A tale of two pilgimages: From Elvis' house to Jack's

Recently got back from a weekend in Nashville full of cool stuff, starting out the night I arrived by wandering through the Wedgewood-Houston neighborhood Art Crawl in order to see Th3 Anomaly, a hallway-spanning, floor-to-ceiling, wall-covering, sci-fi graphic novel featuring Nikola Tesla, Jules Verne, and Sarah Bernhardt (who knew Sarah was a science geek?). Very compelling, entertaining stuff, the scope of which was incredible both in size and the amount of imagination and effort required to create it.



The next day was spent visiting a pair of old cemeteries in Franklin, hiking through Stones River, one of the few preserved Civil War battlefields in the Nashville area, and hopping off of route 840 to find the road leading to a castle overlooking the highway.  But the first of the dual purposes of this trip began on Monday, with a smooth three-hour cruise along route 40 from Nashville to Memphis to visit Graceland.

As they say on the website, "For fans of Elvis Presley, Graceland is the ultimate pilgrimage", and I'm a big fan of both Elvis and pilgrimages. And, seeing as how it's been just over two years since I plunged purposefully down the Elvis rabbit hole, the timing of this visit also made it a late anniversary celebration.

Coming down route 51, I had expected to turn off the highway onto a side street or two to get to the house, but there it was, right smack on the side of the four-lane road. Should've realized, considering 51's been christened Elvis Presley Boulevard but, no, it was a disorienting surprise.  It might have been a smaller neighborhood road back in the day, but not anymore, not with all the traffic and gas stations and fried chicken joints and the Graceland visitor's complex across the street. So I girded myself for a schlock attack and headed in to buy my ticket for the Platinum level "Elvis Experience", plus airplanes.  

You apparently can't walk up to Graceland anymore, unless you go early in the morning when the grounds are open for free walk-ins to the meditation garden where Elvis and his parent are buried. At any other time, you have to grab an iPad and headphones and hop a shuttle for a ride across 51 and up the long driveway to the front door.

My favorite photo from one of the visitor center exhibits, snagged from here

The thing most people seem taken aback by right away is how small Graceland is. It's probably half the size of today's average McMansion, and even cozier considering the number of people who inhabited it and just plain hung out there when E was still alive. 

Borrowed from here. Follow the link and click on the image there to be taken to the
360-view images used in the Graceland iPad tour.

Only the ground floor and a couple of basement rooms are open to the public. Visitors are told before entering that the upstairs area, and Elvis' bedroom specifically, are kept private and closed. His bedroom and the bathroom in which he died have apparently been completely untouched since his death (though, of course, someone scrounged up before-death and after-death photos for the morbidly curious amongst us). The closest you can get is the bottom of the stairs.

Borrowed from here, where there are a lot more great shots

But his parents' ground-floor bedroom is viewable, complete with a few of his mother Gladys' dresses hanging in her closet. What was it about those modest dresses hanging there that brought tears to my eyes?
 

From here

And I began sniffling again when the tour got to the kitchen and I imagined his grandmother, Minnie Mae (or, as Elvis called her, "Dodger"), holding court and cooking for the family.
 

Another shot from here

The basement, with its mirrored-ceiling tv room and tucked-fabric walls and ceiling pool room, is where things began to get noticeably ostentatious.
 

From here. That creepy-eyed little white monkey had brothers on display elsewhere in the house. 

From here

And then, of course, you come back upstairs next to the jungle room. Doesn't everyone have a jungle room with a built-in waterfall wall?

From here

Then you're suddenly stepping out the back door, following the walk-way to the carport and E's father Vernon's office, then to the trophy building, which is a series of rooms displaying gold and platinum records, movie posters and memorabilia, and awards for everything from music to philanthropy. Then into the racquetball house, which has been filled with displays of those famous/infamous jumpsuits.  And then you're back outside and the walkway wraps around to the side of the house to Elvis' meditation garden. One of the things that I was most surprised to learn about Elvis was the breadth of his spirituality. I'd assumed he was raised deeply Christian, being from the deep south and all. He was, of course, but he apparently explored a vast variety of faiths, reading everything from Kahlil Gibran to very New Age-y sounding stuff.  The meditation garden was built during his lifetime for exactly the purpose its name indicates, and it's perfectly fitting that it would become Elvis' final resting place, along with his parents and grandmother.

From here.

And, yeah, I felt no shame in pulling a Kleenex out of my pocket and wiping my eyes repeatedly while I stood there reading the inscriptions on their graves.
 

