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