Based on the teenage listening habits of the two Black Keys, no one would have predicted them forming a band that, at its best, can sound like R.L. Burnside mainlining Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff.
Raised in a house where bluegrass jams were a family affair, Auerbach remembers being obsessed with Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline as a kid. That album’s “Peggy Day” would become the first song he ever learned to play on guitar.
“Musically, that’s what I wanted to be able to do,” says the 27-year-old. “But when I was with my friends, I’d listen to a lot of hip-hop. And I always gravitated toward a specific sound — stuff that was raw, as opposed to the radio-polished hip-hop.”
Rap records that changed his life are topped by Wu-Tang Clan’s Disciples Of The 36 Chambers. “Other seminal stuff would include that first GZA record [Words From The Genius] — he’s part of the Wu-Tang,” Auerbach continues. “I remember being in high school, probably doing stuff I wasn’t supposed to be doing, and somebody put that record on. For me, I’m sure it was just like people hearing psychedelic music in the late ’60s for the first time. It just blew me away.
“I loved the Geto Boys — the first piece of music I ever bought was that Geto Boys record [We Can’t Be Stopped] with Bushwick Bill on the cover, where he’s on the hospital stretcher after he got shot in the eye. Also, Too Short, and Gang Starr. I still love Gang Starr, and the way that DJ Premier would take a lot of jazz and soul records and put great beats on top of them.”
Auerbach describes himself as a normal kid in high school who smoked a lot of weed, captained the soccer team, and had no desire to attract attention to himself. He and Carney lived around the corner from each other, but were in different grades, and even though they never counted themselves as friends, Auerbach saw enough of his future bandmate around the schoolyard to remember him as a “Devo-influenced class clown.”
Carney, who’ll cheerfully admit he probably suffers from undiagnosed ADHD, doesn’t necessarily disagree with that. “My whole family has short attention spans,” confesses the drummer, who’s a year younger than Auerbach, “so it was easier to focus on making fun of shit than school. Me and my friends were borderline assholes.”
On the subject of Devo, he adds: “They were, at one point, the coolest band that ever existed. Part of it was that they were from Akron. And part of it was that they were complete smartasses who didn’t take themselves seriously — I mean half of their songs were about masturbation.”
Carney grew up in a family where making a living as a musician actually seemed an obtainable goal, as opposed to an exotic way to ensure you’d be collecting food stamps.
“My uncle Ralph [Carney] was a musician. He played on a bunch of Tom Waits stuff — from Rain Dogs I think right through to Mule Variations. He did a bunch of weird New York rock-jazz stuff, and played on the B-52’s Mesopotamia record.”
Ralph played sax (and banjo, and many other instruments), but Patrick’s first love was the guitar. And, of course, being a smartass, which evidently spilled over into his music-making.
“I wasn’t very good at guitar, so I couldn’t really play along with anything,” he says with a snort. “When I was 14, me and my friends thought we were like Sonic Youth. We’d let our guitars feed back and think we were really cool. And we’d change the name of the band every week — Umbilical Whored was one of the names I remember.
“Then we had a band called the Deprogrammers — that was our fake-jazz outfit. We never played live, but if we ever did, we were going to dress up as what we thought jazz musicians would dress like, and then pretend to play something that sounded like it was somehow coming out all wrong. I still think that’s a great concept for a band. Rather than being intentionally dissonant, try to pretend that everyone, including yourself, can’t help but fuck up and is just off all the time.”
How the Black Keys first got together as teenagers depends on who you’re talking to. Carney swears it was through their older brothers, who were friends. Auerbach remembers having a mutual acquaintance who played harmonica.
“His name was Steve and he was into blues music and so was I — so that’s how we knew each other. He knew Pat, and one day he was like, ‘Let’s go over there — he’s got a drum kit. We went over there and played stupid music really loud. Pat played drums really similar to the way he does now. You know what I mean? Like unschooled hip-hop beats, or whatever they are. And I was playing open-tunings — things like Fred McDowell that I was just learning — in a loud distorted way. Our friend Steve was playing harmonica through my amp, and it was fun.
“We decided to get together and keep playing, but basically Steve stopped coming and then it was me and Pat,” the guitarist continues. “At a certain point we broke out the four-track, and then, before you knew it, I’d be down in his parents’ basement recording. Or he’d be at my parents’ house, we’d set up the drum kit, and then hang mikes from the shower curtain.”