From here

Then it's back onto the shuttle bus and back across Elvis Presley Boulevard to the visitor's complex, where there are a variety of exhibits of his cars, his clothes, his two private planes, and where every single exhibit space dumps you out into another gift shop. Hell, at one point, one gift shop led into another.  The gift shops are totally schlocky, but some of the exhibits are great. And it's all part of the Elvis mythos, all of it, the schlock and the grandeur, the tv sets in every room and the gaudy jumpsuits and the love he felt for his parents and grandmother and whatever his conception of God was. How many people in the history of this world have inspired the kind of joy and rapture that Elvis has? Certainly not many in recent decades. So many people seem to know of his legend as something cheesy, but what he accomplished, not just for himself but for popular music as we know it, was extremely powerful.  The tour of Graceland is definitely a must for anyone even slightly curious about Elvis, but it does not tell the whole story. It tells a lot about the man and the myth, but you need to go elsewhere to really learn about the music.  If the folks running Graceland were smart, they'd add another exhibit space focusing on that aspect of the man's deep and more-complex-than-you'd-expect legacy.

Back in Nashville the next day, I had my second pilgrimage, and a second anniversary celebration. Anyone who's followed my babbling knows I've been to Third Man Records in Nashville many, many times. But on this occasion, just a few days beyond the sixth anniversary of my original White weekend, I was allowed the opportunity to step "behind the curtain", as it were. Third Man has begun offering behind-the-scenes tours as an incentive for things like their annual holiday blood drives. Well, a pal of mine gave of his blood for the second year in a row and was rewarded with pulling a certificate for a tour for 6 people from TMR's pile of mystery gifts. And then he surprised the hell out of a few people, myself included, by inviting us to join him. And then... he got horribly sick and wasn't able to come for the tour himself.  But Third Man honcho Ben Blackwell graciously gave the rest of us well over two hours of his time and has promised a make-up tour for our incredibly generous friend once he recuperates.

Surprise! I have no grand revelations to reveal. Most serious fans know what's contained behind those black, yellow, red, and blue walls, beyond the store-front: Foremost is the Blue Room, a 150-or-so-person live venue for music performances, film showings, and art events; facilities for recording shows in the Blue Room to both tape and acetate; a warehouse/distribution center for the in-house and on-line stores; a photography dark room; the offices from which the entire company is run; and, last but not least, a temperature-controlled, fire-, smoke-, and bomb-proof vault for the master tapes of all of Jack White's music and Third Man recordings.



So for me, the revelation was not so much in seeing what was contained back there, but in how it's all contained, how it all fits within that really not very large complex, how the two buildings are connected (one tall hallway leading from front to back between the two, a second hallway crossing through the first from one building to the other with windows on each side looking out into the larger hallway), how the various design elements flow from one space into the next (matching desks on the loading dock-turned-office space, very graphic wall decor in the graphics dept, gorgeous over-stuffed sofas in the shipping dept...).  I had always imagined trick walls and subterranean chambers, but there were none (at least none that we were shown). There was just a shrewd use of every nook and cranny of space, an eye-boggling mix of seemingly jumbled clutter and and neat, sleek design. And incredible furniture. My eyes kept being drawn to the vintage furniture and light fixtures in every. single. room. Except the graphics department, but they had nifty wall installations instead. But it was everywhere else. The place is a vintage decor lover's wet dream. From Deco to Retro to Diner, it had me salivating. 
 
However, the fact that there was nothing really unexpected does not mean that there were no thrills.  The first was walking into the lathe room tucked behind the stage of the Blue Room.  That room is definitely no secret, TMR highlighted it in their video of the recording of the World's Fastest Record-- 


(Had to kick myself afterward that I forgot to ask for a peek inside the furnace elevator to see that incredible wallpaper. In an elevator, for crying out loud!) 

And you can see the lathe machine itself through a large glass window at the side of the stage.  But to walk into that room, to stand in it and have Blackwell describe exactly what they do there-- capturing live music as it happens, no second takes, no overdubs... I'll admit to bouncing a bit in excitement as we entered.  Because listening to live records cut there really is the next best thing to being at the show. You can watch YouTube video footage of all sorts of concerts, professionally or amateurly filmed, but as close as that seems, it's still two-dimensional.  The acoustics of the Third Man Blue Room are so crisply pristine and the recordings so immediate, that you can close your eyes while listening and really, truly get a feel for what it was like to be there.  It's a room in which technology and magic come together. 

The next big thrill came when Ben led us into the master tape vault (after leaving us waiting momentarily in the Blue Room while he unlocked the door  with its state-of-the-art keypad lock).  You can see this room in Dan Rather's interview with Jack, at 24 minutes in--


 
Let me say it again: The master tape vault. To actually be in that tiny room, to scan the jampacked shelves and read the names of much-loved records and performances on the spines of the boxes, to know that these were the original tapes from which all of every fan's records were created and could be re-created if necessary, all housed in Jack's "house" under his control... it was the mother lode, pure and simple, and my eyes were probably as big as dinner plates the whole time I was in there. And that's what meant so much to me about this tour-- It wasn't that any secrets might be revealed, it was the thrill of proximity, of being close to the literal sources of the music. Where Graceland focused on the man behind the music, this tour of Third Man focused on the music and how it's created and made available to us all.

