He’s been a dealer, a cabbie, a fashion model and - thanks to run-ins with a band saw and a hurricane - nearly a dead man. But now Florida’s answer to Nick Cave (or is it Tom Waits?) is being told to become the most unlikely of things: a star.
I first met Jim White in September 1998. He had driven to the Pensacola airport to pick me up, and when I got off the plane he was standing there wearing a battered cowboy hat and battered cowboy boots and battered cowboy jeans. “I don’t normally dress like this,” he told me. “My record label thought I should look the part.” Back then he drove a white van with the rear seats replaced by an elephantine wooden box that held an ancient sound system and his fourteen thrift-store guitars. His front license plate was also customized: An impossibly big cross floated over a field of heather. Below, his name appeared in small, trim letters. This was his tour bus and airport shuttle. I didn’t know what I was in for.
Outside, the sky was gray. In a few days, the rain would come and the wind would follow and together they would manage to work themselves into enough of a frenzy that meteorologists would warn natives to pack up and evacuate their homes and head north or west or anywhere that wasn’t about to be smothered by the bluster of Hurricane Earl. In hindsight, we should have done the same. But we didn’t, because this is a Jim White story and in a Jim White story nobody ever fits his part. In a Jim White story, even one in which a hurricane arrives and anyone with an ounce of sense splits for higher ground - well, what can I say, we went surfing.
Here’s how you first hear about Jim White: Somewhere someone you know is walking by an open door, and beyond that door is another person, a stranger perhaps, who is listening to Jim White. It happens very quickly, this blind compulsion, but your friend stops and turns, caught by the music that sounds like smoke, not just haunting and beautiful - though it is these things, too - and not like music heard in a smoky room but like music that is almost carcinogenic: dirty, wafting, wispy, completely addictive. And that friend will tell another and another and so on and so on, and you will hear about him and head off in search of that first album, which was rereleased in 1999. Hooked, you will then start hunting for his second offering, No Such Places, which is nearly two years overdue and which finally - thankfully - arrives in stores this month.
I have been hearing incarnations of the second album for years now. At last count, I’d heard seven versions of its first track, “Handcuffed to a Fence in Mississippi,” a song Jim describes as “a montage of moments from my underbelly past woven into a dark fantasy.” I have heard it played bluesy and jangly and rocking and everything else in between. My favorite version is a mere whisper. It arrived in my mailbox last spring accompanied by a mug designed to resemble Saddam Hussein’s head. For months I have been drinking my coffee from a hole where Saddam’s brain should have been. Jim had found the mug in a pawnshop and packed it into a box and attached a small note that said something to the effect of “I’m sending this to you in lieu of the new album because the damn thing ain’t yet done.” Still he included a tape of a few unfinished songs and sent the whole thing by regular mail. The packaged arrived on my birthday - not that Jim White knew it was my birthday or even my birth month for that matter, but the package was there all the same. Just another Jim White story.
My favorite version of the song didn’t make it onto the album, but that’s just a matter of my personal taste coming up against Jim’s desperate need for exactitude. See, the songs that scratch and squonk and seep from Jim White are the tales of a man who has turned his life into a story and whose life has risen to the challenge. They are stories lifted from the edge of the world, and for much of his life the edge of the world has been Pensacola, Florida, with its pristine white sand and beachfront shacks, million-dollar condos and more churches than anyone could count, a place that on the whole looks as though someone took a very quaint clapboard suburb and put it on the rack.
Jim White few up there, in the spiny vein of the Florida panhandle. By the time he was 23, he had lived a life as a drug partaker and a drug purveyor and a professional surfer and had converted to Pentecostal Christianity. He then suffered a crisis of faith and abandoned surf and church and in 1980 accepted an invitation from his well-connected sister to come live in New York City and try his hand at modeling. Now, as a Pentecostal he had lived in fear of vanity and in suffering, so he had not studied himself in a mirror for years. They way he tells it, the act of trying to become a fashion meld in Manhattan was a lot like “trying to become an elf.”
Nonetheless, he was successful. Appearing in Italian and French Vogue and a handful of other glossy magazines, he traveled to Europe and dated those pretty girls. Along the way, he discovered an innate talent for the guitar. He had never played before, never taken a lesson, but could light it up with rabid flourishes and Mach 5 speed. People heard him and decided he should have a record contract and told him to quit modeling and move back to New York to become a musician. And so he did. In 1984 he relocated and was busy starving and shopping his demo tape, and after about four months he was just too poor and took a job in construction. On the first day of work, through the divine agency of a band saw, his left hand - his fretting hand - was permanently mangled, having nearly lost three fingers. Like that, his guitar dreams collapsed.
