Jack White ft. Special Guest Neil Young | Broken Record (Hosted by Rick Rubin)

foreign [Music] 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 racking tours I highly recommend going back to listen this conversation like the one before is full of fascinating ideas asides and 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 label 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 U.S which has been working overtime lately to keep up with the surging demand for vinhole 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-night stand in La Jack stopped by Shangri-La 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 ear worms 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 Shangri-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 uh great yeah so you said hey so he's like oh it'll be a good time because I've been wanting to have an excuse to come out here again and what's the current band situation so three guys with me drum space and keys and guys you've played with before yes um Dominic Davis who's on base I mean we've been playing together since we're like 13. we go way back to Detroit and um uh daru Jones on drums and who's probably I think really the most unique drummer around today really and then Quincy McCrary plays keys and and sings harmonies too so I debated going on as a three piece I've always wanted to do that and I got to try that out on um when we did Saturday Night Live yeah a 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 we did that and I thought oh wow that would be nice to tour us a trio but but then there's a whole like Bank of like 40 songs that have keyboards that we wouldn't really be able to perform and that we'd have to just kind of cross that off though an obligation to have keyboards in a keyboard song though because then you basically do a three-piece band cover of yes I would love that my my worry was that you're not even worried about that noise Choice which was breaking things up and sometimes playing keys or synth on a song or acoustic on a 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 uh I don't want things to sound wimpy either you know so sometimes um 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 oh 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 no but I like that because it keeps me on edge the whole time yeah what's your relationship to rocking material versus non-rocking material in general yeah I've sometimes think that the things that I like more are not as appealing to other people like I for example a great example is I I really can would just like to be a drummer you know and I but I know that my drumming is just you know it doesn't capture people and 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 then want to push me to keep doing that where that's the one instrument for the uh I like that that's the last one I would pick was guitar you know I mean just like everybody plays guitar and 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 ends 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 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 uh Melody and sing those words they're reading then all of a sudden you've got more people paying attention possibly than 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 I like okay this is the window to it if I can tell the story to you if I need to set use this instrument to do it okay if that's what you want okay 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 I played drums in my band the Dead weather and I'm 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 a lot hoping it had a large popular reach or anything like that it sounds like a cynical like hipster thing to say like 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 jump but um it'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 gonna like this or what's the right presentation to make somebody respond I early on uh coming on the sort of the 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 uh way of not wanting it 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 or puts them in a gallery I mean if you're not sharing with other people I guess what's the point in a way you're just doing it by yourself maybe you should just stay at home or something that's just a hobby 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 stadiums why would that make me mad I think Kurt Cobain sort of brought a little bit more of that to the to the surface of punk rock guilt where you're uh 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 the 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 yeah it's odd and it's another odd it's an odd way of thinking about it um I think there's some belief and and I do not I do not subscribe to this movie 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 not a lot of the stuff that's successful I might not like yeah but things do break through that are amazing yeah and those are the Revolutionary things yes I mean there'll be times though 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 pretense shifts or something like that and then what like what I'll do is I'll realize well you know that's hard man that's really hard if you want to sit down and write a hit yeah that's gonna be number one on the charts or whatever especially nowadays that's no easy task and um so then you have to give credit for that like hey even if you don't like it you got to give someone credit they actually made it work they 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 a important beautiful thing that happened when that song became popular even novelty songs yes like I think of songs in the 80s that I thought were just you know these novelty goofy things that were on the radio that now when I look back I'm like wow damn you know Take On Me by aha incredible wow think about the the structure of The Melody of that vocal alone let alone the production of it you know if you would ask me when I was whatever 10 12 I'm going whatever but now I 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 that's part of the craft when you're getting yourself involved in the craft and you care about it and you're open-minded yeah I feel like maybe everyone has a choice like 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 and hear new things it's almost some kind of unconscious Choice yeah I used to think when I was younger hey you know some old-timer uh musicians come into town and they're playing this club and we go see them and say hey come and talk to us after the show and they wouldn't want to or and I would say God that would be terrible I wonder why they're so grumpy and grouchy well now I can see now that you're grumpy and grouchy well I can see that he was like there's been moments in my life where I could definitely have gone down that road like when I finished my show and get in the car and go to the hotel yeah 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 like yeah but you miss so much in 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 yeah so it seems like everything other than the show might suffer yeah for the show to be all that it could be yeah when I see acts that are sort of maybe doing the same set every night and they have the pyrotechnics 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 that would be so easy and it would be so nice you just go up there or say someone who stands still and sort of just can sing yeah like Willie Nelson doesn't really need to do anything he 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 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 uh well what am I gonna do and um first you have to care you know absolutely 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 bus 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 please God I don't want that happen to me yeah you know that would be I I would just I know what I would do I just wouldn't tour anything yeah and I can't imagine the shows are very good if that's the attitude of the performer it can't be I guess yeah or save what's popular