Changing their spots, the Black Keys—Pat Carney and Dan Auerbach (foreground)—embraced collaboration full-on for their new album, with the tongue-in-cheek title Ohio Players.
There are so many facets and reflections, so many angles beaming influences and ideas … and it’s clearly the product of time—a work Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney say they could not have completed earlier in their partnership, although there has been lots of groundwork along the way.
“It’s amazing to be 20 years into our career and have a new trick to be able to do, which is collaboration,” says Auerbach, when asked about the sprawl of styles and the roster of mighty contributors—including Noel Gallagher and Beck—on Ohio Players. “That’s kind of the key to most people’s success throughout musical history, but we’ve shied away from it, extremely. Now, it’s lit a fire under our asses, and the possibilities feel endless.
“Pat and I are at the point in our careers where we feel like letting other people into our space. We never used to be.”—Dan Auerbach
“We were just too insecure back in there,” he continues. “But now we’ve produced enough records, we’ve worked with enough people, so it’s really fun for us. Pat and I are at the point in our careers where we feel like letting other people into our space. We never used to be. And at the same time, our own relationship is tighter than it’s ever been.”
The Black Keys - Beautiful People (Stay High) ("Official" Video)
Revisiting the Black Keys’ first two albums, The Big Come Up and Thickfreakness, it’s hard to imagine they would become an international juggernaut and that Auerbach, their singer and guitarist, would evolve into one of the most interesting players, producers, and songwriters in modern American music. After all, the duo’s initial recordings were raw as uncooked bacon—recorded in a basement in Akron, Ohio, with mics bought on eBay—and their repertoire bridged garage rock and a style, cultivated by North Mississippi hill country rural bluesmen Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside, that’s so rough and thunderous that even some hardcore fans of that genre had difficulty comprehending it.
But Auerbach and Carney’s intelligence, empathy, and history as collaborators might be more apparent to their fans than it seemingly was, at least until this album got underway a few years ago, to them. Starting with 2008’s Attack & Release, they’ve worked with Danger Mouse as a producer and co-writer; Mos Def, Ludacris, Q-Tip, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, RZA, and other hip-hop luminaries on their 2009 Blakroc album; North Mississippi firebrands Kenny Brown and Eric Deaton on 2021’s blues payback Delta Kream; even Billy Gibbons and Sierra Ferrell on 2022’s raucous Dropout Boogie. And Auerbach’s co-op rock band, the Arcs, recorded two acclaimed albums and toured the world, while his second solo recording, 2017’s Waiting on a Song, was a spelunk into the heart of his adopted hometown Nashville’s studio history, drawing on a cross-generational cast of legendary session players. Then, there’s the guitarist’s football-field-long production credits, ranging from the Black Diamond Heavies to Dr. John and Grace Potter to La Luz to CeeLo Green to Marcus King to Hermanos Guitiérrez to Robert Finley and Yola.
“We got to this maturity as a band where not only can we call these friends, but we can deliver music our idols want to play on.”—Pat Carney
Sometimes, when you’re in the forest, all you can see are the trees. But now, after all that experience, the Black Keys’ omnivorous tastes, ceaseless drive, and undeniable success tilted their creative compass and comfort zone to Ohio Players, which might be poetically described as an album of peace, soul, and thunder. Also, eclectic and skillful af. Here, Auerbach and his drumming buddy have evolved what sounds like a mastery of every genre they’ve chosen to assimilate over the years: blues, jazz, country, classic pop, rock in its old and new variants, soul, hip-hop … even ambient music. Spend 20 minutes listening to the anthemic chords of “On the Game,” a co-write with Noel Gallagher; the fuzz fests “Paper Crown” and “Everytime You Leave,” the latter co-written with Beck; the psychedelic hip-hop-pop of “Candy and Her Friends;” and the period-perfect reworking of William Bell’s 1968 Stax hit “Forgot to Be Your Lover,” and you’ll get lost in the vibe—a happy time traveler through roots-informed music’s past and present.
The band’s new release was made at the same time as they were creating their last few albums, with Dan Auerbach and Pat Carney collecting the results of their collaboration wish list.
