‘Technically, everything’s wrong with it’: An oral history of The Black Keys’ debut album at 20

While The Strokes and The Hives spent the early 2000s giving guitar music an expensive leather jacket and sharp-suited makeover, it would take two childhood friends from the industrial city of Akron, Ohio, to strip down rock’n’roll to its raw and ragged roots.

Taking inspiration from hill country blues – while throwing in some Wu Tang Clan-worthy sampling – early twentysomethings Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney would start 2002 by hunkering down in Carney’s dilapidated basement to record an album that would change the course of their lives.

Working it all out as they went along, the deeply DIY duo produced everything on The Big Come Up themselves. Getting things wrong almost as often as they got things right, they developed their own distinctive sound in the process: a dirty Delta blues crunch that married their love of hip-hop with riffs worthy of juke joint king RL Burnside and British invasion artists of the 1960s like the Keef Hartley Band.

A full five months after it was released on small independent label Alive, The Big Come Up received a glowing four-star review in Rolling Stone, forging their status as a cult concern. By 2011, their breakthrough album, Brothers, would win the duo three Grammy Awards and make The Black Keys one of the biggest bands in the world.

Twenty years after The Big Come Up and in the month their 11th album, Dropout Boogie, is released, I visited the duo at their own Easy Eye Sound studio – a significantly swankier spot than that Akron basement – in their adopted home of Nashville to hear just exactly how it was done.

Before The Black Keys got together, the 21-year-old Carney was having a tough time – he’d taken on a soul-destroying job in telemarketing but had quit after two weeks. He decided to cheer himself up by buying a digital 12-track recorder with the idea of working with local artists.

Patrick: Me and Dan had jammed in high school, but it was infrequent. We ran into each other in a record store and hadn’t jammed in a year or so. Dan had a band called The Barn Burners and he would do three or four gigs a week at college bars. I told him that I had this new recorder. Dan said, “You should record my band.”

Dan: I needed demos to try and get more gigs.

Patrick: I wanted to record bands, so I said, “Come on over to my house, we’ll do it this afternoon”. I basically lived in a crack house. Well, it wasn’t a crack house, but all the houses next door were. It was ’hood.

Dan: That house was crazy – we would hang out on the front porch and listen to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Bayou Country over and over.

Patrick: It was a really dangerous neighbourhood, but nobody ever f***ed with us because they were like, “What are these crazy ass white kids up to?” Anyway, his band never showed up, so Dan said, “You should just play drums.” I hadn’t been playing drums at all, but he showed me the songs. We did that recording right before 9/11. I mixed it for a couple of days and put samples on it. I gave it to Dan and he said we should start a band.

The demo, which featured artwork made by Patrick’s brother, saw three record labels get in touch. They decided to go with the LA-based Alive and – suddenly – they were a band.

Patrick: [The head of Alive] said if you give me 11 songs I’ll put it out – I’ll give you 50 copies on vinyl and 200 CDs. We named the band in a second; Dan’s dad was into outsider art and he had discovered this guy in Akron called Alfred McMoore who was schizophrenic and super eccentric. Dan’s father would take him crayons and paper and he introduced Alfred to my dad, who wrote a story about him and started taking him pipe tobacco. So for our whole childhood on the answering machine there would be 30, 40 messages from Alfred, saying things like “I need some pipe tobacco! If you don’t bring me some Diet Coke you’re a black key!” He thought the black keys on the piano sounded dissonant.

Dan: It was definitely a negative thing!

With the band now christened, the pair started recording their very first album in February 2002. Dan and Pat would have to pay for it themselves, but they both saw it as a possible escape route out of Akron. As a result, they put everything they had into the sessions, which were powered by Folgers coffee and wonton soup that Dan would pick up from the Chinese restaurant between their houses.

Patrick: My dad was so stressed out that I’d gone into $1,000 of debt, but we just worked every day. Dan would come over to the house at 10.30am and start yelling outside or honk his horn to wake me up because we didn’t have cell phones.

Dan: Then I’d get the coffee going.

Patrick: We’d work until 4pm, when I went to work cooking at this little deli called Gasoline Alley, or Dan went to play a gig. We’d do that Monday to Friday and after about four weeks, we had recorded 14 songs. I didn’t know how to play the drums, I truly didn’t. I had bought a drumset when I was 15, but it was for other people to come to my house to play.

Dan: We were all business when we were recording. It’s always been like that. It was cool, because we had different friends and ran in different circles so when we got together it was like our own little world. We were totally focused.

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