now Vegas residencies are popular now yeah and I can get the appeal of that you know like you may be those artists like they get paid already no matter who shows up the 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 nice and decent stuff so I could see all that but then I think ah man I don't know if that would work for me I I would feel like I gave up like for my own personal music no judgment on that no of course 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 and he's he's got the pipes for that and maybe it would work for Willie Nelson and in a way in in the right environment or something but uh maybe for me I would think ah man how could I do that and not give up and and make it a different show every night and have energy to it that would almost be it's so unchallenging that sounds really fun like that could be a 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 yeah and it was more like a Ramones concert other than the fact that he the songs that he's singing but yes it was that you think would be like yeah it's almost like wimpy for a second it's like Whiskey River don't run and you're like damn that that took he didn't even really raise his voice but all of a sudden the energy went bam like maybe with one little snare head yeah and um so much to learn from that and him as a guitar player so punk rock yeah so punk I mean that guy his guitar solos if you haven't listened to a Willie Nelson guitar so you know anybody uh I always say God man just type in Willie Nelson guitar solo on the internet and listen to what he does you you won't believe it at first you're like wait what you know and um it is so pumpkin so carefree and such a rebellious uh thing that I just kind of can't believe he he he got away with that even in even in the different environments he's worked in all the time it's like damn that's a real rebellious Outsider way to to attack the guitar and and the instrument he plays the strange acoustic electric hybrid deck has a matching amp yeah built by like Warlords or some I forget what company made it but it says bizarre instrument that he chose uh that nobody else has as well so very unique I wouldn't have thought to ask this before but you talked about a a song that plays in 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 artists work of uh 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 uh someone who studies music I've Heard lots of opinions about it over the years you know some being really positive and and feeling like it's groundbreaking other people trying to sort of like take it away from me or or I say I copied something to or 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 um that it's it has an organicness to it that we that maybe just got accidentally Unearthed in in that scenario but I did read an article once about why do we like music at all from a scientist's point of view and it was you know really scientific and methodical and it was the interesting thing uh the theory in this article was the brain is trying to make patterns and and make sense of patterns and that we we find a thrill in 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 what the last two notes are going to be you know uh maybe that's a pleasantness to that and then when you don't do that yeah resolve it and then maybe that gets into like why horror films are appealing to people like it shouldn't on paper be like why would you want to be scared that doesn't make any sense but we do we like it we find it a thrill and maybe that Seven Nation Army with the The Melodies there seems to be two moments in there if I were to analyze it and I'm just taking a guess I have no idea but uh this is you know that sounds like you're gonna go up like or something like that it's on the way up but you go up and then you quickly change direction [Music] now I'm going back down that gets you to pay attention yeah so wait what's the hey how's it going to result why did it change direction exactly why did it change direction so then you got and then this next one is sort of what I think is maybe like the horror movie thing there like okay I guess I agree to that yeah you know it's not an actual full result Mr like yeah I can I can I can deal with that your brain can maybe say I can do that I don't know it's just a guess that maybe maybe those two little moments are what is it the Riff would you say the the song is the riff yes yeah okay the funny thing was that I was at the time I remember saying to Meg this would 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 or we'll just keep hammering this and then we'll play off the the loud quietness of maybe the grunge era can be part of that and there's also slide guitar in it too and it's also sort of like a base but I'm not really playing bass I'm playing a detuned guitar so there was like yeah that's enough for things that I think are interesting so interesting did you play guitar barely like punk rock you know like rudimentary guitar who plays guitar on uh on like uh the Beastie Boys uh I played guitar now that first album that's you oh okay I didn't know that I really I thought you were gonna say some studio guys now great what guitar did you use for that [Music] had an SG Junior 56 SG Junior nice and that was that was my main guitar and then I remember I saw Slayer and I was really impressed with Slayer and um and I met them and Carrie King got me a carry King guitar like uh real 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 oh it was like shoot yes I didn't really like it but I was just like oh this is fun for this kind of a thing yeah yeah yeah yeah but yeah why didn't add Rock play why did you play guitar on that I don't really know yeah I don't really know wasn't also the concept of the Beastie Boys as rappers maybe they just they had no instrumentation it wasn't supposed to be that like because when they played it was more like what the Beastie Boys the band sounded like yeah and we were doing something really different than that yeah yeah yeah I always had a sneaking suspicion like when I was like 18 or another he's 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 uh and people really don't 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 listen to and love hip-hop right and that was the new thing I was the new punk rock yeah yeah and and you know it was for me it was heavy metal before before like I loved heavy metal music or whatever what I call heavy metal music which is really rock hard rock music you know I liked AC DC and Aerosmith and Ted Nugent and those guys yeah and then when I heard I guess the Ramones and then 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 uh God I wish you would have tried that I I'm just throwing out a hypothetical do you think that that song would have worked with any other band like if you had tried that with Led Zeppelin or a deep purple or any other track or any other song 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 that one one key was the inspiration for that was I went to dinner in Los Angeles with a uh head of a record company yeah who was trying to uh 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 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 yeah this is not why would anybody like this thing that's not music right right yeah and I 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 and I just started listening to records and think about okay is there a record that's a a familiar record that vocally is not so different from a rap record yeah and the phrasing was and it's not melodic right it's really the phrase It's the phrasing yeah so it could have been um what's the Dylan song Subterranean yeah it could have been that that would have worked Too Much Monkey Business Jack barrier no that could work yeah I am let's see 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 exactly it was already considered in the hip-hop Canon 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 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 whenever whenever