The album’s other spark plugs include hip-hop-beat brainiac and producer Dan the Automator; Memphis rap legends Juicy J (of Three 6 Mafia) and Lil Noid; producer/guitarist Angelo Petraglia, who’s made records with Kings of Leon and many others; and Nashville session hero Tom Bukovac, a truly estimable guitarist.
Of course, the biggest surprise is Gallagher, who co-wrote three rockers for Ohio Players, lending his patently anthemic touch. As it turns out, Gallagher is a big Black Keys fan, and in 2009, the duo were invited to open for his former band, Oasis. “But we were busy,” Carney says, “and they broke up.”
Despite a four-year hiatus from 2015 to 2019, the Black Keys stayed busy—even separately, during that break. They resumed making Black Keys albums in 2018, with ‘Let’s Rock’, and while they were creating its two successive releases, Auerbach and Carney also launched the series of collaborations that yielded Ohio Players.
“We had this epiphany—we can call our friends to help us make music,” Carney says. “It’s funny because we both write songs with other people, but we got to this maturity as a band where not only can we call these friends, but we can deliver music our idols want to play on.”“Noel Gallagher was feeling inspired because he hadn’t recorded like that. It’s not really common to have zero baffles between the vocals and the drums.”—Dan Auerbach
The first call was to Beck—a major influence on Auerbach and Carney when they were growing up in Akron. “His aesthetic was incredible,” Auerbach says. “He wore his influences on his sleeve, and we learned from that. There was someone showing us a way to go.” Beck was also an early Black Keys fan, and took them on tour in 2003. He is on half of Ohio Players’ 14 tracks as a writer, vocalist, guitarist, and keys player.“
After we’d gotten Beck in the studio, we were throwing names back and forth—‘Who else would be meaningful and write big songs we like?,’” says Auerbach. “Noel was at the top of the list.” The Keys’ manager, and even Gallagher’s team, when initially approached, responded that the former Oasis co-leader simply doesn’t co-write. “But we got a message back a few days later that said he’d be down if we came to London. We didn’t know if it was going to work, but after we recorded one song the first day, it took all our nervousness away.” By the end of a week, they had three numbers for Ohio Players.
Dan Auerbach's Gear
Dan Auerbach plays one of his original Supros in concert in 2023. He has a collection of vintage guitars, including instruments owned by Hound Dog Taylor and Mississippi Fred McDowell.
Photo by Jordi Vidal
Guitars
- 1960 Fender Telecaster Deluxe
- 1965 Teisco Del Rey ET-300
- Gibson J-45
- Danelectro Vincent Bell Signature Coral Firefly
Amp
- 1950s narrow-panel tweed Deluxe
Effects
- Analog Man Sun Face
- Marshall SupaFuzz
- Fulltone Octafuzz
- Vintage flanger
- Strymon El Capistan
- Xotic RC Booster
- Custom fuzz (gift from Pat Carney)
Picks, Strings, & Slides
- National metal finger pick
- Custom picks
- SIT .011 sets
- Brass slide
“That was amazing on a lot of levels,” Auerbach continues. “It was fun as hell. We’d really wanted to go to Toe Rag Studios in London and record there. Toe Rag is such an amazing studio. It’s one room, no vocal booths or anything like that—smaller than a single-car garage. [The all-analog space is where Wolf Alice, Tame Impala, the Kills, James Hunter, Hugh Cornwell, and many others have recorded.] Pat’s got a drum kit, I’m on guitar, and Noel’s playing his ES-335 most of the time, with Leon Michaels on this weird little German ’60s keyboard, and [engineer] Liam Watson behind the old, beautiful desk.”
After the sessions, Auerbach and Carney dubbed Gallagher “the chord lord.” “He would sit there and cycle through chords until he found that one that worked with mine,” Auerbach recounts. The songs they cut, “On the Game,” “Only Love Matters,” and “You’ll Pay,” were essentially recorded live, with additions—like Bukovac’s guitar—done at Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound studio in Nashville. “Every time we listened to a playback, it sounded so good that it was inspiring, and Noel was feeling inspired because he hadn’t recorded like that before. It’s not really common to have zero baffles between the vocals and the drums. We were just going for it.”
