The story behind The Black Keys’ ‘Lonely Boy’ music video
Creating a potent indie rock anthem is a formidable task on its own, but when you pair it with an iconic music video, you’ve struck pure gold. In 2011, The Black Keys unveiled the video for ‘Lonely Boy’, the opening track from their studio album El Camino and the record’s lead single. Surpassing 400,000 views within 24 hours, it became evident that the unassuming yet powerful artistry of this creation was unstoppable.
The secret ingredient to El Camino was its rawness. As lead singer Dan Auerbach explained, every song was recorded in his Easy Eye Studio in Nashville, Tennessee. “Almost every song on the record has a foundation of live drums and guitar together in the room,” he told Spin. “It’s guitar bleeding into the drum mics. It’s pretty raw.”
This video is a unique gem as well. It stars Derrick T. Tuggle, an actor, musician, and part-time security guard, who dances and lip-syncs to the song in front of the Pepper Tree Motel in North Hollywood. Captured in a single take, this video aligns with the tradition of seemingly spontaneous dance clips, reminiscent of iconic moments like David Bowie and Mick Jagger’s ‘Dancing In The Street’ and Fatboy Slim’s ‘Praise You’.
Interestingly, however, Tuggle’s appearance nearly didn’t happen at all. He told MTV News: “I was cast as an extra, and there were maybe six or seven other people who were supposedly going to be in the video. I was the first one to perform in the video. It was a motel shot where the guys from the Black Keys come and give me the keys to their motel room. The director just sort of noticed me dancing and asked me, ‘Can you perform?’ I said, ‘I can dance, anybody can dance,’ so I took some moves from everybody: John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction, the Carlton Banks dance from The Fresh Prince and a little bit of Michael Jackson, so it was a smorgasbord of everybody in there.”
Drummer Patrick Carney also admitted that the band’s original plans for the video didn’t involve Tuggle at all. “There was supposed to be [a proper video for the song], but there is not. We shot a whole video here in Los Angeles about two months ago, but we didn’t like it, so we scrapped the whole thing,” he explained, “Except for the footage of Derrick Tuggle dancing, which was a complete accident. … He had an hour to listen to the song, and he memorised all the lyrics and he came up with the dance, and he basically did that on his own. And if we didn’t have that footage, we would not have a video for the song.”
The song’s signature riff, according to Auerbach, started with a riff that they built “from the ground up”, after they were “listening to old rock ‘n’ roll records, from the ’50s. ’60s, ’70s, ’80s. Music that was very simple and fun – drums, bass, guitars, organ and not a lot of bells and whistles on top.” This became a trend for The Black Keys, and an integral part of their widespread appeal, as witnessed in other hits like ‘Howlin’ for You’.
In a conversation with Rolling Stone, Auerbach explained the genesis of the distinctive fuzz riffs in ‘Howlin’ for You’, attributing them to the unique tonality of his Supro Martinique guitar. Similar to the formation of ‘Lonely Boy’, ‘Howlin for You’ also took inspiration from vintage rock and roll, but the recording process presented some challenges, as Patrick Carney recollected: “You could only hear back twelve channels at a time. We could never hear the whole song constructed, so we didn’t use many tracks. So there’s a lot of space on this record and it was a kind of accidental thing that was amazing.”
