How did The Black Keys begin?
We grew up together. In high school we would fuck around on my 4-track. Then Dan bought a 4-track, and we'd fuck around on his. We'd bounce back and forth.
4-track cassette recorders?
Yeah. Then a couple years later, we were both making music independent of each other. He was kind of in a bar band, and I had an indie pop band. I had decided that I wanted to become a recordist; I wanted to record bands.
Were you more fascinated with the idea of making the recordings than being in a band?
I was more interested in making records, at the time. I think most people just obsess with music. For me, it wasn't necessarily tedious practicing and learning skills – it was listening and getting into the sounds. I ended up buying a Korg digital 12-track in the summer of 2001. I didn't have any money, so I got a Sam Ash credit card. I sat with it the whole summer of 2001, because I had lost the shitty job I had and I was desperately poor. I had a summer off, and I was about to go to college at the University of Akron for my third year, not knowing what the fuck I wanted to do. I just played with this recorder and I got pretty good with it. Dan was like, "Do you want to record my band?" I said, "Of course, man! Come over to my house." He showed up and we waited on my front porch. It was a late, hot, summer day. The other guys never showed up. Dan was like, "Shit, why don't you play the drums?" I was a guitar player; I could barely play the drums. The only time I'd ever played the drums was when I played with Dan years earlier. So, I recorded this demo. It was one afternoon for a couple hours, playing some songs I'd never heard; covers, mostly. Then we got a fucking record deal, and I became a drummer!
How did the record deal come about?
I spent a couple weeks mixing this on headphones. Then 9/11 happened; Dan had dropped out of school, and I was about to. It was a weird time. It was like, "We should just start a fucking band, and this is it!" This whole demo turned into a demo for a band, and we named the band The Black Keys. My brother made a cover, and we sent it out to a list of probably about 20 small labels. We ended up getting an offer. Then I had to become a drummer. But our thing early on was that we'll just make our own records, because it's cheaper. We also think it's a fun way to spend our time.
When I interviewed Dan I hadn't realized is that you guys had a band and a recording before you played your first show.
We had finished our record [The Big Come Up] completely and had it mastered before we played our first show. That was the fun part. Then we toured that. We started getting some heat on that first record. The White Stripes, The Hives, The Strokes, The Shins and all those bands were hitting, and we were the second wave of bands that hadn't been signed. We got flown out to a studio in Berkeley, California. This guy, Jeff Saltzman – who went on to produce The Killers' [Hot Fuss] record the next year [Not to be confused with Jeff Stuart Saltzman in Portland, Oregon. -LC] – was a manager for Green Day for a while. He had started this studio; he flew us out and said he wanted to produce us. He recorded six songs of ours. I went back and listened to them recently, and they sound good, but at the time we were like, "This is so produced!" We didn't really know what we were talking about. We were so insecure with letting someone else do stuff.
Close the ranks. It feels safer sometimes.
That's what we did. Actually I think it became our secret to longevity. We didn't sign to one of those big labels. We realized we were better suited to be on Fat Possum, the label we had admired since we were high schoolers. We were allowed to operate in a way where success for us was not about getting played on TRL [MTV's Total Request Live]. It was just about making a record and having fun. Around that time I bought another studio setup. We got another record deal and made another record. I got a Tascam 388 in 2002, and we did our second record [Thickfreakness] on that.
Did that feel more copacetic to the sound you wanted?
It was a lot easier, for sure. Around the same time that I got that, I also went back and did a couple singles and songs on that second record on an Audio-Technica [cassette] 4-track. It sounds fucking insane. Fat Possum was a really cool label to be on, because the record advance for us was like $12,000. I ended up taking their old Tascam 85-16B 1-inch, 16-track to knock $2,500 off the advance. I ended up buying a mixing desk on eBay; the matching desk for the 85-16B; the [Tascam] M16. This one belonged to the band Loverboy. It was just a fucking piece of shit, but we ended up making Rubber Factory on this. Then the next record we did on Pro Tools.
What spaces were you using during those different records?
It was always in my basement, except for Rubber Factory; that was recorded in this old General Tire factory in Akron. It was a factory, but the second floor was offices and laboratory space. They'd moved out of there in '86, and this was 2003 or 2004 when we were in there. It was so polluted. When we finished the record and were done with our lease, I just left the mixer in there. They tore the building down five or six years ago, and the city can't afford to clean it up because it's completely filled with asbestos.
That's the history of Akron in a nutshell.
We ended up making all the records ourselves, up through Magic Potion. Dan didn't have a studio until around Magic Potion. At that time he started collecting gear. He's a much different collector than me; I'm more of a cheapskate. When he got into it, he bought this 1970s Studer; a real desk with a big power supply. I'd always been reading Tape Op and reading books, but I think it was around that time, when I was 25 or 26, that we started getting into the nuance of how different records were made and we started actually learning. We realized we were in a position where we could go make records with people who had made records we really loved, and we could learn a lot from them. We started to really take advantage of that. But then we had a really miserable experience at the Man or Astro-man? studio [Tape Op #9] in Atlanta.