“I definitely tend to classic sounds, and then it’s nice to be able to move from there, finding new ways to use them.”—Dan Auerbach
If anything, collaborators like Gallagher and Beck have amplified the Black Keys’ already impressive way with hooks and choruses—reinforced as usual by Auerbach’s guitar, which, regardless of musical setting, always seems rooted in the tones of the ’60s and ’70s.
“I definitely tend to classic sounds,” he says, “and then it’s nice to be able to move from there, finding new ways to use them. But just being able to find that classic sound has always been thrilling. It’s finding the right fuzz pedal or finding the right combination of things that make that magic that’s on all of this stuff.”
On their most recent major tour, the Black Keys hit the road as a sextet. “Our band is so capable,” says Auerbach. “The guys that we’ve been touring with sing and play percussion and keyboards, so we can recreate anything, which is awesome.”
Photo by Debi Del Grande
Fuzz has long been an important element of Auerbach’s sound, and it expands the dimensions of “Please Me (Till I’m Satisfied),” “Paper Crown,” and others. Auerbach primarily used three fuzz pedals on Ohio Players: an Analog Man Sun Face, Marshall SupaFuzz, and Fulltone Octafuzz—sometimes in combination, mostly driving a narrow-panel tweed Deluxe when he was on home turf at Easy Eye. But there’s plenty of sweet stuff in the grooves, too. In particular, the cover of “Forgot to Be Your Lover” enjoys not only a sweeping string arrangement but a lovely, chiming phase-shifted guitar that pairs perfectly with Auerbach’s near-falsetto vocal—another element of his singing that he’s perfected over time. (“My family would sing bluegrass, with all those falsetto parts, so it never felt out of the realm of possibility for me—although I never had the balls to do that until we made the Blakroc album, and we were messing around and experimenting,” he notes.) “Forgot to Be Your Lover” was done at Valentine Recording Studios in Los Angeles, a room frozen in time, left exactly as it was after its last remodeling in 1975—a place perfect for the track’s old-school vibe.
With its intuitive intersections of locations, collaborators, and the Black Keys’ realization of the strength of their own artistry, maybe there was some Zen at work during the Ohio Players sessions. And perhaps beyond. As we end our conversation, Auerbach offers an anecdote: “I was just making a record with Early James yesterday, in a friend’s hundred-plus-years-old home. As I was getting ready to record, my friend said, ‘Hey, I’ve got this guitar in a case here. Your friend dropped it off for you a couple years ago. He couldn’t get ahold of you or something.’ It was an old Supro Res-O-Glass that I had bought in Akron and completely forgotten about. I had loaned it to somebody 10 years ago. We took it out of the case. The strings on it were prehistoric, rusty, and we plugged it into a little black-panel Champ, and James played slide guitar on it, and it’s got a little Airline pickup. God! It sounded so amazing. And it was just like all kinds of wrong—hadn’t seen a luthier in a decade. You know what I mean? But it was the perfect thing for the sound that we were looking for. The perfect thing.”
YouTube It
On October 9, 2023, the Black Keys threw a blues party at Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl, digging into their North Mississippi hill country sonic roots with Magnolia State ringers Kenny Brown on guitar and Eric Deaton on bass. Here, they play “Fireman Ring the Bell,” a variation on the “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” theme by the late R.L. Burnside.
When some people travel, they take photos on their phone to remember the trip. Old-soul voyagers will recount their adventures with pen and paper. But for Alejandro and Estevan Gutiérrez, who together make the globetrotting Ecuadorian-Swiss duo Hermanos Gutiérrez, their experiences conjure soundtracks, and a visit years ago to the American Southwest changed their sound forever.
A couple years after forming their duo, the brothers took a trip through Death Valley and the Mojave Desert. “It just blew our minds,” Estevan told PG. The desert, he says, “is where our music was born.”
“Part of what we’re doing is traveling together as brothers,” Alejandro told PG in 2022. “We go to places, we come back and we’re feeling inspired, and we feel like we’ve gotta write something about this place.”
