Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney formed The Black Keys in Akron, Ohio. After a decade of relentless touring and navigatin | dG1fZVd6UkxydEZyVUU
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00:00I'm going to take you to where, like, Dan and I started the band.
00:06You can see this house.
00:08There's photos of this on the inside cover of the first album.
00:12They haven't changed the paint job at all.
00:14And the inside's fucking gnarly.
00:18Dan wanted to make a demo.
00:20We waited around for a half hour.
00:22The guys in the band never showed up.
00:24And then we just decided that maybe we would just cut the songs.
00:32It was me, Dan, and our friend Gabe played, like, some basic organ parts.
00:44Right away, Pat and I totally bonded over that love of recording.
00:48Dan would come over and honk his horn to wake me up.
00:52And we would make coffee and then go down and start messing around with sounds.
00:56Put microphones in weird places and swing microphones around.
01:00Record the guitar.
01:06Pat had a knack for making shit sound great.
01:09It didn't just sound like three idiots in a basement.
01:12And I loved that right from the get-go.
01:17It was like, wow, this sounds like music.
01:23There's no rules.
01:25It was a lot of fun.
01:27Right then, Dan said, what should we call ourselves?
01:30We both knew this outsider artist, Alfred McMore.
01:34He used to leave these messages, like,
01:36if you don't bring me crayons and a pipe of tobacco, you're a D-flat.
01:40If you say no, you're a black key.
01:42Don't be a black key.
01:44I was like, we should call the band The Black Keys.
01:48We had nothing to lose.
01:50We sent out those demos to, like, 13 little tiny labels.
01:54And one of the labels gave us a deal.
01:56And we felt like, that's it, we're in a band now.
02:00We're professionals now.