there's a new style a lot of the time as you look back to music history the the the it seems like the main uh gripe from the majority of people is this is a lower ring of the bar this is a lowering since Punk all these guys know how to play their guitars you know but some of the roles I was like that's something about uh we're gonna ask Quincy Jones what the Jazz guys thought of The Beatles when they first got to America and all that we said and he said something like those were some no playing [ __ ] we thought and everyone got kind of offended when you said that and I thought I shouldn't be offended by that because I mean stop for a second and think about the um in complex 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 jeez 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 yeah and then you've got to construct construct it and um the actual painting of The Jackson Punk doesn't really matter that the dripping part whatever it's same thing with punk rock as it doesn't really matter about the the notes of it's the attitude behind it you had to construct that attitude or or coerce it out of you from nothing and then that becomes more important than the proficiency of the music and all that but that's always the same thing the same thing with hip-hop we came along he's not even playing instruments anymore these aren't even instruments the funny thing now is like I I kind of feel like you know modern sort of uh pop production and Hip-Hop production I'm taken back through the 80s my feeling when I was 10 12 years old my feelings then were it bummed me out that my friends didn't know that was Led Zeppelin being sampled on the Beastie Boys Home yeah and it pissed me off at 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 shrug their shoulders like I don't care yeah and I was like you know just as a young kid I was like if you like it that's what's cool about it is because it's our we already know that uh riff and it's it's they're not even reap performing they're actually sampling it so that was frustrating to me as a kid that other people didn't or be like what was like EPMD I Shot the Sheriff or uh now that's Eric Clapton covering Bob Marley and nobody 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 100 teenagers the top 10 songs right now and asked them all what is making this sound at this part of the song who is performing this part of the R Who where does this sound you're hearing coming from I would I would venture to guess and know this I'm concerned why would they know that they wouldn't know uh what what's making the sound and um what is that like that's sort of like uh you know I guess you could call it uh some people would call it gatekeeping where you'd say like you 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 yeah 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 the positive side of it is they can easily look it up on the internet and find out yeah if they're really resourceful and maybe recreated themselves whereas in our day we would have to go to the library go to the music store ask somebody hey what makes an echo do this kind of Echo and and then you'd have to do a lot of work to figure something out absolutely 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 oh it's the computer yeah exactly yeah but I know when Rage Against the Machine came out when that was why I I embraced that instantly 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 that sound it's very rare when you when you hear a instrumentation where you where you don't know and you know it's not some trick you knew he's actually playing that uh at that time 92 or something those are the moments you save or you want these moments I wish I had them once a week like the base is so much of like what we think of the guitar riff is the bass yeah yeah I know it's like deep purple we think of these huge guitar riffs that are really organ based exactly yeah it tricks you because 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 the thing you think yeah the underneath the growl underneath that frustrates me now when I listen to earlier recordings I've done is that I wanted to get that underneath deep growl and even in a two-piece mounting a white stripes double tracking or adding something else didn't happen I didn't really know about subwoofer and double octave you know overdubbing and all these kind of things that now these tricks I've learned over the years to bring these 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 the Hammond Organ and not from the guitar itself you know takes a while to learn that 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 yeah and 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 um uh and I underappreciated that what the some of the stuff Deep Purple did tell me about the um 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 yeah tell me the story well we had um you know big family my brothers liked a lot of rock and roll and you know Johnny Cash and who and uh 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 um parents were big music lovers of big band music and Nat King Cole and Glenn Miller and Gene Krupa yeah and I was growing up in the inner city Detroit 80s so that was hip hop and the Def Jam uh early records were all being played as we were playing Four Square it's LL Cool J and that's outside and Mexican music at the next house over and the neighbors next door they all listened to all the boys in their family all listen to like the Punky side of things MC5 Stooges and that kind of stuff our family didn't really listen to that that much I didn't get into that until I was a teenager older so yeah that was kind of a lots of different kinds of music going on but my friends at school didn't listen to any of that stuff it was only house music and rap and top 40 or whatever when did you first when did your love of Music start I think pretty early on when I I started playing dramas when I was five uh but my brothers had a drum kit up in the attic and so it was easy to go up there and mess around and they didn't have a job I had a guitar player bass player and a keyboard player as my brothers already that was our those interests were already taken so you know drums were obvious for me to play around with so I did that my whole childhood I only wanted to play the drums growing up that was it I used to practice in high school under the desk with my feet you know do paradiddles with my feet and uh with tips of my fingers on my lap during classes and yeah it was it was something I I kind of considered that it would be a lifelong obsession along with whatever job I had it would be drums and drawing 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 uh 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 a really eye-opener thing I went to a concert and I thought he really was like a modern Gene Vincent and that kind of felt like that was my own and then uh but it was also at the same time it was Rage Against the Machine was happening and that felt like that was new that was something my brothers were you know maybe are a little bit older and wouldn't have caught on to that in whatever it was 1992 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 be 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 uh the song Human fly from Grievous tits I think yeah gravis tits yeah yeah it was a good one yes I mean I still think that might be one of the top 10 recordings ever made it's 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 might have been Junior High School wow and it was mind-blowing life changing who else was on with the original with the original band with with um the original crew and uh uh Brian Gregory oh the original guitar player wow yeah fantastic I don't remember who was I don't even know if there was anyone else on the bill it was definitely a cramps gig there may have been an opening act yeah yeah yeah but it wasn't like a bunch of right right yeah my first Punk show was fugazi wow it was another that was another band that I did one