After finding bountiful inspiration in the West, the duo began turning out mystical compositions, like sonic souvenirs and passport stamps on their consciousness. “It’s just beautiful where we can go with this music,” Alejandro said last year. “It’s just my brother and I together, and we’re so happy to have this.”
The sold-out Hermanos Gutiérrez concert at Nashville’s Basement East on June 20th marked their first time performing in Music City since recording El Bueno Y El Malo with Dan Auerbach at Easy Eye Sound in 2022. The pair invited PG’s Chris Kies onstage to decode their spellbinding cinematic sounds. The conversation touched on their symbiotic alchemy, enchanting hollowbodies, and how a single Strymon reset their slow-burn backdrop.
Brought to you by D’Addario Nexxus 360 Tuner.Black Mamba
Like their muse the desert, the brothers’ setups are sparse. Each one totes a single hollowbody. Alejandro travels with his 1963 Silvertone 1446, which is stock except for a refret and custom-made, snake-like Bigsby arm, both done by longtime Dan Auerbach tech Dan Johnson. (You might recognize Dan from his three different Black Keys Rig Rundowns. Check out the latest one from 2019!)
Alejandro is a fingerstyle player (inspired by Estevan) and, at the suggestion of Johnson, uses Pyramid Gold Heavy (.013–.052).
Silver Serpent
For songs like “Tres Hermanos,” Alejandro gets down with this 1940s Rickenbacker Electro NS lap steel.
Snakecharmer
Estevan connected with Dan Auerbach’s 1958 Gretsch 6120 “Rudy” while tracking El Bueno Y El Malo at Easy Eye Sound last year. For road duties, he never leaves home without his own Gretsch G6120T-59 Vintage Select 1959 Chet Atkins hollowbody. Inspired by a random YouTube video of an older gentleman playing Santo & Johnny’s “Sleep Walk,” Estevan built a partnership with the 6120. “I’ve tried many, many guitars, but none of them gives me the sound that is me except this Gretsch,” he says. Estevan puts D’Addario EXL 115 (.011–.049) strings on his creamy crusader.
Slither
Check out all the hip hardware substitutions and rattlesnake-approved artwork on Estevan’s 6120.
Lucky Loaner
Given that Nashville and Easy Eye have become an oasis for Hermanos Gutiérrez, it makes sense they would take advantage of the studio’s library of vintage and vibey gear. For the Basement East show, Alejandro borrowed a 1960s Fender Deluxe Reverb from Easy Eye and plugged into the first input of the vibrato circuit.
Spaghetti in Stereo
When creating El Bueno Y El Malo, Estevan plugged into Auerbach’s vintage Magnatone for the whole recording process. (You can really hear the amp’s magic vibrato pulsing during the album’s opening title track.) For this show, he compromised by running his 6120 into a modern Magnatone Panoramic Stereo model.
Alejandro Gutiérrez’s Pedalboard
Alejandro packs light with a compact board that holds a MXR Dyna Comp Mini, a Boss GE-7 Equalizer, a Strymon Flint, and the influential Strymon El Capistan. While Estevan discovered the El Cap and unlocked its magic for Hermanos Gutiérrez (more on that in a second), Alejandro has molded it to his sound in different ways. “I use it as a layer,” he explains. “Really subtle. My brother uses it more as a delay. He has this horse sound, like this galloping sound he can create with his slapping, which only he can do.” A Boss TU-3 Chromatic Tuner keeps the Silvertone in line.
Estevan Gutiérrez’s Pedalboard
You can see that Estevan utilizes nearly every square inch of his pedalboard. Overlaps between the brothers’ boards include the MXR Dyna Comp Mini, the Strymon Flint, and the aforementioned Strymon El Capistan. You might think their setup is basic now, but they used to play sans pedals. Eventually, Estevan discovered the Strymon El Capistan, and their sound was never the same. “I remember that day,” he recounted to PG about first playing the pedal. “I fell in love. I knew it was gonna change something in our sound.” As soon as he purchased the El Capistan, he called his brother and said, “You have to buy this. This is gonna be next level for us.”
