Dirty Three Drummer Jim White Is a Legend Who Refuses to ‘Be Comfortable’
“I don’t think I’ve ever played a solo drum show.”
-Jim White, one of the most revered indie-rock drummers ever
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Jim White, he of the Dirty Three, and Nick Cave and Cat Power collaborative note, is perhaps the most quintessential music mensch in the last 30 years. (An extremely critical point: White was never a member of the Bad Seeds, despite his affiliations with Cave.) To say that the drummer and percussionist is well respected is to say that PJ Harvey, another icon who has tapped White, can be a bit shy or antisocial at times. Other White collaborators include Mark Kozelek, Courtney Barnett, Kurt Vile, Smog, Bonnie Prince Billy, Nina Nastasia … we could easily use up the word count for this article if we were to list all the musicians with whom White has rubbed elbows in studios and on stages.
But here’s what’s even more remarkable than all the facts spelled out above: During his impressively long career, White has never released an album of his own material until now. We went into our interview with him thinking that masochism or a complete and utter lack of self-respect and self-worth must be at the root of that bizarre wrinkle in White’s resume. But what we found instead was something that lessened our cynicism and upped our hope for humankind, if only just a little, and if only for a temporary period of time: Jim White is, simply put, a really good guy who appears to have determined that his purpose in life is to help others and serve where he believes he can be most useful.
“I don’t really think of genres so much,” the soft-spoken White says during a video conference call in late October. “But I do have to feel like I’m making something new, something I haven’t done before. I have to be excited by what’s being proposed to me, and then see what happens with it and whether it works.”
He adds: “I don’t want to be comfortable, I don’t want to do the same thing. I don’t want to repeat myself.”
For the sake of accuracy, White – who is now 63 years old – took his first stab at “solo” recordings last year in tandem with producer Guy Picciotto of Fugazi. White mentions more than once that he and Picciotto have developed both a working relationship and a friendship, and that they live down the street from each other. The fruits of their labor resulted in All Hits: Memories (Drag City). But the drummer issued its successor, Inner Day, post-haste on the same label, leading us to wonder if he didn’t explore all the nooks and crannies he had wanted to excavate after so many years as a team player.
External forces also contributed to White pursuing his solo project. A lockdown trapped him in Melbourne, and during that long period he tended to his father. Eventually the music bug bit him, leading White to call a friend who owns a nearby studio and allowed him to borrow a selection of mics.
“I went to the shop and bought an interface,” White states. “This is something I’ve never done before. I never thought I had the patience for performing and recording alone. I always thought I shouldn’t spend my time trying to learn new practices. I thought I should be playing music, not recording, not learning engineering and all that stuff. Maybe I toyed with the idea, though I never did it. But it finally happened, and I learned to record in that room in Melbourne, in that house.”
White furthered his music education – which really does seem odd to say, given his mile-long list of credentials – by dipping his proverbial toes into singing and playing keyboards on Inner Day.
“I never, ever would have thought I’d play keyboards or sing,” he confesses. “And now it’s a different situation. It’s coming together, because we made a band to play these new songs. We played our first show the other day, and it went great. We rehearsed a lot to make sure it would.
“I never thought I would write a lyric either,” White continued. “And then, when I tried it, it just came out really quickly. The thing that amazes me is that I did it. That I was OK and felt totally confident in putting it out. I was a bit shocked, like I was watching myself. I was like, ‘That’s weird.’ And now it’s out.”
It seems almost appropriately mystical that the cosmic (or karmic) lesson a musical guru who humbled himself for decades eventually reached was this: “In the end, I actually see everything I do as really part of the same thing. There’s a thread that runs through everything I do, an essence that is elucidated and changes and develops. The thread is the feeling that it’s happening, that you’re making music and that you’re making something happen in this world.”
The Bad Penny (beta) 
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