It’s tough when you’re in the nation’s top blues-based two-person rock combo, and another blues-based two-person rock combo comes along and gets some serious hosannas from the likes of Rolling Stone as well as some decent sales….. The blood between Jack White of the White Stripes and two fellas from Akron calling themselves the Black Keys has been pretty bad at least as far back as the time White urged his former wife, Karen Elson, to pull their two kids from the Nashville-area school that Dan Auerbach’s daughter had recently joined.
White has accused the Black Keys of ripping off the White Stripes sound. Then last year, there was some kind of reconciliation, evidenced by White’s statement of late May 2014 that he wishes “the Black Keys all the success they can get.”
Today has seen a kind of Twitter war (complete with truce) erupt between Jack White and Patrick Carney, the drummer of the Black Keys, however, including some indication that there might have been a scuffle or something like that. According to Pitchfork, Carney started the whole thing off with this series of tweets (which have since been deleted) in which he indicated that White, as a “40 year old bully,” “tried to fight” a “35 year old nerd” at “a bar in Nyc” and also called White “a bully asshole” and “basically billy corgan’s dumb ass zero t-shirt in human form.”
I’ve never met jack white.
— Patrick Carney (@patrickcarney) September 14, 2015Until last night.
— Patrick Carney (@patrickcarney) September 14, 2015He came to a bar in Nyc I go to a lot with a few friends and tried to fight me.
— Patrick Carney (@patrickcarney) September 14, 2015I don’t fight and don’t get fighting but he was mad!!!
— Patrick Carney (@patrickcarney) September 14, 2015He is why I play music. The bully assholes who made me feel like nothing. Music was a private non competitive thing.
— Patrick Carney (@patrickcarney) September 14, 2015Not sure what he’s unhappy with cuz I just liked Zeppelin a lot and wanted to play guitar. Cut my pinky off and ended up being a drummer
— Patrick Carney (@patrickcarney) September 14, 2015Not the best drummer but a passionate one. But any way jack white. A 40 year old bully tried to fight the 35 year old nerd.
— Patrick Carney (@patrickcarney) September 14, 2015It might get loud but it might also get really really sad and pathetic.
— Patrick Carney (@patrickcarney) September 14, 2015Jack white is basically billy corgan’s dumb ass zero t-shirt in human form.
— Patrick Carney (@patrickcarney) September 14, 2015
White’s first response to the tweets was to issue a statement to Pitchfork directed at Carney. The statement included the following: “Nobody tried to fight you, Patrick. ... Nobody touched you or ‘bullied’ you. You were asked a question you couldn’t answer so you walked away. So quit whining to the Internet and speak face to face like a human being. End of story.”
As is the way these things often turn out, somehow White and Carney immediately contacted each other and have done a complete about-face from the trash talking earlier in the day. At 11:03 a.m. Carney tweeted that he had “Talked to jack for an hour he’s cool. All good.” For his part, about half an hour later, White’s label Third Man Records tweeted, “‘From one musician to another, you have my respect Patrick Carney.’ -Jack White,” as a way of signaling that both sides of the dispute now view the matter as closed.
For observers, however, the incident remains puzzling. Did Jack White shove Patrick Carney? And if not, why did Carney suggest that such a thing happened? At a minimum, despite whatever olive branches are being flung into the fray, it remains obvious that the relationship between Jack White and his Nashville neighbors Patrick Carney and Dan Auerbach might remain fraught.
After the jump, the White Stripes play live in Germany from 2007…