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I can think of no-one I’d rather have pull
a switchblade on me in a seedy Soho alley. Which is lucky because
that’s what happened.
Who is Jim White? It’s tough to describe the man, as even
he’s not Jim White himself in reality. Brought up in Florida, he
was heavily involved at various points in his life in the Pentecostal
church, drugs, and pro surfing. Add to these time as a model on
the catwalks of Milan and financing his way through film school
via a stint in New York cabs. That stint was ten years long, and
eventually illness and exhaustion forced Jim off the road and into
bed, where he now had time to pick up an electric guitar. Through
the usual route of stuff just kinda happening he released his debut
album Wrong-Eyed Jesus via David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label
last year. Fantastic stories in a beautiful country style that,
at times, ache with the sorrow of the misunderstood, and, at other
times, are just downright strange. He is the nicest man I’ve ever
interviewed.
Why did you change your name –
was it a music biz thing?
There’s two reasons. One of them
is practical and the other is esoteric. Well, one of them is slightly
esoteric and the other is crazy, let’s put it that way. When the
record company called me and said that they wanted me to perform
I thought I’d prefer to be executed, and they said “You’re gonna
have to do this if you want people to hear your songs” and I
said “Well maybe I won’t do it.” I talked to my friend Jim
Creek and he said “It’s gonna help people to hear your songs
so you have to figure out a way to do it” – so I took his
name Jim and another friend of mine who has always encouraged me
and been kind to me – Steven White – so it’s an homage
to them first of all; it’s a way to hide myself cos this isn’t me,
this isn’t me here. But the second part is I had a lot of spooks
and ghosts chasing me around, and I had a hunch that when I changed
my name they wouldn’t be able to find me. So far it’s worked, I’ve
lost them. It’s like I’m standing in the midst of them and they’re
looking around for me saying “Where is he, so we can scare him?”
Surely wandering around the world
telling people that you've changed your name would alert them?
No. It’s exactly what you have to
do. If you try to hide you become conspicuous, you know what I mean?
When this started the record company said “You’re gonna have
to decide whether or not you’re gonna tell people you have another
name” and I said “Of course I’m gonna tell them I have another
name.” It would be the wrong kind of lie, y’know – there’s
the right kind of lie and the wrong kind of lie. The right kind
of lie is said with a wink, and everything I do I hope is permeated
with a wink.
You've had quite a career path so far,
are these changes of your own making or do you just wind up in situations
and see what happens?
It’s a function of a lot of things.
It’s a function of the fact that I don’t have a conspicuous ambition,
like I don’t necessarily want to be something. I’m not convinced
that that’s a fruitful path for me so I let things occur. And because
I let things occur kinda strange and remarkable things that wouldn’t
happen in most people’s lives take place. I’m sort of free of a
certain amount of inertia that other people get into. But I say
that having driven a cab for ten years in New York City, which is
a pretty long time and I was almost caught in that, the inertia
of driving a cab.
Feeling that this was where you'd
end up?
Yeah, getting stuck. I wasn’t going
to do it much longer – the record company said “Let’s make
an album” and then kinda dragged their feet. It took two years
to actually make the album.
So you were still driving at this
time?
Oh yeah! The last time I drove,
believe it or not, was one year ago right now. It was my birthday,
tonight’s my birthday.
Happy birthday!
Thank you. I’m 41 years old and
when I turned 40 I went from 39 to 40 in a cab and let me tell you
that was a fucking depressing moment, heh heh, I mean it
was depressing as hell.
You said in soundcheck that you have
different hats for touring and recording. Do you really think this
one travels any better? It's pretty beat up.
Well this one has a story. It does
travel better, look! (he folds it up and scuffs it around)
You couldn’t do that with my other hat. But this hat... I played
my home town — no-one knew I was Jim White, they all knew me
by my old name — and people started hearing about me and came
to the show. One of my ex-girlfriends, who resents me leaving her,
showed up. She stayed for about two minutes and left in kind of
a weird huff because I had my new girlfriend with me. Four o’clock
in the morning, the show’s over, my band members are drunk and staggering
around and when I’m loading the van by myself I hear a car start
up down the street. The headlights come on and it starts racing
at me, it swerves really close and out the window comes this hat!
