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\ Different Strokes

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Table of Contents Is This It? Album Review /8-9 Is This It?: The Strokes /10-35

Room on Fire Album Review / 38-39 The Strokes: Elegantly Wasted /40-53

First Impressions of Earth Album Review /56-57 Group Therapy /58-75

Angles Album Review /78-79 Different Strokes /80-87

Comedown Machine Album Review /90-91 The Strokes, New York City, and the Photographer Who Was There for It All /92-101

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IS THIS IT? 6/

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01/ Is This It 02/ The Modern Age 03/ Soma 04/ Barely Legal 05/ Someday 06/ Alone, Together 07/ Last Nite 08/ Hard To Explain 09/ New York City Cops 10/ Trying Your Luck 11/ Take It Or Leave It \7

Is This It?

By Olli Siebelt BBC Music

You have to laugh. Being a New Yorker myself, I can only stand back and snigger when I see the music press proudly proclaiming how amazing New York is suddenly only to watch two weeks later as they then shout “New York? That was so last week - it’s Detroit now!” What’s going on here? New York has always been chock full of great bands (as has Detroit, by the way) and let’s be honest - it’s always been a rock and roll town (hip-hop notwithstanding by the way because we all know about that scene!).

Now then, let me set the record straight. Just because some music journalist decides that New York is super hip this year does not mean that suddenly tons of great bands just popped up where there were none before. Rudy Gulliani may have clamped down hard on the club scene, but then again putting The Strokes in the same league as club kids at Twilo wouldn’t really work now, would it?

But that’s all academic.

At the centre of this big mess of NYC coolness are our good friends: The Strokes. Undoubtably, one of the most over-hyped bands of this year, if not the past five. Now I’m someone who firmly believes that where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire.

And where there’s fire, I feel it’s usually best to have a fire extinguisher in hand, ready to smother any flames of hype before they get too big and begin hurting innocent bystanders.

The problem with the Strokes is that overhyped or not, they really are worthy of great praise. Formed around 1995 or so, they spent a few years playing the tried and tested Manhattan club circuit until finally coming up with a 3 track demo. That demo eventually made it to the offices of Rough Trade, where, well, the rest is history, innit? Everything about the band - from the songwriting (Taking all the best elements of The Stooges, Television and The Velvet Underground not as theft but as influ-

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ence) to the lyrics (“New York City Cops” - enough said) to the production (as raw and indie as you can get) is just fantastic.

There’s no real pretence (ok, they’re all privileged white kids, but nobody’s counting) or ulterior motive. They just do what they do and my God, do they do it well, in this really weird Warhol-esque way.

Listening to Is This It reminds me very much that The Strokes could have been in an episode of Star Trek where Captain Kirk and company find a record that’s been transported back from the back shelves of a record store in the early 80s to the future (read: ‘Bleeker Bobs’ or ‘It’s Only Rock and Roll’ all you newly converted NYC aficionados). Then Kirk turns to Spock and remarks on how it perfectly captures the spirit and sound of the city during that time. That’s only logical - that record comes from that time and place, Spock would say.

But The Strokes are not from 1977 or 1981 or 1984. They are from 2001 and that’s what makes them so unique. One listen to “Hard to Explain”, and I guarantee you’ll be singing it in your head for weeks. The same goes for “New York City Cops”, “The Modern Age”, “Barely Legal”...let’s just say the whole damn album, while were at it, shall we? New York has always had a plethora of fantastic rock bands and you simply can’t deny that The Stokes are a hell of a great band. Do yourself a favour and forget everything you read. Forget everything that comes out of the bands mouths. Forget you’ve even heard about them. Just get this CD as if you knew nothing about them, put it on your stereo, turn the volume all the way up and just........ listen.

Don’t believe the hype - they really are that good.

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Is This It?: The Strokes Boys want to be them. Girls want to be with them. But for the guys themselves, living the rock dream is a whole lot more complicated. from The Face

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\ Is This It?

‘I guess I’m confused,’ says Julian Casablancas, his head drooping towards the bar. ‘Confused between everything I thought when we started and everything I think now.’ Next to his left hand he has a can of Milwaukee Beer; next to his right hand a whiskey on the rocks. ‘I obviously have the same goals, the same ideals,the same everything…’. He is pretty drunk. ‘basically I feel like when we do something that’s good, no one gives a shit, and when we play the game it pays off.’ He’s rarely keen on talking like this, and has little faith in the purpose of such conversations.’All I know is that from the start I wanted to do something that was… cooler, and hopefully be successful by not doing the typical things.’ I take the seat next to him; the least I can do is hit the beer and the tequila… try to catch up… listen.

‘I don’t know, dude, I wish I understood it better myself.’ We are in New York, in the East Village, not far from where he shares one end of a dumbell-shaped apartment with his bandmate Albert Hammond Jr. “I guess we haven’t done it right or worked hard enough.’ He lowers his head so that his hair covers his face.

‘It tears me apart that you can’t do it in a really original way and be successful.’

You don’t need to spend much time around The Strokes, and especially around Julian Casablancas, to realise that behind the smirks and the swagger and the falling about, they couldn’t be more serious or ambitious about what they do and what they want to do. When it comes to explaining exactly what that is, the answers might sometimes seem a little inarticulate, or even banal, but perhaps that is just because they are young men talking about the kinds of things which words don’t readily express so well: about music, about doing something distinct, about making people feel.

But they couldn’t be more serious about it and though The Strokes have had success, they already feel frustrated that is has not been enough success, and that already many of the kinds of things they have ended up doing are not the things that they ever meant to do or wanted to do. Tonight Casablancas mentions a few of these things: being told that the video you didn’t want to make but which you’re proud of doesn’t work because there’s not enough of the same cheesy band posing everyone does; being forced to play radio station concerts when you’d rather be writing a new record because they won’t play your songs otherwise; the constant pressure to do things the way everyone \ 11

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elsedoes them. Probably also having your photograph taken, answering questions,for articles like this. I’ve caught them at a delicate moment.

“when we do something that’s good, no one gives a shit, and when we play the game it pays off.”

I point out that many people would imagine that right now he’d be having the time of his life.

‘Well, I would be having the time of my life if my only dream was to be a rockstar and get laid,’ he begins. “Which is cool – I mean, don’t get me wrong. But that’s not why I got into it.

I got into it because I felt… when you feel serious pain and serious depression in your life, like “what can i do?” Your fists clench and you have to do something or you’re just going to kill yourself because you don’t understand. It’s so much frustration.

But the only thing that you can do about it is work really hard on whatever is. I’m talking about slaving over shit.You focus on one thing. It becomes special. I would thing nothing but music.

That’s all I can do.’

Why did you feel that kind of pain and depression to begin with?

‘I don’t know,’ he shrugs. ‘I mean, look around, dude. I guess I had a problem. Not a problem but I always just, maybe thought too much, whatever it is, in any situation, I was in… I’m not trying to complain about anything. The weird part is that I feel I’ve felt pain so many times in my life for different reasons and I don’t like to talk about it so much…’

He goes to the jukebox. He says he needs to put on ‘as much as I can of The Harder They Come soundtrack’. He does not return for some time.

“I don’t think people should know too much about anything. It messes up the fun.”

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What do people most misunderstand about The Strokes?

Fab Moretti [drums]: That we’re in this for anything other than the music. That we’re fashionistas. That we’re rich boys trying to steal the spotlight from someone else. When you try a hard as you can to just be yourself and make music, people like to start making things up.

Albert Hammond Jr. [guitar]: They don’t see our bigger picture, our bigger goal. The music gets put to the side and a lot of stuff gets talked about that doesn’t really mean anything.

When the media first talked about us they talked about the way we looked, which is fine, but what a small thing to talk about: the hours you spend on music compared to the minutes you spend on what you’re going to wear.

Nikolai Fraiture [bass]: There’s a lot about us that people don’t know, so they make up suppositions. We’re pretty much five normal guys; we like to work and party and have fun.

Julian Casablancas [singer]: That we act like snobby assholes. As far as I know I’m pretty normal. Maybe when I get fucked up I act weird. When you mess with your brain a little bit, sometimes something positive comes out that’s more longlasting than the negative effects of the next-day regrets.

Nick Valensi [guitar]: If we’re misunderstood, that’s good, because I never understood he bands I liked as a kid, I never knew that their motives were. I don’t think people should know too much about anything. It messes up the fun.

When they arrive at the photo studio where THE FACE will photograph them, The Strokes each grab a Heineken and wander out onto the roof to lie in the sun. Nick is wearing a white stripes T-shirt, which he keeps on for the photos. Julian is wearing a Nirvana Incesticide shirt, which he will change.

They hate having their photograph taken. When they first appeared, the fashion worlds in New York and London assumed that these gorgeously shabby, attitude-drenched New York indie kids would be flattered to be adopted as fashion’s latest pet rock stars; that The Strokes would be thrilled to preen and pose for them. They were very wrong.Eventually, they straggle inside. \ 13

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Julian and Fab sit on a trolley and Julian slides his hands up the back of Fab’s maroon T-shirt, just because. One of the first things you notice around the Strokes is that the casual intimacy they assume with each other is often playfully physical. Julian leans behind Fab and bites his back. “Ah! Ah! Ah! Dude! Slow!

Stop!’ shouts Fab. Albert sits on a sofa and makes a ring out of a $1 bill, meticulously folded, creased and tucked back on itself. It’s a trick someone once showed him when he was wasted, and he was so surprised to remember it the next day that he started doing it himself. He mentions that he once proposed to a girl with one of these rings; she said maybe.

Fab draws a five pointed star in felt pen on the inside of Albert’s left wrist and carefully shades it in.

Julian stands in front of the mirror. He pours a little bit of his Heineken bottle into his hands and applies it into his hair.

Ruffles it a little. That’ll do. As he is being photographed, he cradles a Heineken in his lap. ‘My friend, the beer…’ he mutters wryly. He doesn’t seem comfortable with any direction from the photographer. ‘Looking relaxed makes me feel weird,’ he explains.

At the photographer’s request, the five of them pose together, arms around each other. In a break Fab and Albert dance cheek to cheek, ‘I’m jealous of your slow dance,’ teases Julian. ‘I’m going to kill you both in a jealous rage.’ Nick leaps around Julian’s waist, his legs wrapped high behind Julian’s torso, his head tucked in below Julian’s chin. ‘My monkey child!’, Julian shouts.

‘Somebody have my monkey child.’

These are the Strokes, being as they are, as they do a little more of what they don’t like to do.

Why are you called the Strokes?

Julian: Because it means a lot of things that are artistic and strong. We all do interesting things in different ways and the words means interesting things in different ways. It just made so much sense that you can’t deny it.Fab: We’d rejected a bunch of names. Nikolai said that made us laugh for days: ‘de Niros’ as in ‘the Niros’. I used to think of what the word actually 14 /

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meant: a stroke [holds his heart in an inaccurate medical mime], a stroke… blow to the face… a stroke in a painting. The one I think of the most is the brushstroke. But now I just of five dudes standing around.

