Revisit Jack White's pre

Before Jack White found fame with The White Stripes, he was a prominent player in the Detroit rock scene. However, music wasn't his full-time profession, and White spent his weekdays as an upholsterer. He worked alongside Brian Muldoon, and the two of them decided it would be fitting to start a band named The Upholsterers.

Muldoon played the drums in the duo, while White was tasked with making magic on the guitar. Staying true to his craft, White also used upholstery machinery such as the worm gear saw to enhance their sound. At the time, White was also playing with The White Stripes, and they released their eponymous debut album in 1999, but success still evaded them.

In all honesty, The Upholsterers were nothing more than a side-project for White and an amusing activity between two friends. There were no grand plans for world domination, and the duo only released one single, ‘Apple Of My Eye’, which is incredibly rare. Rather than release their second single to the general public, they instead decided to hide them inside furniture they were tasked with upholstering.

Speaking to NPR in 2011, White explained: "Something hit me as a teenager while I was apprenticing. I said to [Brian] … ‘How come we don't write notes to each other? Upholsters. We’re the only ones who see the insides of this furniture. We should have so many inside jokes and things we could write.'"

He continued: "We really went to great lengths to make sure possibly no one would ever hear our record. [We] sliced inside the foam and slid in there … You could only get [it] if you ripped the furniture open."

When White revealed they’d hidden the records within the furniture, nobody had yet found a copy. The musician added: "My guess is what's gonna happen is it's going to be passed down a generation and some upholster will re-upholster it 40 years from now and pull the record out and throw it away. That's probably what's gonna happen."

Upholstery is still on White's mind today, and his record label, Third Man Records, is a nod to his former workplace, Third Man Upholstery. They also use the same yellow and black colours as his former employers, which went out of business decades ago.

"You have to learn like a thousand different tasks," White told GQ about the craft. "You have to basically be a carpenter, you have to know about fabrics, you in turn end up being a de facto interior designer by the end of it, you need to know how to sew like a seamstress. I mean, you’re turning all these disparate fields into one package. It's wild."

Although The Upholsterers’ recording career never got off the ground, White continues to keep the legacy of the band alive through everything he does with Third Man Records. On top of White learning the craft of upholstery, the job gave him a grounding and work ethic that spurred him onto greatness.