Oh, the Zero Return studio?
Yeah. It wasn't with the guys in the band. Those guys were all cool. It was with an engineer who they worked with. We didn't really know how to express what we wanted. We kept talking about how we wanted the drums to be more distorted. Since then, I've run into this problem a couple times. Our second time we tried to go back to a studio with someone else, and it was just fucking terrible. It just wasn't fun. When we finally had to go to the studio with someone else, it was with Paul Hamann [Tape Op #13] at Suma Recording in Cleveland. He passed away a few years ago.
Crazy history at that place.
Yeah. I think he got offended because when I was describing it after we finished Attack & Release, I described it as this dusty piece of history. But it really was. His dad [Ken Hamann] had built it with him, and when his dad passed away they had not touched anything. It was amazing because we got to work with Paul. Paul was not the kind of guy who had a big ego. It wasn't like, "You have to use this mic." He had his own way of working, and it was really cool.
Besides Ohio and that connection, was it Pere Ubu records and such that drove you to that studio?
What ultimately made us go there was the fact that it was in Ohio, first and foremost. I actually didn't really start getting into Pere Ubu until around the time we made those records. Right before we went in there, I started listening to Dub Housing. When I grew up, my uncle [Ralph Carney] was in a band called Tin Huey and made some songs with David Thomas. I was familiar with it, but I just missed it. I didn't even listen to the Dead Boys first record until I was 30, and they're from Cleveland! I think, at the same time, Dan and I were both in super codependent relationships and we didn't want to be too far away. He was also expecting his first child. Danger Mouse [Brian Burton] was involved in that record. The way that record started was we were going to write and record the instrumentals for an Ike Turner comeback record that Danger Mouse was going to produce. He solicited us through the Ike project. We only got two of them finished, but it was six months of work. I actually went to L.A. and met with Danger Mouse without even asking Dan. I was just like, "Will you produce our records?" He came to Cleveland, to Painesville, really. It was right at the peak of Gnarls Barkley, and he said, "Man, this is really rural for me." He kept having to take a day off every four days and go into Cleveland! To this day, I would still consider Brian one of my best friends. Everything I know about production, I learned through him. With Dan, we knew how to make songs and records. But I think Brian really helped us see the light.
In what ways?
Brian is not a sonic guy, necessarily. Dan and I are heavily sonic guys. To a certain degree, we would rely too heavily on sonics and not enough on actual production.
Like, "The song sounds cool, but is it being done right?"
Exactly. We learned a lot. The next thing we did was Brothers; it was a weird time. Dan had put out his first solo record [Keep It Hid]. Dan and I are very close friends. It was a very weird time. We turned 30. I was going through a hard change in a relationship. You get two men having communication issues, and it's basically the history of why most bands fail. I was just like, "I'm not going to let this shit be the demise of the band." Ultimately, Dan didn't want to not do the Keys, he just wanted to make other music. I think that conversation led to us, inadvertently, to making this hip-hop record.
The BlakRoc record? I love that record.
Thank you. It was a big deal. It was our first foray back into the studio. It had only been six months; but you have to remember that at that time we had been going non-stop for eight years! We took six months off. We went into Studio G [Brooklyn] with Joel Hamilton [Tape Op #85]. Working with Dan and Joel – that was the most fun part of the experience.
He's really sonic in the way he records and produces.
Very sonic. I definitely learned a lot from him. His attitude in the studio was just amazing and very encouraging. We started writing bass and drums first. We basically did a practice session for going to Muscle Shoals. We made that BlakRoc record in June, July, and early August. Then, in late-August, we went to Muscle Shoals to make Brothers, which we had no material for, really. We had a couple of demos. In a two month period, we made this hip-hop record, and then we went into the studio with Mark Neill [Tape Op #29].
Was it liberating to do BlakRoc beforehand, to see how you could craft songs out of grooves?
It was like spring training. I think we had exhausted every idea that we had when we were up there. I remember going down to Muscle Shoals and being like, "We don't have anything!" Because of that, I think there's a way different energy to Brothers. It was mid-August and hot as fuck in Alabama. It was just the three of us. Mark wasn't producing; he was engineering.
How did you pick Mark Neill? He's a fascinating guy.
Dan picked Mark. I think he read about Mark, maybe in Tape Op. I remember reading the article about him. Mark's known for his studio designs. He designed Toe Rag [Tape Op #15, #88], and Dan was into that. On tour, in 2008, we actually ended up in San Diego at Mark's home studio [Soil of the South]. We did three songs in one day. Two of them ended up on the record, and one of them was on a Twilight soundtrack ["Chop & Change," from Twilight 3]. I liked working with Mark. He's peculiar and eccentric, which is exactly like Paul Hamann or most people we end up working with. He brought all his own gear to Muscle Shoals, like an old Gretsch round badge [drum] kit, some mics, and some preamps. He's secretive about it, which is a bit annoying, to be honest.
"What are those preamps?"
