Few rock stars know how to build mystique like Jack White—from playing super obscure vintage guitars to color-coding his various musical projects. The coolest example dates back to 2004, when he recorded a single, pressed 100 vinyl copies, and hid them all inside random pieces of furniture.
Before we dive in, let’s tackle some backstory. Prior to his music career, White worked as a professional upholsterer in his native Detroit—first as a teenage apprentice, assisting friend and future bandmate Brian Muldoon. White opened his own shop, Third Man Upholstery, at age 21 and made enough money to pay the bills. But he also turned that business into a kind of art project, likely alienating potential repeat customers with his unique style.
“I was so strange with it,” he recalled during an interview on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend. “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?’“
Speaking to NPR in 2011, White said that he and Muldoon even started passing along notes to fellow upholsterers inside the pieces. “We’re the only ones who see the insides of this furniture,” he said. “‘We should have so many inside jokes and things we could write.’ You know, ‘This guy was a jerk. He wouldn’t pay for this.’ We should be telling each other what was the story on these couches.”
He and Muldoon formed the fittingly named garage-punk duo The Upholsterers in 2000 and released one official single, “Makers of High Grade Suites,” that year (it’s since become a major collector’s item: As of this writing, record-resale site Discogs lists a price range of $250 to $1,500, with a median of $1,066.65). But that wasn’t the band’s only recording: The Upholsterers reportedly celebrated the 25th anniversary of Muldoon’s shop by recording those 100 copies of a second single and stuffing the vinyl into furniture.
“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,” he told NPR. “I’m talking about—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! But it’s there. It’s so great. It’s there. There’s [100] pieces of furniture out there that have those records, and maybe one day someone will find them.”
According to White’s Third Man Records label, that miracle long-shot came true in 2014, when two people claimed they’d found separate copies of Your Furniture Was Always Dead … I Was Just Afraid To Tell You.
After White’s music career took off via The White Stripes—followed by his solo work, along with The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather—he wasn’t able to focus as much on upholstery. But he’s never quit that pursuit. “While White may have stopped doing upholstery as a ‘job’ he’s never stopped his actual practice of the trade,” reads a note on the Jack White Art and Design site. “In the intervening 20+ years Jack has always kept an operational upholstery shop in his house or on his property. Third Man Upholstery is now located in Nashville, TN.”
That skill has been a big part of his life in recent years, including in the early pandemic year of 2020, when, as he told O’Brien, he “worked on nothing but furniture, really.” As he explained on the podcast, he even offered to redo the comedian’s furniture back when he launched Conan in 2010.
“I don’t have a lot of regrets in life,” O’Brien said, “[but] one is: When we were doing our show at TBS, you contacted me, and I had no idea you were serious. You said, ‘I’d like to do the upholstery. I’d like to make you your talk-show couch.’ I was like, ‘That’s so hilarious, man. That’s great.’ Later on, you were like, ‘No, no, I was serious!’…I felt like it was such a lost opportunity to have a talk show where Jack White made my talk-show couch.”
This article originally appeared in May.