Nikolai: There were so many different meanings to it, it could never pin us down. So many people have said ‘stroke of luck’, ‘stroke this’… there’s never one thing they can focus on. There’s when you have a stroke, cerebral congestion; there’s a stroke when you play guitar; then there’s the obvious sexual undertones.

Nick: When it first came up, it was like, ‘Oh, The Strokes, like a wank.’ Then a person said ‘No, it’s The Strokes like a heart attack’. Then another person said,’…like a caress’. It rolled off the tongue really well – sort of violent and sort of sexual and it just sounded cool to everybody.

Albert: We’d come in with all these bad names – the de Niros,

the Rubber Bands, the Motels, Flattop Freddie and the Purple Canoes – and no one would agree. One day we’re in the studio after practice and Julian said ‘The Strokes’. And everyone was like ‘that sounds great!’. It was that easy; five guys agreeing. it doesn’t really mean anything. We thought it was a cool rock and roll name. When I first heard it, it sounded so old, like someone would have already taken it but no one did. Then I looked it up in the dictionary and ‘a powerful blow to the face, chest or body’ was the first thing. Perfect. That’s exactly what our music is. It’s like a powerful blow to the face.

Julian is back from the jukebox and there are new drinks lined up. He’s chosen three dollars of music: some from The Harder They Come, some not. ‘Some Johnny Cash, some Patsy Cline,’ he says. ‘I’m in a country mood tonight. A let’s-get-drunk-andremember-the-good-old-days mood.’He is being wry. He insists that he remembers almost nothing of his early life. ‘I have a really vague memory’, he murmurs. His parents had met in Paris, his mother was a model from Denmark; his Spanish father was setting up a modeling agency. They moved to New York where

“That’s exactly what our music is. It’s like a powerful blow to the face.” \ 15

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his father started the Elite model agency and a single son was born.

When he was about 7, his parents’ marriage fell apart. This is what he says about it: ‘Basically, when my parents got divorced… I don’t know… everything was, I don’t know… I’m not trying to say that’s like why… it’s just, they got divorced.

My mum was fucking miserable and I just lived with her crying every day and that was my life, so I fucking didn’t hate my dad but – I don’t want to say that now because I get along with him now fine, but I did, I did.’

Did you see your father much?

‘No. I would see him sometimes, but I didn’t like the whole vibe of it because my mum was in hell. And I was living with my mum. And you know, walk into the bathroom and your mum’s fucking crying and you start crying and it just fucking sucks you know. Whatever…’

He offers other occasional flashes of his youth. When he was 11 or 12, at school in New York, he realised that his role as the class clown didn’t work for him: ‘being the clown meant that girls just wanted to be my friend’. So he changed. ‘I remember all of a sudden just being really serious and all of a sudden girls would like me. It was strange.’ He was doing badly in school and his father suggested he went to the posh Swiss boarding school his father had attended and loved. His father was European and loved sports; Julian grew up in New York. ‘It was a total clash’, Julian says. ‘He didn’t know. He doesn’t like New York that much. See, I love New York. Hanging out in the street, that’s what I wanted to do.’

He hated Switzerland. The weekends were the worst. ‘All these kids would go out to town and I guess my parents didn’t give me pocket change or whatever these other kids had, and the whole weekend was me sitting in my room by myself’, he remembers.

‘I was just fucking depressed, you know. I’d walk around. Sometimes I’d play basketball by myself. I did that a lot’.It was his stepdad, a painter called Sam Adoquei, who showed him the way he would go. He hadn’t been much interested in music, though there was one moment the previous summer when Nikolai played him a Pearl Jam song, ‘Yellow Ledbetter’.

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‘I was like, “Wow, that’s pretty and it makes me feel something special that I don’t usually feel that I like to feel”,’ he recalls. ‘It made me feel stronger’. His stepdad gave him a CD: The Best of the Doors. One weekend he lay on his bed, listening, and he felt like he understood it: ‘There was so much different shit – cool instrumental shit, cool lyrical shit, there was some cool singing stuff. I said “fuck that’s what I want to do”‘.

“I was just fucking depressed” Back in New York, released from his Swiss exile, his stepdad would talk to him about art, and about what makes you a great artist, and about how hard you had to work. He got more into Pearl Jam, and into Nirvana. ‘Everything to do with my life’, he says. ‘teenage… angst. I’m using the usual word. I was just totally alone. Totally alone. So many people had friends or were hanging out, and I would like talk to some people but it was a very alone experience, and hearing Nirvana and Pearl Jam made me feel… positive about shit. Because beautiful music with lyrics about the truth of how things can be not great is a powerful thing… It made me feel like, if I put my mind to it, I could make myself happy. Like I had some help. I hate music where it’s, like, “it all sucks, fuck this, we’re gonna die, fuck you, kill yourself ”, and I hate shit where it’s “it’s gonna be alright, everything is just fine”. The most powerful aspect of music is that it can open your eyes to the frustration of everything and give you the adrenaline and faith to go on with the ideal that you can make it better if you do your thing.’

By then he’d also met Nick, who played guitar, and taken some guitar lessons himself. The first song Julian could play, just the bass notes, was Nirvana’s ‘Polly’. He went through a phase of interviewing himself while he was in the shower, as though he was famous. ‘I think everyone does that, don’t they?’ he says.

He would pretend he was making some kind of political speech.

One was about the price of cigarettes.

In the world outside the bathroom, he ran into some problems.

The first time he got drunk was when he was 11, swiping fruity alcohol residues off the table at his father’s house with a friend. (‘I think I liked it’, he recalls, and adds, ‘I got all my sins from my dad: drinking, cheating on women…’ Any others? ‘Yeah I \ 17

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“Beautiful music with lyrics about the truth of how things can be not great is a powerful thing… It made me feel like, if I put my mind to it, I could make myself happy. Like I had some help.”

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dont know. Let’s not talk about that.’) At school in New York he would ask friends who had access to their parents alcohol to bring him drinks, and he would get wasted in the mornings. ‘I got caught drinking whiskey or tequila at 9 am’, he remembers.

‘Two days a week after school I had to go to some kind of rehab type place. It was called Phoenix House.You know, rise from the ashes. It was stupid. They’d give me urine tests and stuff.’

At school, he also started studying music. ‘I took it so fucking seriously, ridiculously seriously’, he says. ‘The only class i got an A in was music.’ He got a scholarship to music college by writing a short classical piece; he asked this Korean guy he knew to play violin and he borrowed a keyboard from an electronics chain during a ‘return it within a month if you don’t like it’ promotion. ‘People don’t understand,’ he says ‘how hard I worked. Really hard, you know what I mean?’ He studied classical composition. ‘I always felt that you need to learn the rules before you could break them. It wasn’t like it helped me in rock at all, but it made me realise what was cheesy, what was typical, what typical chords and scales were, it gave me a foundation where my original thoughts could actually be original… The one thing that made us good now is that I realised my whole life I sucked. Always. Everything I did, it sucked. That was the motto of everything: I suck, I gotta do better. I gotta work harder. That was the motto of music.’

Aside from a one-show band with Fab, Nick and himself called Half Pipe, The Strokes was his first group. He now dismisses the early Strokes songs exchanged by over-eager pop archaeologists on the internet as ‘garbage’. The first song he wrote which he thought didn’t suck was ‘Soma’. So far there have been a little over a dozen of them. But he’s not exactly satisfied with these. ‘Never’, he says. ‘That’s never going to happen. It’s like an exponential curve.You’ll get close to it but you’ll never do it.’Though he writes all of the Strokes songs, he shares all the money from them five ways. ‘It wouldn’t work any other way’, he says, ‘I just want to write great songs, and if they’re great

“That was the motto of everything: I suck, I gotta do better.

I gotta work harder. That was the motto of music.” \ 19

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songs I want them to be played great, and I think that we can do it, the five of us, better than anyone else.’

How equal are The Strokes?

Nick: Completely. Obviously when we’re doing musical stuff Julian has the definitive last say but that doesn’t mean it’s a dictatorship. We all listen, we all contribute and we all hve the same goal, and when something’s good we all agree that it’s good.

We disagree about small, stupid, irrelevant things – whether we should fly or drive to Chicago for a show, shit like that.

Fab: There’s an understanding between us. There are times

when we step back and let one person make a decision. Different people for different stuff, but a lot of the time it’s Julian, I guess. I’d be an ignorant fool if I didn’t realize that Julian is primus inter parus. First among equals. We are all equal, and Julian is probably the one who most recognises that because he’s the one we all look to.

Albert: Obviously, as of now, Julian writes the songs, and it’s probably the most important thing. I wouldn’t want to say how equal we are apart from that though, because that’s between us.

When you see us as a band, as an image, you see all of us and you know all of us; that’s very important.

“I think that we can do it, the five of us, better than anyone else.”

Nikolai: It’s like the toy Voltron – a big robot that turns into five animals.

Julian: We’re all equal; five different guys. As friends we argue

and fight, but when it comes down to it we all want to be on the same page. Sure I write all the songs. I try to push some ideas that I feel strongly about. But I don’t think there would be a time where they’d be ‘you’re wrong, Julian’ and I’d just be like ‘no, this is how it is’. It just doesn’t happen that way.You try toagree on the same best thing and at the end of the day you’re all way stronger.

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Today, The Strokes are playing a one-day festival organised by one of America’s most important radio stations K-ROCK: around half an hour of music each from a dozen of America’s hottest bands at an outdoor stage at Jones Beach, about an hour from New York. The Strokes are seventh on the bill, beneath System of a Down, Korn, Papa Roach, Incubus, P.O.D., and Jimmy Eat World, which reflects where they stand over here in naked commercial terms. Though they make a little effort to disguise the fact, they didn’t want to play this event, but within the American record industry few bands can snub the most important radio stations without being punished. ‘Sometimes you gotta do certain things’, says Albert, ‘There’s no point in making cool music if no ones going to hear it. It’s all about politics.’

They gather in a trailer on a parking lot round the side of the stage. (The real backstage dressing rooms are taken by more important bands.) Julian works on today’s set list. It includes two unreleased songs, ‘The Way It Is’ and ‘Meet Me In The Bathroom’. After he opens a bottle of red wine and wanders off, Fab and Nick come in and study the print out.

‘It’s 11 out of 15’, Fab notes. It takes me awhile to realise what he means, which is this: the Strokes musical career involves just 15 active songs. There is are the 11 on Is this It? CD, the song ‘When It Started’ on the American release after the September 11, and three new songs (the third of which is still simply known to them as “Ze Newie”) It’s nearly time to perform. Julian says something about needing to puke, but he doesn’t. He often used to, before they played.

The last time was at Reading last year. ‘Extreme fear’, he explains it to me, ‘of us being terrible and sucking.’