was kind of mine it was great nation of Ulysses warmed up and um way to see him play uh it was the Majestic Theater which I ended up playing in a couple years later a few years later with the white stripes and uh 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 Corridor and now you know it's great there's 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 got to be good if you're playing in a place where there's a bowling alley yeah because forget it I'll just go bowling yeah this is no good I'm bowling so everybody likes to 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 and 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 could 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 uh and that felt like yeah 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 um I was learning slowly about it it was a band or the most important band from then was called the glories there were three piece a female drummer named Peg who would only had two Toms no skin on the kick drum she put her foot in the kick drum to hold it steady two Toms and a tambourine duct taped to the kick drum that's it that was the drums and um two guitar players no bass very cool black black male singer white female drummer white male guitar player no bass no Kick Drum so no bass no Kick Drum and such a unique sound and they they're the the kings of the Detroit garage Rock scene still are when you were a kid did you see them play live it just had stopped um performing when I was old enough to go to shows I just missed them and they split and turned into these other groups called the dirt bombs and a rocket 455 and I saw those bands and I ended up playing with those bands a couple years later how old were you at this time when you just started playing this is like maybe 15 16 starting on just just start to learn about playing guitar and I only did did that because the guy I worked in an upholstery shop with he was a drummer too so 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 again at the end of the day sometimes it's pretty amazing experience to be 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 um this was another band that was my own you know that felt like I owned this band you know and um then we like actually got to meet them we saw that I remember seeing a Dan crow in a coffee shop oh my God that's Dan from the Glorious yeah it's uh it's wow because uh yeah so you had that whole scene uh there with that and then by the time I come out with the with doing the White Stripes in that scene I was a little bit shocked they embraced us um so quickly and and things happened we made a lot of friends pretty fast I didn't have any friends yeah neither did Meg and we we uh all of a sudden wait you wait a minute this guy likes the same music we do I never had this you see like I had one friend in high school who plays Bass with me still this day yeah he he like you know the the Deep purples and the Holland wolf records and stuff that I liked there was another kid I knew in the next block and he liked the Beastie Boys and we bonded a little bit on that but mostly everybody around me I went all Mexican great 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 this 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 I kind of almost feel like you should have just loosened up a little bit or made some more friends you know if you just been a little bit more I just said such strong beliefs about uh what what turned me on you know musically artistically and all that stuff we think because of the glories the idea of having a two-person group felt acceptable yes the gorys and the flatula Jets both of them made except acceptable idea that the White Stripes could be a thing interesting and then I'd come from playing the with this upholsterers group the two of us playing and that was just guitar drums no bass yeah 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 categories and ifato 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 that yeah exactly yeah silver 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 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 scheme and the male female thing and 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 track Stratocaster nonsense which was super uncool in that zone of that garage Rock World at the 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 uh my my uh upholstery shop was yellow black and white I died all the colors came from my tools and my my power of saws and my hand tool holster hand tools and then I had bought a yellow van it was a abandoned like or an old Detroit fire department van and that's what I was going to do the deliveries from the furniture with and um I started to dress in 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 what was taking over you did you own that company or were you an employee oh I didn't know that you owned the company yeah when I was 21 I had a mortgage I had my own business I was in three bands wow I 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 21 year old son that was doing a little bit wow oh my God how can I help you can I you know oh you know about or pat on the back or whatever 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 um paying attention or what do you think I think maybe they're just kind of thought like he's weird and I mean he or he thinks he has a company or something 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 them either what do you think triggered that idea if I had to pick one moment there was a moment of uh I watched this on a special on counterfeiting and they talked about this uh Dutch designer and I don't know how to pronounce his name it's like oh J oxanar but he designed this uh currency that the five and the 10 and the 20 dollar bills I don't know the name of the currency over there but it was you know this was purple was the five and blue was the ten and and red was the 20. 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 had to do with Third Man uh upholstery was going to be yellow black and white and center around the number three as well third man was the name of the upholstery company yes they're man upholstery where did that name come from originally for the upholstery company that's a long uh answer but but it's it's uh I was actually the third upholsterer on my street uh there was an old guy named klomp and then the guy next door to me Brian Muldoon and I was the third one also the street was called Ferdinand Street Ferdinand third man and I'm also obsessed with the number three and also Orson Welles was my big title at that moment especially so all of this came around and Third Man yeah your furniture is not dead was the on my business card was the slogan which now with Third Man Records it's your turntable is not dead and wow so yeah so you basically keep um retreading the same old tired ideas from a 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 white 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 like I love peppermint candies and we were at the drugstore I said oh you know that we've been playing this music that should be on your bass drum that that peppermint uh she you it's just pain a pain I said I'll paint it when we get home I'll paint the peppermintry bass drum 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 and 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 this would be red black and white yeah for some reason people missed the black part of it a lot people always just 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 um you know whites all colors and black is the absence of color and so he 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 uh 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 we didn't we kind of 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 war and then at that point it was sort of we could almost ask for whatever we wanted at that second which was very strange because 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 that's on up and up on anybody any favors or anything like