The remaining effects for Estevan include a Malekko Omicron Vibrato, a Boss RC-500 Loop Station, and a Boss TU-3 Chromatic Tuner (off the board) keeps his Gretsch in check. Lastly, you’ll notice a G7th Performance 3 ART Capo on the pedalboard, too.
On a Tuesday morning in early May, while taking a break from mowing the lawn of his home just outside Nashville, Roe almost sounds puzzled retracing his steps: touring and recording with Johnny Cash and Charlie Louvin, backing up Dwight Yoakam and Loretta Lynn, working as the in-house bassist for Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound and as a coveted hired-gun session musician and mainstay in the Nashville gig circuit. “A jack-of-all-trades and an expert at none,” he quips.
That aside, Roe’s self-taught and intuitive upbringing on bass have made him a stylistic chameleon, with perhaps a deeper connection to the rhythms and feel of each genre he plays. His playing evidences a seamless quilting-together of his teachers—’50s, ’60s, and ’70s radio-pop sweetness, the swagger of his mother’s country records, the calm confidence of West Coast Americana, the flair and bravado of funk and disco. His bass parts are classic and unimpeachable, witness marks of a player who learned, with his body and spirit alongside his brain, how to play the bass in a way that people will want to hear.
Dave Roe lays down a track at his Nashville Home Studio, which he named Seven Deadly Sins.
Photo courtesy of Dave Roe
Roe’s path from cover-band grinder in island tourist bars to one of the country’s most sought-after bass players might not make technical sense on paper. Thousands of others have started out the same way and never advanced beyond their hometowns. It doesn’t fit into the tidy algorithmic churn of modern life. But music isn’t about algorithms and optimization—not all of it, not yet. It’s still about feel and soul and heart, and a bit of luck.
Roe’s father was a military man, whose service eventually took him and his family to the middle of the Pacific Ocean. He was stationed in a small town called EwaBeach about 40 miles outside of Honolulu on Hawaii’s third-largest island, Oahu. This is where Roe grew up. He was a drummer before he ever picked up a bass, but in high school, without any local bass players, Roe’s friends elected him to take up the instrument. His first bass wasn’t a bass at all: It was a 6-string Silvertone electric guitar, which Roe restrung with bass strings. “That didn’t last very long,” he says.
Roe didn’t have the money to buy a proper bass, so in 1969, his high-school sweetheart’s father went with him to a music store in Honolulu and signed for a Fender Jazz Bass and an old Guild amp for Roe. “That’s when I got my first really good gear,” he remembers.
Getting a real bass was one thing. Learning to play it was another. And Roe did it all himself—he’s still never taken a single formal lesson. “I sat down with records and taught myself,” he says. “I was a big Top 40 enthusiast. I loved anything that was on the radio.” That included the usual suspects: Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Cream, the Rolling Stones. “That’s really where I cut my teeth,” Roe continues, “just playing the blues and hippie rock and stuff like that.” Roe’s first band, a power trio playing covers by Chuck Berry and other early rock ’n’ roll pioneers, worked its way up to opening for Grand Funk Railroad in Honolulu.
Roe rips it up with guitarist Chris Casello at Robert’s Western World on Nashville’s Broadway entertainment strip.
Photo by Elise Casello
Roe moved east off Oahu to Maui in 1971 and joined a country outfit at a critical moment. Due to its relative proximity, the West Coast scene had an outsized impact on the island’s cultural imports, and once the hippie-country and Laurel Canyon folk waves swept over California in the late ’60s and early ’70s, it didn’t take long for it to reach Roe’s radio. His mother was a country fan and imparted some early affection for the genre, and, later, Roe would catch Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and the Burrito Brothers when they toured Hawaii.
Roe didn’t sit still for long. After the country stint, he moved back to downtown Honolulu and played in a rhythm and blues band. In the mid ’70s, he went through a “real heavy” disco and funk phase, and dabbled in prog rock and jazz, too. “I was a working Top 40 musician,” says Roe. “When you work in a tourist town, you have to learn how to play a bunch of different stuff.” His learning technique was the same as ever: “I just would listen and play and try to pick up stuff and copy people. That’s all I did.”
