Raconteurs recording in the studio in Nashville, October 28th, 2018. Sign up for Third Man Records Vault Package 38, featuring their first NEW MUSIC in ten years, by Wednesday at midnight CT:thirdmanrecords.com/vault
If you have not previously been a member of the Vault, it's Jack White's subscription vinyl service. To get this package you would need to sign up in the next two days. Don't sign up too late because you won't get it. You'll be charged the same amount and get the NEXT package, which hasn't been announced yet and could be anything. Well, any Third Man Records thing worth around $60.
Jack White has expanded the Third Man Records store. It was about three yards square and is now about six yards square - but what an addition! Here's the video announcing the new nook:
It features Jack himself tearing down the wall - to open up the Third Man Novelties Lounge which is indeed a cornucopia of impressive coin-operated gewgaws. A Scopitone with 16 mm films of Third Man acts like the Dead Weather, a full-color Photobooth, and a small coin-operated injection-molding device which pumps out small red plastic models of famous Montgomery-Ward Airline guitars! Each machine is carefully branded in Third Man livery and is cleverly operated by Third Man 'gold tokens' because you just know that half of those will be bought and hoarded by collectors and never put back in circulation.
To round things off, you can buy a sort of modern-day Zoopraxiscope disc of a 50's stripper, Tempest Storm, and watch her strip in jerky half-motion! This is probably not sexist but actually ironic or Hipster or something. And I'm always a fan of things pioneered by Muybridge (in this case jerky half motion, not stripping) as he is my fave early film-maker.
(Possibly one of Jack's faves as well, as one of Jack's concert posters is a Muybridge series rather hilariously altered to conform to a Kafka short story...somebody is a well-read clever boy, but of course it could have been the graphic artist rather than Jack.)
Perhaps if we buy enough gold tokens we can organize a multi-strip-in inside the photobooth and make our own Zoopraxis movie disks!!eleven!
Vintage photos and blurb on How Records Are Made, from Voices of East Anglia. (More at the link.)
It hasn't changed much. Here is the video of the Dead Weather visiting United Record Pressing in Nashville, their video for Will There Be Enough Water.
A couple of weeks ago, John Scalzi posted a video of his 13 year old daughter reacting to her first sight of a vinyl record. She did not believe that anything so primitive could possibly have existed.
It caused a bit of a fuss, as a lot of people assumed it was staged or rehearsed. So much so that Scalzi disabled comments on the video and put up a rebuttal, here, which MIGHT be staged.
It is hard to believe that she lived for 13 years in a house with LPs and never opened one before, I admit. Then again, some years ago I came home after Cleaner Monthly Visit Day and found the record player was on, with the stylus gouging a deep groove into the rubber mat. I thought that it was possible to hit the "auto play" button by accident, though, so I bought a new stylus and gave them the benefit of the doubt. A few years later, it happened again. I phoned the cleaners' firm and tried to describe what had happened, and the owner said, "You can't possibly expect the cleaning crew to know what a record player is!"
I retorted that a crew who rubbed cleaning cloths across buttons on equipment ought to be aware that "on" buttons activate things, and he agreed to come out and watch the record player in use. He grudgingly admitted that there was enough clicking, arm movement and subsequent loud noise that maybe someone should have known that they had pressed a button, even though he clearly felt that no normal person had ever seen a turntable in action and couldn't be expected to recognize one.
Scalzi junior's rebuttal was an interesting development for me today, of all days, as my biggest news this fine day - and probably biggest news all month - is that renowned vinylphile Jack White announced he is releasing his first solo album. It will be available, on vinyl of course, on 23rd April. The single is available for download (equally of course) tonight, but the vinyl single will be on sale on February 7th. The album is called Blunderbuss and the single (on vinyl!) is called Love Interruption. The b-side, in the classic way of vinyl, is not on the forthcoming album, and is called Machine Gun Silhouette. Rob Jones is said to be involved.
The single is streaming at Jack White's new website www.jackwhiteIII.com at this very moment.
Enjoy, assuming your daughter and/or your cleaning crew have left you with a workable stylus!
My childhood, several centuries ago, was enlivened with stories of English rock bands and their touring vans, which were cramped and unheated and full of battered cheap gear that musicians these days would give an arm and a leg to obtain - and how often these beat groups got sick on the road, and how often the bands got laid in the back of those vans. Paul Kossoff, the druggiest of Free, was the best driver in that group and would cheerfully drive the length of Great Britain without a protest or a problem. Jimmy Page, touring with a combo of now-mostly-forgotten rockers in a van, famously got sick from Glandular Fever (Mono, in US-speak) and retired from touring forever at the ripe old age of 19 (or something), vowing to spend the future as a session musician. (I believe he went back to touring with some group or other later, when he preferred charter jets with fur-topped beds in the cabin.) The rivalry between those groups who preferred the Bedford van and those groups who preferred the legendary Transit van is the stuff of sagas.
