Old magic unlocks with a new Key

ALMOST 60 years since Elvis Presley became the first rock god, the problem for any star is to keep their feet on the ground while reaching for the heights.

The singer-guitarist of the Black Keys, Dan Auerbach, is the latest to ponder this conundrum. His band, which started out in 2001 as a raw, blues-inspired duo in the vein of the White Stripes, has very gradually ascended into the multi-platinum league, finally hitting the top five in charts around the world in December with its extra-catchy seventh album, El Camino.

"Dan's got an old-school understanding in a young body." - Dr John 

Like many of his generation's most successful artists, Auerbach has chosen to avoid the flashy, debauched lifestyle of the archetypal rocker, preferring to bury himself in music-making. Amid lengthy world tours, he keeps himself busy producing and co-writing for diverse artists, including rap crew Blakroc.

Auerbach's latest project, which arrives barely four months after El Camino, involves teaming up with one of American rock's most colourful and credible maverick figures - a man who plunged head first into the druggy excesses of the 1960s counterculture, without ever becoming a bona fide megastar himself.

Dr John - or, to give him his full title, Dr John Creaux, the Night Tripper - made a series of strange, spooky albums in the late 1960s that connected the heady explorations of psychedelia with the voodoo weirdness of Mardi Gras in his native New Orleans. These struck a chord with the hippie elite, to the extent that the recording of 1971's The Sun, Moon & Herbs turned into a notorious narcotic binge, attended by Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger, who may or may not have contributed musically.

Yet, apart from left-field hits such as 1973's Right Place, Wrong Time, Dr John never converted his connections into sales.

Now, Auerbach has become his latest disciple, and together they have made Locked Down, a terrific collaborative album that has already begun to reinvigorate the legendary piano-player's career.

When I meet them backstage at the Howard Gilman Opera House in Brooklyn, Auerbach, 32, is dressed down, trim of hair and beard and seemingly rather introverted. Meanwhile, Dr John, at 71, sports an electric-blue suit, vaguely matching alligator-skin cowboy boots, a pale-orange shirt and braces gaudily patterned with cartoon street scenes. His autobiography, Under a Hoodoo Moon, reveals a life misspent as a desperate heroin addict; in an argument after a gig in the early 1960s, the ring finger of his left hand was famously all but shot off - you can see the Z-shaped remnants of it among his rings and bracelets.

''We actually had a lot of common ground,'' Auerbach says, when asked what bonded them. ''We've both been playing music since we were little kids. That's the common language. It's not like he speaks French and I speak German, you know?'' (In fact, Dr John - whose real name is Mac Rebennack - talks in a hippified breed of jive that can border on the incomprehensible.)

The two first got together when Auerbach approached Dr John to perform on a line-up he was curating at Tennessee's Bonnaroo festival. The veteran says his granddaughter duly furnished him with a copy of the Black Keys' breakthrough album, Brothers, and he was surprised to find he liked it.

''Dan's got great understanding,'' he says, ''like, old-school understanding, in a young body.'' After Auerbach floated the idea of recording together, he visited Dr John in New Orleans for a few days, bringing along a stack of ''weird soul 45s, and '70s Ethiopian funk''. They listened and talked for hours. Suitably impressed, Dr John accepted Auerbach's invitation to come up to his Easy Eye Studio in Nashville for a session.

Though always an in-demand live performer, Dr John had lost his way creatively. ''See, they got a word - complacency,'' he says, pronouncing it ''koh-play-sussy''. ''When you get that, you ain't gonna do nothin'. Dan pushed me into a zone where I couldn't get it, and that's the perfect place to be, to play music.''

Auerbach says, ''It was really apparent to me that Mac still has a whole lot of enthusiasm for what he does. I just wanted him to make a record he could be really proud of.

''I didn't want to recreate anything; just to do something fresh - but informed by those old records of Mac's that I love.''

They wrapped in 16 days, with Dr John dropping his familiar banter to write lyrics of rare intimacy, apologising to lost loves, as well as to his disparate children and grandchildren for his absenteeism.

Dr John, who has been sober since 1989, has seen everything a musician's life can offer. For Auerbach, it has obviously been a tonic to encounter this wizened, spiritually inclined veteran at such a vertiginous point in his career.

''The thing we hated when we started out with the Black Keys,'' Auerbach says, ''was that we didn't have immediate success, and we saw all these bands on big stages and getting on the covers of magazines, and we were just roughing it … Even though we're on the big stage now, and on the covers of magazines, we're just normal people.

''There's nothing I hate worse than a rock star.''

In the US, the first-week sales of Locked Down exceeded anything Dr John has released in at least 15 years. Does that make the man himself feel good?

''Hey, of course, but you know the main issue? I feel good about the music. If that didn't feel good, an' it sold eleventeen kajillion records, it wouldn't matter. It's the music,'' he says with a rattle of his bracelets, ''that matters.''

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Locked Down is out now on Nonesuch/Warner.