Throughout the tour, it was nifty peeking into people's offices and meeting members of the staff. But, really, the biggest treat of all was hearing the stories told by Ben. Those are what made the tour unique and special.  In hindsight, there are so many things I would've liked to ask about if I'd remembered while I was there, but we could have ended up there all day, and having him answer questions might've meant he wouldn't have talked about other things (like the story behind the exceedingly rare White Stripes/Virgin Airlines poster on his office wall, which I found especially funny seeing as how my antiquated cell phone is a Virgin phone). And like every other Third Man experience I've had, the people I was fortunate to share it with added a camaraderie that warmed up that very cold day, especially after the tour was through and we huddled around the TMR Record Booth to record an appropriate tune for our missing benefactor.

But of course, tucked into a corner of the sitting area in the midst of the main building, between the store-front and the Blue Room, was one door that we were not allowed behind-- the door to Jack's office. Ben didn't even point it out to us as he ushered us past it on the way to his own office, or when we came back out and stood chatting for a bit longer before the tour came to an end.  But it was there, with "JOHN A. WHITE III, D.D.S., FAMILY DENTISTRY" emblazoned on dark glass. I can't help but think of it now as being like Elvis' bedroom, kept private and inviolate from the prying public.  

Though, thanks to J.D. Wilkes of the Dirt Daubers, I'll always envision Jack's mysterious room as looking something like this---

Full image borrowed from here.

Record Store Day 2015: The human aspect of vinyl records

So how many of you all grew up in the days before cds, before cassette tapes, back when vinyl records (and sometimes those gigantically bulky 8-track tapes) were the way that all music was played?  It was a while ago, wasn't it? I grew up in that era and I remember not even thinking twice about switching to cassettes when those came along. They were portable! We could record our records and listen on our Walkman! We could record songs off the radio! And, best of all... we could make mix-tapes!  And then cds came along and who thought twice about switching to those? Well, I'll admit I did, but pretty much only because I was poor at the time and didn't have a lot of money to buy a cd player, either for home or for carrying around, much less a whole lot of cds. But I had to do it, because cassettes became obsolete pretty much immediately.  Through these changes, all those records that took up so much space didn't necessarily become obsolete, they just... went away.

Now that I'm older and make a semi-decent living, I have more liberty to spend hard-earned dollars on my tunes. But five years ago, I still thought twice about shelling out a bunch of bucks to make a big format switch again, this time going backwards, from listening to cds back to playing records again. Anyone who reads my babblings with any regularity knows why, of course. It's pretty much impossible to become a devotee of Jack White without learning his philosophy of musical formats by rote. Notwithstanding his latest venture of becoming involved in the Tidal digital streaming service, vinyl records have been and apparently always will be the way he prefers for music to be listened to. As recently as last month in Billboard magazine's vinyl revival issue, he broadened his usual focus to speak of an appreciation for cds, and went on to say "...when you respect music, it doesn't matter how we're getting it. We still know what the real deal is." And that 'real deal' is still records-- "It's the movie theater compared to the iPhone....You're reverential to it. With vinyl, you're on your knees. You're at the mercy of the needle. You watch the record spin and it's like you're sitting around a campfire. It's hypnotic."

So when I discovered Jack's music five years ago, taking that seemingly backward step of investing in a turntable and buying records again was the only way I could participate in one of the most exciting things he's created, the Third Man Records Vault subscription service.  As soon as I began hearing about the sort of exclusive music the subscription provided, there wasn't much choice to make beyond "How much can I spend on a turntable (and a receiver, and speakers)?"  Once I had the thing, it became a source of nostalgic delight well beyond what I got from Third Man-- The very first records that I went out to shop for on my own were all the old Bill Cosby comedy albums I loved so much as a kid. I wanted to laugh til my gut split while listening to that fucking Chicken Heart that ate Chicago again, dammit!  And I wanted to do it the way I had as a kid, with a record on a record player.  Of course, I've got some mixed feelings about those Cosby records these days, but up until recently they were an unadulterated joy, as are all of the other records I've accumulated over the past five years as I've explored the wide genre of blues music, picked up all of Jack's previous and continuing releases, and dived into the many artists I've been exposed to via Third Man Records and connections I've made radiating out from TMR.

