White people have been stealing black peoples’ music for as long as black people have been making music, and no one does it better today than Akron, Ohio’s . Impressively playing Muddy Water’s style of music at Jimi Hendrix’s volumes, they reintroduced the roots of classic rock to a sold-out Thursday evening.
The Black Keys are a two-man band: drummer/producer Patrick Carney and guitarist/vocalist Dan Auerbach. Making that stripped-down setup work live was a challenge they mastered using Carney’s heavy-hitting and deep-droning floor tom and Auerbach’s various stages of overdriven guitar.
The set started off with a good chunk of the Keys’ first record, “The Big Come Up.” The crowd loved everything they did, but the super-hooky guitar riff of “The Breaks” and the catchy slide in “Busted” packed the 3,700-plus audience members as close to the stage as they could get. A laconic Auerbach made of point of not stopping too long between songs, and the crowd got a fairly comprehensive selection of the Keys’ catalog. The songs were big and mean and the guitar tones stayed dynamic, moving from a nice, pushed, clean tone to a solid distortion to a full-on heavy fuzz.
About halfway through the set, the band brought out a bassist and a keyboard player to help with songs from their newest release, “Brothers,” but the four-piece did little to help with simple bass playing, basic keys and a mix that remained predominately guitar. Playing for just over an hour, the Keys finished the show back as a two-piece and treated their fans to more of their early work like “I’ll Be Your Man” and a ten-minute rendition of “I Got Mine,” from their 2008 album, “Attack and Release.”
The show was unanimously a good time for fans of the band, and while the sold-out crowd walked away feeling like they got every penny worth, it mostly made me want to go home and listen to Muddy Waters’ “Folk Singer.”
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Jamie White is a Denver writer, musician and producer.
Joe McCabe is a Denver photographer and a regular contributor to Reverb. Check out his .