It hits me in the face and she drives away. So I’m wearing this
in honour of my friend Tara, who is a complex girl who I admire
in some ways.
What does it say around the band?
“Jim White’s Travelling Hat.” What
else would it say? Any hat’s good if you let it sit on your
head long enough, you’ve just gotta let it find out how it belongs
to you.
You're contracted for six albums –
do you think music will hold you for that long?
That’s sort of a misdirection, the
whole idea of being contracted for six albums – what they’re
saying is they have the option to do six albums. If this first album
hadn’t come out well there wouldn’t have been any talk of two or
three or four or five or six. It’s been well received. They know
I’ve written thousands of songs already and that I could write a
new song every day.
Do you?
When I’m at home, yeah. Not when
I’m on the road – when I’m on the road I just have to keep
thinking “You’re Jim White you’re Jim White you’re Jim White”
– it’s distracting. So when I’m at home I can just let myself
float and be a more amorphous being. And so there will be a second
album certainly; if I learn how to make a living at this there will
be a third album.
Have you record anything for it yet?
No. I have all the songs written,
I have most of the songs written, we’ll be playing some tonight
for you to hear. You see, the first album I was sitting on the edge
of the world when I recorded it, really fearful of death and really
haunted. With the second album I’m feeling a little bit more cocky
about things, so there’s going to be a little bit more defiance
in it.
Music's the thing that's going right
in your life, then?
You know I can’t say something’s
going right because I could take a step here and die.
You were saying you feel more
confident.
It’s nice to have validation from
the world. It’s also nice to have it not mean very much to ya, heh
heh heh, you know what I mean?
Yeah, like it would matter whether
people think you're bad or good at what you're doing?
Well, if they said I was bad I wouldn’t
let it bother me that much, I would’ve gone and done something else.
I have faith in myself that I can do something, but it’s nice that
I’ve stumbled across something that there’s a pretty big consensus
that I’m doing a good job. That’s nice.
But would you go back to something
you'd done before, or try something completely new again?
It depends on the context, you know.
I mean I’m gonna go back and start surfing again pretty soon. I
moved back to my home town recently. Who was it, Emerson I think,
said “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
I don’t want to say that I’ll never do something again – I
won’t ever drive a cab again — unless the Russians take
over the world and consign me to a cab-driving prison or something.
Not that I have anything against the Russians, it’s just an example.
What's you relationship with religion
now?
Well it’s a question I have a pat
answer for I’m sorry to say. I don’t care much about religion. I
love religious people, but personally it doesn’t have that
much appeal to me. I like to watch it. like you like watching TV.
It's more an interest in spirituality?
Yeah. I’m interested in finding
my own little abstract path to God, which has nothing to do with
an organised attempt through community. I love people and I try
to be humane and decent and all those things, not because I’m looking
for some reward but because I like the idea of the world being a
better place. I don’t know if that’s spiritual – spirituality
to them is sort of like when you have all the numbers in front of
you and then you get a different sum.
Are you interested in being famous?
Did you hear at the end of the album?
Way at the end there’s a desperate voice saying “You famous people!
Let me in!” I’ll tell you something – I went to see Iggy
Pop the other night and I was more interested in meeting the bouncers
and the cook than I was in Iggy Pop. I mean he’s a fabulous person
but I like marginal people who have never succeeded, y’know. So
no I don’t care about famous people.
My problem is with people who
think they're more famous than they are.
Heh heh heh. Oh well there’s
always some little twist of fate which can prove them contrary.
