Detroit native Jack White will take the stage for the Thanksgiving Halftime Show on November 27, during the Detroit Lions game against the Green Bay Packers. The 86th Annual Thanksgiving Day Classic airs later today at 1 p.m. EST on FOX.
We know Jack White as one half of The White Stripes, a soulful and electric solo artist, and owner and proprietor of Third Man Records and The Blue Room in Nashville. Additionally, he’s a recent inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside Meg White. But before he was all of this, he had an odd little upholstery and furniture-making business in Detroit.
White, however, wasn’t really business-minded, as he admitted in a 2003 interview with The Believer. Speaking with Dave Eggers, White revealed that he apprenticed with Brian Muldoon for a few years before moving around to different upholstery shops. He eventually opened his own studio in 1996 called Third Man Upholstery, which is now located in Nashville.
“I didn’t really have a love for money, which kind of hurts the drive to keep working,” he said at the time. “I would get a check for something, and I would just say, ‘Oh,’ you know, ‘Big deal, I’m just going to use this to pay bills or something.’ I never really loved the money part; I guess it started to hurt my business attitude.”
If Jack White Ever Made You A Chair in the 2000s, There May Be a Rare Record Hidden Inside
In a 2022 episode of Conan O’Brien’s podcast, Jack White spoke about his days building furniture and doing upholstery. It’s a practice he still enjoys to this day, only probably not in the way he used to.
“I was so strange with it,” he said. “I was doing sculpture as well. Everything became an art form with me. I was filling the inside of the furniture with poetry, and the bills I was writing in crayon. It would be yellow paper with black crayon: ‘You owe me $300.’ I would present it to them, and I’d deliver the piece in a yellow-and-black uniform in a yellow van that was an old Detroit fire-department van. People were like… ‘What?’“
On top of all that self-described strangeness, Jack White and Brian Muldoon formed the short-lived experimental garage band The Upholsterers around that time. While they never officially released any music, their record still got into people’s hands. Or, more accurately, into their chairs.
‘There’s [100] pieces of furniture out there that have those records’
In 2000, White and Muldoon pressed a single called “Makers Of High Grade Suites”, producing a limited number of copies. They hid the record, along with various branded ephemera, in custom furniture orders. In 2004, Muldoon Studios celebrated its 25th anniversary. So, they pressed 100 copies of another single and did the same thing.
“We even made it on clear vinyl with transparency covers, we thought you couldn’t even X-ray it to see if it was in there,” Jack White said in 2011, speaking with NPR. “Really, you could rip open a couch and think it’s not there ’cause it’s inside the foam, sliced inside the foam, and slid in there. I mean, we really went to great lengths to make sure possibly no one would ever hear our record!”
He continued, “There’s [100] pieces of furniture out there that have those records, and maybe one day someone will find them.” While Jack White predicted back then that the records would probably not survive, two of them were actually found, according to a 2014 report from The Guardian.
How Third Man Upholstery Turned Into More Performance Art Than Business
Jack White’s business practices and aesthetic were definitely odd, at least around Detroit. He admitted in 2003 that people who came to him for his work didn’t really understand his whole “thing.” For starters, the business logo and cards were yellow, black, and white. So were the uniform and the truck White used to pick up furniture.
White claimed the aesthetic was “pretty cool.” However, he also admitted that “I got so much into the cartooniness of the business, almost to the point of it being a joke to the people who would see me, and they wouldn’t really trust me to do a good job.”
Telling the story of writing bills in crayon, White then said, “People just didn’t dig it. It was two different worlds colliding.” That is, the upholstery world and the art world. (Although it can be argued that upholstery is definitely a kind of art.) Nevertheless, the way Jack White was doing it in suburban Detroit apparently didn’t win him many fans. The people who did appreciate his work and his style found him anyway.
Still, with a slogan on his business cards reading “Your Furniture’s Not Dead,” it’s a surprise he got any business at all. “Most people didn’t think it was funny,” White said, adding with a laugh, “The guy I used to apprentice for, he saw the card and was like, ‘Do you want anybody’s business?’”
Photo by Scott Legato/Getty Images
The post Before He Was Performing at the Detroit Halftime Show, Jack White Was Running the Oddest Upholstery Company You’ve Never Heard Of appeared first on VICE.
