The Big Come-Up

THE BIG COME-UP

The Big Come Up is the debut album by the American rock duo The Black Keys, released in 2002 on Alive Records. It was produced by drummer Patrick Carney. As of 2012, the album had sold 139,000 copies according to Nielsen Soundscan. In 2005, music critic Chuck Klosterman singled out The Big Come Up as one of 21 “high-quality albums” from the previous three years. (More from Wikipedia)

Hacienda caught the attention of Dan Auerbach of the acclaimed blues-rock band the Black Keys, who produced both of their albums. One of Bomp! Records’ recent coups was releasing the first album by this band in 2002 called The Big Come-Up; the new Black Keys album, Brothers is one of the standout albums of 2010, landing a Grammy nomination and a #2 ranking on the 2010 Albums of the Year by Rolling Stone, and even making Time Magazine’s list of Best of 2010 in Music.

(January 2011)

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Of course, the other side of the complaint I mentioned above is that, sure enough, “they do still make ’em like they used to” from time to time. I heard an ad on VH1 the other day that used a killer track by the Black Keys as the background music. So far, I only have the Black Keys’ first album, The Big Come-Up, but that won’t be true much longer.

(January 2012)

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The king of all of the new garage-y bands is probably the blues-rock duo the Black Keys (sometimes viewed as a sort of twin of the White Stripes) whose debut album, The Big Come-Up came out in 2002 and is the largest selling album that the Bomp! family of record labels has ever had – Alive Records in this case.

(January 2013)

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Bomp! Records would qualify as a mostly underground record label in their early decades; but with the May 2002 release on Alive Records of The Big Come-Up, the debut album by the Black Keys, their artists have a higher profile these days. Not surprisingly, Alive Records has made several special reissues of their hit album, such as the above copy that was released on gorgeous hand-mixed colored vinyl.

After making a six-song demo and sending it to a dozen or so record labels, the Black Keys signed with Alive Records, since they were “the only label that would sign [them] without having to see [them] first” (according to Wikipedia). Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney recorded the entirety of The Big Come-Up on an 8-track tape recorder in Carney’s basement, accentuating their raw blues rock sound. They released one single from the album on Isota Records, the blues standard “Leavin’ Trunk” backed with their cover of the Beatles song, “She Said, She Said”. At a later date, another track from their debut album, “I’ll Be Your Man” was used as the theme song for the HBO series Hung.

(June 2017)