The Black Keys Fan Lounge

This is a guest post from Ohio native April who, when she’s not wasting her time on The Black Keys Fan Lounge forum, is writing for her excellent music blog Now This Sound Is Brave.

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“So, is that the new LeBrons you got there?” a co-worker at my day job asked upon spotting the photo of the Black Keys that served as my computer desktop wallpaper.

Once I got over the shock of someone at the white collar company I work for in northeastern Ohio recognizing one of my favorite bands on sight, I thought about the parallel my co-worker had drawn. Despite the fact that both Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney had recently written responses (for Rolling Stone and the Wall Street Journal Speakeasy blog, respectively) to the exodus of basketball hero LeBron James from the Cleveland Cavaliers and Ohio, I had not drawn the same parallel myself, but it made sense.

Both LeBron James and the Black Keys grew up in Akron, Ohio, and both made a point of honing and employing their superior talents while remaining in the Greater Cleveland area. To their fans, they offered the possibility that our downtrodden, blue-collar brand of hope would finally pay off. You see, we are an area that loses. Cleveland lost the steel industry, Akron lost the rubber industry, our sports teams – the Cavaliers, the Cleveland Browns, the Cleveland Indians – have built a reputation as losers, and we lost our dignity when our river, the Cuyahoga, caught fire. Despite the turnaround we have made overall since our nadir in the 1970s, all our losses have had a seemingly permanent effect on our mass self-esteem. Our unofficial motto is “There’s always next year”, and, for better or probably for worse, when a light shines in the Greater Cleveland area, we pin all our hopes and dreams on it.

Growing up a misfit in a small farm community twenty minutes outside of Akron, I would often hole up in my room with my stereo set to “Turn that down!” and let the music – which was then, as now, a primary solace and salvation – take me away from the boring, embarrassing place where I lived. That music never seemed to come from here. Sure, we all knew that Devo and Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders were from Akron, but they had moved away long ago. As far as I knew, bands had to move to New York, L.A. or London to have successful careers, so there was still no hometown pride, especially when one of the Pretenders’ most-played songs was the searing anti-cheer “My City Was Gone”.

I grew up, moved away from home and, for a handful of years, made my home in the San Francisco Bay area. Dire economic straits forced me to make a decision, and that decision led me to move back to the Greater Cleveland area in the autumn of 2001, a move I was not thrilled about. At the same time that I was driving across the country in a rental truck, a couple of dudes in Akron were recording songs in a basement mere minutes from the shopping malls and chain restaurants where I had spent many weekends of my youth, and they were getting ready to make a go of it as a real, live band with a recording contract and everything.

The timing was fortuitous for me. When I started seeing mention of this two-man Akron band in the local alternative weeklies like The Cleveland Free Times and Scene, it gave me pause. And when I first heard the Black Keys, they knocked me down. Now it seems impossible that there was ever a time when this music wasn’t a part of me. Whether from being brought up in the same region at roughly the same time or from sharing the same musical influences or just from a coincidental shared aesthetic, the music of the Black Keys resonates with me, in my bones and in my nerves, as few other artists ever have or ever will. The fact that Auerbach and Carney stayed in Akron while building a worldwide fanbase and ever-greater success and looked like they didn’t plan to leave caused me to take another look at the place where I grew up and was living again, and I began to cultivate something akin to pride… though it remains tempered by our mass self-esteem issue and my own misfit antipathy.

So, when Carney moved to New York, it left me with mixed feelings because, while it made me sad to see someone who had been such a champion for the area leave, his reasons for leaving and hitting the “refresh” button on his life were understandable. And besides, we still have Dan! …or maybe not. On the heels of Carney’s move came the news that Auerbach has been looking at houses in Nashville, family being the only anchor keeping him in the area at this point. This mixes the feeling even more. While, again, I fully understand the reasoning behind it, to have both halves of our “hometown” pride light out for other territories stings.

But I, for one, will not spew vitriol at Auerbach if/when he moves – unlike the Cleveland fans who did, and continue to, hurl the most hateful invectives at LeBron James, angry that he did not bring us the championship that they were all convinced was a lockdown when James joined the Cavs – because, frankly, it assuages some of the guilt I’ve felt in considering my own move back out of the area in a couple of years. While Ohio in general, and the Greater Cleveland area in particular, is a fertile birthplace of creativity, it remains a difficult place to grow and evolve.

In the end, no matter where they go, the Black Keys have given us something equal to, or better than, a championship because each time they have recorded an album here, each time their music has been heard and enjoyed everywhere from down the street to the other side of the world, every time Auerbach has announced “We’re the Black Keys from Akron, Ohio”, the Black Keys have raised our profile in the eyes of the world and, for some of us, in our own eyes.

And they still knock me down on a regular basis.

Related posts:

1. The Black Keys Akron, Ohio, Google Map
2. MP3: Free Download Of The Black Keys’ Track ‘Ohio’
3. 2010: The Black Keys’ Year In Review
4. Keeping It In The Auerbach-Carney Family
5. The Nashville Years

Tags: ohio, the black keys