The Vindication of Jack White
Photographs by Erik Tanner for The Atlantic
Something preposterous was happening the night I visited Third Man Records in Nashville. The label and cultural center founded by Jack White, of the White Stripes, generally strives for a freak-show vibe; you can pay 25 cents to watch animatronic monkeys play punk rock in the record store, and a taxidermied elephant adorns the nightclub. On the March night when I showed up, Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead was performing. Through a pane of blue-tinted glass at the back of the stage, another curiosity in White’s menagerie could be glimpsed: a 74-year-old audio engineer in a lab coat who calls himself Dr. Groove.
In a narrow room behind the stage, Dr. Groove—his real name is George A. Ingram—stooped over a needle that was etching Weir’s music into a black, lacquer-coated disc called an acetate. This is the first step in an obsolete process for producing a vinyl record. The lathe he used was the very same one that cut James Brown’s early singles, in the 1950s.
Observing this process intently was White himself. Thanks to the endurance of early-2000s White Stripes hits such as “Seven Nation Army” and “Fell in Love With a Girl,” the guitarist and singer is one of the few undisputed rock gods to emerge in the 21st century. On this evening, White, now 46, wore half-rim glasses and flannel, the only hint of rock coming from the Gatorade-blue tinge of his hair.
Listeners generally want a record to sound as loud as possible, White told me as Dr. Groove continued his work. But “you can have a mellow song like this”—the Dead’s downbeat “New Speedway Boogie” drifted in the air—and then, all of a sudden, the drummer hits the effects pedal and pumps up his volume. If Dr. Groove isn’t prepared, “the needle will literally pop out of the groove from the jolt,” rendering the recording useless.
[Ted Gioia: Is old music killing new music?]
For so finicky an operation to take place in 2022 is, from one point of view, absurd. The music industry largely stopped cutting performances directly to disc 70 years ago, with the advent of magnetic tape. A few minutes before taking the stage at Third
