Records that the nearby vinyl factory, which once subsisted on minor orders such as White Stripes 45s, now runs around the clock. Jack White is musics King Canute, determined and inventive enough to actually turn back the tide.