As I began buying records more and more and cds less and less, I realized that there really is something that I prefer about vinyl. I'm no audiophile, so it's not necessarily the lows and highs or warmth and depth that serious vinyl purists go on about, though those elements are often very noticeable. And, unlike Jack White, I don't sit and watch my records spin around. I do enjoy admiring the sleeve art and taking the effort to drop the needle in just the right spot, there is a lot to be said for those rituals. But once the music begins, I either lie back to soak it in or bounce around the room dancing to it. So my reason for preferring records isn't based purely in the sound quality or in the ritual of listening, it's something more elemental, something I was only recently able to put into coherent thought, thanks to an episode of Marc Maron's WTF podcast in which he toured the plant at United Record Pressing in Nashville (it's a bonus episode only available to subscribers but, seriously, go and subscribe and then search for "Marc's vinyl factory tour", it's worth the couple of bucks even if you only sign up for a month).

Marc's conversation with URP's PR rep Jay Millar begins with them discussing that return to vinyl that I talked about above, and why so many people are doing it these days. In their conversation, Jay used two words that turned on a lightbulb for me-- He spoke about the "human aspect" of vinyl. I realized that's it, that's what encompasses the sound quality, the ritual, the art that accompanies record albums, the tangibleness and moving parts that so mesmerize Jack White, it's that there is a very human aspect to creating, handling, and listening to vinyl records. Of course cds and even digital music files are also ultimately created by human beings, someone has to push the buttons and flip the switches on the machines that manufacture the cds or the computer that turns the music into the 1s and 0s of an mp3 (or flac, if you're an audiophile purist), but there's more machine than human in those creations. And while vinyl records are pressed by massive machines, there are humans involved around those machines at every step along the way, there's a symbiosis between man and machine that gives records an organic feel that digital music just does not have.



In comparison, to me at least, cds and mp3s have come to feel robotic and a bit sterile. I mean, hell, there's no way you could create a work like Dario Robleto's Melancholy Matters Because of You from digital music formats, in which the generations of a family are conveyed through the varying rpms of ground-up vinyl records.

Not my photo, snagged from the artist's website as linked above

And this past weekend's Record Store Day event at Third Man Records confirmed all of that, it confirmed Jack White's commitment to vinyl records, and it confirmed the human element that keeps drawing me in.  As described in the Billboard article linked above, Jack recently spent $300,000 to purchase the original acetate of Elvis Presley's very first record, My Happiness, which Elvis recorded at Sun Studios for $4. He then had it digitally transferred so that new copies could be pressed for a special Record Store Day 78rpm edition (and a less-limited 45rpm version to be released later this year).





Jack's motivation for spending all that money is surely based in the reverence he feels for music and its history.  And the tangibleness of records is tied up in that history. You can listen to a digital recording of an historic song, as I did at another Dario Robleto exhibit, Setlists for a Setting Sun, but there's so much more impact in seeing an historic item, seeing the age and the wear and realizing that that thing has been around and represents something that happened in time.  So seeing that original acetate of My Happiness that Jack bought displayed at Third Man like it was a shrine object gave me goosebumps.

Leaning around to glance at the back of the record,
I was able to see the still-loose Prisonaires label on the b-side

And then to see the Rek-O-Kut machine that that very single was cut on sitting right there next to it brought the magnitude of it all home. 

I've not been to Graceland yet, but I have visited the museum at Sun Records in Memphis and stood in the room where that Rek-O-Kut captured Elvis' first attempt to put on vinyl those urges that would before long change his life and musical history together.  And just that morning, I had watched TMR honcho Ben Blackwell carrying a bulky object covered by a white sheet across the street and into TMR and wondered if it was the Rek-O-Kut.  A representative from the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (from whom TMR had the machine on loan for the day) confirmed that, sure enough, that'd been what Blackwell was hauling in.  If it'd been me, I'd have been scared to death of dropping it, would've wanted to put it on a cart or at least a dolly or something. The Hall of Fame rep also told me a fantastic story about how they just recently found out that theirs was the machine that cut My Happiness-- Scotty Moore, Elvis' guitar player in the early days, was walking through the museum and stopped in front of it and said "You know, that is the machine". The rep told me he replied something along the lines of yeah, we know it was used for a lot of records at Sun. Apparently Scotty said, "No, I worked with that machine a lot and I know it well. It's the machine that was used for Elvis' first record". When my jaw dropped and I took a step back, the rep said his reaction had been exactly the same. 

He then explained how they got the call from TMR early last week asking if it could be displayed for RSD. There were questions about things like insurance and such, but the biggest stumbling block was that the display case at the museum was built in, couldn't be moved with the machine. But then the very next day, the museum rep was out picking up a steel guitar that was to be added to the museum, and when he went to get it he found it was in a plexi case that was the perfect size for the Rek-O-Kut to be displayed in. He said it was as if it'd been meant to be for the machine to be displayed at TMR, because after that they worked everything out and all the pieces just fell into place within a day or so, just in time for Record Store Day.

