2024 was famously not a great year for the Black Keys. After releasing the not-great Ohio Players — and calling out Exclaim! for giving it a 4/10 — the millennial-core rockers cancelled their arena tour for more "intimate" shows that never happened. Since then, the band fired their management and PR team, and have kept mostly quiet about it (besides a since-deleted subtweet) — until now.
Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney have shared their side of what happened with Rolling Stone, ahead of their modestly sized tour in support of their upcoming album, No Rain No Flowers. They attribute last year's mess not only to faulty management, but to the Ticketmaster "monopoly" and the "consolidated" music industry.
When asked about ditching Azoff Management, journalist Jason Newman asked if the split was as "amicable" as the firm's statement claimed to be. To which Carney replied, "I mean, we fired their ass. Shit happens."
Later, he revealed that the band never personally considered scaling down the dates, but that management convinced them to. "The plan wasn't there because there were no holds on rooms. It was bullshit," he said. "I don't want to use the term 'lie' because I don't want to get fucking sued, but what was presented didn't exist."
Speaking of not wanting to get sued, Carney said the reason he deleted the tweet explaining that they "got fucked," was to avoid a lawsuit, despite no one threatening to sue him. Auerbach said he woke up to the tweet, and "understood the intensity of it" before declining to elaborate further.
Newman also asked if the band thought it was fair that some publications said the Black Keys might have overestimated their demand if they couldn't fill arenas. Carney rebutted this with sales figures he allegedly saw from the cancelled tour, but mentioned Ticketmaster never consulted with them about ticket pricing:
I don't know, but all I know is this: After the tour was canned, I went through my email, and I had one email from Ticketmaster about the tour on the day it was announced and nothing else in my inbox for six weeks. When I finally went through the numbers after the tour was cancelled, we had sold nearly $10 million worth of tickets, and we had four months till the first show. We just had to take one on the fucking face.
This wasn't a comment in the ticketing giant's favour though, as he clarified, "When you control ticketing, promotion, and all this stuff, and then you get into owning the venues and then having shared interests with management, it just becomes harder and harder [for artists] to do business."
The band also finally spoke about the "America Loves Crypto" show they played in their hometown of Akron, OH, saying they took the gig because they were broke. "It was very simple: We had lost all of our income for the year. We had retainers for people that we were working with," Carney said. "We got offered a lot of money to play a show, and we saw that the Black Pumas had done the same event and we were like, 'Book it.' It's that simple, bro."
When asked about the criticism they got for it, Carney said they were told it "was a bipartisan thing": "If us playing a concert for 300 people is going to sway the whole state's vote, then we have bigger fucking problems, bro."
Though some questions remain unanswered, one thing is abundantly clear: Carney loves using the word "bro." Revisit the Black Keys' callout of us just before their crash out below.