But by the final years of that decade, the magic feeling was getting harder to find. There weren’t enough opportunities to create and live on playing original music, and after a decade of playing covers for tourists, it was time for something new. He settled on Nashville. “I just put my socks in a bag and took off,” says Roe.
Luckily, Roe had an insider in Music City. His cousin, a comedian and professional entertainer, lived in Nashville and let Roe crash with him when he arrived. More than that, he set Roe up with his first gig. His cousin knew folks at the Grand Ole Opry, and took Roe along to a show one evening. Roe was introduced to country artist Charlie Louvin that night, and as fate would have it, Louvin was looking for a bassist. Roe expected to be asked to audition, but Louvin simply told him when the bus was leaving for the tour. “That was a really good gig at the time, a highly respected gig,” says Roe. “That was really beneficial to me.”
Dave Roe's Gear
Roe gets ready for a take, with one of his Fender electrics along for the session.
Photo courtesy of Dave Roe
Basses
- 1964 Fender Jazz Bass
- Alien Audio 5-string bass
- Lemur Music Jupiter upright bass (in studio)
- Blast Cult upright bass (live)
Amps
- Ampeg B4 Head and 410 Cabinet
Strings
- Dunlop .045–.105 flatwound strings for electric
- Pirastro Evah’s for upright
It can be hard to tell sometimes when a moment is the beginning of something, or if it started even before. Both things can be true, but playing with Louvin certainly seems like a critical moment in Roe’s career. After playing with Louvin for three months, Roe was recommended to Jerry Reed, who hired him for his live band. He says gigging with Reed and his band took things to another level. Reed’s musicians, including Kerry Marx and the Blackmon Brothers, were aces, and playing alongside them meant Roe was, too.
Roe says from then on, his career had “a movement to it.” After working with Reed, he joined Chet Atkins for a short stint (“It doesn’t even feel like I was really there,” he admits), and for the next 20 years, he worked the road with a rotating cast of country greats: Mel Tillis, Dottie West, Vince Gill, and Faith Hill all tapped Roe for touring. By the early ’90s, he’d begun doing session work in addition to touring gigs.
Roe was on a break from touring with Vern Gosdin in 1992 when he got a phone call at home that changed his life. On the other end of the line was an unmistakable voice. It was Johnny Cash. Cash’s publicist had jammed with Roe around town and mentioned him to Cash, who wanted Roe to play with him. “He just said, ‘I want you to come and play in my band, and you’re gonna have to play upright bass,’” recalls Roe, who accepted immediately. There was one problem: He had never played upright bass.
“I think it was sort of understood that I would know the style, but I didn’t,” laughs Roe. He did what he’d always done. He figured it out on his own. He borrowed an upright bass and started to teach himself the slap-bass rhythms and plucking styles of Cash’s rockabilly-leaning repertoire. “I had to pull my bootstraps up and get after it,” Roe chuckles. As that first call was winding down, Roe told Cash that he’d see him at rehearsal. “He said, ‘Well, we don’t really rehearse,’” says Roe. “Then I said, ‘I guess I’ll see you at soundcheck.’ He goes, ‘I really don’t do soundchecks, either, so I’ll just see you there.’”
Roe was encouraged to play the upright bass by a call from none other than Johnny Cash. Here, he cuts a track at Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound studio in Nashville. He is a frequent contributor to Auerbach-produced albums, including Auerbach’s own Waiting on a Song and the Pretenders’ Alone.
Photo courtesy of Dave Roe
Roe describes the first gig with Cash, around a week later in Charleston, West Virginia, as “completely flying by the seat of my pants, with my ear. I didn’t feel good at all. I just felt like I wasn’t the right guy.” But Roe kept working at it. He credits Cash with giving him a shot even though he wasn’t experienced. “He was very patient with me, and the rest of the guys in the band helped me along to develop that style,” says Roe. “There were other guys here [in Nashville] that were already doing that [style]. They could have easily got them. I can’t tell you to this day why they hung in there with me, but they did.”
