Vancouver's Union Tube & Transistor finds a fan in Jack White
By Adrian Mack
Photo by Photo by Mitka Alperovitz
If you pick up the August issue of Electronic Musician magazine, you'll find an interview with Jack White describing how he used a pedal built by those geniuses at local boutique company Union Tube & Transistor. White's vocal was run through a signature pedal called the More on "I'm Shakin' ";, while the same pedal is responsible for the guitar sounds on "Sixteen Saltines";, both from the album Blunderbuss.
"In July I got this call from Andy Wilson, who's a mastering guy in New York,"; Union Tube cofounder Chris Young told the Straight. "He phoned me on a Saturday morning and he said, 'I just spent two-and-a-half days trying to track you down. Jack White says he used your pedals on the new album.' I was like, 'Fuck off…' ";
It was the first Young had heard, although he knew that a bunch of Union Tube gear had been shipped down to Third Man Records. He subsequently built a Facebook page for the low-key company, since, as Young says, "I should at least have someplace for some people to go look!";
You can get your gear on at the Union Tube and Transistor Facebook page .
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Music: Q&A: Jack White on New Dead Weather and Solo Tracks, Radio City Walkoff
Jack White attends the 55th Annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles.
BY PATRICK DOYLE
FEBRUARY 26, 2013 | 12:45PM EST
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Christopher Polk/Getty Images for NARAS
It's been a busy week at the Nashville offices of Jack White's label, Third Man Records. White has taken meetings with potential new artists and promoters pitching a local music festival, and he personally edited a Web video about a new mural in the Third Man offices. But his first order of business is his label's new Document series: Third Man teamed up with archival imprint Document Records to reissue the complete remastered works of three Depression-era musical pioneers: Charley Patton, Blind Willie McTell and the Mississippi Sheiks. White spoke at length about the reissues and answered questions about recent recordings with the Dead Weather, more than 20 new solo tracks he recently recorded and why he walked offstage after less than an hour at a recent Radio City Music Hall show. "I shut up when the crowd tells me to shut up," he says. "The crowd's in complete control of me. I was just doing what they told me to do."
100 Greatest Guitarists: Jack White
Thank you for doing this, Jack. We really appreciate it.
Sure. I like to help out up-and-coming magazines like Rolling Stone.
I loved listening to the reissues. It's fascinating what these guys did with such primitive equipment during tough times. Why did you want to team up with Document and reissue these records?
The first blues records that I bought myself were Document reissues. I was 17 or something. A record collector had died in Detroit, and they had brought their whole collection to this record store called Desirable Discs in Dearborn, Michigan. They had brought them all in, and each one had a number in the corner. There were a lot of interesting records in there - I was buying Roosevelt Sykes and Tommy Johnson and a lot of people I had never heard before. I was able to get maybe 20, 30 records. And when Third Man Records opened, the first thought I had was it would be so nice to put those records out on vinyl again, because they haven't been available in 20 or 30 years now.
I don't remember when the last ones had been done, because Document and Yazoo and all the archival labels stopped pressing vinyl records, so we could definitely do the vinyl part. That format is missing from this whole world. So we talked to Document and, luckily, Gary Atkinson was up for it. So we thought, "I want to present this in a whole new way. Let's make this something that always stays in print.