that I still feel that way today and um it worked it worked out and Ian got us our own label to sort of protect me and protect us and you know this imprint label name of uh well what are you going to call I said oh Third Man Records and um that became we we licensed these people records 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 when how did encs we would talk to somebody at Sub sub pop named Craig Aronson I think he's no longer with us I think he started asking questions which every label probably would or should uh you guys are thinking about getting a bass player and stuff like that and we thought uh see here we go you know this is what we've always heard they're not gonna they're gonna try to change this into a regular band or something and we didn't get mad or anything we just thought ah maybe it's not for us and then we would sit the next day and think oh God are we so spoiled that we're gonna have an attitude about a really nice opportunity like so what 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 forth did you like the sound though 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 and felt good yes if someone comes in the room and says well we're gonna try to take this to the mainstream yeah yeah I would have said that's not going to work right 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 right and um it still shocks me that that connected with people I mean I'm coming home and then 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 listen man 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 I mean sometimes you just assume and when you get into like especially in the Hipster 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 that rut which is not really true but you could do that right especially when you're younger so this 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 were 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 that there was especially after Jimi Hendrix like Jimi Hendrix you'd think broke open the world and cream 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 years after all white blood cells came out there was several two-piece bands that become signed to major labels with the kills and the fiery furnaces or yada yada yada all down the line and we kept seeing that oh say okay so this is now I guess we prove we proved something to somebody we weren't trying to really but it may be it it's it proved something to somebody that maybe this is a path we could explore some more and it was great because a lot of great music came out of that do you know if any of those bands existed before they heard the White Stripes hmm 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 now they have a chance to have some attention paid to them and brought out brought out into the daylight and um if something new that comes out that's novel you 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 the copycat second wave is 10 times more successful than the first wave often yeah often and then sometimes you you see a little bit of CopyCat happen and then that copycat morphs into something else I remember when I first saw the Arctic Monkeys come on I thought wow that guy's moving around look at the car guitar player in The Strokes like he's walking around he's holding his guitar High uh the Strat eye like like Albert in The Strokes I said well that's great I mean there's kids you know they're like I don't know what they were 19 or something I was like that's fine and then look the 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 to have that folk process of being inspired and taking it trying to take it to another level and and emulating uh people I think everyone goes through that of of like it's the you have to start somewhere to end up finding your own voice yeah yeah yeah any way in is good yeah yeah I think so if you can get in at all yeah 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 gonna play it like that like that seems obvious that's the starting yeah and then it turns into whatever it's going to turn into if you were Dylan coming up and you liked rock and roll in the 50s 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 and changes the world subsequently he doesn't lose that love of rock and roll it's still in there and uh 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 Zeppelins are going to be with me forever it doesn't matter how whatever bizarre punk band or strange thing I get into that's still going to 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 like I I don't doubt it you know I I don't doubt I don't run to try to copy that stuff of course but I don't run away from it either and and try to pretend 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 gonna copy that and steal that yeah I've never had that devious mustache twiddling thought in my mind of that I was like no this is 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 that sounds like that I'm like okay well you can't live in a vacuum anyway you're already playing an instrument and singing with your own vocal cords I mean something to say you sound like something so don't worry about that but let's just try to dive forward what were the blues things you said at the beginning of the band do it really deeply into the blues yeah what was the blues at the time that was really speaking to you oh Sun 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 to 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 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 Led Zeppelin and then the Yard Birds and The 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 Jimi 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 uh all those commentations like okay great yeah well I guess I'm in good company then because I feel the exact same way maybe 30 years has passed yeah but I feel like I'm almost everything yeah exactly absolutely yeah maybe it was yeah it was time for it to be re-revaluated 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 also like say what was like on alternative radio yeah like what would have been played before you and after you um I remember now I think it was the like the limp biscuits and the new Metals I see corn and things I think that's what's what's happening late late 90s early 2000s I think that's what was going on well I had listened to alternative radio uh in the early 90s when I I was in high school yeah so that was yeah Nirvana and Pearl Jam and all that stuff in Rage Against the Machine yeah so I 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 well if you like rock music you're going to yeah you have to if you're a kid right that would be the rock music of the day when you're growing up exactly yeah it seemed like in 1990 if you said the Beatles did something in 1969 that seemed like it was 50 years ago it was only 20 years it was unbelievable that's like talking I started talking right now about the questions records in 2001. I know that seemed like it was five years ago yeah 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 know he was sitting outside yeah what's going on hey man make yourself comfortable wow you look great you look great too yeah God bless wow how cool to see you here well I heard you were here sit in the middle sit in the middle Rick told me you were here and yeah oh man so here we are cool that's great so you've been recording out there uh having a beer doing some stuff you know excellent how's it been going here it's great yeah we finished uh well it took us three weeks something like that yeah I saw the trailer for the uh the Crazy Horse uh uh Barn uh oh yeah movie that looks really cool we had a good time dude yeah yeah that was great Daryl made a movie about it it's fun it's just great I mean [ __ ] yeah the youngest guy in the band is 70. it was fantastic we had a great time you know I've been putting on an album recent so everyone keeps asking you know these these questions about like well so you know where are things going to be for you you know when you're you know 60 years