Yeah, "What are you doing?" "Oh, don't come in here!" Mark's allowed to get away with that shit because he's Mark, but if it's another engineer? This whole thing is about sharing. If you have a signature kick drum sound, come on! Everyone's got to share the knowledge.
And every single, tiny, incremental variable changes everything.
Everything! You can't reproduce it yourself, even if you wanted to.
Mark's known for doing a lot of research on how old records were made.
Yeah. There is a bit of mythology. Mark created some of the finest-sounding recordings with us at his house, and at Muscle Shoals. The Muscle Shoals studio was completely broken. Nothing was really working properly, at the time. We ended up waiting for, like, two or three weeks to get mixes back from Mark. Maybe even a month. We finally got the mixes back from Mark, and I said, "Man, they don't sound fucked up enough!" He's like, "There's so much distortion on there." I said, "Your 'so much distortion' is not my 'so much distortion.'" I don't pull punches. I'm not trying to be an asshole. I said, "No, I really think we need to have Tchad [Blake, Tape Op #16, #133] mix this. Tchad's the guy who will get this." We'd used Tchad on BlakRoc for one song.
I interviewed him last year and he talked about some of this.
I love him. I think our direction on the email was, "Hey, Tchad; these don't sound fucked up enough. Do whatever you want. Just make them fucked up." The first mix we got back was "Howlin' For You," and it sounded basically identical to how it sounds now. It was like, "Fucking amazing!" At that point, I knew that the record was going to do something special for us. I remember calling our lawyer; she's like a big sister to Dan and me. I said, "I think this record is going to sell a quarter million albums." It was all a big joke, because a former manager of ours said we'd never be the type of band to sell a quarter million albums. Our reaction to that was to fire him. We were like, "You can't tell 25-year-olds they can't sell a quarter million albums! [Pavement's] Slanted and Enchanted sold a quarter million albums. We can sell a quarter million albums. Maybe not. But you can't tell me no."
Don't say, "No!"
So, we finished the record and Tchad mixed it. I had just gotten divorced and was living in New York. We'd made everything on the first record, second record, and third record pretty haphazardly, in a cool way. The last record we'd done with Danger Mouse, but we only spent 11 days on it. I thought, "What if we go back into the studio for two more days and see if we can get a song that's catchier than what we have on here?" I asked Dan if he'd be willing to do it, and he said, "Yes." I asked Brian if he would produce. We ended up doing the Late Show with David Letterman in New York in December to promote BlakRoc. Danger Mouse came out, and in two nights – between like 7 and midnight – we wrote and recorded "Tighten Up." When we first finished it, it didn't sonically – or vibe-wise, maybe – match up to the rest of the record. We sent it to Tchad, and Tchad kept tweaking it. Our initial reaction was, "Okay, that's not right." We went to Dan's studio and did another song, using kind of the same lyrics as "Tighten Up." That's when we were like, "Oh yeah, that's it. That's the single." Our record was due in mid-February, in a couple of weeks. Our friend, Leon Michels – who ended up being in The Arcs with Dan and touring with the Keys – is an amazing engineer and producer. He and I were drinking in New York, and he came over to my apartment. He asked, "What's the single?" And I said, "I think it's this one." I played the song for him from Akron that we'd recorded at Dan's studio. He said, "Uh-huh. Anything else?" I played him "Tighten Up," and he's like, "You're a fucking moron. That's the single, clearly! The other one, don't even put that out." I called Dan and I said, "Leon says that the song with Danger Mouse is the single." Dan said, "Oh, really?" I said, "Yeah, what should we do?" He said, "I guess we should just put it on the record. Cool." Once again, I learned something there. We almost didn't put it on there, and then we have this song that becomes our first hit. At that point the story arcs back into us recording at our own studios again. El Camino is with Danger Mouse, and so is Turn Blue.
Was El Camino done at Dan's new Easy Eye studio here in Nashville?
That was done right as he finished that spot. He pumped all the money he made on that Brothers tour, which wasn't much, into that. He overextended himself to do that. But it worked out. He got his dream studio space. At that same time, for the first time ever, I got rid of my studio. I moved to Nashville, and I had no studio. That's when I started working with Roger Moutenot [Tape Op #20] a lot. We made quite a few records together.
Records that you were producing?
Yeah. I would produce and he would engineer, or maybe produce. We did bands like Tennis and Sheepdogs. I had my own label, Audio Eagle Records, and I found this band, Royal Bangs, from Knoxville and I did a record for them. I learned a lot from working with Roger. For a long time, it was perfect for me. "I don't need to have a studio. I'll just go play my drums in the basement and work with Roger." But I missed being able to go into a place late at night and listen to music, or start tweaking a plug-in, or fucking with shit, so I built this place. I had the space built out. Joel Hamilton [Tape Op #85] found the API console; one of two that was sold at the same time from Evergreen State College. It was in perfect condition. When I first got it set up, I didn't treat this room. Then, after 10 or 12 years, I finally bought the ATC SCM150 monitors because I'd used them at Blackbird. I thought, "I'm going to get all the gear I want. Fuck it."
How much recording have you done in this space, at this point?