So now Jack has translated the full musical van-experience from live music to vinyl, transferring the romance of the touring troubadours of rock to the staff of the record store. Four or fewer Lovable Moptops (Ben Swank) will soon arrive at our doorsteps to personally provide us with sounds at whatever cost to their selves, their relationships and their health.
One hopes Jack has taken to heart the tales of all those English boys tested - and so many of whom were broken - by the stress of having to get to Bradford St. George's Hall by 1 pm next day after the Hammersmith Odeon gig last night, in the freezing fog with the top two gears f*cked and the brakes a bit slushy and a slapper in the back seat who's forgotten her shoes. If not, we'll no doubt hear these epic tales of struggle and victory from Third Man in their tweets and web-updates.
Actual footage of a fictional group race between a Bedford and a Transit. You don't want to know the movie it comes from.
Also, the first person to glom/glue/clamp/magnet a GPS on the underside of this sucker at SXSW and tell us where it's headed in future will win my undying appreciation.
Third Man Records recently announced they'd be selling limited edition colored vinyls of some White Stripes records or other (I don't know the details and, actually, don't care). The day before they were due to go on sale at Third Man's only outlet, in Nashville, the record company put five of them up for sale on eBay. Bidding quickly got to the $500 or so level. The announcement of the auction was made on the paid fanclub website The Vault, and tweeted to fans who subscribe to the feed.
Jack White jumped into The Vault chatroom to defend his exciting new business model, and Antiquiet has done a wonderful job of cutting out all the usual chatroom crap and presenting his words in context here.
He begins with the less than cheery greeting "see you in hell", which was also the sign-off to the eBay listings. It's nice to see a pop star who can quote Han Solo. His argument was that placing them on eBay himself takes the wind out of the flippers' sails. (Many Nashville locals go to the opening day of these limited editions, pay $20 and 'flip' them - list them on eBay the same day.)
He muddied things up a little by talking about the eBay price "setting the price" for the ordinary sale of the record - though of course the eBay price of five rare albums is not the actual value of 300 rare albums bought by locals with zero travel and shipping costs to cover. Many people were left with the impression that the eBay price would be the retail price at the store the next day.
Oh well. It doesn't bother me and for the three grand or so Jack makes out of it, I doubt if it's feathering his nest so much. But it did invoke a major shitstorm from fans who felt otherwise - not so much in the chatroom, but on the comments thread on The Vault's listing of the auction. After all, they'd been roused by tweet to go to the (paid access) website and then found nothing but an announcement that five of 'our' (fans') limited edition records were being sold off to collectors - and told "see you in hell" for their troubles. Major angst ensued. After a while, someone joined the comments thread using Jack White's account and posted an amazing rant that one blog described as,
quickly devolv[ing] into the Four Loko-fueled ramblings of the drunk dude outside your bodega.
"You act like we bury [records] in tunnels in Vietnam for Gods sakes!" said Jack White.
"Uh, not really," said fans, putting on their headphones and discreetly crossing the street.
What all of the blogs who reported this seem to have missed is that the rant was from Jack's account but was signed "the staff at Third Man Records". And it doesn't sound like Jack either.
Here is the major part of it, because it's jolly entertaining.
Posted by trucks on 11.29.2010 at 04:22 PM Well I think it's official this is my last Vault experience. Really nothing on here worth paying for anymore. Think you get something special with a message, but it's really just a link to fan exploitation. fan exploitation? really? if you don't want it, DONT BUY IT. and if you do want it, don't act like you DON'T want it. get in line like anyone else, hunt for it like anyone else. you act like we bury them in tunnels in vietnam for god sakes, you can get one randomly in the mail if your lucky, in line at a store if you're lucky, in your hometown if you're lucky, etc. who is guaranteed a rare hard to find record? only vault members and their quarterly subscriptions. there's luck in every other version. Posted by surfingelectrod on 11.29.2010 at 05:07 PM Fuck you, Third Man. really? you think we deserve that? would you like us to just stop making limited edition records? you would go so far as to say fuck you to us? for what? we didn't do anything to you but give you what you want. you're a vault member obviously, for what reason? limited records you can't get elsewhere? would you kindly send us those records back so we can sell them to some other fan who didn't get to have them? don't want a split colored limited edition record? then guess what? don't buy one. don't want them to be expensive? then guess what? don't WANT them. it's you and others wanting them that dictates the price and the entire nature of the idea. make no mistake, we could make twenty thousand split color whatevers for you, and they'll be worth 20 bucks, and you'll pay 20 bucks for them, and you'll never talk about them, desire them, hunt to find them, etc. why should ebay flippers, who are not real fans, dictate the price, make all the profit (taken from the artist and the label) and take the records out of the hands of real fans. there's a guy who waits in a black suv down the block from third man who hires homeless people to go buy him tri colors when they are on sale. doesn't even get out of his car. should he be charged ten bucks or two hundred? don't be spoiled, don't insult people who are trying to give you what you want. last quarter every vault member got a black and blue live record. a record you're only supposed to get if you ACTUALLY GO to a live show at third man. are you pissed about that? we've done giveaways, contests, auctions, etc. a lot of different ways for vault members to get first crack at limited records when we don't have to. we do it because by being a member you're supposedly making a statement that you're a real fan who wants the music, and to be involved in collecting rare and interesting vinyl. from some of these comments i take it that a lot of you would like this to be all digital, available to anyone on amazon dot com, anytime. boring, lifeless, lazy, and redundant. don't get mad at third man for giving you exactly what you've asked for. and seriously stop all of the whining, because what you communicate to us is that all of the trouble we go to isn't worth it because nothing we do will make you happy. we'll try to do back rubs door to door when we get a chance. sincerely the staff at third man records [1]
Oh, poor widdle record company! Fans hurt its ickle feelings.
