Jack White
Detroit's famed musician Jack White opens his Third Man Records shop at 441 Canfield St. in Midtown on Friday.
The shop is a branch of one that opened in 2009 in Nashville, where he relocated after starting Third Man as an indie label here in 2001.
Detroit's outpost is next to Shinola, which bough the building with White's company last year. It's not far from the former site of the Gold Dollar, where the White Stripes played their first concert in August 1997.
Adam Graham of The Detroit News reports:
It will contain approximately 4,000 square feet of retail space — roughly quadruple that of the flagship Nashville location — and will house and sell all the vinyl goodies, trinkets and merchandise associated with White’s Third Man Records.
In addition, and even more important to White’s vision, it will include a 10,000-square-foot vinyl record pressing plant, making it one of only around 20 in the United States and a few dozen in the world.
The record pressing equipment is on its way from a manufacturer in Germany and won’t be up and running by Friday. But the long-term goal is that the plant will be pressing records 24 hours a day, seven days a week, creating industry for workers in Detroit.
It's a homecoming of sorts for White, 40, who left Detroit because he felt the music scene had become "super-negative" and people seemed to be rooting against him.
Here's what Third Man says about the vinyl presses in an announcement posted last Friday:
There's a bottlenecking in the record pressing industry right now -- so much glorious demand, so few presses. We want to help ease the flow, and we want to bring more "real-life manufacturing jobs back to Detroit."
We have purchased eight presses from German startup Newbilt, and we are anxious to get them up and running, which we expect to happen mid-2016. . . .
We couldn't feel luckier that we get to expand our business in a field that we are so damn passionate about. Detroit, we love you, and we can't wait to be a part of your community yet again.
