"I'm not really well cut out for this whole entertainer lifestyle," he says. "I don't glean any iota of satisfaction from being on the stage. You know, a lot of people really live to be up there -- to be seen, to pour their heart and soul and passion into it. For me, it's a job. And I go up there and I try to do it well, because people pay their money and they want to see something interesting. My heart isn't organized around being an entertainer."
Part of this struggle comes from what White calls "chronic fatigue touring syndrome," a side effect inherent in the fact that he's logged close to 60,000 miles in the last five months alone. "I start to feel like a sailor who gets off the boat and the ground starts to sway," he says. "You don't really make a living at it, either. The guy from 16 Horsepower [David Eugene Edwards] said that he worked out the math and it came out to about dishwashing wages. Think about it: I'm riding in a van 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for six to seven weeks at a time. Every second of every day, I am property of this so-called career. That's minimum wage there, buddy."
There's no such place like home: Jim White prefers writing to the road.
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Voicing his concerns about the rising suicide rate among working bands, White joined a panel discussion at Austin's South By Southwest musical showcase a few years ago (organized by ex-Bad Livers bassist Mark Rubin) on mental health in the music industry. "Touring musicians frequently suffer from depression and start trying to self-medicate," he says. "My bandmembers are drunk every night -- and they're drunk for a reason. Imagine going to a different city every night, singing the same songs, answering the same questions, doing the same routine, but never ever having any consistent contact with any person except those six people who you ride around with in a clunker van with no air conditioning, who you don't feel like talking to 'cause you're around 'em too much. It's a weird, alienating lifestyle."
Fortunately, White has the literary bug, something to quiet his busy mind when he's not staring down highway lines or crowds of music-loving strangers. "I write a story for each album," he says. ("Blessings and Curses" -- though too expensive to include with the new release -- is available through a link at jimwhite.net.) He's also stretching his Jesus! concept into a feature-length script for UK filmmakers the Douglas Brothers. And other than participating in an upcoming tribute album for Kris Kristofferson (covering "Nobody Wins"), White keeps his shoulder to the wheel -- and his eye peeled for potential folk art along America's many super-slabs.
"Found objects really interest me," he says. "If I find a TV tray that's been run over, I might take a photograph that I found at the Salvation Army and just mount the photograph on it, and that'll be it. If you go and stare at it and try to consider the significance of it, you're fucked. It's just something nice to look at."
