The White Stripes
"The Big Three Killed My Baby" b/w "Red Bowling Ball Ruth"
scum stats: original SFTRI pressing was 500 on red vinyl (I think), a shit ton on black, TMR version is 150 copies on tri-color and a shit ton on black
Week one of living in a world of three little girls crawling around this house has me generally optimistic about how the next 18 years of my life will play out. While some folks response to my having a three month paternity leave is "wow...no work!" it hardly plays out that way.
It should come as a surprise to no one that running a record label is FAR less work than wrangling a 5 year old, a 2 year old, and a newborn. Three months paternity leave is three months deep in the trenches. School pick-up and drop-off, pediatrician visits, ballet class, coordinating mattress deliveries, hanging on the telephone with customer service, runs to the pharmacy, grabbing carryout food, play time activities director, homework assassin, second string burper, furniture assemblyman, sleepy time therapist are all things I've tackled in the week since Navy Eleanor was born.
I just try and GET SHIT DONE as much as I can when I'm here. Don't let tasks pile up. Smile every once in awhile.
Woke up this morning to a dead battery in my car. Let my mother-in-law borrow it to run to the grocery store the other day, but had to back it out of the driveway because she felt uncomfortable doing so herself. It was raining, I turned on the headlights and she never turned them off. Ugh.
Usually this is something I would let fester, Uber in to work for a couple of days before finding the time and energy to address it. But on leave, I waste NO time.
Battery wouldn't jump and the most complicated thing I can do re: car maintenance is replacing a dead battery. So I am on top of this. I pull out my sorry excuse for a tool box, disconnect the terminals, throw the dead, ten-year-old battery in the back of my wife's car and ramble on down to Autozone to get a replacement. $140 something later I'm back in business. There's still some alert lights pinged on the dash, but hell, I really just drive this thing to work and back. I can wait those out.
So as I type here with fingers still greasy from the transplant, I can't help but think of how much the early existence of the White Stripes was tied to car troubles. "The Big Three Killed My Baby" was not tongue-in-cheek, it was a frustrationary tale firmly rooted in real life. The Third Man Upholstery van had no windshield wipers and woudn't start if it was rainy. But Jack figured out some way to wrap tinfoil around SOMETHING under the hood to get that sucker humming. I never did figure out what that was. Pretty sure that van only went out of town once, to Chicago in '98, for Two Star Tabernacle opening for Jeff Tweedy at Lounge Ax and then two days later the Stripes opening for the Sadies and the Waco Brothers. Jack and Meg sat in the two front seats and since there were none in the back (it WAS a delivery van) I sat on a bean bag. So dangerous. Oh yeah, there was no radio! We had to use a boom box on that trip (listening to demos by Poopy Time) but most of the time in that vehicle it was just the low hum of the wheels on the road. Meditational silence.
A two day tour in January 2000 was side-tracked as Meg's Ford Escort just stopped moving on I-94 right outside of Chicago. Had to cancel the gig in Youngstown, OH that night. Yes, the White Stripes did tour dates in a FORD ESCORT. Well, one date. Then the car died.
The first "official" vehicle of the band was a maroon van used starting around spring/summer of 2000. It ran well most of that tour, but something went haywire in Los Angeles. I'm pretty sure a large portion of the profits from that tour went to the $800 worth of repairs in Denver to fix the incorrect work done by the crew in LA.
So much uncertainty, so much resignation to the fact that the mechanic could say "you need a johnson rod" and ultimately having to be beholden to them and whether or not they decided to screw you that day. Cars still seem overwhelming to me, but I'm not as scared of them as I used to be.
"The Big Three Killed My Baby" was originally written for Andre Williams to sing with Two Star Tabernacle and we released the fruits of those sessions back in the Vault however long ago. But to me, it was always perfect when Jack and Meg tackled it. The b-side to their version was originally supposed to be "Stop Breakin' Down" and was pitched as an "anti-automotive" single. But "Red Bowling Ball Ruth", the song "inspired" by AC/DC's "Have a Drink On Me" seemed to be more appropriate here. Song title came from a bowling ball that was kicking around Jack's house at the time that was inscriped "Ruth" and was red. It may have come from the burned out East Warren lanes, but I digress.
The typeface on this single was originally set to be something different, but the designers (Andy and Patti Claydon) found out that it was $500 to use it, so they just ripped it off free-hand, or so I was told. The logo on the original SFTRI edition was a re-appropriation of the Tucker Automobile logo, and instead of it's slogan "The Symbol of Safety" it was labeled "The Symbol of Sympathy."
The huge photograph of a motor on the cover was something left over from a photo shoot or film shoot that Jack had worked on as a production assistant and years after he'd moved out of his Ferdinand house, I found the "insert your money here" tag underneath the rug in that room.
