Jack’s Record Store
May 10, 2010 Hat's Off, Nuts & Bolts, Random Ramblings, Stranger than Fiction, Tech
Posted by
JohnHampton
I started this all off verbalizing about the Hell Days of Disco music that society barfed up in the late ’70′s and how the advent of a drum machine altered our pop culture almost as much as Sgt. Pepper (well … a different altered).
In both applications, pop culture made a HARD turn.
But in the bigger picture, you can see that the longer line of pop culture over the last 50 years or so also has a soft bent toward the left. And, as always, the bent is due to technology. The Internet, the personal computer, iPhone, uPhone, wePhone, Vodafone, global communications … all of these are bending not just pop culture but Culture culture in a really profound way. Go to any “Made in China” wholesale site and take a look at what’s heading our way. TV watches with TWO cell phones built in, one for home, one for business.! I remember hearing Ray Kurzweil, one of our most brilliant inventor/philosophers, tell it all once. In Ray’s words, ‘Society has become accustomed to a linear rate of technological change. That has been the norm. BUT technology doesn’t play by the rules. In the world today, where we used to have a man designing a computer or software … just about everything, we instead have computers and robotics doing the designing and the manufacturing. And when number crunching systems are designing and making more number crunching systems, suddenly we have a technological growth that has taken on a more exponential rate of change. In other words, we are no longer changing along a straight line. The line is changing faster every day, taking it from a line to a curve that is going up.’
And he points his finger away from the host and points it up more and more until he is pointing at the ceiling!
WOW! Technology is growing faster than man can keep up with it! One day, 8 bit is the thing. A year later it’s 16 bit. the next MONTH its 32 bit and now, a WEEK later, its headed toward 64 bit! How do we slow this thing down? Or do we?
We can’t. We either hang on for the wild ride or drop off where the landscape looks friendly. I’m getting off, and I notice I have LOTS of company. One person who got off one stop before me is that wacky Jack White. I think Jack, like me, has an almost romantic vision of the whole music buying experience. What fun is a download? CD Artwork … why is that so NOT stimulating? You used to go to a store that sold records, and just hang out, look at a 12 inch by 12 inch cover of a record and by just looking up close at the artwork and the artist, and maybe even reading a few of her/his words, you might walk out with a record you never even meant to buy; the artist sold her/himself with just the cover. You could cruise aisles and rows of bins and bins of various genres and stop, pick one up, look it over, and walk off to look at another one. The record store enabled the buyer to become more intimate with the artist. A truly unique experience that I want to continue, and I think Jack does, too.
At his recent Dead Weather performance, I found him and the totally understated Jack Lawrence (see Raconteurs) out in the hall with Dean (Fertita … The sexy singer Alison Mosshart was in the dressing room … RATS!) At their show the band was so exciting to watch as well as hear.
But as I meandered the venue, I saw the merchandising “event” from a hundred feet! A beautiful yet tough looking wall of tees and caps and buckles, yada yada, and an extraordinarily fabulous looking table of Jack’s Third Man Records. It was all vinyl, BIG records including White Stripes records and Karen’s records (his wife) and Dead Weather coming soon posters, and then his “Blue Series” records. These looked like the exploratory side of the label, all an identical muted blue cover, with one exception, a green one for BP Fallon. It was a record store on the road!
For myself, and many others, Third Man has re-invented the record store at a fun, in-depth level that is the closest thing I’ve found yet to an actual store. As they build their artist roster, and I’m sure that they’ll start taking other product and bringing it on-board, It will catch on in a big way. And I must also say that working with Jack and his bands has been a reviving high point in my life and I just can’t wait for the call to do another Third Man Record. Jack’s a gas. And his label/store are just what we need.
Next Question ….. ?
Tags: Alison Mosshart, BP Fallon, Dead Weather, Dean Fertita, download, Jack Lawrence, Jack White, Online Records, Raconteurs, Ray Kurzweil, Records, Third Man, White Stripes
May 11th, 2010 at 11:17 am
Glad to hear someone is waking up to this. Remember the days of Hipgnosis. Storm Thorgerson with photography Aubrey Powell and illustrator George Hardie…no one makes album art like that anymore.
All the Pink Floyds, Year of the Cat, Houses of the Holy.
Indeed…next question.
May 21st, 2010 at 10:54 pm
A friend ran a record store that finally met its downfall in the Bush economy and those days of the downloading avalanche.
The other night an old friend was back in town, we talked of how that music store was able to reach minds. All because the owner gave a damn about what his customers wanted and he learned to filter his own tastes to meet the sense of others.
Along the way people on both side of the counter got turned onto new music, along with world views, lifestyles, brands of alcohol, etc.
Thus, the River Rat Records store was more than a business. It was a Medicine lodge for its Shamann proprietor.
Jack White is that mythical medicine man reborn.