It’s not often that a band as hot as The Black Keys plays the Cumberland County Civic Center in Portland.

But the band, which made the coveted cover of Rolling Stone magazine in January, is indeed scheduled to play a sold-out show at the venue on Tuesday.

Because The Black Keys are just about at the plateau of pop-rock success, does that mean they won’t be playing a venue as small as the civic center again anytime soon? Does it mean if you didn’t score tickets to Tuesday’s show, you’re out of luck for a while?

Maybe, maybe not.

“I don’t think this is necessarily the last time people will be able to see them in Portland,” said Lauren Wayne, general manager of Portland’s State Theatre and the promoter of The Black Keys’ civic center show. “It’s not like they aren’t playing smaller arenas on this tour — they are — and our show happens to be one of the smaller venues, but not the smallest.”

But Chris Brown, head of marketing for the Maine-based Bull Moose music store chain, thinks The Black Keys are at the stage now where they might be a little too big to play a market the size of Portland anytime soon.

When you look at the band’s current tour schedule, you see lots of arenas in major cities, including TD Garden in Boston and two sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden in New York City, along with a some festivals and a few smaller venues.

“I think it will be a while before they return to the area. It’s too bad the show sold out so quickly,” said Brown. “Selling out Portland is something an artist does on their way to the top.”

The Black Keys are a duo from Akron, Ohio — guitarist and singer Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney. Far from an overnight success, they have been building toward their current level of fame for 10 years.

At first, they were seen by some as a White Stripes knock-off. But the band’s unique blues-based guitar rock defies easy categorization and hasn’t followed pop music trends, making it stand out.

The Black Keys achieved mainstream success in 2008 with the album “Attack & Release,” which reached No. 14 on the Billboard 200. The follow-up, “Brothers,” reached No. 3 in 2010 and earned three Grammys, thanks in part to the hit single “Tighten Up.”

The band’s latest album, “El Camino,” is its most successful to date, debuting late last year at No. 2 and spawning the hits “Lonely Boy” and “Gold on the Ceiling.” The duo has promoted the album with high-profile TV appearances on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” and Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report.”

Auerbach and Carney are both in their early 30s, and a little surprised at their success.

“Tighten Up” was a huge commercial hit, having been used in a Subaru car ad, a soccer video game and an episode of TV’s “Gossip Girl.” But now the band is big enough that it doesn’t have to sell songs to ad companies to make a living.

“When no one’s buying your records, it’s easy to justify selling a song,” Carney told Rolling Stone. “But once you start selling records, you can’t really justify having two songs in Cadillac commercials. It looks greedy. And it is greedy. This whole music thing should be about music.”

The duo met in Akron when they were 8 or 9 years old, and went to high school together. They both briefly attended — and dropped out of — colleges before returning to Akron and teaming up musically.

Wayne said she had been trying to book The Black Keys in Portland for the past couple of years, and the booking didn’t work out “for various reasons.” But when the tour to promote “El Camino” was being put together, she and the band’s management were able to make a Portland date work.

If recent setlists are any indications, fans can expect to hear selections from The Black Keys’ entire catalog in Portland, going all the way back to the first album, “The Big Come Up” (2002).

Wayne thinks The Black Keys are hot right now because they have toured “relentlessly” for years and built up a loyal following that promotes it via word-of-mouth to others. And they made the music they wanted to make — stripped-down and without gimmicks.

“I think it’s natural that more and more people are introduced and are attracted to their kind of raw music,” Wayne said. “It’s real rock and roll without the production tricks. And they write amazing songs.”

Brown thinks the duo’s success is also partly due to the fact that they honed their music for years before gaining national attention.

“They were totally seasoned before the mainstream started paying attention. Real rock bands have to work their way up,” said Brown.

“Their sound has a lot to do with it too, of course. It’s fresh-sounding, but it’s very much based in bluesy garage rock. It excites many different kinds of music fans.”

Staff Writer Ray Routhier can be contacted at 791-6454 or at:

rrouthier@pressherald.com

Twitter: @RayRouthier

 

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