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Music

Patrick Carney (black Keys)

Patrick Carney apparently approaches music festivals like Norman Mailer did backyard cookouts. When he's not weathering the unwanted teenage jock-style revenge techniques of delusional 30-somethings in Rite-Aid Halloween costumes, he's all sorts of...

Photo by Jason Bergman

Patrick Carney apparently approaches music festivals like Norman Mailer did backyard cookouts. When he’s not weathering the unwanted teenage jock-style revenge techniques of delusional 30-somethings in Rite-Aid Halloween costumes, he’s all sorts of things, like the drummer half of the Black Keys, plus a guy who’s the type of cool and hilarious dude your current friends gave up on seven years ago.

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Vice: Have you witnessed anything really truly ridiculous at a recent festival that just stopped you in your tracks, good or bad?

Patrick:

The most retarded thing I’ve seen happened this past summer­—it was at the Virgin Festival in Baltimore, and we were scheduled to go on after Lil Wayne. We get to the festival at fucking eight in the morning. We wander around all day bored out of our minds, and it finally comes time for us to play so we walk over to the stage area and 800 of Lil Wayne’s friends are up on the stage, trying to turn everything into a hip-hop video, and we notice that Lil Wayne isn’t even up there. So we watch this for a while, and when our set is scheduled to start, Lil Wayne actually gets onstage for 10 or 15 minutes, which is the typical hip-hop performance length.

Even though he fell into the supershort hip-hop-set cliché, he was so late that you guys… Well, did you guys play at all?

That’s the thing, we played for 10 minutes and got paid an insane amount of money and just drove home. So that was good and bad but definitely ridiculous.

So… what did you like about playing All Tomorrow’s Parties?

It’s hard to contribute anything specifically, because all festivals are pretty much the same, except that the hippie-to-nonhippie ratio changes a little for each one. They’re hot as fuck, you can’t, well,

I

can’t ever get comfortable at a festival.

With fests like Bonnaroo, there’s a strong hippie element. They were born of the jam-band culture, they were exclusively jam-band festivals at the beginning, whereas the Pitchfork Festival is born of that specific culture, whatever that is.

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The Pitchfork Festival is born out of the desire to make money off the Pitchfork culture. That’s what most of the festivals are about, making money. I guess the best festival I ever went to was the Columbus Music Festival, which is sadly no more, in 2002. We played in a gymnasium, and there were a lot of interesting bands, Glass Candy played, the Locust… I got into a fight with the drummer and keyboard player of the Locust.

Ooh, tell me about that one.

Yep. My brother and I were standing around talking, and they walked up and started talking to us. One of them put a cigarette out in my brother’s half-empty beer can, then they started acting like high school bullies or something. I couldn’t believe that they were acting like such dicks. I put them both in headlocks and fell backward onto a big trash bag full of broken bottles, and I wouldn’t let go, I started rolling around with them still in the headlocks. I was laughing the whole fucking time, I thought that it was hilarious, but they were extremely pissed off. They couldn’t get out and started biting me. So the next time we went to San Diego, we were touring in a Buick Century, and when we came out of the club, the entire car was covered in Locust stickers. It took at least two hours to peel all of them off.

Those guys are my age, what are they going to do next, drive to Ohio and rut your yard, roll your house? That’s what kids in high school do.

The only people who do things like that are spoiled shits who never had to work for a living. Those are the only people that will ruin your things. The only times I’ve gotten into a fight—I never get into them because I can’t fight—it’s been at festivals and with rich, spoiled kids.