Some purists believe you shouldn’t mess with classic gear combinations. A Les Paul through a Marshall stack. A treble booster and Vox AC30 à la Brian May or Rory Gallagher. These are the sacred formulas of rock tone.
But Jack White wanted no part of them.
In fact, he says he “decidedly hated” the most iconic electric guitars of all.
Speaking in a new interview with Reverb, White recalled how, as a teenager searching for his own voice, he rejected Stratocasters, Les Pauls and other widely used instruments — not out of rebellion for its own sake, but out of a desire to escape what they represented.
“In my late teens,” he says, “I decidedly hated anything to do with Stratocasters, Les Pauls, [or] any of the common instruments that you see everybody use.
“I thought it’s so overused, and so indicative of ‘white boy blues’ if you had a Stratocaster.
“I would rather try to find something that didn’t have any connotations already thrown on it. So I was attracted to Silvertones and Airlines and things that you just didn’t see on TV or on videos.”
That instinct would help define his sound — and his image.
I thought it’s so overused, and so indicative of ‘white boy blues’ if you had a Stratocaster.”
— Jack White
White instead embraced pawnshop oddities, most famously his fiberglass-bodied 1964 Montgomery Ward Airline Res-O-Glas, which became a key instrument in the breakthrough success of White Stripes.
Its offbeat look and raw tone perfectly matched the band’s stripped-down, anti-establishment ethos — an approach that even Alex Lifeson of Rush has said resonates deeply with him.
At the time, White wasn’t trying to make a statement. He was simply trying to be different.
“In the ’90s, I had a Silvertone guitar in Detroit, I never saw anybody use that guitar,” he says. “I never saw anybody on TV, definitely nobody playing shows or anybody I knew that owned one. So when I was using it, it felt very unique.”
The irony, he later discovered, was that these forgotten guitars had once been everywhere.
“Then you start talking to older people, and it’s like, ‘When I was a kid, that’s all anybody had, was Silvertones.’ Nobody had enough money to pay for a real guitar,” he explains.
“[It’s] different time periods, you know. It’s about trying to find uniqueness, a new voice for yourself. I didn’t wanna use the same tool that everyone else was using.
“I’m glad I did that. I’m glad I had that desire to carve something out. Because once you do that, then you can rewind and put on one of those more common guitars and get something out of it.”
Ironically, White would later come full circle, releasing his own signature Fender Telecaster — albeit one loaded with eccentric features true to his outsider spirit. He’s also continued to pursue unconventional builds, even hiring Eddie Van Halen’s go-to luthier to create a guitar-bass hybrid.
In the same interview, White also revealed that his obsession with unusual gear once led him on an eight-year search for an amplifier he didn’t even know existed. Elsewhere, he’s shared the invaluable advice he received from Prince, and his candid thoughts on what separates rock players from blues guitarists.