Have to mention another little kick I got related to one of Elvis' predecessors-- A portion of an old, broken Robert Johnson Terraplane Blues 78 that was hanging on the wall in a frame with no glass and a little placard beneath it that read "Touch Me". Of course I did. 

So much history on those premises in one day. As if the vibe at Third Man doesn't buzz enough on its own, they had go and add these other thrills, these reminders of how the human aspect goes hand in hand with music and the records that contain it.  For the memories of that day that are attached to it, memories of time spent with friends, of stories told and history encountered, I'll always treasure my own My Happiness.

Few more photos from this trip (and previous ones) to Third Man, here.

A White weekend: Five year anniversary

Wish me a happy anniversary, it's been five years since my first White weekend. Between that and a bunch of recent shows, this be-log's been a little inundated by Jack White the last couple of days (weeks, months, whatever).  Might need to take a break and try to write about other things for a while, even I'm beginning to need a little relief from the addiction (just a very little).  But before I do that, I'm gonna reminisce over how it all began and then draw a parallel.  

So it's been five years since my epiphany but, really, it's been longer than that since I first began trying to get into Jack's music.  I heard of the White Stripes on the message board for another band I was into at the time, where people were discussing the Stripes' tour of Canada for Icky Thump.  The crazy b-shows they were playing struck my fancy and I began paying attention to conversation about the band.  But I didn't go looking for their music, not yet.  I was just fascinated by the idea of what they were doing up there in Canada and the whole nothing but drums'n'guitar, brother'n'sister thing.  It wasn't until an October night in Baltimore that I heard their music. 

Some friends and I were in B'more for the annual Fells Point Festival, one of the largest, longest-running festivals on the east coast.  For lunch, we escaped the crowds by ducking into the restaurant upstairs at Sláinte, where we ended up with an especially flirtatious waiter. Yeah, I know this seems like quite a digression, but this guy is The One Behind It All. He told us he was tending the bar downstairs that evening and that we should come back later to see him. How could three single women resist an invitation like that?  So we finished lunch and headed back out to wander the festival until evening.  

The bar was packed when we came back. And our buddy the waiter was now a very harried bartender, with people placing food orders in addition to drinks and no one from the restaurant upstairs bussing for him. There were stacks of plates and cutlery all over the floor behind the bar. He was pissed as hell about it and acting out his anger in an alarmingly maniacal manner.  He flirted up a storm with us again as he took our orders, then headed to the other end of the bar, cussing out loud and kicking plates along the way.  But we settled in and after a while he brought our drinks.  By that time, I'd been struck by the music playing in the bar and asked him who it was. He said it was the White Stripes.  Ok, I was finally hearing this band I'd heard so much about.  A few songs later, I was still digging the mix and when he waded through the debris of dishes down to our end of the bar, I asked him again "What's this song?"  Again, he said it was such-and-such song from such-and-such album by the Stripes.  Then he picked up a glass from behind the bar and, while looking me straight in the eye, threw it over his shoulder where it smashed into a pile of plates.  The dude was insane, but I was seriously excited about his choice in music. This went on and on, every single song I asked about was the White Stripes and he finally said that was all he was playing, just their six cds on rotation. I asked which of their records I should start with and he told me the later ones were best because Meg finally learned how to keep time (if I'd known more about the band at that point, I might've chastised him for dissing her. Meg was integral to the band whether she kept proper time or no.).  By that point we'd finished our drinks and realized he was keeping us hostage by not bringing our check, so I headed upstairs to find a manager and get us out of the line of flying glassware.  I hope to this day that I didn't get the guy in trouble, because I owe him a huge debt of gratitude, crazy as he was.

It was still a while before I picked up any of the band's records, though. Dunno what held me back.  And when I did finally get ahold of a copy of Icky Thump, I was held back again. The music was immediately appealing, and I was struck hard by Jack's lyrics.  Four songs on the album resonated with me especially-- 300mph Torrential Outpour Blues ("I'm getting hard on myself, sitting in my easy chair".  The simple profundity of that line was like a punch in the sternum. To this day, if you held a gun to my head and forced me to name a favorite White Stripes song, this would be it.), Little Cream Soda, Rag and Bone, and Martyr For My Love For You.  The word-play in all was so witty and clever and the sardonic angst expressed in them was something I related to strongly.  But then there was Jack's voice, so high-pitched and nasal and unpolished compared to singers like Chris Cornell and Maynard James Keenan, who I was heavily into at the time.  I just couldn't connect with it. 





