Jack White and the retro future of guitar

What can we learn from Jack's gear? Looking through his collection, it's clear he is at once the junk store aficionado and the nutty professor, chasing tones that exist out of the pop-cultural timeline...

- Jonathan Horsley

Jack's rarer-than-rare Gretsch 1957 G6199 Jupiter Thunderbird

Jack White cast himself as a rock 'n' roll revivalist as The White Stripes were making their bones at the Gold Dollar in Detroit, reanimating garage punk with the hectic industrial pulse of the city. But that was never the whole story.

Over the years he has been equally a Nikola Tesla figure, an innovator, taking a pedalboard ex machina approach to electric guitar tone, demonstrating a design and entrepreneurial acumen that has made his label, Third Man Records, a self-sustaining indie powerhouse.

His gear choices add to the intrigue. This is the man who coated his go-to 50s Kay archtop with paper and made the Airline fibre-glass bodied electric a must-have, and yet he does not restrict himself to pawnshop gold. Heck, he was on the cover of this magazine with a Gretsch White Penguin. That day, he said guitars were tools be treated with "respect or disgrace". He might be onto something.

PAWNSHOP GOLD

1964 JB Hutto'

Res-O-Glass Airline Guitar

Think of Jack White and the chances are it will be this retro electric that comes to mind. It was a model long forgotten, an oddity comprised of a hollow fiberglass body, with a pair of Valco single-coils in humbucker-sized covers, a nonadjustable neck with few high-profile users. Rory Gallagher used one but its found its true calling in The White Stripes, its voice just the thing for a sound that stood astride the threshold of garage punk chaos. They used to be cheap. But for a while in the 2000s they were the coolest guitar you could find, and amid an over-heating market for vintage models Eastwood made a reissue.

50s Kay Archtop