Whomever tells the best story here regarding car breakdown, car repair or anything in the car realm gets a tri-color version of this record. Cool? Cool. Back to diapers for me.
I got caught up in the story telling and forgot to add, congrats on your daughter, I have 4 girls daughters are a gift, best of luck to you.
Drove a 28ft U-Haul while towing an 18-foot 1972 camper trailer (that’s 46 feet to you and me), the longest thing I had ever driven before that was a 1986 Buick Skylark with cloth interior that smelled like cigarettes. We were loaded down with all our shitty furniture, 4 dogs and 2 cats driving from Eugene Oregon to Minneapolis Minnesota through one of the worst snow storms I had ever witnessed, and I’m born and raised in Minnesota. After successfully navigating the mountain pass in Coeur d Alene Idaho with white knuckles and zero visibility we decided to exit the freeway to smoke a joint and let the dogs out of the camper trailer to take care of business. The snow was falling literally in clumps. We pulled off on an exit that had one of those official looking brown signs that said, “Historical Mission”. At the top of the exit ramp we turned left and crossed over the 94 interstate and began to travel up a narrow 2-lane road that wound through the forest and back up the mountain. There were no lights, and every tree limb was drooping heavily with the weight of the snow, it was pitch black and the headlights of the U-Haul made the falling snow look like the Millennium Falcon cutting through hyperspace. It took all of 2 minutes for both of us to realize that the urge to smoke a celebratory joint after conquering the mountain pass could potentially turn out to be a grave mistake. We drove in silence winding up the mountain road until our worst fears became realized in the form of a closed steel gate and a heavy chain with a lock. At the top of the mountain road and on the other side of the gate sat the “Historical Mission” darkened and closed for the season. The mission that had seduced us into exiting the safe plowed road of Highway 94, it’s large open parking lot where we could have easily turned a wide U-turn after dog’s dumped and joints were smoked seemed to scoff at us. The 46ft U-Haul / Camper shit train sat idling as the snow fell outside. No cell phones, this was 1992, we were in the middle of the forest at a “Historical Mission” on December 23rd in a snowstorm in the remote Idaho mountains with 4 dogs and two cats and no way to turnaround, shit I didn’t even have snow boots. In the pitch dark, middle of the night we decided to wait until morning to try to hike back down to the highway for help. We shut down the U-Haul and climbed into the camper trailer with the dogs to try to sleep. We both woke up in the morning freezing cold with dogs curled around us like a sled team, our breath hung heavy in the air and we decided to try to warm up before making the trek back down to the highway. We climbed into the U-haul to fire up the engine and the heater, but it made one rotation and a “rahh” sound and that was it. Want to guess why? “Diesel engines gel, yah didn’t know that?” is what the trucker who picked me up hitchhiking on the side of the road half frozen said. To add insult to injury, he added, “Don’t you have any boots” as I tried to knock the snow off my red converse high-tops. If this sounds like a scene out of the English Patient it’s because it basically was, I left my brother, the 4 dogs and the 2 the cats at the U-Haul /trailer with no heat and promised I would “come back for them”. On Christmas Eve I returned with “Jeb” who happened to be the brother of the guy that was the caretaker for the Mission (he was in Arizona) with keys for the gate and chains for the U-Haul (he gave them too us “you keep elm’”) How I found Jeb well that is too much to try to get into here. We broke down again in Fargo at a truck stop (Could have been the J-Rod don’t remember, only know that I had to call my Mom “Collect” and have her “wire” me money for the repairs before eventually making it home the day after Christmas.
A Toyota Truck Will Not Start After a Year Ago and it Broke Down After an Engine Won’t Start Until We Got it Fixed Thank God
First of all congratulations on your new baby girl Navy Eleanor, reasons to be cheerful !!! Second I really enjoy how you encourage stories which in turn bring up funny memories . I have so many car stories , literally at least 5 crazy ones. One that stands out in my mind most was one night I went to a club with a friend in the city. Upon leaving my T Bird would not start up. I was a member of a national towing service so I called them. They tried to boost the engine but said the battery would not take the charge and it was probably the alternator. I had to leave the car and they would tow it to the nearest station for repair. The man gave me the address for the repair shop and my friend and I took a cab home.The next day the repair was completed . After work my friend and I took a cab to the city to the location of the repair shop. We arrive at the address and it is literally a brick facade on a main street, something out of a Hollywood movie set. There is nothing behind the facade, but a man appears out of nowhere ,gives me my bill and said I needed an alternator and a battery.He gets my car from somewhere up the street. The car worked like new after that for a while until the cam shaft went .For a minute that day my friend and I had thought we were on Candid Camera! I might not have thought of that day again in a million years if not for your contest, so thanks !