 



For almost two years I kept coming back to Icky Thump, knowing there was something there that I should be into, but unable to make it click.  Finally my buddy Leo told me that if I was interested in Jack's music, I should check out one of his other bands that she'd seen at Lollapalooza a couple years before, the Raconteurs.  We just happened to be in a record store as she told me this, and that record store just happened to have a copy of the first Raconteurs record, Broken Boy Soldiers, on cd. So I bought it. But I didn't listen to it that day.  No, it wasn't until a week later, on a bright, clear, cold day at the end of January, when I was out driving the curvy backroads along the border of Maryland and West Virginia, that I popped that cd in and gave it a go.  Like Icky, the music struck me as appealing, but it was just that-- appealing. Not profound or astonishing.  Until Blue Veins came up.  

You know how sometimes things happen to you and you know that you will never, ever forget where you were at that moment?  I feel like I'll go to my grave still seeing that bright blue winter sky through the windshield of the car, that I'll always remember the exact spot along the road paralleling the Potomac River when Jack sang the final line of that song and the lightning bolt came down from heaven and I finally... got it.  The combination of intensity and delicacy in his voice in those final few words was exactly what I needed to hear and changed everything. 



I feel like I've learned a lot about Jack since then, and I don't mean personal, gossipy, trivia shit.  I mean about his art and his philosophy.  I've been accused of "verbosity and mind-numbing analysis of... mundane detail" but, for crying out loud, when something moves you in such a way why shouldn't you throw yourself into it deeply and express the things it makes you think and feel?  To that end, I'm going to explore a little parallel before wrapping this up.
 
Around this time last year, I decided to finally get into Elvis Presley's music and went down a similar rabbit-hole to the one I went down with Jack, though not quite to the same degree.  A few months later, Jack covered Elvis's Power of My Love as a b-side to the World's Fastest Record.  To my knowledge, it was the first time he'd covered an Elvis tune and I was struck by the synchronicity (or was my brain just looking for patterns?).  Since then, I and other folks have been seeing what seem to be little nods to Elvis from Jack. Some of the parallels are superficial, such as Jack's recent pompadour haircut. Others are more profound, as in the way both blurred genre lines to make their music appeal to a widely diverse audience and to introduce that audience to styles of music they might otherwise have remained ignorant of. And there's no denying that both have (had) the same intense magnetism, the ability to hold crowds large or small in the palm of their hand. But there's one way in which Jack will presumably always differ from Elvis and it's a vital difference-- Where Elvis allowed decisions to be taken out of his hands by his manager, Colonel Parker, Jack has from the very beginning exerted a strong effort to protect his music. Third Man Records, his headquarters in Nashville (record label, venue, storefront, distribution warehouse) was created for just that purpose, to allow him to maintain control of his art. He will always do what inspires him and just hope that people dig it. So far, his instincts, much like Elvis's in the very beginning, have proven pretty much infallible. It's a sad shame that Elvis didn't have Jack's confidence and strength of will. He seemed to crave love, acceptance, and fame too much, whereas Jack may want those things (it's obvious he gets intense fulfillment from connecting with an audience and his ambition is palpable) but doesn't seem to need them the way Elvis did.

I read this the other day in Greil Marcus's Mystery Train--

"...When an artist gives an all-encompassing Yes to his audience (and Elvis's Yes implicitly includes everyone, not just those who say Yes to him), there is nothing more he can tell his audience, nothing he can really do for them, except maybe throw them a kiss.

Only the man who says No is free, Melville once wrote. We don't expect such a stance in popular culture, and those who do might best be advised to take their trade somewhere else. But the refusal that lurks on the margins of the affirmation of American popular culture... is what gives the Yes of our culture its vitality and its kick. Elvis's Yes is the grandest of all, his presentation of mastery the grandest fantasy of freedom, but it is finally a counterfeit of freedom: it takes place in a world that for all its openness (Everybody Welcome!) is aesthetically closed, where nothing is left to be mastered, where there is only more to accept. For all its irresistible excitement and enthusiasm, this freedom is complacent, and so the music that it produces is empty of real emotion-- there is nothing this freedom could be for, nothing to be won or lost." 

For all the little signs over the past year that Jack seems to be channeling Elvis, the thing that will always set them apart (or that I assume and hope will always set them apart) is that Jack will never give that all-encompassing Yes to his audience. He constantly walks the line between Yes and a hint, or threat, if you will, of No. The "are you with me or against me?" question at so many shows on the Lazaretto tour, voiced so vehemently recently in Austin and New York, the immediate switch from semi-scripted arena shows in New York and Nashville to spontaneity in Ohio, and to lecture/complaint and willfulness at shows after that in the southwest, are indications that the No will always lurk on the edge of Jack's art. He will never succumb to the complacence that Elvis did. He can pay all the homage in the world with his cover of Power of My Love, his pompadour, playing the stages Elvis played... Hell, tell me that hair, shiny jacket and open collar, and even some of the motions of his recent performance on The Tonight Show don't call to mind the King's early days--

Update 3/14/2017: Thanks for taking this down, NBC. Y'all reading this are just going to have to take my word for it.
 
