Nice Black Keys interview from the Toronto Star.

Revelling in raw and raucous
Young Black Keys play love-hate with the blues

Fat Possum Records hub of Mississippi sound

Note: The Toronto Bluesfest, scheduled to begin this weekend, was cancelled after the What's On section went to press. As a result, a number of Bluesfest-related stories are now outdated.
Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach gets a little nervous when told his performance in Toronto this Sunday is part of the Bluesfest.

"Is this a blues festival? Ninety per cent of blues I can't stand," he says over the phone from his home in Akron, Ohio.

"We would never just play a blues festival and we would never just play a blues club ... We don't want people getting the wrong idea."

But it's easy to get the wrong idea about the rock-blues duo, whose ragged, hard-driven performances have earned critical acclaim and growing crowds at venues throughout the U.S.

And Auerbach won't deny that the band, for all of its jumpy rock 'n' roll abandon, is inextricably linked to the blues, at least an electric, guttural, stripped-down version of it that won them a spot in the tightly knit and iconoclastic Fat Possum Records family.

For it is down in the north Mississippi hill country that Auerbach, 25, drew a main inspiration and the attention of the Oxford, Miss.-based blues label.

He and the other half of The Black Keys, 24-year-old drummer Patrick Carney, are resuming their hectic touring schedule this summer after recording their third album, Rubber Factory, due out in September.

For Auerbach, "there's nothing better" than the kind of blues played by Fred McDowell, Junior Kimbrough and T-Model Ford, all in the Fat Possum catalogue.

It was Kimbrough's haunting voice and guitar on the album Sad Days Lonely Nights that made the greatest impression on a 16-year-old Auerbach, who had just started messing with his first guitar.

So he dragged his father down to Mississippi to find Kimbrough.

They drove to Holly Springs, but the bluesman was too ill to play. Auerbach made two more trips but Kimbrough, still sick, eluded him.

A fourth trip to the magnolia state led Auerbach to a juke joint in Greenville, playing alongside T-Model.

"We played there pretty much all night and ended up crashing over at his house," he recalls. "It was great. ... He's feisty, man."

Like The Black Keys, T-Model's two-man band generally shirks the wan sound of the low-down blues. Ford and Auerbach both play raw and loud and T-Model's drummer Spam attacks the drums just like Carney slaps around his kit.

T-Model and Spam played the Wasaga Beach Bluesfest last weekend, hooting and stomping through a one-hour set, T-Model pausing between songs to sip bourbon and declare, "It's Jack Daniels time."

T-Model, 84, recalled Auerbach's visit during an interview before his trip to Wasaga. "It went on pretty good," he said. "Some of them young crazies trying to play, they coming to me ... They want to play my style and my style is shaping a whole lot of them. They like my sound, the way I play my gi-tar. And I do, too. My style, I just love it the best."

The Mississippi sojourn inspired Auerbach, who grew obsessed. "It just kind of consumed me. I couldn't really get away from it," he says. "Then all of a sudden, all I was thinking about was playing music when I was in college and just wasting my parents' money sitting in class tapping my foot all the f---ing time."

So he dropped out, and he and Carney, friends since high school, mowed lawns in Akron, making just enough to pay for guitar strings, alcohol and a makeshift U.S. tour in a hatchback to promote their first album, The Big Come Up, released in 2002.

Soon after the critically acclaimed release, the two-piece signed with Fat Possum.

Auerbach appreciated the label's pugnacious but honest approach to making blues music. The label logo features a rodent sniffing an overflowing garbage bin, and the motto reads, "We're trying our best." One of Fat Possum's compilations, Not The Same Old Blues Crap, includes the track, "Crack Whore Blues."

"The thing about Fat Possum is they understood what we were doing," Auerbach says. "They were the same way about blues that I think I am, where they're kind of completely infatuated with a small amount of blues and they don't want to have anything to do with the rest of it."

Fat Possum founder Matthew Johnson feels the same, and when asked how his artists' sound differs from other blues, he said, "It just sounds rough and snotty. It sounds like a robbery or something."

Explaining the decision to sign The Black Keys, Johnson said he was impressed with Auerbach's desire to woodshed with the Fat Possum masters.

"They do the Junior Kimbrough songs better than anybody else, period," Johnson said from Oxford, where he and three others run the label that has released nearly 70 titles since 1991.

The Black Keys' future with Fat Possum remains unclear, however, as the label and its distributor, Epitaph, have split. Rubber Factory will be the last album released under the partnership.

For now, Auerbach wants to stay in Akron, dubbed the former rubber capital of the world, and continue making music. The band recorded the upcoming release in an abandoned General Tire factory in east Akron, using a recycled magnetic tape from the Fat Possum studio that featured radio ads for fried chicken restaurants.

T-Model, nearly 60 years Auerbach's senior, didn't have much advice for the young guitarist and vocalist, except to say, "I like the blues but I never had the blues. Nope. I don't let the blues get into me."

This from a man who started ploughing his family's land at age 11, who can't read or write, who served time on a chain gang for murder.

"Blues is something else when they get into you. You wants to do things you ain't supposed to do."

At least drummer Pat Carney is safe, Auerbach quips. "Blues is based on the shuffle beat. We've never played a shuffle ever. I don't even think Pat knows how to."

DAVID BRUSER
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