Roe played bass with Cash until the Man in Black’s retirement from live performances in the late ’90s, and did session work on the singer’s intimate American records. For the first of the series, 1994’s American Recordings, Roe joined Cash and producer Rick Rubin to rehearse and feel out the songs before Cash ultimately recorded them solo. They practiced and recorded at Cash’s cabin studio near Hendersonville, Tennessee, and Roe joined them later when they did overdubs at Rubin’s Hollywood studio. The working relationship was one of the most profound and important of Roe’s career. “Johnny was sort of a Buddha to me, man,” says Roe. “He’s the nicest man I’ve ever had in my life. I learned a lot.”
Working with Cash marked another important transition period for Roe. Back in those days, he says, a professional musician moved to Nashville with the understanding that they’d work the road until they could land a studio gig and settle in one spot for a while. For Roe, that happened after he was hired by Cash and country singer Dwight Yoakam, with whom Roe played for four years. Given Yoakam’s and Cash’s high profiles and the proportionate pay for their musicians, Roe had more time to himself and less need to get back out on the road for another paycheck. Not that he didn’t like the road, though. “To be honest with you, if I had been offered another good road gig, I probably would’ve taken it,” says Roe. “But it just worked out this way.”
Dave Roe and his frequent collaborator Kenny Vaughan at Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge in Madison, Tennessee, with their band, the SloBeats.
Photo courtesy of Dave Roe
Full-time session work required yet another pivot. Studio players in the city communicated and played with the Nashville Number System, a method of transcribing music by denoting the scale degree on which a chord is built, and thanks to his time in Hawaii, Roe was prepared. Some of the older jazz players back home had introduced him to the system when he was starting out, so he hit the ground running.
Roe spent the next 10 years doing session work and around-town gigs when his next “big break” came. The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach called him up in 2015 and asked Roe to join a crew of veterans to back him up on his Easy Eye Sound recordings. It turned out that Cash’s engineer, Dave Ferguson, had recommended Roe to Auerbach. Roe became part of Auerbach’s in-house band at his downtown Nashville studio, where he got to work with a lot of the “old-timers”—like Bobby Woods, Russ Pahl, and Billy Sanford. Before long, though, he had joined their ranks. “I’m an old-timer now,” he laughs. And Roe considers his performance on Auerbach’s “Shine on Me,” from the Waiting on a Song album, among his best recorded performances.
Like most musicians, Roe has spent the last few years off the road. He’s focused on demo and custom tracks via work at his own studio, Seven Deadly Sins, and remote collaborations on platforms like AirGigs. He played on Brian Setzer’s 2021 solo record, Gotta Have The Rumble, and his long-time Nashville outfit the SloBeats, with guitarist Kenny Vaughan and Average White Band drummer Pete Abbott, is stirring from its hiatus. His son, drummer Jerry Roe, has worked his way into becoming a coveted Nashville session player. The apple didn’t fall far.
Like all great Nashville session bass players, Roe has the ability to learn tunes and adapt to different styles quickly, whether it’s blues, rock, country, R&B, or even improvised music.
Photo by Anthony Scarlati
Thinking back on his career, Roe is quiet, almost confused, like it’s all a dream he’s just woken up from. “I find myself always being in a state of awe, you know?” says Roe. He’s toured the world and made friends with the biggest names in American music. (He names CeeLo Green—whose track “Lead Me” is one of Roe’s favorite recordings—as the most talented artist he ever worked with, and Chrissie Hynde, Faith Hill, Ray LaMontagne, Carrie Underwood, Kurt Vile, Bahamas, and many others are also on his session resume.) Roe has come a long way from his makeshift Silvertone bass back in Ewa Beach, but that same do-it-yourself, fake-it-’til-you-make-it ethic has guided his career to soaring highs.“It always felt totally lucky and serendipitous to end up in those positions,” he says. “There’s always been people around that could have played those gigs better than me when I was doing them. But somehow, I ended up there. I just did the best I could.”
Marty Party 1995 - Johnny Cash & The Tennessee Three
Dave Roe’s experience of playing with Johnny Cash in the ’90s was just one of many remarkable successes in his long and fulfilling career.