Sot here was convalescence and a stint as a professional photographer, then film school and a thesis film that took almost a decade to complete and was paid for by New York City cab driving and toil. It’s called The Beautiful World and is fifty-six minutes long, and the few critics who have seen it have called it brilliant and astounding and always the wrong length to do anything but sit on the shelf and gather dust. So no film career and no big break and then a magical love affair gone bad and a debilitating illness whose origin and machinations he still doesn’t understand, because his father who was a doctor and a tyrant, and in being so he inflicted a deep mistrust of doctors upon his son. Jim White never went to the hospital and instead retreated to Pensacola to convalesce. Again.
White there he picked back up the guitar. All day in bed, on his back, barely alive, with the sodden white of the ceiling for company and a horror-movie hand, he retaught himself to play. The virtuosity gone, he replaced it with a shifting progression of ghost chords that suddenly matched his vocal style, and the whole deal came together in a way he likes to describe as “sound emerging from one small, dark, metaphysical corner of the entire human condition.”
Eventually, in 1995, Jim White was signed to David Byrne’s label, Luaka Bop, because every other label that had heard his music had told him he was a talentless mess who should never bother them again. Byrne called his music genius. Three years ago, The Mysterious Tale of How I Shouted Wrong-Eyed Jesus! was released, and the critics agreed with Byrne. There are outtakes from the album, songs that didn’t make it because David Byrne’s record label felt they were too weird. Think about that for a moment: too weird for David Byrne. Originally, those songs were supposed to be on No Such Place. But, then, No Such Place was slated to take less than a year to record and release, and, well, it might have if this weren’t a Jim White story.
Every few months since that fist meeting, I find a message from Jim on my answering machine. Usually, he calls late at night to tell me why the second album is taking so long to finish. There are songs to write and rewrite and tracks to record and rerecord. He must assemble collaborators such as Morcheeba, Sweetback’s Andrew Hale and Q-Burns, which means further delays. There’s also the fact that during the time between albums, Luaka Bop was acquired by Virgin Records, and for a while none of the record execs were quite sure what to do with Jim White. Eventually, they decided Jim wasn’t going to be just another quixotic Luaka Bop artist but instead was going to be a big star - which, as Jim says, “is a whole other proposition altogether. Really, it’s amazing how important every little detail on a record can become when people decide you might just make them some money.”
Jim White’s music falls into that amorphous category occupied by folks like Tom Waits and Nick Cave and PJ Harvey, if any of them were slightly more radio friendly and southern. Tall tales and dense orchestration and a wispy twang of a voice. The first time I asked Jim to describe his music, he called it “psychedelic swamp pop,” and then he thought about it awhile and decided, “No, maybe not swamp pop, maybe hick-hop,” which I guess says it all. The difference four years’ work makes in one of amplitude. On No Such Place, the volume has been turned up. Melodic has become groovy; spooky has become haunting; funny has Become hilarious. Wrong-Eyed Jesus! is more instantly accessible, but No Such Place emerges as the stronger record. Where the former offers merely a glimpse of Jim’s world, the latter provides a full-scale introduction.
Back in 1998, when we first met, non of this record-industry, songwriting chaos had yet come to plague Jim Back then, No Such Place loomed near on the horizon and about the only thing that loomed closer was the improbably name Hurricane Earl. Earl arrived a few days after I did, and since this was still the early part of my acquaintance with Jim, I didn’t know any better. And Jim was still trying to hold on to some appearance of normalcy, so, sure, we did what any other good citizens would have done in the middle of all that menace: We hightailed it to the airport in an attempt to get me on the last flight out.
We didn’t make it. Somewhere in the middle of that journey, in the middle of the freeway, in the middle of a bride, with only the gale-force winds and sheets of rain for company, the white van’s windshield wipers ground to a sudden and permanent halt. There was no place to pull over and no way to see. In the panic that followed, I quickly suggested several things, including tying a string through the windows and operating the wipers manually until a safe haven could be reached. It has once worked for me. But Jim just smiled and shoved his head out the window and drove on - blind, at high speed - through Earl.
Somehow we didn’t die, but we didn’t make it to the airport, either. Yes, we were in a hurricane, but Jim had stories to compile and an album to record, and once he caught sight of those storm waves breaking offshore there really was no arguing. We couldn’t fix the wipers, and we couldn’t catch my place, so he decided now would be a good time to head back to his house, dig his old surfboards out of the closet and go surfing. Which we did, he much better than I. Somehow, despite the hurricane, the waves weren’t all that fierce. Still, some photographer took our picture, and some newspaper in Alabama ran it on the front page. Jim sent me that photo in the mail. The image is blurred, and you don’t quite get the idea. But one thing’s for sure: If Jim had taken the photo, the damn thing would have been perfect. A few years late, but perfect.