Actually I would like music to be available to anyone on Amazon... and it's never hurt any other pop singers. As for easily available music being "boring, lifeless, lazy and redundant", that's so true. Here's a clip of Jack White playing his favorite record. He's almost in tears as he listens to it, and I bet that's because it's the limited-to-15-copies triple-deckertri-color Japanese pressing with the blue, white and black plastic cover that folds into a clockwork-powered Tesla Coil and the Eskimo scrimshaw for "strength" hand-carved into the run-out groove by the artist himself.
Oh, wait, it's not. It's a black vinyl pressing of the popular release with the regular cover. Is Jack (or is the record - I can't tell whether the Third Man commenter meant to skewer the buyer or the product) boring, lifeless, lazy and redundant in this clip? If not, why not? Might Son House have been onto something here?
I especially liked "don't get mad at third man for giving you exactly what you've asked for" in the next sentence to "nothing we do will make you happy". Clearly logic isn't this person's strong point...if it's exactly what we asked for, we'd be happy, wouldn't we?
The postscript to all of this is even weirder - or it's spin control. According to a poster on one of the (free) fan message boards, as one person was lining up outside the record store the next day, Ben Swank of Third Man Records explained, "it was just an experiment gone wrong. They were hoping that people would not bid them very high and the price would be set low. Then a bunch of douchebags created fake accounts and bid the auctions up." He said that they would "just offer second chance offers to legitimate bidders."
Whatever he said while handing out hot chocolate to freezing fans then, he's unapologetic in the Grauniad this morning. "The industry is constantly changing. I can't believe it's taken 15 years for a label to start selling its own releases on eBay (even in limited numbers). We're going to continue doing it. We're also going to continue all the contests, giveaways, pop-up shops, random mail orders, subscription services and manufacturing of insane new vinyl products and any other ridiculous idea that strikes our fancy. Why? Because we're American. And American's do crazy shit for capitalism. See you in hell."
Getting a bit tired of "see you in hell" now. A little glint of anger from Han Solo was kind of sexy, but three times in three days from a record company is like having your knuckles sandpapered. And it's Americans, FFS. Plural.
[1] I'm claiming fair use. Swank knows where to find me if he wants it taken down.
In this piece I mentioned that United Record Pressing didn't seem to have a way to make one side of an album one color and the other side a second color. I underestimated them.
The trip to URP to watch vinyl being pressed failed to discover this clever bit of novelty pressing - The Dead Weather's Blue Blood Blues is available (in infinitesimal quantities) as a single trapped inside a 12 inch. Jack White explains it in the video below.
Here is the Nashville White Castle, where we were unable, even after sampling, to determine what was in a Chicken Ring.
Tutwiler, Mississippi, Candy Store
Temember all those cocks on the street in Memphis and Nashville? Well, Third Man Records evidently knows about the tradition of big cocks and is trying to emulate the guy on the car a few blocks away in the Nashville photo, but it seems to have gotten the symbolism subtly wrong.
On the roof there - that's the wrong sort of cock, isn't it?
On Friday we toured United Record Pressing, Inc. plant.
Friday's not actually a tour day, but people in Nashville are so danged nice that when we phoned, they said we could come around and if anyone was available we'd get a tour. We turned up and we did get one.
A record pressing plant is like a printer's, not like a publisher's. A publisher (or record label) signs an artist, but the printer or presser prints for many labels. URP worked with such labels as Motown, among a zillion others. URP has been in that building a long time and one major feature of the tour is the un-redecorated rooms where the Black Motown artists, among other Black artists, were lodged when they came to Nashville, so they wouldn't have to put up with any Southern segregated shit.
