AUGUST 2017 _ http://www.popularmechanics.co.za 57
AM. EDDIE IS DRAINING HOT PURPLE VINYL FROM
an extruder. The purple is from a special-edition
Destroy All Monsters/Xanadu split LP they were mak-
ing on opening night, but now Eddie prepares to load
black record seeds into its hopper.
“When we had all the people here from the major
plants the other night, if a bomb had gone off, it would have really
put a dent in the pressing business,” Eddie says.
At 10 am, four guys in Third Man Pressing jumpsuits walk in.
Someone turns on Detroit Gospel Reissue Project #2, a record
they’ve just started to press. It’s a sleepy morning. Two guys sit
down in the quality-control area, where they pull records off spin-
dles one at a time to examine them for defects. The other two head
to pressing stations.
When Third Man bought the plant in 2015, it was a disused
parking garage with a few fluorescent lights, a leaky roof, and a lot
of rust. Third Man has since made a sizable investment in its trans-
formation. Third Man brought in gas. Third Man brought in elec-
tric. Third Man brought in sewer. Then White applied a colour
scheme. The concrete floor is a spit-shined sunflower yellow. The
structural support pillars and ductwork are red. There’s a tool
chest against one wall: yellow DeWalt. Here and there are green
accents: doors, cabinetry, and wheeled carts that hold the black
metal drums of vinyl pellets, which have “Record Seeds” stencilled
on their sides in white.
This is what you do when you want to preserve a technology you
believe is still relevant. You build a temple to it, and you
paint it bright, and you invite everybody.
Jack White wears black pants, a black shirt, a black
Cass Corridor letterman jacket. He is having his picture
taken. He’s brought his mother – 86, and word was she
was at the after-party on Friday until 3 am – and
Stephen, another brother.
As the presses fall into a rhythm, somebody changes
the music. ‘Cabbage Alley’, by The Meters. The tempo
picks up. Eddie shifts to QC, where he holds records up
to the light like hundred-dollar bills and looks them
down sidelong like a hustler checking a pool cue.
Someone changes the music again. ‘Wild Horses Rock
Steady’, Johnny Hammond. A jazz album.
White admires the operation, basks in it, puts it
through its paces for the shoot. First there are shots
before the stamper library, a ceiling-height green book-
case where Third Man stores plates off the presses for
reference. Then to the boiler room, where water for the
presses’ heat cycle is warmed. Then to the listening sta-
tion, where the QC team has a guy listen to new records
to make sure they sound pristine and warm to the ears.
White talks to the guys on the presses, walks the
floors. His mother asks if he smiled in the pictures, for
once. Behind a black curtain, through a large glass window,
are the people. The people who’ve been here all weekend
and who will keep coming, in part to look through this
window. It was White’s idea to give the public a view.
Some of the guys here have taken to calling it the aquari-
um. Every day, as the record store opens and fills, faces
appear and swim behind it. Young Detroiters. A balding
middle-aged guy in a Bob Seger System baseball tee. Women old enough
to make you wonder if maybe they were on the Cass Corridor years
ago and used to catch The White Stripes at the Gold Dollar.EFORE THE PARTY, WHITE SAYS SOMETHING that
foreshadows the Sunday-morning march of the tour-
ists. He grabs a yellow notebook and a black pen and
draws a long, straight line. “This is analogue, you know?
A pencil goes on a paper and it drags. This is analogue,
whether it’s tape or vinyl,” he says. Then he resets the
pen atop the paper and draws a parallel dotted line. “And this is
digital. No matter how good your sample rate, you’ve got breaks.”
He looks at the two lines. “And this” – here he points at the solid
line, and stutters out a laugh – “This is, kind of: real life. No breaks.
No empty spaces in between.”
Some of the workers were worried they’d feel like monkeys at
the zoo with the window, but they haven’t. Because though they
are ostensibly the ones inside the aquarium, from their vantage
point they have the rare gift of being able to discern something
profound in the faces of the people through the glass, whose brows
furrow in consideration, whose eyes gleam in recognition that the
presses are not far removed from the preschool impulse to jam
Play-Doh against a zipper so you can see the imprint, whose
mouths hang open and drip joy at the technicoloured reveries of a
man who makes music made real. It is written on those faces: in
real life, where there are no breaks, and no empty spaces, you are fortu-
nate indeed that the fruit of your labour is something beautiful. PMSUNDAYFRIDAY