He could even hit the stage in a rhinestone-emblazoned white jumpsuit, but he will never become what Elvis became. He will always make demands of his audience. One of the best reviews I've read of one of his shows included this line that's become my signature at the two Jack-related message boards--  
 
"And the message is clear: if we want Jack White as our hero, he will entertain, but not pander. We have to accept all his flaws, whims, caprices and manias as a critical, sometimes uncomfortable, part of the contract."

In other words, he will sometimes tell us No. And, as Greil Marcus put it, that is exactly what gives his Yes such vitality and kick.  After five years of addiction to that vitality and kick, I still crave it as much as I did from the very beginning.  And, heaven help me, I hope to still be verbosely expressing mind-numbing analysis of every mundane detail of Jack's art five years from now.  



And is it just my brain looking for patterns again when I notice that this post about my 5 year anniversary is the 55th in which I've written about Jack?  It ain't 3s, but hmmmm... 
 

The strange and mighty "Power of My Love" **

So, back on New Year's Day of this year, I began a new musical infatuation. I woke up that morning wanting to get into Elvis Presley. Of course, I've heard Elvis' music over the years. I even seem to recall one of my grandmothers having some of his albums and talking about him once or twice. But I never got into him, y'know?  But suddenly on January 1st I decided it was time.  I had a day-trip planned with a lot of driving, so before leaving the house I did a quick search of Amazon.com, found and downloaded The Essential Elvis Presley, and loaded it onto a flash drive for the car.  By the time I got home that night, I was deeply hooked and completely understood why the man became the star he was and still is. Since then, I've picked up the gorgeous six-lp 50th Anniversary box-set, gotten a couple of his movies from Netflix (I highly recommend King Creole, it's a blast) and read a few bios: One heart-breakingly sad, another heart-warming, and one just begun-- Peter Guralnick's two-part Last Train to Memphis/Careless Love. 

This new infatuation, though, has in no way eclipsed the already existing one, my addiction to Jack White and his music.  It's not inconceivable that Jack might've led me to Elvis, the same way he's led me into so much other music, from blues to rockabilly to garage rock.  After all, he's been Elvis--



And the connection doesn't end there.  Jack's worked with a few of Elvis' former girlfriends in recent years.  Both clearly grasp(ed) the effect of taking the stage in distinctive clothing (Elvis' early pink'n'black getups and those iconic white jumpsuits, Jack's red, white'n'black with the White Stripes and equally color-coordinated outfits in every other incarnation), and both dyed their hair black and play(ed) up their eyes with makeup. Both took existing musical styles and turned them into something just a bit different.  But that's all superficial stuff.  Something I read in Last Train to Memphis summed up what it really is. Guralnick quoted Tom Perryman, a young dj and promoter from Gladewater, TX, describing Elvis at nineteen, just a couple months after the release of That's Alright:

"You know, he was really a natural.  When Elvis was performing, everyone had the same basic reaction.  It was almost spontaneous.  It reminded me of the early days, of where I was raised in East Texas and going to these 'Holy Roller' Brush Arbor meetings: seeing these people get religion.  I said 'Man, that's something.'  You'd see it in the later years with the big sound systems and the lights, but Elvis could do it if there wasn't but ten people (in the room).  He never realized what he had till later years.  He said, 'Man, this sure is a good crowd in this part of the country.  Are they always that way?'.  I said, 'No, man. They never seen anything like you.' Nobody had."

That's Jack. I missed the White Stripes, as I didn't get into his music until the band was already unofficially over. But I've spoken to many people who did experience the Stripes, read many a review of their shows, and have experienced for myself all of his post-Stripes incarnations.  I would bet money that every fellow fan I know would agree that seeing Jack perform live is like getting religion and that they'd never before seen anything like him.  And he puts the same passion into every show, whether it's in front of ten people or one of those places with a big sound system and lights and a few thousand people.

So just imagine the degree to which my silly l'il fan-girl brain was blown when my two infatuations recently came together.

Last Saturday was Record Store Day and, like last year, I headed to Nashville to celebrate the day at Third Man Records. The anticipation for this year's event, though, was light years beyond the previous one.  On April 3rd, just two days after announcing on April Fool's Day that Jack would be releasing his second solo album, Lazaretto, this summer, Third Man announced that on Record Store Day, he would take the stage of the Blue Room to record, direct-to-acetate, a live version of the first single, also titled Lazaretto.  Not only that, but the acetate would then be rushed down the road to United Record Pressing Plant (who presses all of Third Man's releases), an abundance of singles would be pressed, and then said singles would be rushed back to Third Man to sell to the fans waiting in anxious anticipation.  And not only that, but tickets to attend Jack's performance would be on sale within a couple of hours of this announcement. Did my stomach immediately begin doing flips?  Did I actually tell my boss that I needed to be off the clock for a short while that afternoon with my office door closed?  Did I then clock out, shut my door, and pounce on that ticket sale like a hawk after its prey, scoring one of those highly sought-after $100 tickets within a matter of seconds?  Affirmative to all of the above.