“There’s no point in making cool music if no ones going to hear it.“ I stand in the audience as they take the stage in the bright afternoon sunlight. ‘You guys are gay,’ shouts someone from behind me. A large bouncy ball is being thrown around, back and forth, above the audience’s heads, and many of them seem more interested in this than in the Strokes. They sound great, but this is not the place to hear them; even with a sympathetic audi\ 21

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ence I’m not certain that their music, all frustration and tension and release, would make sense here, by the sea in the sunshine.

Applause ripples between the songs and there is more of it by the end than there was in the beginning, but they don’t seem to make a huge impression. Afterwards, a plane circles overhead, trailing a banner advertising the forthcoming Strokes/White Stripes concert at Radio City Music Hall.

‘I guess we all feel a little bit shitty and disappointed by ourselves’, Albert says afterwards. He says it’s difficult playing to people who barely respond. ‘The craziest people in the world to go play a show in front of,’ he notes, are in Glasgow’.

Backstage awhile later, I find Fab and Albert punching each other, pretty hard. ‘It’s a whole thing explains Fabrizio between blows and yelps, ‘It’s love, right?’ ‘No its not,’ retorts Albert, ‘It’s violence!’

The band is gathered in the trailer when I walk in there. There is barely room to stand, and nowhere to sit. Julian suggests I sit on his lap. I demur but he is insistent. It’s comfy enough there, though after awhile, being considerably heavier than he is, I inquire how his leg is coping. ‘My third leg?’ he says, ‘It’s getting pretty hard.’

They’re now enjoying a pleasantly drunken sunny afternoon.

‘How much more fun have we been having since we got offstage,’ laughs Julian. He asks how they seem to me, but doesn’t wait for me to answer. ‘Pretty rich boy homos’, he says. ‘Yeah, their musical is basically Seventies rip-off stuff by vain, spoiled

“I guess we all feel a little bit shitty and disappointed by ourselves” assholes. Rich and Vain: The Story of the Strokes. Someone wrote all their songs for them.’

Afternoon slips to evening. I overhear Fab talking about Kierkegaard, and about how he used the tale Abraham and Isaac as anan analogy about Christians in general; he is relating this to the rock audience and the way they are spoon fed certain kinds of bands. ‘His name was Soren,’ says Fabrizio, ‘Soren Kirkengaard.

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He had a strange love for thought’. He is mortified when he realises I have heard this. ‘You can’t write that,’ he pleads, ‘Say Nick said it.’

All of the band except Julian and Fab take the first bus back to Manhattan when it gets dark. I find myself in System of a Down’s dressing room talking to Fab, Mike from Incubus, System of a Down’s singer and Jack Osbourne. When there is a ‘who has the best afro hair competition?’ Jack Osbourne passes round his wallet which shows a ninth grade photo of him with a huge afro; he threatens to grow it back.

Everyone dozes on the way back into town, until Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ comes on the radio. Julian stirs, ‘Can you make it much louder?’ he asks the driver, ‘Painfully loud’. The driver refuses, and they row about it. Julian sighs when he spots me writing this down, the shuts his eyes.

Earlier in the day Julian had taken my notebook from me and written a greeting in large, wild capital letters. ‘I’LL MISS YOUR CREEPY, IN THE SHADOWS, MAD SCRIBBLING,’ he wrote. ‘EXPOSE US FOR THE FRAUDULENT POSEURS WE ARE.’

Who is the best kisser in The Strokes?

Fab: I don’t know. We might have all kissed in a drunken stupor, but I don’t remember. I may not have kissed Nikolai. It’s not a regular thing. But we’re that comfortable with each other, we’re that close to each other; the boundaries that society have set saying ‘this is what a friend does and this is what a lover does’ is a little skewed when it comes to The Strokes. We’re not homosexual; we understand what the love between the band is worth and we like to express that to each other. It’s also being able to not feel uncomfrotable as individuals touching each other, because we’re brothers. Imagine you were looking at a five year-old and a six year-old playing in a pool where they had no inhibitions and they’re just having a fun time, no real boundaries.Albert: Julian kisses like me – the problem is, I don’t like his breath sometimes. We have really big lips. Fab and Nick kind of kiss the same; Fab has the stubble, it itches. I can’t believe I’m telling you this. It’s ridiculous. It’s hilarious. I’ve never kissed Nikolai so I don’t know – he’s the only one that doesn’t allow that. The best kisses is my girlfriend. But it’s always been a running joke \ 23

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in the band. To go and promote ourselves we’d get pretty wasted because we were tired of going to all these places and seeing the

“the boundaries that society have set saying ‘this is what a friend does and this is what a lover does’ is a little skewed when it comes to The Strokes.” same assholes who’d say ‘fuck you’ when we gave them a flyer.

And we loved fucking with people. Everyone thought we were gay or something. It always fucks with people’s heads.

Julian: Everyone’s a pretty good kisser. Albert’s pretty nice.

It’s not like we’re getting turned on. It’s sort of a joke. Nikolai likes it the least. It’s when we fuck around and get fucked up but it’s not an important tradition with us or anything. It’s just something that people catch us doing every now and then and make a big deal out of.You know, we just act like idiots sometimes. We’re friends and we don’t care. We’re five very headstrong, different people with one extreme blessing, which is that we all want the same thing. We all want to do something that’s cool and interesting , so all the small pretexts get wiped under the rug, and let’s just act like it is together because that’s pretty much all we are.

Nick: [long pause, exhale] That’s a ridiculous question. I’ve kissed most of them, it’s true. I’ve never thought about gauging how good my friends kiss. They’re all not bad. When they kiss me it’s a bit different to when they kiss their girlfriend. We don’t go around kissing each other all the time – people see a snippet of something and they assume that we’re hanging out after a show in a hotel room having make-out sessions. We’re all pretty secure with each other and we find it funny. Watching Julian dry-hump Fab is funny. Whether we’re in public or in our rehearsal studio by ourselves, I just think it’s funny. And I don’t care why.

Nikolai: thought about, showing true affection. We’re good

friends; we don’t care. With guys open affection is almost frowned upon, we’re five guys that are close and it goes beyond

24 /

\ Is This It?

sexual; it makes people weird. In the environment we’re in there’s so much outer pressure that it’s good to know there’s five people who don’t have to hide anything; it’s just comforting inside.

‘I got to piss badly,’ says Julian,’ Whiskey on the rocks’, he requests.

It is later on the night of our long, New York bar conversation.

When Julian comes back, he brings with him some regrets about having discussed his life. ‘I feel bad I talked about it,’ he says, ‘I just feel like it sounds so cheesy.’ He doesn’t like stuff when it’s pinned down. ‘You read Crime and Punishment? How did you feel after you read that book? Probably totally differently than I felt. So what are you going to say?’ He says we don’t need to know what Dostoevsky was thinking about. ‘Because of what was in his mind and if he was being interviewed by a rock journalist – that would make any kind of a difference?’ he says.

“EXPOSE US FOR THE FRAUDULENT POSERS WE ARE.” Isn’t it a pity that Dostoevsy never did an NME interview?

‘Well dude, thank God. That’s why he’s so good. If he did then people would be “Oh, OK, I’ve figured him out, he’s about this and that”. Well it’s not about this and that, it’s about everything.’

He says how much he hates it when The Strokes are dismissed as rich kids, not because his family never had any money (though most of it was his father’s, and not within his orbit) but because it somehow casts doubt on his sincerity, and on how hard he worked. ‘I think that if I knew me, and then saw the music we played, I would think it was cool,’ he says. ‘If I read stuff that they wrote about me then I would think I’m full of shit’.

Some more of his chosen reggae comes on the jukebox. Julian is particularly crazy about Bob Marley. It annoys him that, because The Strokes don’t play reggae or country or whatever, people don’t notice the way all of that, and so much else, has influenced what The Strokes do. ‘Journalists know so little about music \ 25

You Only Live Once /

sometimes,’ he says, ‘If they can’t explain it in one sentence they won’t write about it.’ I ask him what the pat journalist sentence about The Strokes is and he says, ‘I don’t know… Velvet Underground Seventies New York punk…’ and shrugs. ‘I read a funny quote that I thought was good from Frank Zappa: ‘rock journalism is people that can’t write interviewing people that can’t talk for people who can’t read.’ It’s true. And shit like this Johnny Cash song, ‘…Ira Hayes…’ – he gestures toward the jukebox – ‘It’s a good song, no one knows about it.’ He has a theory, ‘If you replaced Elvis fans with Johnny Cash fans and Rolling Stones fans with Velvet Underground fans the world would be a better place. They’d have a more realistic view of how things can be.’

He talks about drugs (‘Stuff that I guess is rightfully frowned upon for health reasons and mental reasons but at the same time I always felt like there’s this different part of the brain that was always fun to fuck around with’) and fighting. ‘I don’t like fighting,’ he says, ‘but at the same time, anyone that fucks with you, then I don’t give a fuck, I’ll fuck them up, you know what I mean?’

I ask him about the story that he’d thumped representative of one of their European record companies a few months ago in Paris.

‘That was different,’ he says. ‘Different situation – you get to a point sometimes when you’re on tour, you get pushed around so much it’s like your career is on the verge of being over, you break up, or everything you do can sometimes be broken by a business-minded person. Being on the road and doing stuff all the time – it’s already delicate as it is. To make it work the way it does now, the way you see we all get along and stuff, that’s not just that we’re getting along people, that’s the attitude of don’tmake-us-fucking-hate-each-other. Even Kurt Cobain, a lot of the time, I think that’s why he killed himself, – honestly, sometimes I think it’s because they didn’t tour right. I want to learn from their mistakes. If you think of it in terms of just,like, someone’s organizing your day and stuff, it’s ridiculous, obviously. But reality-wise, when you’re constantly doing shit like that, to get along and be creative, is hard.’

26 /

\ Is This It?

So what should Nirvana have done?

‘I don’t know what they should have done. That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Doing whatever a record company tells you to do – basically it’s not good.’

And that’s what happened in France? ‘No. They lied to us.’

It gets later. ‘You believe in God?’ Julian asks and then he details his own convoluted but clearly heartfelt faith.

What do you think God thinks of the Strokes?

‘That’s a good question,’ he says. ‘Sometimes I wonder if he wants us to be like a martyr for like rich fuck who don’t do anything but then inspire someone else to do something else, you know.’ He half-laughs, he doesn’t want to mean that at all. ‘I just feel like I’m not supposed to know. Maybe later…’

“I always felt like there’s this different part of the brain that was always fun to fuck around with” Do the rest of the band believe in God? ‘I don’t know. I don’t really speak to them about it. If they heard me say this they would probably think I was crazy.’

Though the words themselves are making sense, his sentences are becoming more and more slurred. ‘I’m only 23 years old, man,’ he says. ‘I’m getting started. I don’t have shit figured out.’

