Before he became the Willy Wonka of rock n’ roll, Jack White worked as an upholsterer in Detroit. He apprenticed under mentor Brian Muldoon, and in their off hours the duo would play music together. They actually recorded a bit of the music, back in 2004, and pressed it onto vinyl records, 100 of which they hid in random pieces of furniture they were working on at the time.
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Now, ten years later, two different people have discovered vinyl copies of the rare furniture-stashed single. The song, titled “Your Furniture Was Always Dead… I Was Just Afraid To Tell You,” was recorded by The Upholsterers in 2004. The record itself is made of clear vinyl – an attempt, White claimed, to prevent it from being detected by X-ray.
A statement from White’s Third Man Records reads:
Recently Third Man Records has been made aware of the discovery of two different copies found by two separate individuals of the 2nd single by the Upholsterers. This duo, comprising of actual upholsterers Jack White and Brian Muldoon, pressed 100 copies of this single and proceeded to hide them in furniture being reupholstered by Muldoon in 2004, in celebration of his 25th year in the business. In celebration of these discoveries, Third Man would like to share with everyone the cover art for this single, done by noted Detroit artist Gordon Newton.
“Something hit me as a teenager while I was apprenticing,” White told NPR in 2011. “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.’” Eventually they landed on the idea of stuffing music inside their re-upholstery projects. “We really went to great lengths to make sure possibly no one would ever hear our record!” he joked. “[We] sliced inside the foam and slid in there … You could only get [it] if you ripped the furniture open.”
The Upholsterers’ hidden work hadn’t yet been found at the time of the interview. “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,” White predicted. “That’s probably what’s gonna happen.”
Not quite…
