Jack White has always been a traditionalist.
The famed musician has decried music festivals as a “necessary evil” while objecting to the smartphone revolution ruining the live concert experience.
But rather than just becoming a crotchety figure splayed on music’s proverbial lawn cursing the young’uns and the sign o’ the times, White is doing his part in preserving the music culture he so readily champions.
The former White Stripe is a major preservationist; he has single-handedly rescued a historic live music venue from financial ruin, and with his personal label, Third Man Records, has reissued rare vinyl and provided supreme fan service in the process, all which made him the perfect choice for Record Store Day ambassador this year.
Now White is the public face of the National Recording Preservation Foundation (NRPF), recently donating US$200,000 to the United States non-profit organisation while becoming a public figurehead in their aim of preserving recorded history and ‘The Sound of America‘.
As part of his public summons, White has given his view on the digital age of recording versus analogue recording, noting that the modern era has “proven to be anything but fail-safe” when it comes to the crucial needs of music preservation, as The Atlantic reports.
White also discusses the importance of preserving outdated formats, especially in an age where music listening is becoming primarily about access and not ownership through the popularity of streaming services and online resources. “Less than 18% of commercial music archives are currently available” through dominant digital distributors like iTunes and Spotify…
“A lot of the digital formats in the last 20 years have proven to be anything but fail-safe. The tapes break or the information can’t be retrieved,” says White, noting that modern ways of recording aren’t as reliable as vintage recording methods, meaning that there’s potentially millions of recordings that have been lost to time.
The Nashville-based muso also lamented on a near-century’s worth of recordings and formats that have tumbled down history’s rubbish tip, including culturally significant formats like Thomas Edison’s phonograph cylinders, which (until recently) are all but extinct.
“There are stories of early phonograph companies taking apart the masters used to press wax discs so they could be sold as roofing shingles. They didn’t think a recording was a document of anything cultural. It was just a way to sell phonographs,” says White, who records with 1930s-era direct-to-acetate disk technology at his Third Man Records studio.
It’s these kinds of recordings – that are slipping through the cracks of culture over time – that the NRPF is charged with preserving, for future generations. Chief Executive Gerald Seligman estimates that “less than 18% of commercial music archives are currently available” through dominant digital distributors like iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, and other legal music platforms.
“We’re concerned with the other 82% languishing out there somehwere, that’s culturally important while maybe not commercially viable,” adds Seligman.
His comments almost directly echo those of Pittsburgh collector Paul Mawhinney, the owner of the self-proclaimed ‘World’s Largest Record Collection’, with an appraisal of his 3 million vinyl library noting: “that only 17% of that music is available to the public on CD… that means 83% of my collection of the music that I have on [these] shelves you can’t buy at any price, anywhere.”
Yet even for the dirt cheap price of $3 million (a dollar a vinyl), Mawhinney has struggled to sell his enormous archive because “basically, no one gives a damn.”
There are ongoing concerns that culturally significant, historical collections such as Mawhinney’s may disappear due to apathy, a disinterest that the NRPF – whose board includes White, T. Bone Burnett, Sub Pop co-founder Jonathan Poneman, and a host of engineers and music figures – is combating.
White’s Third Man Records are going to great efforts on the consumer front by reissuing rare and outdated releases. Following on from their Sun Records partnership, White’s label are set to partner with Paramount Records, reissuing their back catalogue – including such music greats as Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and Ethel Walters – on vinyl through a comprehensive 800-song collection called The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Volume One (1917-1927), as Rolling Stone reports.
White also fondly recalls that it’s the simple history of sheet music that may be the longest-lasting recording format. “My mother was telling me in the ’30s when she was a little girl you could go to the department store downtown and there was a sheet music section,” says White. “You could pick out a piece of sheet music and the lady running the section would play it for you on a piano.”
On the music front, White’s next project appears to be returning to the drum stool for The Dead Weather, one of his many musical occupations that features The Kills’ Alison Mosshart, QOTSA’s Dean Fertita on guitar and Raconteurs/Saboteurs and Greenhorns bassist Jack Lawrence.
A recent tweet from Third Man Records confirmed The Dead Weather were back in the studio working on the follow-up to 2010′s Sea Of Cowards.