old and 80 years old and 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 yeah because I remember you know when I was 12 and the Rolling Stones were 40 and everyone's like oh my God yeah and um 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 80 you know you never know people like hearing the songs yeah exactly you're doing something yeah you know if they got the spirit they'll be cranking something out yeah exactly yeah you know what else can we do right down to it yeah yeah yeah there's really nothing everything else is fun a little relief here and there but the real deal is to make the music you know whether you know however you make it absolutely we had a good time we were in here and had a great time for three weeks no that's great man that's great yeah I feel good about it yeah did you play uh acoustic electric or both or was like it'll like everything else I played unheard of combinations of instruments oh great because you know nice become a kind of a funk pipe uh pump organ oh yeah yes yes or pump funk that's what they'll be doing pump funk that's it and they combine that with a a Marine band you know through an octave divider into a rollable box oh and combine that with the funk pump Funk thing happening you know it's cool we can play his stuff this year if you'd like to hear it I'd love to yeah you then won't recapturing you like that you know you've got you've got a commitment to me yeah yeah yeah it's up to you it's up to you but if you want to hear it you can hear it 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 inspiring it's a good vibe here too yeah it's great this started off with uh always taking a walk in the woods up in Colorado you know in the wintertime and I was walking along whistling and I and I heard this that's the same song I was whistling yesterday I don't know what it is uh you know so I got off 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 until I had like 10 different Melodies with no instruments just yeah that's great so cool going through the trees and singing into this old uh you know whatever it was black thing yeah and and then I put it on my computer and I I categor I listened to them all and say well that's that Melody this is that Melody this is that day and everything because I didn't organize it yeah so I got it in there and then I put them all yeah I listened to him I said [ __ ] you know it might be something here yeah they're all here all these Melodies where did this [ __ ] come from I'm telling you man antennas it's like antennas and and and if you're lucky to have a little tiny little silver antenna for a minute in your life to just pick up a frequency like that you know amazing magic now 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 yeah that's the Muse and it goes fast yes if you don't catch it it's gone no and it's gone there's you know so many times where you walk up in the middle of the night and played something and I'll remember not go back and save I'll remember that and that never happens no no you got a job you gotta do something and you know some kind of sound yes so I did that and I wrote I I had this combination and stuff and I 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 all the lyrics going 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 mess and I did it and then and I haven't changed a [ __ ] word oh great or a punctuation mark or anything oh great so it was like a direct shot it just came I had no idea that's a good sign already yeah without hearing any of it that's a good sign I was going to send you this uh track uh the other day I just got the mix done recently this uh song I thought might maybe would like it's going to be on this record I'm putting out can I play you a second over yeah cool how'd you ride it nice how did it come to pass this was um um as a quote uh something um John Stuart Mill I said ask yourself if you're happy and then you cease to be so I just had said that you know ask yourself if you are happy and then you'll cease to be you know just staying there and I just ask yourself if you are happy and then you will cease to be that's when those moments come when you're like oh thanks that happened thank you thank God that happened and now you can the rest is easier like yeah that's great man it reminded me of some of uh your things in the past too so I thought I was going to send that to you I'll send it to you and go can I get back I love you know I love the viewers um besides the record we just did in the booths you know there was a mess and that was the bat that was the best fun record oh man what a concept yeah recorded in uh in Jack's Booth where you you know you go and be an affair or something you pick put 10 cents in or something and and or a quarter or whatever and record a record yeah to your girlfriend yeah it's direct to vinyl direct to vinyl in the booth or something yeah yeah you can mail it to them it's funny we had somebody in the the third band 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 I think of it I saw Neil Young messing around with one of these on TV once this is the Boost yeah yeah funny yeah this is great but um oh but what I was gonna say was is that track you did the Oh Susanna that version of Oh Susanna you did I love that man it really was something yeah it's got a whole vibe to it doesn't it you know who did that originally was the the thorns oh really no Tim Rose okay yeah Tim Rose yeah uh so the group that he was from was called The Thorn the Thorns okay it was just part of the Thorns okay and the Thorns did folk rock things so they took Classics like that and they did that arrangement I could I heard that and I went oh wow the greatest [ __ ] oh I gotta go check that out now yeah the Thorns check them out they got a lot you know and then I did come around the mountain when she comes on this I just kept going yeah yeah it's a great idea fun thing to do yeah yeah I had fun with that there was those wild moments in the 60s uh folk bands of the Fairport conventions and the the you know all the different ones that we're trying to like find a little Zone um to uh but sometimes they were doing this novelty like old uh you know uh John Brown what hit the hammer and the blah blah and then whatever uh uh 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 that they actually stumbled on something amazing right there like synthesizing two different genres that must have been wild like when you because you you were there with that uh with Buffalo Springfield and those early moments of people embracing country and rock and roll and blending them together yeah was it clear that the folk Revival was a Revival at the time no it was just folk music it was just focusing on a Revival because folk music never really goes anymore it is yeah it's not here and then gone and back right it's just always here just depends on if you want to go there everybody kind of went there and then the rock thing was happening folk and rock and it was a happening time you could do a lot of stuff it was cool that's cool you know I would go and play a little club and then I'd read about how I was cliche written I'm going I'm in the paper yeah [Laughter] do you know about his uh van that he was in with the Rick James for a minute oh yeah isn't that great yeah incredible it was wild incredible with Rick amazing in an apartment and uh on this Street just off of Young Street Toronto amazing what a 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 guy is 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 it was on its way and we uh you know we tried we did what we could we got busted for uh that was a draft and uh then our uh our manager OD'd he was on heroin heoged so what happened next how how long was that period after that finish we were like didn't know what to do next three months or so before Springfield you know because Bruce Palmer and I from the minor Birds Went to went South minor birds flew South yeah oh [ __ ] can we play oh man could I yeah yeah I'd love to hear let's