Once you get over the reason for their existence, those rooms are beautiful. The colors are completely wild and if I'd had a large enough handbag there's at least one rug and three chairs I would have smuggled out with me.
Then Adam, the guide - it's cool he was this young guy, in a vinyl pressing plant - took us to the label-making area. He said Third Man Records fans like us spent a lot of time in the label room. He was, as I say, young and probably didn't realize they were most likely memorizing serial numbers and trying to guess at upcoming releases for personal kudos and possible financial gain. And after that, we went to see the whole pressing process.
Which I didn't, alas, write down as I went through it. Man, it's complicated. I assumed musicians taped things, and then cut a lacquer which would be electroplated to make a reverse image, and that became the "master" and everything was stamped from that. Not so. There's about four steps between the lathe-cut original and the stamper, involving heavy chemistry and and at least two electroplating steps. Once the stamper is made, a machine you can imagine takes a handful of melted vinyl (a puck), puts the labels on both sides and then moves it between the stamper plates, where it is squished into being a record. Water then rapidly cools the stamped product. The swarf on the outside, which is not cooled, is trimmed off by a blade that runs around the outside of the closed stampers, and the waste goes into a bin. After a moment, the stampers open and the vinyl record is nudged up and on to a slide, where it is dropped on to a spindle for later collection.
The records are then inserted by hand into inner sleeves and piled up with flattening dividers every ten or so, and the albums await the outer sleeves, which I assume are printed elsewhere as Adam didn't mention them.
One thing that URP specializes in is multi-colored vinyl and Adam showed us exactly how pearlescent, glow-in-the-dark, bi-color and tri-color vinyls are made. Vinyl comes in small beads, so it's relatively easy to mix colors - throw in a few handfuls of different colored beads and when melted together, the puck is multi-colored or pearlescent. There's an automated way to make one half of a record one color and one half another. (I mean six inches of blue and six inches of black on an album. They didn't seem to have an easy way to make side A blue and side B black.) A tri-color puck has to be made up by hand and placed in the machine, so that's why they're rare and only sold as limited edition records. Since the pressing machine just squidges whatever's in the puck, every multi-colored puck makes a unique record.
And I'm ecstatic to report that the black-and-blue two-color albums they were pressing at that very instant were the Sea Of Cowards Dead Weather Live at Third Man Records records. Of which I'm getting two - on for being a Vault (fan club) member and one for actually being there when it was recorded. And frankly, I've waited long enough for that - it was May 3rd, so I'm glad to hear it's finally being pressed.
To my complete delight, Adam handed me a "rose" - a flower shape made by taking the still-soft (they aren't cooled, remember?) trimmings from the edge of a newly-printed album, and forming it into a spiral with a stem. So I have a "rose" from the black-and-blue album I'll be getting in a few weeks.
I loved this trip and the places I've been. I've seen cotton fields, blues groups on the streets, a luthiers' factory, a studio, a record-pressing plant. What I needed to see next was a retail vinyl outlet.
Oh, I'm in luck! The next place we went to, of course, was Third Man Records. Where I bought a bunch of vinyl records. Wonderful to see the culmination of everything we did on this trip, from stay in the delta, to make guitars, to record in a studio, to see records pressed - and now to buy them.
Next we went to the Chihuly exhibition at the Frist. Glassblowing seemed to fit the theme of blue bottles on trees/blue guitars on trees/pressing multicolored vinyl that had followed us around for a few days. I loved his Venetian and some other work and ended up with a bit of an issue around what he calls 'plant' or 'organic' shaped - don't think he has a grasp of the utter beauty of plant growth, but then again, not everyone does. Another exhibition at the Frist was of a Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) Golden Age of Couture - "The New Look". The captions puzzled the hell out of me by stating that the "Board of Trade" had condemned the New Look, as if they were culture critics and without going into why they weighed in. Well, it's because of wartime rationing. The entire country was starving and had no cloth to spare for full figured, pleated designs! Why can't the exhibit state that? (You have to look for the PDF download to find out that simple fact.)
Arty video - Will There Be Enough Water, by the Dead Weather. Shot while the Dead Weather toured URP.
I have to say I love the bit about how the copies sound better than the original. No, I really do. If someone can explain the way that works, we could solve entropy, which would be a remarkable breakthrough.
Edit: I just noticed that site recommends you play your new record on a turnstile. I know it's just a typo but it's weird that turntables are so rare that the word can be replaced in your mind by such an infrequently-used term as turnstile.
[Partial link from Wayback Machine, accessed 10/2017]
I sometimes mention a product on this blog, and I give a URL to Amazon or similar sites. Just to reassure you, I don't get paid to advertise anything here and I don't get any money from your clicks. Everything I say here is because I feel like saying it.