He peers at the tape recorder perched on the bar in front of him, then up at me, his eyes both drooping and pleading. ‘Can we stop this shit?’

How close have the Strokes come to splitting up?

Nikolai: Very close. There’s two ways to look at this. Look-

ing back on it we know that it’s pressure from touring, and this and that. That’s kind of the real reason. But if you look at it more precisely there’s a bunch of things that go between bands, between friends, that have happened. Definitely when you’re \ 27

You Only Live Once /

drawn into this environment at our age, mistakes like partying too much and not concentrating on why you’re actually here, which is the music and us as friends. I would always say: excess in moderation.

Albert: We’ve never come close to splitting up. The boat has never sunk, but there’s definitely been fights. Especially in the early days when we did two world tours, so unorganized… sometimes it took its toll. But we’re our own psychiatrists.

Fab: Once, I felt it might be over. It was definitely the influence of success. I was scared, because it’s just been so much fun.

But then there’d be nights where I’d think if it is over, this has provided me with the most spectacular time in my life so we’re just going to have to deal with it. We all said, this is what we love to do. There were times when we got caught up with the rock and roll life and we had to sort that out, we had to bring back the people who were sort of on the moon, bring them back to earth. Now everything’s sorted out. It was heavy enough that we realised, as friends, and I don’t think we’re ready to make the same mistake twice.

“I’m only 23 years old, man.

I’m getting started. I don’t have shit figured out.”

Nick: Not close at all. Even if we did stop playing music, as long as they were still my friends, as long as I still hung out with them, I wouldn’t give a fuck. And I’ve told them that too. Our relationships with each other to me is so much more important than our band. It’s not that I don’t care about the music – it’s my entire life- but I would still be happy if I was friends with those guys. If the friendship thing went out away but we were still playing music together I would be miserable.

Julian: It’s easy to stay as a band and not get along – the thing that’s really hard is to stay the way you were when you started out. That’s what I want to do. And doing that means pissing some people off. The record company, whatever. We got to the point where it was about to be no fun. We were about to not have time to write new songs, not have time to get along, see

28 /

\ Is This It?

each other too much. It’s been on the verge and that’s not our fault. So we just said fuck that. And maybe we’ll be less famous but at least we’ll write cool songs.

I follow the band to Los Angeles. On the day I arrive, I find three Strokes swimming in the Sunset Marquis hotel pool there, while Fab reads Alexandre Dumas’s The Count Of Monte Cristo.

Julian is nowhere to be seen. After the others dry off, they order lunch. I sit with Nick as eats a grilled cheese sandwich, sips a pina colada and, at my request, talks about the book he’s reading. William Faulkner’s The Sound And The Fury and then about the other authors he favors: James Joyce, Charles Bukowski, Celine, Kurt Vonnegut. He is wearing a T-Shirt commemorating the sleeve of Duran Duran’s second album Rio. He mentions that ‘none of us have ever stepped foot in a fucking gym or on a piece of exercise equipment ever.’ He says that all he ever wanted to do was to play guitar and not have to do anything else and that it has happened for him. ‘I guess it’s like the typical fucking dream story that you write about every day probably,’ he says, ‘but when it happens to you yourself it’s pretty fucking cool.’

We talk about the influence it has on the way The Strokes are that each of them is from immigrant backgrounds. Julian’s father is Spanish, his mother is Danish. Fab’s father is Italian and his mother Brazilian. Nick’s father is Tunisian and his mother French. Both of Nikolai’s parents are French, though his mother’s family is Russian. Albert’s father is British, but raised in Gibraltar, his mother is Argentinean, but with Peruvian and Austrian roots. ‘We’re really priveledged in that we’re all welltraveled, you know, fucking cultured,’ Nick points out. ‘We’ve got fucking table manners you know. I’d like to think that we’re all fucking classy guys, you know, like sort of fucking gentlemen, and not some fucking crass American rock band.’

Nikolai (whose poolside reading of choice is Jung’s Dreams, Memories and Reflections) is sitting out in the hotel’s back garden; the calmest setting, the quietest Stroke. His voice is so low and gentle that the tape recorder struggles to record him. He has known Julian the longest, since elementary school.

‘Everything we went through for the first time we sort of went through together or shared together,’ he says. ‘Your first cigarette, your first drink. Everything you could think of.’

\ 29

You Only Live Once /

I chat with Fab in his room. An acoustic guitar leans against the wall. He talks about how New York’s, and the Stroke’s spirit echo each other. ‘In New York everything’s very tight and tense,’ he says. ‘New Yorkers act more like roaches crawling over each other, and time is of the essence.’ Fab is currently facing his own individual media circus: all the America gossip magazines have photos of him with Drew Barrymore. Sensibly, he chooses his words with care. ‘I would say that she and I share amazing moments, and that I don’t want to lose those amazing moments by tripping myself and saying the wrong things,’ he notes, ‘because she’s one of the most perfect people I’ve ever met.’

Albert announces that he’d like to go for a drive, so he and I head off in his hire car, weaving in loops through the back streets of Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. He tells me about living with Julian. ‘We’re like the odd couple. I’m really neat, he’s really messy. But somehow it all works out. We both keep our doors open all the time. We’re really close. Even though we have two beds, a lot of times we end up sleeping in the same bed; passing out in his room or he’ll pass out in my room. Now his girlfriend lives with him a lot so that’s changed a bit, sleeping in his room, because he’s got his girlfriend in there, it’d be a little weird.’

Albert, who lived in Los Angeles until he was 15, and whose father, also Albert Hammond, is a noted songwriter, is usually credited with focusing the Strokes’ fashion sense. He says he’s always been drawn to that stuff. ‘I liked the whole tie thing, a little looser,’ he says, ‘almost like you’re going to work but you obviously look like no one would hire you.’ He says he encouraged the Strokes to ‘almost look like you’re on stage all the time.’

Driving back to the hotel, Albert thinks he spots someone in a Mercedes passing us in the opposite direction.

‘I think that was fucking Britney Spears!’ he exclaims. ‘Shall we go follow her?’ He does a U-turn. ‘Holy shitballs!’ he says, ‘it makes sense though, doesn’t it? A nice Mercedes…’ We pull alongside at some traffic lights. ‘That’s her, isn’t it?’ he says, then realises that for all her youth and blondness, the drive is not Britney. ‘It did look like her though, didn’t it?’ he sighs, turning back round. ‘I would’ve liked it to have been her…’

30 /

\ Is This It?

What drug would you never take?

Julian: I really try to stay away from heroin.Yeah, it’s fun, but

do you want to have the band break up, play bad music, think you’re good when you suck, die…? There’s no positive aspect to it.You try shit when you’re a kid. That’s like an orgasm – it feels good but it lasts a short time. But for me music is more important. Some people do music to figure out what’s going on, then they do drugs and they figure nothing’s going on. But the only way I can figure how things are going on is through music.

So if anything can take that way, it’s my enemy. I like to work really hard and I like to get fucked up sometimes, so I do shit.

But I want to write music where people’s jaws drop and they go fuck. So fuck everything else. All that rock bullshit. All that cliche. It’s just so uninteresting. It’s fun as an individual who liked to get fucked up, and I’ll always do that, but it has nothing to do with what I wanted to do. I don’t give a fuck if people think I’m a dork. I write better fucking songs than them. And writing a song is so hard. It’s one of the hardest things in the world.

“I’d like to think that we’re all... like sort of fucking gentlemen, and not some fucking crass American rock band.”

Albert: I don’t want to take any more hallucinogens. Not that

I took a lot but I don’t think I could handle tripping right now. I would go bonkers, man. Once we were having a great time and my friend went into convulsions and I thought he was joking and he woke up and he was all pale and he threw up straight in the air and it landed on his face, and for 20 minutes I had the worst time of my life. He ate too many mushrooms.

Nikolai: In our environment, heroin. Just because of all the

clichedness of it. In a rock ‘n’ roll environment of everythingis-so-easy, you-can-get-anything-you-want, it would definitely become a problem. For where we are, a moderately successful band, the record companies want to please you, people want to make you happy, countless people come up to you… it’s all definitely there.You just have to know what to stay away from and what not to do too much.

\ 31

You Only Live Once /

Nick: I don’t want to answer that. I don’t want to talk about drugs.

Fab: Heroin. Never ever. The whole idea that you could be a slave to something…

It is way past midnight when, a little drunk again, Julian agrees to sit at a table near the pool in LA and talk some more. The Strokes have spent the evening rehearsing, tightening up ‘Hard to Explain’, for a TV show appearance tomorrow, and have been working on his newest song, which is right now called ‘I Can’t Win’. ‘It could be good,’ he says,’ but right now it’s not.’ He explains that ‘a new song can only be a new song if it’s better than the other songs – that’s the criteria.’

“New Yorkers act more like roaches crawling over each other, and time is of the essence.”

We talk about some of he weird flotsam and jetsam which recently floated The Strokes’ way. The Different Strokes EP for instance, where some anonymous English musicians covered The Strokes songs on toy organs. He says that he heard it for the first time when someone blasted it at the end of a Christmas party at Fab’s place. ‘It was definitely funny,’ he says. ‘At first I thought it was an insult, that they were going to make fun of it, but they were actually just playing the songs on a keyboard. I guess people think in different ways.’

Then there is the popular ‘Stroke of Genius’ bootleg, melding the introduction of ‘Hard to Explain’ with the vocal from Christina Aguilera’s ‘Genie in a Bottle’. Julian says, ‘I was hoping for better. There’s one part where she goes ‘wo-wo-woah’, actual three different chords, but everything else is just one chord so I was a little disappointed.’

Did you like the sound of it?

He looks at me like I may be slightly disturbed. ‘No,’ he says, ‘I would never listen to it for fun, no.’

32 /

\ Is This It?

It is, I point out to him, quite a big deal in England now. ‘Well you know,’ he says dryly,’ a lot of things are big in England right now. A lot of things that are big in America. It doesn’t mean a shit.’

I ask him about something I’ve seen him do since the first day I spent with him. Sometimes he hangs his head low, lets his hair fall over his face, and simply sits there, motionless, hidden in plain sight. He snorts when I mention this. I ask what he’s thinking under there.

‘I don’t know. Different things. Sometimes I’m thinking about music. Sometimes I’m thinking about other stuff.’

When you do it you give the impression, I say, that you’d rather not be where you are that moment.

‘Well’, he says, ‘I’m sad I make it so obvious.’

“The only way I can figure how things are going on is through music. So if anything can take that way, it’s my enemy.”

What are the strangest rumours you’ve heard about The Strokes?

Fab: That we were on magazine before we had any songs. That we were put together by Julian’s father. [laughs] That I’m going out with Drew Barrymore.

Albert: That we get our parents’ money and we buy our songs.

I mean, how come no one else does that? And the gay one’s a funny one, always.

Nikolai: That either Julian or Albert was the kid in that movie Big. Things like that.

