15 years as a professional musician, and an international star since 2003’s “Seven Nation Army” became a pop crossover and a European soccer chant (check You Tube under “Po Po Po”).

The Raconteurs, a skilled crew who can veer from Zeppelin roar to Kinks-y pop to Status Quo boogie to the lovely mandolin hymn “Old Enough” (featuring bluegrass legend Ricky Skaggs and country songbird Ashley Monroe), have always seemed to be a bit of a holding pattern for White; he’s like a scene-stealing sideman in his own band. The Dead Weather, though they may never make another album, swagger like a serious statement. There’s nothing coy about them.

According to Mosshart’s origin story (which is the most lively), the band began like most exceptional ones do: with a mix of measured camaraderie and drunk-ass impetuousness. The Kills were opening a late 2008 Raconteurs tour, and White, suffering from a slipped disk in his neck, in addition to bronchitis, asked Mosshart to fill in on some vocals for the last five shows. Various video clips online hint at the magnetism onstage, and when the tour ended in Atlanta, the band members kept raging, joined by Fertita, who’d come down from Detroit to visit and crash at White’s seven-acre suburban Nashville manse.

“We played a lot of pool and drank a lot of scotch and, I don’t know, I just got on the bus!” says Mosshart, who’d been in the hospital earlier in the day for a steroid shot because she’d lost her voice and was getting ill. “Jack was like, ‘Come to town, we’ll record something, I’ve got this new studio.’ I just didn’t want to say goodbye to everybody yet.”

The result of the road trip and daylong session at White’s quirkily customized eight-track analog digs (complete with reverb-chamber bathroom) was an unlikely cover of “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?,” the 1979 synth-pop noir by Gary Numan’s Tubeway Army. But a compelling grittiness emerged from Mosshart’s halting rasp, Fertita’s squawking Guitorgan (a late-’60s curio with an organ’s circuits stuffed into a hollow-body guitar), and White’s drums, his original instrument, which he hadn’t played professionally since he was a 19-year-old member of Detroit roots goofs Goober & the Peas. The group began collaborating excitedly, but Mosshart had to leave to resume a Kills tour. A few months later, she got the call at the Sheffield Starbucks, and everyone reconvened, writing a song a day until they had an album.

Horehound basically sounds like the White Stripes all grown up and badly fucked over, desperately trying not to flinch. Or as Fertita, 37, the former frontman of ’90s alt-rockers the Waxwings, says, “It’s like you’re driving, late at night, by yourself, lost, in the wilderness, gripping the wheel….It’s not breakfast music, I’ll put it that way.”

White notoriously instituted a minimalist ethos for the Stripes (unschooled instrumentation, raw recording, strict red-white-and-

black color scheme), which gave him a sneaky, off-kilter entry point for playing the blues music he worshipped, like Son House’s “Death Letter” and Robert Johnson’s “Stop Breakin’ Down.” Otherwise, his own reverence, and others’ judgment, would’ve worn him down. Now, with the Dead Weather, he’s confidently hurtling past those constrictions. And even though he only sporadically plays guitar or keyboards on Horehound, he may be exercising more control as a producer who also drums.

“Yeah, if the power goes out, he’s the only one left alive,” quips the soft-spoken Lawrence, 32, an almost ceramic-doll presence with his alabaster skin, oversize glasses, and blank affect.

“When you’re a songwriter or a singer-guitarist,” says White, “you sort of conduct the drums in a way, like, you’ll say, ‘We need it to do this,’ and you hope that the drums will take on a life of their own and build the structure for you. But as the producer, I get to sit down at the kit and go, ‘This is what it’s going to be, exactly’—not just show them for two seconds, but actually create that house. It’s a really interesting way to do a record. I don’t know what to think––I’m scared of it a little, because I almost prefer it.”

F

FROM TOP: S TEPHEN BERKMAN; KENNE TH CAPPELLO

White and Lawrence with the Raconteurs (top);

Mosshart and Hince go in for the Kills

OR OUTSIDE OBSERVERS or snoopy journalists, it’s easy psychobabble shorthand or just a faux-insightful putdown to label Jack White a control freak. Sure, there’s circumstanial evidence galore—he has tightly monitored, with artisanal care, every aspect of his career, from music to business to press (refusing to do interviews alone, even if his companion is essentially mute). But considering the music industry’s state of sickly disrepute and his state of strapping prosperity (due largely to owning his master recordings and simply licensing the music), who’s the freak?

So there comes a time, like on a Wednesday night in March, when the second gratis martini with three olives works its alchemy, and the deftly orchestrated, painstakingly color-coordinated curatorial majesty of the situation kicks in, and you just have to admit that the world of popular culture would be a more redeeming and aesthetically pleasing place if we all just followed Jack White’s diligent, DIY-with-occasional-corporate-benefits example and created our own versions of utopia and stopped whining and glomming onto somebody else’s hipster sideshow.

If you were financially blessed beyond your most fantastical dreams (the 2006 Sunday

Times of London’s “Rich List” of young enter-
tainers had White and wife Elson ranked No.
7, with a joint wealth of 20 million pounds, or
$35 million) and had cultivated impeccable
taste and weren’t a lazy sod who’d rather
watch Celebrity Apprentice and play with your
dog (like most of us), then this is what you’d
do. You would be Jack White and throw an as-
toundingly catered party for the March open-
ing of the building housing Third Man Records
& Novelties, his combo office/curiosity shop/
rehearsal space/darkroom, etc., just minutes
away from downtown Nashville’s historic
Broadway strip—a party where Sheryl Crow
is just some random skinny lady trying to act
like she belongs and Meg White coolly strolls
through the chic red-and-white-subway-tiled
kitchen while the Stooges’ “Loose” roars. And
you’d debut your glamorously glowering new
band, decked in black, with a lead singer who
comes on like a chain-smoking, gams-for-
days supermodel in tottering gold Hedi Sli-
mane boots, but sounds like Eartha Kitt with
a death wish. And even though you’re one of
the world’s most kinetic guitarists, you’d play
the drums because you’re shit-hot at that, too,
and frankly, fuck it sideways, ya know?
Which left the rest of us—friends, family,
and representatives of various music and
marketing shell games—gaping in awe. It
was like a less-creepy Paisley Park, or more
accurately, a garage-punk Willy Wonka &
the Chocolate Factory, if Mr. Wonka were a
ghostly pale rocker with a cream-colored
T-Bird and a surfeit of nervous energy.

First, we are picked up at the hotel by a guy in a black suit and yellow tie who ferries us to

LOSE WEIGH T FAST WI TH SPIN.COM / JUNE 2009 57