It’s a ridiculous term to begin with, there are degrees to fame,
like I was famous in my little town when I was a surfer. Kids that
I’d never met would walk up to me and say “Hey! I heard you won
the US championships! How ‘bout that!” and “I heard you got
a new surfboard, it’s blue and purple and seven feet long!”
I mean I didn’t know it was seven feet long. Your reputation precedes
you, and I didn’t much care for it at the time. I don’t like walking
into a place and having people think I’m something, so If that answers
your question... Every person I meet I want them to look at me and
I wanna look at them and I wanna say “OK – who are you and
who am I?” I was just touring with David Byrne and all these
people would come up to him after the show, and they were like rabbits
in the headlights. They weren’t looking at him as a human being,
they were looking at him as...something... I don’t know.
A mirage.
You're a very gifted storyteller –
have you published anything other than your songs?
I published one story in the New
York University Press, they have a little book that comes out
every year. It’s called Kimosabe and it was really like the
literary origin of where all these other stories come from. It’s
the first story I wrote where I said “Uh oh, this is my voice.”
I’d written lots of stories and struggled with who I was and how
to say who I was for a long time and suddenly I understood the voice
that I needed to depict who I was with. Hopefully there’ll be other
things that come out – I have a whole collection of short stories,
I have feature films, I have all kinds of things that I’ve written.
I’ve been real busy, I just haven’t taken it out to the world, just
like the songs.
What was your film The Beautiful
World about?
The film I made was about a crazy
homeless man who was corresponding with a beautiful woman in Paris.
He’s told her he’s young and handsome and successful — they’ve
never net, they’re penpals. It’s all lies, he’s built his world
on lies. She suddenly decides to come and visit him and he has to
find a way to make lies true, and because he’s crazy he settles
on a bad scheme. That’s the storyline – there’s an idea of
redemption in it, a lot of confused metaphors and symbols –
sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. I look at the film
and feel it’s very flawed. Film-making isn’t really my medium because
to be a film-maker you have to be a special kind of person that
can do everything well. I’m good with the ideas, the dialogue and
things like that but I’m not good with the realisation of it, cinema-wise.
I saw the video for Book of Angels
on MTV. Were you responsible for the concepts shown there?
Really? Me and my friend
Steven White — whose name I’m using — shot it down at
my best friend Tyler’s house down in, it’s a bunch of inbred people,
really crazy people, down in Mayport, Florida. We thought “Well,
let’s do the white trash night from hell!” and we went out and
shot it. It’s imperfect, once again I don’t think my strength is
in production. I made a version of it which the record company said
we can’t use cos there was guns and we were setting things on fire,
and a lot of drinking and smoking. They had to sanitise it so that
it could be broadcast.
You seem surprised that it's been
shown, are you taken aback by the recognition you've received?
I took a lot of beating, y’know, and when
you’ve taken years and years of beating you flinch at every movement.
When the movement is not only not a beating but it’s some
sort of consoling – you’re surprised.
A naive question to end on – how
clear is your vision of heaven?
Well, I see moments of heaven, I
mean I don’t think it’s a bad question. I see moments of heaven
where I’m free of myself. I think that true heaven is to be in union,
and to be in union means that you lose your identity, that there
is nobody there. I was doing this show in Washington DC, we were
wedged in between two western swing bands and the line-dancing and
the whole thing, and as soon as we got on stage man – phew!
– that dancefloor was empty! I do most of my set with my eyes
closed because I can’t concentrate looking into people’s eyes –
I look at their faces and think “what’s that person’s life like?”
– but I had my eyes closed and the floor was empty and every
once in a while I’d open them and the floor would still be empty.
And I was singing the song Still Waters, I was singing the
part about how this guy stumbles across this man, this drunk who’d
hung himself. He was dead and swinging in this tree and it was a
sad, mournful sound and I opened my eyes and these two people were
line-dancing to it! And at that moment I felt like I was in heaven.
There’s two ways to get into heaven I guess – when everything
is perfectly right and when everything is perfectly wrong –
and I’ll never get to heaven the perfectly right way.
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