I have tons of car stories being it’s my job and all, but all I really want to say if $140 for a battery is highway robbery.
My first vehicle (in 2000) was a 1981 El Camino that I bought in late fall. Because the weather was still decent when I bought it, I never bothered testing the heater on it. Come the first cold winter day, I learned that the heat didn’t work. Being in Canada, our winters aren’t exactly mild. I had to drive it to my uncles place to get it fixed, but there was no way to defrost the windshield, so I had to drive with my head out the window, at night, with wind, falling snow and -25°C (-13°F) weather.
After getting that fixed, I learned that the linkage inside the door for the lock had a bad habit of freezing up too. So before leaving for work in the morning, I had to drape a tarp over the door, with a couple of ladders to make a sort of tent, and run a hair dryer facing the door for about 10 minutes to warm it up enough that it would move. If I was running late, I’d use a small propane torch to heat the door, but had to keep it moving so that it didn’t cook the paint.
I still miss that thing!
July 1996. I had bought a 1978 4-door Chevy Nova from my uncle Gary for $100. It was lopsided, had no bumpers, the whole car was primer gray and there was a nice 10-inch hole in the passenger side floorboard which allowed the car to fill with noxious fumes from the engine. You had to drive with the windows down or you would die. There was no radio. It wasn’t broken, there was literally no radio. My uncle sold me the car because I was leaving for college, an hour away. The day I was leaving I was sitting behind the wheel at my grandma’s house. The car was packed, the engine was running (the windows down). Everyone in my family had come to see me off. Waving. Smiling. I put the car in reverse and as I prepared to back up the steering wheel came off in my hands. It pulled right off. We all froze in a moment of shared disbelief. There I was sitting in my grandma’s driveway in an ugly gray suicide machine with my steering wheel in my hands. A half hour later my mom’s boyfriend had reattached the steering wheel with his guarantee it wouldn’t happen again. He nodded so much, I had to trust him. We repeated our goodbyes and I got on with my new life. I didn’t die.
My first car was a silver 1985 Camry that I bought off my neighbor for cash (I’d been working in the film industry in Mexico and spent it all on the car, a Pearl drum kit, and guitars… oh, and a Bob Ross oil painting kit from PBS). My neighbor sold it to me cheap because of some front-fender/door damage. The car had tried to kill her, she said. It ran her over and pinned her to a tree. It was totaled my first year of college at a red light on Sunset Blvd when a dually from Indio plowed into me. I’d share that story, but I was badly concussed and can’t recall. A former child actor came to my rescue, though, and we were together for a year or two. So it turned out pretty okay. My worst breakdown happened with my next car: a black t-top Pontiac Firebird that I pimped out with leopard-print interior. I had finished up my intern shift at the tv network that used to play music, and I was heading up to the previously-mentioned boyfriend’s house in Pasadena. I had the top off, I’d been in traffic for hours, and I was blasting one of my heavy metal mix tapes. The sun was starting to set as I made my way up the 110 in the middle lane. I flicked my cigarette (we were idiots who smoked back then) and started to smell a different kind of smoke. As Slayer blasted through the speakers, flames shot out from under the hood. Too much traffic to pull over, no where to go, and only rich people had car/mobile phones. Despite the visible flames and smoke, the lovely Angelinos behind me were honking and flipping me off. A guy in a tow truck happened to be stuck in traffic too, so he radioed for police and fire engines. He pulled across lanes and got me into his cab. Police and fire shut down the 110 at rush hour, put out the fire, and helped the tow truck guy hook it up from the rear. At least 40,000 people hated me that day. But damn, I loved that car. Fixed it up good as new. ??? Congratulations on Navy’s arrival, Ben. Girls need their daddies, and I think you need them, too. Love and blessings to your family!
On my way to Jack White concert with my wife and her sister in the car we got a flat tire on a dirt road somewhere up in Upper state New York we were 4 hours from home and it was a hundred degrees out thankfully we had a spare we proceeded to remove the old Tire and found out that is completely rusted on and I couldn’t remove it I had to flag down a old man with a large beard in an old beat-up truck or he proceeded to beat my tire off with a mini Sledge We got the tire back on we drove ourselves to a lake jumped in and made it to the concert just in time
On our way to a U2 concert in Los Angeles in 1987 with my brother and friend my friend, who was driving, thought he saw a passing driver brushing his teeth while driving. In attempting to catch up to this driver to show us, his accelerator got stuck. We then had to seek assistance in a shady area of town, at which point my brother suggested he get a tire iron out of the trunk for protection. I advised him he would run away just as fast without a tire iron as with one, so the tire iron stayed in the car. We were able to complete the repair and make it to the concert, although we missed the opening act, The Bodeans.