Julian: Just stuff like that I was going out with Ryan our manager; that I as the bitch and he was the butch. Some are funnier than the others. I don’t really care about that stuff. \ 33

You Only Live Once /

Nick: I don’t give a shit; I don’t care about anything aside from those four guys, my mother and my two sisters and our music.

The Tonight Show is an American institution, a TV show which has been running for far longer than any of The Strokes have been alive. Tonight they are to make their first appearance on it, playing their current single, ‘Hard to Explain’. On the soundstage, mid-morning, they run through the song. Julian’s voice quickly cracks. ‘Shit,’ he says and begins half singing in a lower register.

As they finish rehearsing, Jay Leno, the host, strides over to greet them, clapping his hands. ‘Thanks kids,’ he says. ‘Are you happy with everything?’ Albert tells him that he just fucked up.

‘Yeah, fuck up – it’s only TV,’ says Leno breezily and wanders back to his interviewing desk.

Back in the dressing room, Nick and Julian play a driving game on the Playstation. ‘I try to think of myself as Tom Cruise in Days Of Thunder,’ says Julian. ‘How would he drive the car? What would he do?’

‘I’m nervous, man,’ says Fab. ‘You’re nervous?’ says Julian. ‘How about me? I just fucking suck.’ He sits there. ‘Dude, I’m so nervous,’ he says. Then he shouts, very loudly, ‘IS ANYBODY NERVOUS?’ he half-laughs.

‘That’s my pseudo-vocal warm up.’

It takes me awhile to realise that, beneath all this play-acting about being nervous, he really is. He keeps talking about it. ‘Is anyone else freaking nervous,y’all?… Dude, I’m so freaking scared… Dude, it’s totally nuts what we’re doing here.’

The show begins on the monitor in the corner of the room, and Jay Leno announces that the Strokes will be playing later. ‘Did he just say our name?’ asks Julian. ‘That’s so great.’ He stands up, walks over to me, grabs my head and kisses me on the cheek.

He and fab dance violently around the room, to ‘get the heart going’.

‘I can’t go on this,’ says Nikolai. ‘I just can’t.’

34 /

\ Is This It?

They go downstairs. When the curtain rises and Leno introduces them, Julian looks kind of pissed off, standing there, which is how he looks best, of course. It’s a fine performance, the first time today Julian sings it the way he can, and is punctuated by the screams of an unexpectedly large number of Strokes fans in the audience. Leno stands at the edge, hands in his pockets, vaguely shaking a leg by way of approval.

‘I was so worried I’d mess up,’ Julian says afterwards. ‘I was fucking it up so bad this afternoon.’

They watch a playback. ‘This is awesome,’ Julian commentates, then, as he watches himself swing a little bit wildly into the beginning of the second verse, says ‘not so good’. But they’re pleased. Julian and Fab dance together and chant, ‘Party! Pizza Party! Party! Pizza Party!…’

“I don’t care about anything aside from those four guys, my mother and my two sisters and our music.”

In the bus back to the hotel, various Strokes call their parents and suggest they watch later. ‘Last Nite’ comes on the radio, and they turn it up. When they turn down the nu-metal noise which follows it, Julian sings to himself, ‘Baby you and me/wouldn’t you agree/we’ve got a pretty groovy kind of love‘. He looks behind him to where I’m writing in my notebook, and he shakes his head one more time. ‘Scribblings of a madman’, he says. Its hard enough, all this, without having to worry about whether anyone will understand it.It is way past midnight when, a little drunk again, Julian agrees to sit at a table near the pool in LA and talk some more. The Strokes have spent the evening rehearsing, tightening up ‘Hard to Explain’, for a TV show appearance tomorrow, and have been working on his newest song, which is right now called ‘I Can’t Win’. ‘It could be good,’ he says,’ but right now it’s not.’ He explains that ‘a new song can only be a new song if it’s better than the other songs – that’s the criteria.’

\ 35

You Only Live Once /

ROOM ON FIRE

36 /

\ Different Strokes

01/ What Ever Happened?

02/ Reptilia 03/ Automatic Stop 04/ 12:51 05/ You Talk Way Too Much 06/ Between Love & Hate 07/ Meet Me In The Bathroom 08/ Under Control 09/ The Way It Is 10/ The End Has No End 11/ I Can’t Win

\ 37

Room on Fire

By Prefix Mag

As usual, the Strokes are getting away with murder.You know the deal: they plunder their musical influences and then justify it with a shrug. They write simple songs that are glossed over with a sheen of effortlessness, a nonchalant dash of style that is the essence of their success. Finally, and perhaps most offensively, they disregard hygiene, which has granted them magazine covers and celebrity girlfriends. But who cares? With the release of Room on Fire, the swift, sophomore chunk of rock from the Strokes, the band proves once again that they certainly don’t.

It’s easy to be conflicted about the Strokes. During the midst of the hype and backlash surrounding their debut, 2001’s Is This It?, my personal opinions about the band performed the most radical about-face that I’ve ever experienced. I despised their derivative sound and their take-it-or-leave-it approach to fame. But the more I forced myself to be exposed to the album, the more curious I became. Before long, I found (gasp!) an emotional sincerity lurking somewhere in the songs. It’s not the first time that something old was hailed as something new, and there’s a certain level of authenticity that can’t be faked. At least I like to think so.

Contrary to much of Room On Fire’s pre-release press, the Strokes’ sound has barely evolved at all. The band claimed that fans would sense more of a dance-y ‘80s vibe than the ‘70s grit that their debut is associated with. This is true to some extent, but the truth is that it’s still the Strokes, and the band was smart enough (or lazy enough) to heed the advice, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Thankfully, Room on Fire does display a slight progression of musicianship. Bassist Nikolai Fraiture adds some creative walking structures into bass lines that are usually as lanky and expressionless as he is. On Is This It?, drummer Fab Morretti was a regular Ringo Starr, providing the simplest drum beats 38 /

in the world for the best rock band in the world. However, the versatile percussion on Room on Fire provides the album with some of its best flourishes.

The Strokes are full-fledged celebrities now -- rock stars, fauxreluctant fashion icons, cigarette bumming heirs of Manhattan.

Their frontman, of course, is Julian Casablancas, a ragged city kid who has been mesmerizing multinational audiences with that emotionless adolescent stare. On Room on Fire, he exercises his flair for unabashed sing-a-longs and poppy melodies (the lead single “12:51” could pass for a Cyndi Lauper song). But these elements are tempered by his haunting groans and increasingly bitter lyrics. On “The Way It Is,” he rasps, “I’m sick of you / And that’s the way it is / But that’s not your problem.

Criticize him if you will, but Casablancas has proven himself capable of accomplishing a task that only the best songwriters of his generation have successfully completed. He builds atmosphere out of evocative lyrics and emotional scenery, and he does it without leaning on linear narrative or songs with singular interpretations. He will design a song out of a complaint, a vague romantic confession, and a few street corners. He never fills in the blanks for the listener, and he is not afraid to allow a few unrelated thoughts collide and reflect off each other. It is a depth of artistry that has lent depth and mystique to the songwriting of Beck, Elliot Smith and Kurt Cobain.

If you can take a risk, go ahead and take Room On Fire for what it is -- beyond all the rumors, the wealthy backgrounds, the VH1 blurbs and the imitation Strokes bands. What you will find is fractured confessions amongst fragments of a shadowy Manhattan nightlife. On “Under Control,” Casablancas deadpans, “I don’t want to change the world / I just want to watch it go by.”

That kind of sincerity has granted Room On Fire the ability to rise above the relentless youth of its creators. \ 39

You Only Live Once /

The Strokes: Elegantly Wasted

By Neil Strauss

40 /

\ Elegantly Wasted

He is supposed to arrive at 9 p.m. When he shows up, it is well after midnight. But he will make up for it by spending the next seven hours and forty-five minutes with me. Not because he likes me or doesn’t like me. Just because that is what he does.

His name is Julian Casablancas, and if he weren’t a rock star, he’d be the neighborhood drunk with a heart of gold.

The lead singer of the Strokes, New York’s finest purveyors of coolly detached retro-rock boogie, is blessed with the ability to talk shit. He can hold forth all night, run around in verbal circles for fifteen minutes, lose his place and then start all over again.

He doesn’t seem to have anywhere to be. He is in the moment.

He doesn’t even own a cell phone, a computer or a watch. But his intentions are the noblest.

“Doing heroin is like walking around with a terrorist as your friend,” he tells a buddy who has started sniffing the dust. Casablancas’ cautionary monologue lasts twenty rambling, heartfelt minutes, slurred with his lips two inches away from his friend’s.

“It’s like taking a terrorist around to parties,” he continues. “You never know when it’s going to blow up on you.”

“His name is Julian Casablancas, and if he weren’t a rock star, he’d be the neighborhood drunk with a heart of gold.”

Casablancas is wearing a green work shirt with the words U.S. GARBAGE COMPANY over the pocket, and faded black pants.

The shirt is the property of his roommate, Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond Jr. On his wrist, there are three fraying colored wristbands that he has not bothered to remove–one from a Kings of Leon concert a week ago, another from a Stooges show two weeks ago and a third from a Vines show from who knows when. I will see Casablancas nearly every day for the next week: His clothes and bracelets will not change, though he claims his underwear and socks do. He will end every night in the company of a girl he does not sleep with. And he will talk about everything from strip clubs to night terrors to his hatred of Pringles potato chips. But when it comes time for a formal \ 41

You Only Live Once /

sit-down, he will give me the worst interview I have ever experienced. It will last seven minutes.

The Strokes are more than just a band. Whether they like it or not, they stand for something. Just as Nirvana became the face of grunge in the early Nineties, the Strokes have become the face of the so-called new garage-rock scene. And, like Nirvana, the Strokes have been embraced by the designers of runway fashion, the death knell of anything sincere.

Of course, the Strokes don’t technically belong to a scene, because they were never even acquaintances with their compatriots. According to Fabrizio Moretti, the band’s drummer, artist and deep thinker, the Strokes originally tried to form a scene of New York bands that would hang out, drink and go to one another’s shows, but “at the time in New York, it was so competitive that bands were not open to it.”

As far as garage rock goes, the Strokes don’t once mention bands like the Stooges or the Troggs when discussing their second CD, Room On Fire. Instead, Hammond credits the reggaesounding guitars in “Automatic Stop” to Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”; Casablancas blames the high-pitched guitar tone of “The End Has No End” on Guns n’ Roses’ “Sweet Child o’ Mine”; and guitarist Nick Valensi pledges allegiance to goth. “There are some bass lines on our first album that were 100 percent ripped off from the Cure,” he says. “We were worried about putting out the album, because we thought we’d get busted.”

As for the famous Strokes boogie beat, Valensi says, “When we were first startins out, we wanted to have songs you could do cheesy dances to — like the Carlton dance from The Fresh Prince or the Pretty in Pink dance.”