play you're up for an entire experience of course yeah man wow what a trip huh for real for real congrats great great songs and great tones and the vibe is great and it's it's different is it like it sounds it sounds obviously like him but yeah the songs are different yeah I think it's because 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 them right so it makes sense all right yeah what a trip yeah it must be nice to have a band of guys like that you just keep coming around for so long yeah you know they're there yeah lucky that's really great I know I know if I caught myself very lucky it was Crazy Horse awesome you know Ralph and Billy and Nils it's great awesome they really can't help but sound like themselves yeah you know like it's it's completely their trip yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah they're great they are great it's uh amazing stuff what is that echo on the guitar what is it uh Echo Flex okay also every once in a while in analog mxr analog delay okay yeah yeah mostly the echo Flex oh great I got four different settings for it with how much Echo the sliding bar yeah but it's a foot thing oh wait wait okay yeah it's the it's the volume of the effects that I have four levels on it's just a lot of well how much how loud yeah how long it goes yeah yeah so I have a lot of fun with that yeah [ __ ] yeah oh baby nice how long is that last track that's a that's a that's the album closer yeah something like that something like that yeah you guys continue on cool cool good vibe no no yeah I think so yeah it's really nice it's um it's it's just I I'm just devastated like how how clean his and clear his voice is yeah and you know at times I wish I mean I feel like I I can't get as clean as I was when I was in my 20s um at times and trying to uh I had uh that I worked with Tom Jones on one little 45 once and he had gave me that same Vibe which is like man it's almost like there's like a water far sitting in the back of your throat cleaning off these uh Tom Jones's voice is unbelievable creamy good crazy yeah people take it for granted I think yeah it's it's pretty impressive especially in person absolutely that's how it feels he sounds like he's 25 years old there yeah on vocally on that you know so clean and um 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 now I always feel like I'm not a singer like a just a vocalist oh you gotta do that thank you go for the long one yeah longer than you thought okay yeah just just go go yeah because that'll 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 sing something that you can't really sing for it yeah and you don't really make it but there's a there's a honesty in that yeah that just feels good I think that's why I like the band the band's back background vocals they seem like they always be original 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 you and you give it a Grace you you allow it you don't you don't really need it to actually succeed successfully hit that note or 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 oh God all the time oh God all the time yes well my favorite Neil uh vocal is you know tonight's the night that that tone and then you know he's tired of me asking you know what Mike can he used and what was going on when we were working before together and it's you know whatever circumstances around the recording in the room or whatever there's there's there's mistakes there's feedback there's all that but who cares nobody cares yeah the feelings in there it's well it's great to see you jack I want to take off so great to see you too great surprise great woke up this morning I didn't think I was going to be seeing you how good is this it's great well good luck man thank you we'll see you later sir have fun I'll probably see you in a couple of days yeah that was a nice treat yeah I I would have those are the is something funny is there's something funny about like I think people said you know when you're um uh like when you can afford it all of a sudden they start giving you free jeans and stuff like that when when you we you know they didn't give it to you and you couldn't afford it that's when you needed the free genes it's something funny about that like when you get into like um to make it short like show business or something you know I I think I was gonna see you or Neil today I woke up yeah and here yeah and the other day I was in Vegas and next door to my room Bill Burr the comedian is next door if I was just a regular Jewish mother still doing upholstery billboard wouldn't be next to me in the hotel room you know what I mean you you manifested the universe and somehow it just kind of makes out you bump into somebody uh out of a crowd of five fifty thousand people you bump into the one person you were supposed to bump into and you're like how could that happen that's so cool it's amazing it's like the thing that really hold on to like to stay positive about it you know yeah 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 we stress on them so much you know our thoughts really have tremendous uh 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 um how your 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 and make it more difficult uh 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 tried 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 you realize like these records I just made recently that you get in there like oh wow okay I knew how to get that kick drum sound and we did it and I I bought that microphone and I I own the studio and we made it and 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 in 1998 and in 2012 I learned that compressor workbook and thankfully those things you can hold on to those and you remember them and they actually can work on a functional level like the carpenter would say yeah that's the right saw chop saw for the 2x4 table saw for the plywood whatever you these perfunctory things and that applies to yeah compression and EQ and these kind of things stuff I could care less about in the 90s and earlier 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 those and they actually do work so you feel 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 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 on more philosophically or conceptually that's different than when you were young philosophically um the sad part the one sad negative thing I don't like about sort of having ring 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 have to answer questions about it I don't want to have it oh they're going to assume I'm talking about myself or they're going to assume I'm talking about my girlfriend or my ex-wife or something like that and it's like even though I I I'm not writing like that they might think that yeah well it's not even worth it just scratch it off and write something else and that's a shame because if 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 we'll 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 thank you I'll 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 are 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 10 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 to be uh sharing with enough people that it's a topic of possible conversation to interpret the new Neil Young record and how it relates to Earth and how uh what 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 I mean 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 not I'm not saying that good art doesn't come from yeah writing abstract things you know do you always know what it means I always hope I always have hopes I think I think like I I can see where I was thinking 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 songwriter is 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 why should you relive my thing it's better to for me it's better to find uh some kind of neutral zone where these are characters that people can multiple people can get multiple ideas from rather than one thing etched in stone were lyrics