Yup, that'd be me. The thing in itself.

 On Friday two weeks later, I arrived in Nashville and checked into my hotel around 5:30pm. Taking a quick peek at Facebook, I found that two of my show buddies from the 2012 Blunderbuss tour were already at Third Man and had begun the line for Saturday morning's 10am performance. When I commented that they were awesome, the immediate reply was "Get your butt down here!".  So I did.  And I was glad and grateful for it in so many ways.

First was the fried chicken that I picked up for our dinner.  If you ever find yourself in Nashville, brave the lines at Hattie B's.  Lord above, I can pretty much guarantee you won't be sorry. And then I was glad for the night that followed with the terrific bunch of people who were there.  From pressing our ears to the metal door that leads to the Blue Room so that we could hear the sound-check (and being chastised for it by Jack's tour manager), to curling up in a camp-chair with a blanket to stake our place in line while my buddies crawled into their tent to sleep, to waking up from a light doze to see an almost-full moon glowing in the sky over the Wardenclyffe tower-replica perched atop Third Man, to taking everyone for a McDonald's run at 6am and coming back to find a bird flying in and out through the TMR logo in the metal door, testing the acoustics inside the hallway, and then perching inside the logo to serenade us before flitting off...  Thinking back on that night and morning, I kind of feel sorry for Jack that we've experienced something he'll probably never be able to-- The magic of spending a beautiful, chilly night outside the gleaming black walls of the place he created.  

This photo and all following courtesy of and property of Mike Dziama

 

But I was mostly grateful that I'd rushed over there when told to because I was third in line to enter the venue when the doors opened at 8:30am.  My buddies and I snagged prime real estate at the front of the stage and, oh, how different it was at this show, considering how tiny that stage is and how close we were to the action upon it.  Very kindly, Third Man put together a video re-cap of the entire day to save me from having to babble about it.  Suffice it to say, the grin that's visible on my face about 18 seconds in sums up the state I was in pretty much the entire 20+ hours I spent on the premises--



So where's the Elvis connection? You heard a snippet of it in that video, when Jack and the band covered Power of My Love, an Elvis tune I'd not yet heard of, as the b-side of the live Lazaretto World's Fastest Record.  As terrific a song as Lazaretto is, it's that cover tune that I and some of my friends have been talking about since.  



Where Elvis' version is all self-assured, sultry seduction, Jack's is a blatant, nakedly urgent declaration that this is how it is and now what are you gonna do about it?  Elvis croons the words, Jack spits and shrieks them (while still managing to slip in a bit of that Elvis quaver), but both versions have the same knee-weakening effect.  Probably not in the least surprising, but I've been giddy over this song all week.  

In an interview with Marc Maron (skip ahead to about 29 minutes in) in 2012, Jack described Elvis as an "alien" because of what he did with music. I don't know whether Jack doesn't realize it or would be too modest to say it out loud, but it's time for him to admit that he's one, too.


Been a tad giddy over these, too, so just for the hell of it...




** Yes, I do know that the lyric is "strength and mighty power of my love". But it sounds like "strange" when Jack sings it and that's somehow just so very appropriate.

Ever wonder why they called him The King?

On June 23, Elvis recorded "If I Can Dream" in several passionate takes. To Binder and Howe [producers of Elvis' 1968 tv comeback special], his performance was so staggering as to seem almost a religious experience. Out on the floor with a hand mike, standing in front of the string section, Elvis fell to his knees. For a moment, he was back at Ellis Auditorium, at the gospel sings of his youth, or maybe down in Tupelo at the Assembly of God church. Howe, having worked with him before, might have anticipated such an immersion. Not everyone was prepared: "The string players sat there with their mouths open. They had never seen anything like this."

But the more astonishing performance came when the producers sent everybody home and Elvis rerecorded the vocal in the dark. Binder sat motionless, afraid to move as Elvis lost himself in the song. Once again, he fell to his knees. But this time, in a fervent act that was equal parts artistry and emotional regression, he assumed a fetal position, writhing on the cement floor. Then, after four takes, he got up and walked into the control room, and Binder played the recording back for him. Elvis sat in rapt attention and asked to hear it again, until Binder had played it some fifteen times. Only then was he satisfied.

From Baby, Let's Play House, Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him.