Alfred McMoore: the outsider artist who named The Black Keys
Most bands have come close to a breakup when it came down to deciding on the name of their outfit. You might like playing music together and may even have a few shared interests outside of music, but when it comes to putting a bunch of words together to tie your sound together, even the most talented artists can’t be asked to pick anything. Although The Black Keys didn’t have to worry about deciding among just two people, Alfred McMoore was just the person to give them those magic words.
By the time that the band started, though, their brand of bluesy rock and roll had been going on for long past its ‘sell-by’ date. Since The White Stripes had called it quits after Icky Thump, the entire genre felt like it was limping along before it ground to a halt, making a lot of their later work look like the kind of sad dad music that blares out of a Ford truck commercial.
For as much as the group’s sound felt homogenised as they went along, the entire premise of their name was about being the opposite of the mainstream. When living in Akron, Ohio, both Patrick Carney and Dan Auerbach had come across McMoore as one of the few avant-garde artists working on the scene.
Responsible for playing on the fringes of modern music, Carney became friends with McMoore through his neighbour Chuck Auerbach, Dan’s father. While McMoore meant well when talking to both of the musicians, the term ‘black keys’ was not exactly meant to put them in the best light.
Given how a piano is laid out, the black keys are known as “accidentals” if you’re playing in the home key of C. They might be able to add some colour or texture to a song in C, but if you use it in the wrong context, it will sound like you should probably go back to the drawing board before playing again.
McMoore would usually call the members that when they were doing tasks for him, with Carney recalling, “We both knew this outsider artist named Alfred McMoore. He would leave these messages saying, ‘If you don’t bring me crayons and pipes back up, you’re a D flat. You’re a black key. Don’t be a black key’. So I said we should the band ‘The Black Keys’.”
Even though the whole thing may have been meant as a tongue-in-cheek musician joke, The Black Keys is actually a far better name than anyone could have come up with when thinking about it. Considering that the whole ethos is about making something that’s somewhat out of place, the name would probably be better served for an art rock outfit than the kind of rock band that made songs like ‘Howlin’ For You’.
As they proceeded to get bigger and bigger, though, they ended up becoming one of the few groups on the album charts that could actually bring rock to the masses, feeling like a fish out of water playing songs like ‘Gold on the Ceiling’ with the other flavours of the day. The Black Keys may have been a standard blues act by many people’s assessments, but in the world of pop music, they did live up to being the one band that wasn’t exactly the same as their contemporaries.