important to you 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 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's song We copied or something like that and you're like oh well okay I still got some meaning out of it and maybe that's kind of what I'm just saying right now like 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 it first of all is it accurate from your perspective and if so is it on purpose us 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 and it's a compliment even if it wasn't true I think it's a compliment to to feel that way that's how I hear it I I hear it as there's always some it's it's got roots and I love Roots Music you know I love I love uh where it comes from well there there's an interesting thing about that I mean a lot of the you know like coming up in in different rock and rollers and you talk to other contemporaries and stuff they're working on and a lot of um artists and writers and guitar players and drummers and stuff they don't uh have much depth in their history or or love of music or anything and so what who cares yeah and then there's people that do and then there's guys who are like you know super nerdy and obscure and and way go way too deep you know and I've lost the beauty of music through the minutia of it you know I've always tried 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 again so it gets me the ability to do this and that even in an engineering and production stuff I try not to really get too 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 and write and perform them and all that stuff and it's been a pretty good balance 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 when you see people like wow he's just a guitar player oh that would be nice or that's just a producer or just a singer even the word justice 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 uh so I'm happy about it feel good about it when did you buy the uh pressing plant or the the record press yeah I started building that in like I think 2015 um and then I think it opened in 2016. and it's uh it's wild it's great and then there was times where I'm like ah I shouldn't have done that this is 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 like all these Jeeps kind of little assembly place and um 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 uh Records a day incredible which is great yeah incredible and the wait 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 the this final 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 these last couple years are like the Taylor Swift's and Paul McCartney's you know putting out multiple variants of a record and it's just amazing because it's just great it's turning on 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 and in Canada and um 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 the only way you can put presses in was to buy old presses from somebody else and they're hard to come by like houndstooth like I need usually other giant uh plants would buy them up if they came available because you know you're not going to see it again yeah so is it similar to like buying an old mixing desk not as peaceful as the mixing desk where you could actually find a you 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 wow you know it's so wild because you can't never get a square answer about this stuff I was talking to um Martin Scorsese recently about the Technicolor machines yeah what happened to all those Technicolor machines and he 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 a talk with Martin Mills who runs Beggar's Banquet label in Europe and he uh was telling me this interesting thing because we were 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 what we'd have in Britain is you know we put out a single and by Tuesday we would get that chart uh number and if it was in the top 20 if you had a song in the top 20 like he had with Gary Newman and cars and our friends electric and stuff then you could get on top of the pumps but that meant you had to have you they would call an order of twenty five thousand seven inches that had to be in the stores by Friday morning for the weekend sales so in two days time they could press 25 000 records and have them in stores with record sleeves wow unimaginable yes at this moment in time yes 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 the um like is the vinyl usually available the pellets is that what it is I know nothing about it tell me this is PVC plastic the same as in a PVC pipe wow so yeah so easy to get the materials it's just the machines just the machines and the the Manpower and knowledge to run those machines efficiently you know you could turn a press on and have some guy who knows what he's is 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 how big is the machine it's about the size of a refrigerator the the manual refrigerator laying down standing up standing up it's an upright machine yes and then the automateds are sort of like a giant like car sized almost uh wide and tall because they have spaces where the the when the record's done pressing it goes and rests and uh yeah you know so knowing about supply and 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 that I think it comes down to probably people my guess would be people who are on the boards of of those major labels which I 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 their 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 a 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 are on team loser and you're You're gone so a lot 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 yes and in the end of the day somehow it all makes sense and we we're we pay the bills with it somehow based on that bad business move and based on it 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 no debate about that I mean right now at the pace that we're at with 12 presses that I have yeah I 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 yeah and buy another press yeah but then it just keeps extending this time period of actually breaking even which I guess who cares on one side of my brain who cares another side of my brain it 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 10 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 where is it easy to sell to someone 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 it's pretty it's an interesting uh possibility yeah interesting and I would like it and I've also I've thought about other things about maybe there's a a secondary thing where I I do that with investors yeah and build those plants under in a different company or a different wing of third manners my first hope would be right now that 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 you did it well it was great man Rick thanks for talking to me my pleasure thank you for doing this this is great thanks to Jack White for coming to Shangri-La 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 brokenrecordpodcast.com also be on the lookout for details on Neil Young's new album with Crazy Horse produced by Rick Rubin very soon you can follow us on Twitter at broken record broken record is producing help from the arose Jason Gambrell bent holiday Eric Sandler and Jennifer Sanchez with engineering help from Nick Chaffey our executive producer is Mia Lobel broken record is a production of Pushkin Industries and if you like this show please remember to share rate and review us on your podcast app or theme musics by Kenny beats I'm Justin Richmond

Channel: Broken Record Podcast

Views: 83,343

Keywords: Broken Record, Podcast, Interview, Music, Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Jack White, Jack White Interview, Neil Young, New Neil Young Album, Neil Young Rick Rubin, Jack White A Tip From You to Me, Jack White Acoustic, A Tip From You to Me Live, Seven Nation Army Riff, The White Stripes, Rock Music

Id: hpyebWaPCNQ

Length: 89min 27sec (5367 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 20 2022