Rock musician and entrepreneur Jack White appreciates the feel of a good tool, and as he held the Innovation Award at the 40th annual TEC Awards he shared something his father once told him.
“My dad used to repair radios and televisions back in the ’50s,” said White, who came to fame with the White Stripes, and since then has played solo and in bands including the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather.
“He used to say you know how good something is by how heavy it is,” he said of the award he’d just accepted. “It’s pretty heavy.”
White, who follows past Innovation Award recipients such as Joni Mitchell, Peter Frampton, Jackson Browne, and Paul McCartney, was honored for the music he’s made with the tools created by the makers of guitars, amplifiers, and other gear he’s used on the road and in the studio. But his creation of Third Man Records, which celebrates recorded music, and Third Man Hardware, which makes gear of its own, also earned him the TEC Awards top prize.
“When I think of innovators, I think of people like Tesla,” White said in his brief acceptance speech. “But I remember that someone told me once when I was younger, that Thomas Edison’s best invention was not anything in particular. Menlo Park was the best invention because it brought together all of the tinkerers and all the inventors in a room, and that hive created amazing things together.
“And that happens, luckily for me, with the Third Man Records universe, the Third Man hardware universe,” he continued. “Everyone in there, that hive of people, are so innovative and creative, and so great to work with on a daily basis that it brings out the best in me.
“I love all the tinkerers and the people and the mad men who are in shops and in little basements working by themselves,” White said. “But a lot of times it takes a team, and a whole village, to make those products come to life. I think everyone here knows what that experience is like.”
The audience cheered, because outside of the Innovation Award, the TEC Awards are all about those tinkerers and inventors who, having formed companies and built teams, are creating the tools that White and so many others in the music industry rely upon.
“It was great walking around here yesterday and seeing so many new inventions,” White added. “A new generation of people have gotten in positions of power where they can make these interesting things that you would have never seen when I was a kid. When I was 15, going to record stores and going to music stores, and going to pawn shops and stuff. Just trying to find anything you could get to be a tool that you used to be creative.”
White then handed off his brand-new award, picked up a guitar and proceeded to rock out the TEC Awards with his band with a pair of songs, “Old Scratch Blues,” from his 2024 album “No Name,” and “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground,” from the White Stripes’ 2001 album “White Blood Cells.”
Earlier, the TEC Awards celebrated the best of the new gear with an awards ceremony hosted by guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, whose credits include stints in bands such as Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers.
“NAMM has always been a great event for us gearheads,” Baxter said in his opening remarks. “I am a gearhead. I have a son over there named Fender, and my grandson is Miles Gibson.”
While comedians such as Demetri Martin and Fred Armisen have hosted the TEC Awards in past years, Baxter wasn’t without jokes himself. After describing how his earliest years were spent playing in bands at old-fashioned resorts in the Catskills where comedians such as Henny Youngman and Jackie Mason were stars, he said he was such a big fan of Rodney Dangerfield that he knew most of the comedian’s material.
“I went to my doctor, he told me I got six months to live,” Baxter said by way of proving that claim. “I told him, ‘I want a second opinion.’ He said, ‘OK, you’re ugly, too.’”
Ba-dump-bump!
“My problem is I drink too much,” he said later, scattering more Dangerfieldisms between awards in categories that included signal processing software effects and microphone preamplifiers. “My doctor took a urine sample. There was an olive in it.”
Hey-yo!