The actual seed for the Strokes was planted when Pierre, the brother of Strokes bassist Nikolai Fraiture, gave Casablancas a Velvet Underground CD for Christmas while he was in high school. The music was an epiphany for friends Fraiture, Casablancas, Valensi and Moretti. The dream when they formed the Strokes, according to Casablancas, “revolved around taking the Velvet Underground and thinking, ‘If only they were really famous.’ And the goal was to be really cool and nonmainstream, and be really popular.

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“Why does everything that has to be big and popular suck?” he adds. “I got a problem with that, so I’m trying to do something about it.”

At 2A, the East Village bar across the street from the basement studio where the Strokes recorded their first EP, Gasablancas runs into an old friend, a large Puerto Rican with dreadlocks named Nestor.

“You probably don’t remember how we met,” says Nestor.

Casablancas responds in the negative.

“We were at Spa and all of a sudden Julian comes up to me and says, ‘If you were a girl I’d kiss you,’” Nestor recalls. “I backed off. And then he told me that his band the Strokes were playing at Mercury Lounge, and if I came he’d be my best friend forever.

No one knew who they were then. So I went, and it was really hot. The air conditioning was broken, so I left after three songs.

Then I saw him later at the Cherry Tavern and told him I’d seen the show, and he bought me a drink.”

“Why does everything that has to be big and popular suck?”

An elderly Asian woman walks past selling bootleg CDs: Radiohead,Beck, Nirvana.

“How much?” Casablancas asks.

They are five dollars.

“I’ll give you a buck.”

She doesn’t even entertain the offer.

Casablancas owns only three CDs: the two discs that haven’t disappeared from his Bob Marley box set (Confrontation and Uprising) and The Essential Johnny Cash.

“I would’ve bought that Radiohead CD for three bucks,” Casablancas says after the saleswoman leaves. “But then you might write about it, and I’d run into them backstage and they’d say something about it.” \ 43

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Casablancas is afflicted by something called the press. Every so often, he imagines his words blown up in big type in magazines and tries to take them back. After putting down Neil Young’s voice, he backpedals, “Not that I hate Neil Young or anything.”

I ask him if he is always like this. “You know how bands have to decide what to wear onstage?” he says. “We just decided that we would wear what we wanted to wear onstage all the time, so we wouldn’t have to think about it. So that’s what I do when I speak now. No matter who I’m talking to, I always talk like I’m doing an interview.”

Over time and beer, however, his disclaimers stop, his conversation loosens and his jokes get sharper. Casablancas is blessed with a quick wit, and if you listen close enough, you hear him delivering off-the-cuff comments that, when spoken in his slow, slurred voice, seem twice as funny.

“I always talk like I’m doing an interview.”

Out of earshot of two girls who have attached themselves to his side tonight, he explains that he didn’t go to a strip club until recently, and he doesn’t like them: His first experience with a heavygrinding lap dance so scarred him that as soon as he got home, he had to beat off twice.

As he tells this story, the jukebox fills the room with the strains of Sam Cooke’s soul-stirring “A Change Is Gonna Come,” and the girls gather round. All time stops for Casablancas. “When I hear ‘A Change Is Gonna Come,’” he says, “it frustrates me.”

Why? “No matter how hard I try, I can never be that good,” he answers.

One of the girls asks if he’s ever considered singing lessons.

The following afternoon, I meet Hammond at Tower Records in the East Village. He is sporting several days of stubble and a pinstriped secondhand snort coat over an inside-out T-shirt. He too will be in the same uniform every night I see him. His CD collection was stolen when his apartment was burglarized last year, and he is replacing the inventory– Ziggy Stardust, by David 44 /

\ Elegantly Wasted

Bowie, 69 Love Songs, by the Magnetic Fields, and three CDs by Guided by Voices, a band that, according to Fraiture, the Strokes aspire to be like: semipopular, making enough money to survive and staying in the game long enough to release more than a dozen albums.

Hammond is excited to go home and listen to his new CDs. “It’s like buying a bunch of pornos and waiting to jerk off,” he says sagely.

On display in the next record store, Other Music, is a CD by the young Australian garage-rock band Jet. “They make me not want to play music,” Hammond says. He finds their look contrived, their music empty, their songs too same-y and their CD overhyped. These happen to be the exact criticisms that people have leveled against the Strokes in the past.

“In the end, I know why people make fun of us,” Hammond says. “I think in interviews we come across as weird, pompous people. Then when they meet us, they realize we’re nice. I like being nice. I want to be nice for people.”

Actually, what people don’t realize about the Strokes is just how serious and hardworking they are, particularly Casablancas and Hammond. (In the early days, Hammond booked shows and harassed record executives, claiming to be the band’s manager and using the pseudonym Paul Spencer, taken from an old fake ID.) Hammond’s passive, grinning, soft-spoken exterior belies a sense of gamesmanship and ambition.

“It’s like buying a bunch of pornos and waiting to jerk off” The Strokes’ so-called fashion sense can largely be attributed to him. Before he was in a band, he dressed like he was in one and enjoyed the kick of getting into concerts for free by pretending that he was in the group playing that night. He also once got into a sold-out Weezerconcert by arguing with the box-office attendant for twenty minutes that he had ordered seats through Ticketmaster, though of course he hadn’t. He is a wolf in thriftshop sheepskin. And right now, he’s hungry. \ 45

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“I only eat two things for lunch,” he says. “Breakfast or sushi.”

Hammond already has the phone numbers for every restaurant under consideration programmed into the speed dial of his cell phone. “Every time I call 411, I put the number into speed dial,” he says. “It’s, like, a dollar every time you call information.” He settles on sushi at Blue Ribbon. As he sits down to the meal, his phone rings. It’s his mother. He doesn’t answer it.

“I’m a bad son,” he says. “I don’t call her enough. She’ll just keep me on the phone and tell me that she loves me. And I’ll be like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mom, I gotta go.’ The last thing you want to do when you’re home after a tour and your girlfriend’s over is call your mom.”

Baptized Episcopalian, Hammond informally converted to Judaism, he says, a year and a half ago, so that Valensi wouldn’t be the only Jew in the band. “The first time I told a guy I was Jewish was in L.A.,” Hammond recalls. “He pulled me into the corner, and I discovered this whole secret world. He even got me laid that night.”

After eating, we walk to the luxury hotel 60 Thompson, where the Strokes are doing interviews with the international press in the penthouse suite. At the moment, a German reporter is asking Moretti and Fraiture questions such as “What’s the difference between your first album and this one?” Midquestion, Moretti wanders away, leaving Fraiture with the reporter. “That douche bag,” Moretti says.

Outside, Moretti sits on a stoop and pensively responds to questions. We have until 11:30 P.M. to hang out, at which point he wants to watch his girlfriend, Drew Barrymore, on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno. Throughout the conversation, he drums his fingers incessantly against his leg and explains that it’s an obsessive-compulsive habit–beating out the cadences of his thoughts and speech. “We have cadence in everything that we do,” he says.

He then points to the feet of people passing by. “Look, they’re creating beats walking down the street. One, two. One, two.

And their heartbeat is in a certain rhythm. Their fucking step is in a certain rhythm.”

He admits that not everyone likes it when he taps his fingers all the time. “It annoyed friends, girlfriends, parents,” he says.

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“’Stop that incessant tapping, you son of a bitch.’” In fact, Casablancas says the first thing he thought when he met the thenhyperactive Moretti in high school was that the kid was “a little annoying.” He point-blank asked Moretti not to talk around him.

But now, Moretti has become the group’s soft-spoken intellectual.

“We have cadence in everything that we do... Look, they’re creating beats walking down the street. One, two.

One, two. And their heartbeat is in a certain rhythm. Their fucking step is in a certain rhythm.”

Afterward, Moretti heads to the Strokes’ office in the East Village to watch Leno. Fraiture, shy, happy-go-lucky and wearing a Ricky Skaggs shirt, arrives in the office and collapses on the couch, not far from the two office video games–Galaga and Golden Tee. Casablancas met his bandmates over the years at various private schools–elementary, boarding and high school.

When the band got serious, Fraiture decided that it was time to begin learning the bass his grandfather had bought him for Christmas, playing along with songs by Blur and the Jackson 5. Unlike his classmates, Fraiture grew up crammed into a two-room apartment with his parents, his brother, his brother’s girlfriend and his adopted sister. He still lives in the apartment, but only with his brother now. His father was the manager of security at Macy’s and suffered the ensuing shame when, one day, he caught his very own Nikolai stealing a Luke Skywalker doll from the department store.

Moretti settles on the couch, flips on Leno and cranks up the sound. One of the hardest things about dating Barrymore, he says, is seeing her kiss someone onscreen. The couple met backstage at a concert more than a year ago and recently bought an apartment together in the East Village. When she comes on TV Moretti stares at her rapt, clearly smitten. “Her mom gave her that bracelet,” he says. “I gave her the necklace.” \ 47

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A car pulls up outside. The driver is here to take Moretti to the airport to pick up Barrymore, but Moretti wants to finish watching her on TV first. Barrymore shows Leno some photos she has taken, two of which are of Moretti. She mentions his name, but not his band. Moretti is unsure about the whole thing, worrying that discussing him seems cheesy or boring.

“She’s just like that in person,” Moretti says. “She is always so positive and energetic. That’s the first thing I noticed about her when we met.”

After Moretti takes off for the airport, I meet Hammond and Casablancas at 2A. It’s a rough night for Casablancas, who’s complaining about how he dislikes Pringles again. Hammond, who is dating Catherine Pierce (one-half of the countrified-pop sister duo the Pierces), is hanging out with the boys tonight. I last see him at the bottom of the stairs, asking where his shoes are. He is wearing them. (Says Casablancas, “For the record, none of us do drugs. Hi, Mom.”) At 5:30 A.M., an hour after I’ve left the bar, Hammond calls to ask where everyone is. He’s still considering going out. The next afternoon, at 12:20 P.M., he calls again.

Hammond: Did you call me this morning?

Um, no. You called me. Don’t you remember?

OK, sure. How are you feeling?

OK. And you?

It’s been a while since I went out like that. I needed that.

Yeah, good times.

Yeah. I partied so much that my ears hurt.

The next night, I meet Casablancas at an East Side dive, the 19th Hole, for a sit-down interview.You already know what he is

“For the record, none of us do drugs. Hi, Mom.” 48 /

\ Elegantly Wasted

wearing. He’s tired from having spent the day battling RCA over the artwork for Room On Fire and doing interviews with the international press. He announces with evident pride that he has finally invented a stock answer to “the Nigel Godrich question.”

Originally, the band hired Radiohead producer Godrich to work on the CD. But their working habits didn’t jibe: Godrich wanted to constantly press forward, but the Strokes liked to labor on every sound. So the band returned to the womb of Gordon Raphael, who produced the Strokes’ debut, Is This It, and recorded the new CD in just over two months. It is similar to the first album, but more refined, a tighter, more studio-proficient version of the Strokes, finally adding to the small repertoire of songs that most fans have burned out on by now.

