That was the short answer. Personally, I only like distortion part of the time, and didn't really care for all the break-up in that video. Plus, read with a grain of salt, because I am mostly a guitar guy. But, my wife plays keys, and while recording her (trying to get a clean sound), I routed her Kurzweil through my Digidesign Eleven rack (in error). Its preset was for massive distortion, and the keyboard sounds were just that. So the long answer would be, yes, use a tube amp (I have a high-gain THD 15 watt Univalve that is very hard to get clean) if you have one. But if you don't, run the keyboard into a distortion plug-in. I would add that I have tube amps that do things impossible to do with modeling (IMHO), but you could certainly try to get close. The Rhodes has its own strain of break-up when you whack those metal tines, but it sounded to me like it was the amp that was adding the flavor your client's ears demand. If the client likes that sound, ask him (or her, selon le cas) to bring in the guitarist's pedals and amps. I would be surprised if they are using solid state, but maybe. Anyway, any guitarist without a tube amp must certainly have an overdrive pedal, and some of those can come close to producing output tube breakup.
What if you want the soft notes to be clean and the loud ones to be distorted? Maybe record two audio tracks and use automation to fade in the loud passages with the added distortion. I imagine you could also rig up one track with a limiter, and one without, thereby using a side-chain with its threshold set to trigger the distortion once the keyboard hits a certain dynamic level.
But, getting back to my initial reaction to the video. It just sounds like the Rhodes (or rather, the emulation of the Rhodes...) is plugged into a tube amp.
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