The Black Keys song inspired by Can
It wasn’t uncommon for The Black Keys to insert references to other artists throughout their work. The Akron blues rock trio were happy to make direct nods to everyone from Junior Kimbrough to The Beatles, both of whom were covered on the band’s 2002 debut LP, The Big Come Up. Their 2010 single from Brothers, ‘Howlin For You’, famously copies the main beat from Gary Glitter’s ‘Rock and Roll Pt. 2’. It’s not exactly stealing – it’s more like being inspired by a variety of sources.
Evidently, those sources can go as far out as German Krautrock. For the song ‘Tighten Up’, which itself has a title that alludes back to Archie Bell and the Drells’ iconic 1968 single of the same name, drummer Patrick Carney admitted to copping a bit of Can’s 1972 single ‘Vitamin C’ for the song’s main drum part.
“That’s my shitty version of Can’s ‘Vitamin C’ beat,” Carney told Mojo Magazine around the song’s release. “Dan came up with the riff, and we both had the idea of a whistling hook. We made the song, didn’t think anything of it, shelved the thing for a month and a half. That was ‘Tighten Up’. We never thought it would get played on the radio. And then it did. It got played on the radio a lot.”
Guitarist Dan Auerbach had a different view of the song while talking to Billboard about the track. “That was the last song that we did – and the only one with Danger Mouse – and the whole idea was to try to make something that could get played on the radio,” Auerbach claimed. “We realised we could get all the press in the world and do everything we’d done in the past, but the only thing that would be an obvious leg-up was radio airplay.”
Can wasn’t the only inspiration behind the track. “Brian suggested a tempo change in the middle,” Carney added. “We talked about bands who’d done a similar thing, like The Clash with ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go?’. Dan went in the live room and jammed in a different tempo in the same key. We had this whole other section, and I said, ‘Well, I could do a stupid drum solo!’ So I did a whole stupid drum solo, and, surprisingly, it worked.”
Years later, Auerbach admitted that he still didn’t really know what the song was about. “I took a couple of verses out of a book of lyrics and worked around them. I worked like that a lot like then. Sometimes I write songs, and it’s about the words: other times it’s about the vowel sound,” Auerbach said. “If I try to put a smarter word in, it doesn’t sound better. They’re all kinda spontaneous. I have no idea what the song’s about.”
Check out ‘Tighten Up’ down below.