“I just think I try to be a good person–and I fail.”

I ask Casablancas what his great sound bite about Godrich is, and he says he will tell me when we start the interview. So this seems like as good a time as any to press RECORD on the tape deck. And so begins the worst interview ever. The thing about Casablancas is that he speaks and sways like he’s out of it, but if you stick around him long enough, you begin to realize that he is ultra-aware of everything going on around him. I tell him this.

“That’s your opinion,” he says, almost defensively. “I see myself out of my own eyes, which means I have no idea what’s going on the other way around. I just think I try to be a good person –and I fail.”

With that, Casablancas reaches over to the tape recorder and turns it off. I look at him. He looks at me. Then I turn it back on and try to start again with something easier.

OK, so what’s your stoct answer to the Nigel Godrich question?

Fuck you. I’m not answering that question.

What the hell?

Next question. \ 49

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Honestly, this has to be the worst... ... the worst interview ever?

Once again, he reaches across the table and places his dirty fingernail over the STOP button. And then he just stays in his seat, swaying and staring. I suggest stopping the interview and just having a normal conversation, but with the tape deck on.

He declines.

“I just don’t have anything deep to say,” he says.

I explain that nothing deep is expected of him.

“I’ve got nothing to hide,” he says. “But what I meant a few minutes ago, if I can even recall what I was saying, is just that there’s so much shit to do, and so little time. And everything I have to say is not going to be in this one Rolling Stone interview.”

The issue, he explains, is that he believes in a higher power, some call it God. And right now, that higher power is telling him that it is not the right time for him to say anything. And it won’t be time until the Strokes prove themselves to the world, until they do something that he terms “undeniable.”

“I’d like to just get to a point where maybe we can say something that will be matterful. That’s definitely not a word, by the way.

And I look forward to the future, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

A few minutes later, Casablancas picks up his beer, downs three quarters of the bottle in one gulp, slams it to the table, stands up and walks to the video game, Golden Tee. He turns around and addresses the bar. “Anyone want to play Golden Tee?” he slurs.

No one responds. Four minutes later, he returns to the table.

“Never play Golden Tee when you’re drunk,” he advises.

Then he sits in my lap, kisses me seven times on the neck, and makes three lunges for my lips, connecting once. Before I can wipe dry, he is out the door, rolling himself home in a discarded wheelchair he finds abandoned outside.

The next night, I meet Casablancas at the Gramercy Diner.

He has promised to behave himself this time. His eyes are glazed over from lack of sleep. “I very often have night terrors,” 50 /

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Casablancas says. “Just think of the worst possible situation, and it’s a regular thing for me. I’ve died in my sleep twenty-three different ways.”

He apologizes for his behavior yesterday. He was drunk.

So does anyone ever worry about your drinking or try to get you to stop?

No. I mean, I think they know that if it gets too out of hand, I usually stop myself.

And how do you know when it’s out of hand?

When we were doing the record, I stopped for about five months.

“Just think of the worst possible situation, and it’s a regular thing for me.”

How did you do that?

I realized it was getting to the point where it was about to have serious effects on my music if I wasn’t going to stop. I would be too hung over to sit down and play music. Drinking destroys your mental capability unless you’re drinking. Whenever I was hung over, everything just seemed so negative. So I would be like, “Fuck this, I need a drink.” And then you have a drink and everything is fine.

What did other people think?

Casablancas:Your girlfriend can leave you and your mother will yell at you, but when you start feeling like it’s hurting the music, then it’s a bad mistake.

When was the first time you got fucked up?

Casablancas: The first time was probably when I was ten and there was a dinner party. There were drinks on the table, and I think I just downed all the drinks, and I was like, “Whoa. What the hell is this? This is great.” My body immediately enjoyed it. It was like, “Life is actually fucking amazing in every single way.” \ 51

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After a cigarette break, Casablancas orders abeer and a grilled Jack-and-cheddar-cheese with bacon, and we talk for nearly three hours. We discuss his school days, in which time he received one trophy, for his role in Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, before dropping out junior year; and Nirvana and Pearl Jam, who first inspired him to make music. “I can’t even explain it,” he says of the first time he heard “Yellow Ledbetter,”

by Pearl Jam. “It was like the first time I drank.”

He says that if he weren’t a musician, he’d be “a bartender trying to be a writer.”

Casablancas is a different person from who he was the night before and is willing to talk about anything. The only taboo subject is his father. John Casablancas was the founder of Elite Models.

He divorced Julian’s mother when Julian was nine, and, though Julian still sees his father, he tends to blame many of his bad habits, particularly in regard to women, on his dad. Julian remembers a joke his father once told him about a group of bulls: One bull said that he could have sex ten times a day, another said he could do it twenty times, and a third bragged that he could do it fifty times. Then a fourth bull came along and said, “Yeah, but not with the same cow.”

“It’s not funny, really,” Casablancas says, “but it has a message.”

“I told him the other day,” Casablancas says of his father, “’I love you with your flaws and your qualities.’”

My cell phone rings. It is Hammond. He’s calling for Casablancas. This is how one gets in touch with a singer who doesn’t have a cell phone. The two are planning to watch the movie Fletch tonight.

Once upon a time, most of the Strokes lived together. But, one by one, they have moved apart or disappeared into girlfriend land. Casablancas is the only single member left. Outside it is pouring rain. Casablancas leaves and walks into the downpour without an umbrella. Within two steps, he is soaked. After he disappears, I survey the detritus of the night on the table. There is a half-eaten sandwich, several empty beer glasses, an empty cigarette pack and a crumpled piece of paper. I unroll it: It is a receipt from a Walgreen’s drugstore for $2.99. The date is today.

Only one item has been bought: a can of Pringles.

52 /

\ Different Strokes

“Fuck this, I need a drink.”

\ 53

You Only Live Once /

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

01. You Only Live Once 02. Juicebox 03. Heart In A Cage 04. Razorblade 05. On The Other Side 06. Vision Of Division 07. Ask Me Anything 54 /

\ Different Strokes

OF EARTH 08. Electricityscape 09. Killing Lies 10. Fear Of Sleep 11. 15 Minutes 12. Ize Of The World 13. Evening Sun 14. Red Light \ 55

First Impressions of Earth The Strokes making a third album? That wasn’t supposed to happen. After all the tricks they stole from their 1970s New York rock heroes, they seemed destined to blaze out in a storm of booze and leather and Danish strippers, preferably in a five-room suite at the Chelsea Hotel, with a neon sign out the window flickering the words too much too soon. But look at them now. Julian Casablancas got married, reportedly quit drinking, and now he’s writing songs about God and fate and the meaning of the universe. They go for a heavier, beefier, louder sound, recording with L.A. studio-rock pro David Kahne, the guy who produced the Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian.” There are songs on this album with titles like “Vision of Division” and “Electricityscape.” “Don’t be a coconut/God is trying to talk to you” — this is the Strokes? Hard to explain, dude.

Fortunately, maturity hasn’t slowed the Strokes down. It hasn’t even matured them all that much — they’re just learning some new tricks to go with the adolescent faster-louder-more-now stomp of Is This It and Room On Fire. They earned a place in the heart of jaded rock & roll trollops with Is This It, the 2001 debut that shocked the world with the revelation that music should be crass and speedy and flashy and slutty. They tightened the trousers of a whole generation — even the Swedish guys who wrote Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” admit they were just trying to copy the Strokes. But some fans thought Room On Fire was too exactly like the first album — OK, everybody thought that, even the band. Song for song, it was almost as excellent, and some of us secretly like it even more, but you can’t blame them for trying new moves.

First Impressions of Earth is different; it’s ambitious, messy, nearly as long as the first two records combined. Guitarists Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. get to show off, while drummer Fab Moretti provides the forward momentum that 56 /

By Rob Sheffield Rolling Stone

makes the Strokes a killer groove band. They’ve never kicked harder than “Juicebox,” which turns the old “Peter Gunn” riff into a surf-metal snarl, or “Heart in a Cage,” which jumps like Iggy Pop in “The Passenger.” But the music is full of beardstroking classic-rock flourishes. “Razorblade” has twin-guitar leads straight from Thin Lizzy, and in “Juicebox,” Nikolai Fraiture demonstrates that he can do a frighteningly accurate simulacrum of Yes bassist Chris Squire circa Fragile, though why anybody would want to demonstrate this remains a mystery.

Casablancas’ voice is still a panty peeler, especially in “Razorblade,” where he wails a melody nicked from Barry Manilow and makes it sound soulful. He pouts and moans in fine mod form, as if he realizes his lyrics need all the help they can get. The guy has an uncanny ear for the did-he-say-that? moment, when a dumb bar-stool monologue veers into a brilliant little haiku. He achieves that effect with lines like “I love you more than being seventeen.” But man, if you thought he was ridiculous when he was chasing girls, wait till you hear him contemplate mortality in “Ize of the World,” as in “modernize,” “terrorize,” “desensitize,” etc. It’s like he’s challenging Interpol to a poetry slam.

Like most rock bands, the Strokes are better at rocking than not rocking, so ravers like “You Only Live Once” beat failed experiments like the synth-strings ballad “Ask Me Anything” or the Pogues-ish waltz “15 Minutes.” Really, this could be the excessive, erratic second album Room On Fire wasn’t; if you switched the order of the two albums, Room On Fire would undoubtedly get hailed as their return to form. But as maturity moves go, First Impressions proves what the Strokes set out to prove: They’re a serious band of dedicated craftsmen, a band that is here to stay. It also proves they could steal your girlfriend without even trying. But you already knew that. \ 57

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GROUP THERAPY Can a sober, settled-down front man and a great new record solve the problems of New York’s most dysfunctional rock band?

By Jay McInerney

58 /

\ Group Therapy

Hiding behind a pair of big aviator shades and clutching the mike stand, Julian Casablancas can hardly tell if he’s singing or not, the monitors are so murky, and lead guitarist Nick Valensi feels like the bass is some kind of malignant force swallowing all the music; rhythm guitarist Albert Hammond Jr. is exchanging worried looks with bassist Nikolai Fraiture, and even the unflappable drummer Fab Moretti seems to lose the beat for a moment. For the five guys onstage, the performance seems to be spinning out of control. And damned if those aren’t the boys from Franz Ferdinand standing right out front witnessing this debacle.

Fifteen yards out from the edge of the stage, the drunk girl with the bleached-out Jane Fonda–in–Klute shag thinks the performance is absolutely brilliant. She waited in line for 26 hours in subfreezing weather to be one of the lucky 800 or so packed into London University’s student union to hear the band preview their new album, First Impressions of Earth. Actually, no matter what the monitors might sound like onstage, it’s a pretty tight performance, a testament to hundreds of hours of rehearsal the Strokes have put in over the last couple of months.

