Music licensing unlocks success

IN the back of a huge, gleaming tour bus, The Black Keys’s drummer Patrick Carney is nostalgic for the bad old days.

“When you travel to gigs in little, beaten-up vans, you see a lot of the city you are playing in. The venues are always in the middle of town. You can get out, walk around. Nowadays, it’s arenas, so you don’t experience so much of wherever it is you are. Things are more anonymous.”

Still, for the first eight years of the band, Carney and Dan Auerbach slept in flea-pit motels, travelled in leaky station wagons, and headlined pokey venues. It wasn’t glamorous. “We’ve been there, done that,” says Carney. “The way things are now, it’s a lot more relaxing. At first, doing really big rooms was intimidating. Now, we’re starting to enjoy it.”