Jack White: How He Built An Empire From The Blues by Nick Hasted, review: Unearthing witnesses to seminal moments in the White Stripes' unconventional rise

This first major biography of the former White Stripes frontman explores the life of the wayward rock star with real depth

The new Jack White biography captures the early fascination with the idiosyncratic rock star

“Jack and Meg White had something precious in 21st century rock: mystery.” With this stark opening, Nick Hasted, music scribe of this parish, nails part of our early fascination with one of contemporary music’s most combative figures.

In 2001, the White Stripes exploded onto a moribund rock landscape with primal energy, anachronistic lack of detachment and a strange back story. Were the pair siblings? A divorced couple? In an age of dull authenticity, bafflement at White’s tall tales ensured we remained unsure of the truth even as their marriage certificate emerged.

The writer’s introduction to this thorough, enlightening work also hints at the challenge he has taken on, telling the life story of a musician stubbornly keen on old-fashioned values of honour and loyalty alongside self-mythologising, against modern over-sharing and media saturation. Without any apparent support from his subject (bar a tour of the auteur’s idiosyncratic Nashville HQ, Third Man Records), Hasted digs deep via travels to White’s hometown of Detroit, unearthing witnesses to seminal moments in the White Stripes’ unconventional and unexpected rise.

This is vital for shining a light on the former John Gillis’s tough upbringing as a ninth child (and seventh son) in a rough, mainly Latino district of a city in deep decline. Along the way, often with forensic detail, the author draws out the conflicting poles of White’s personality, his peculiar mix of ego and self-doubt, fear of loneliness and paranoid suspicion.

Hasted is clear-eyed about the Motor City native’s love of early blues morphing into festishisation of the genre’s pioneers and how old-school chivalry turned into violent outbursts. Above all, though, is the formidable work ethic evinced through his output in the White Stripes, Raconteurs and Dead Weather, alongside a successful solo career and work with various collaborators from Loretta Lynn to Neil Young. Meanwhile, the former upholsterer’s respect for craftsmanship has shaped his label and helped ensure the vinyl revival has been more than a hipster concern.

Through necessity, Hasted fillets archived interviews (thankfully some of our finest peers queued up for time with White, among them David Fricke and Barney Hoskyns), so notes would have been handy, along with an index. In the title, he calls Third Man Records – now a combination of label, studio and Detroit outlet with added vinyl pressing plant – an “empire”, a description too aggrandising for a figure still in thrall to the tactile and hands-on. With its playful design and novelties such as the Voice-o-Graph instant record booth (where Young made his album A Letter Home), White's citadel is more Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory.

Yet it is with Third Man that the book ends, White's recently opened Detroit outpost a peace offering to a city with which he has had one of many prickly relationships. Without access to the horse’s mouth, Hasted suggests the owner is currently as comfortable as he has ever been, though how long that lasts is anyone’s guess.

Jack White: How He Built An Empire From The Blues by Nick Hasted, published by Omnibus Press, £16.59