The Strokes first broke in the U.K., and they remain huge here, which may be one reason London gets to hear them perform the new tunes before the hometown crowd in New York does.

When the band play the opening chords of “Last Nite,” that instant classic from their 2001 debut, Is This It?, the drunk girl starts screaming like it’s 1964, and I feel my scalp tingling, find myself grinning idiotically. It’s exhilarating, hearing the band perform the song in this tiny venue that’s about the size of the Mercury Lounge in New York, where I heard them in December 2000, when all their fans could fit in one medium-size room and it felt as if maybe we were experiencing a Lazarus moment in the history of rock and roll, the way a lucky few hard-core fans in Seattle might have felt hearing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for the first time. For many Strokes fans, though, “Last Nite” really evokes the fall of the following year. As if she’s reading my mind, the drunk girl turns to me as the song ends. “I was in New York then,” she shouts. “You know, September 11th.” And then she hugs me—because she’d already learned I was a writer from New York—and spills her vodka-cranberry all over me.

In retrospect, it seems strange to me that an album of edgy, urban, hyperhip garage rock would have become the soundtrackof \ 59

You Only Live Once /

our post-traumatic distress. Released days after September 11, Is This It could have easily vanished without a trace, as many contemporary pop-cultural offerings did that fall. Instead, the Strokes’ debut album became part of the fabric of that autumn of “missing” posters and anthrax scares, when the air downtown smelled like oven cleaner, and the friend with whom you used to play tennis every week was officially missing.You’d think, in that environment, we would have all had an appetite for the familiar offerings of classic-rock radio, though, in a sense, listening to the Strokes was like listening to an underground, highly selective classic-rock station playing tunes with which you knew you were familiar but that you couldn’t quite identify. The Strokes’ sound seemed both brilliantly distinctive and hugely derivative.

You couldn’t necessarily point to any one riff or vocal phrase and say, that’s the Velvet Underground, or Blondie, or the Cars, or Nirvana, or even Tom Petty. Singer Casablancas, who writes all the band’s material, seemed to have digested his influences a little more thoroughly than, say, Oasis’s Noel Gallagher.

But it was almost impossible not to feel a sense of déjà vu while listening to the Strokes. Even visually, the band seemed like a mix-and-match visual compendium of classic-rock iconography: guitarist Nick Valensi looking like a more handsome version of Dylan beneath his Keith Richards–’65 wardrobe; Afroed Albert Hammond Jr. channeling Hendrix and Mike Bloomfield; mustached drummer Fab Moretti making a fine Freddie Mercury; Nikolai Fraiture kind of Brian Jonesy; and heavy-lidded Casablancas, with his baby-suckled-on-absinthe face, looking plausibly like a young Rimbaud, which is to say, like a lead singer.

“listening to the Strokes was like listening to an underground, highly selective classic-rock station playing tunes with which you knew you were familiar but that you couldn’t quite identify.”

And, of course, they were a New York band—finally, after all these years—which seemed important, too, at that moment 60 /

\ Group Therapy

ofuncharacteristic civic pride and outside sympathy. All city boys, with the exception of L.A.-born Hammond. Edgy and dark as they were—it’s always 3 a.m. in Casablancas’s voice— the Strokes were also reassuringly retro.

To many of us, anyway. Some music geeks grumbled that the band were mere copycat stylists, and certain guardians of the counterculture, abetted by rival bands, questioned whether the Strokes could claim to have any street cred, given their privateschool educations and privileged backgrounds (Julian’s father, John Casablancas, founded the eponymous modeling school; Albert Hammond Sr. writes huge pop songs, like Jefferson Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” which he did with Dianne Warren). On balance, though, the rock press greeted them as the saviors of edgy guitar rock, and the band managed to reach an audience large enough to certify them as a phenomenon, but not quite so large as to alienate their core audience of urban hipsters.

“it’s always 3 a.m. in Casablancas’s voice” As the first album gained momentum and world tours followed, the Strokes presented themselves as an enviable social unit, real friends just out of their teens, living the dream of adulthood postponed. Like the seventies bands they took their cues from, their musical skills were unpolished; they were really just mastering their instruments, together, in public, and that was no small part of the appeal. Though Julian had an uneasy relationship with the limelight—you can see evidence of it in photos, where he is often shuffled off to the side or the back, not preening in front—the band was utterly reliant on him, artistically and emotionally. Gifted and driven, he also displayed a strong penchant for willfully destructive behavior. Periodically, this would burst out into the open, but you had a feeling that the band was dealing with his black moods and impetuousness on a more regular basis. Almost from the very start, the Strokes gave their fans plenty of reasons to wonder if they were in it for the long haul, or if, at any moment, Julian might yank the cord and bring the whole band crashing down around him.

Two weeks earlier, at Wiz Kid Management, the Strokes’ East Village headquarters, “Sugar, We’re Going Down” is playing on \ 61

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the big TV screen—that ridiculous Fall Out Boy video where the guy grows antlers. It’s the night before they head off on the first leg of their world tour.

“When did music get so bad?” asks the normally upbeat Moretti, sprawled on a couch with his bandmates between photo shoots.

A willowy brunette named Juliet appears, holding a clipboard, announcing an 8 a.m. pickup time to JFK. Only later will I learn that this is Julian Casablancas’s wife.

“Simple Plan is the worst band,” says Hammond, as the next video rolls. He holds his hand over the mouthpiece of his cell phone: “I’d rather put shit in my mouth than listen to them.”

Then he returns to his phone conversation: “Hey, Mom, I love you, see you later.”

Casablancas glowers at the screen with his jaded baby face.

When asked who was the last great band, he frowns and says nothing. Just when it seems he’s forgotten the question or decided to ignore it, he says, “Nirvana.”

Of the five, Nikolai Fraiture is the least talkative, and it’s often hard to figure out what he thinks. He still hits the clubs in New York, as aggressively as ever, to hear new music, identifying an Australian band called You Am I as one of his new favorites, as well as the Arcade Fire, with whom they shared a bill on their recent Brazilian tour. It was Nikolai who was responsible for the let-there-be-light moment in the creation myth of the Strokes, when, circa age 13, he arrived at his friend and Lycée Française classmate Julian Casablancas’s Upper East Side apartment with a Velvet Underground record his older brother had given him.

“I don’t listen to much music,” Casablancas tells me later. “Most of the time I stick with the important artists, and I don’t want to waste my time with anything less.” Among the chosen few: Bob Marley, the Doors, and naturally, the Velvet Underground.

The next day over a pizza at Mezzogiorno in Soho, Nick Valensi, the youngest, tallest, and most relentlessly sincere member of the band, says, “I’m happy to listen to anything. I like music.

Nowadays I like Queens of the Stone Age and System of a Down. I’m of the opinion that now is a great time for music. I really respect Norah Jones for what she does—God, I’m such a 62 /

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fag.” He rolls his eyes as if anticipating his bandmates’ reactions to this kind of talk. “I even like My Chemical Romance.” Looking very Carnaby Street mod in a tight velvet coat and a long silk scarf, he ventures a theory: “The reason people liked the first record, maybe, was because it was kind of New Wave, kind of retro, and no one was doing that music then—the Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie, the Cars. That music never went out of style, but no one was playing it. We were filling some kind of void in music.”

Since Is This It, of course, bands like the Hives (the Swedish Strokes), the Vines (the Australian Strokes), the Killers (the Mormon Strokes), and a dozen more have made the neo–New Wave sound almost ubiquitous. In 2003, the Strokes themselves released Room on Fire—which Rolling Stone called the most eagerly anticipated follow-up since Nirvana’s In Utero. Though not quite a dud, Room on Fire failed to live up to the band’s mystique.

To devoted fans, it sounded like a slightly lesser version of Is This It, which is to say good but not great. Detractors, meanwhile, seized on it as evidence of the Strokes’ inherently limited musical vision.

“We were filling some kind of void in music.”

First Impressions of Earth is an altogether more ambitious and impressive album. It’s still 3 a.m. in Casablancas’s voice, but it no longer sounds as if he’s drunk and shouting at you from the sidewalk through a tenement intercom. The production is cleaner, less garagey. The songs don’t sound quite as interchangeable— I still have trouble telling many of the songs on Room on Fire apart—and the band, especially Valensi, reveal previously unsuspected flashes of virtuosity. By almost any measure, it’s their best album. The propulsive rhythmic energy and the instant melodic appeal of the best songs provide a taut counterpoint to the wounded sneer of Casablancas’s lyrics, which are as disillusioned, doomy, and sarcastic as ever. Five years after their arrival seemed to presage a New York rock-and-roll renaissance, First Impressions of Earth confirms the fact that the Strokes are still the only local band capable of conquering the world.

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Early buzz is strong. Jon Pareles gave it high marks in the Times last week. “Juicebox” became the band’s first Billboard No. 1 single, shortly after its release in December. And the authority I trust the most, my 11-year-old son, summed it up this way: “Definitely better than Room on Fire, at least as good as Is This It—maybe even better.”

Talking about the album, the Strokes themselves sound cautious and self-critical. Even as the crowd in London went nuts over their performance, they stood backstage enveloped in an evil mood. “That was awful,” said Hammond, crouching with the others in a stairwell between the stage and the downstairs dressing room immediately after finishing the set.

“Get me to Heathrow immediately,” said Casablancas.

“Are they even applauding?” asked Moretti. “I don’t hear anything.”

While the audience stomped and screamed for more, the guys were convinced they’d bombed. Throughout the few days I was with them in London, their angst was almost unbearable. Before the show, in the dressing room, I thought I was going to have a contact anxiety attack or possibly puke from the collective tension. Now, after the show, nobody was any more relaxed. I thought this was supposed to be the fun part.

“Fuck it, I’m going out,” Hammond said, grimly determined to plow through the encore.

“Julian eats, breathes, sleeps, and shits music” They may look jaded in their photos, but they take their jobs very seriously, and at that moment, they seemed convinced that no one was going to like their new album.

“The best artists,” Casablancas says, “are the ones that work the hardest, and if you work hard enough, you’ll eventually experience the happy accidents that are art. I learned that from my stepfather.” We are sitting in a ramen shop in the East Village, Julian’s neighborhood, a few days after Thanksgiving. He’s wearing a T-shirt that says JUST ONE MORE AND THEN I GOTTA GO 64 /

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under a tan Levi’s cord jacket. Bob Marley’s “Exodus” is playing on the speakers. In an hour, he will head off for rehearsal.

Casablancas doesn’t look like a type A personality; in fact, he always looks, and sounds, as if he’s just woken up from a nap or he’sabout to pass out. A work ethic is not something one associates with rock and roll, let alone a band this languidly stylish, but by many accounts, Julian is a grind.

In the early days, the Strokes worked the scene, hitting the bars and clubs of the Lower East Side after eight hours of rehearsal to hand out flyers and schmooze the scenesters. “They have an almost military sense of discipline,” says manager Ryan Gentles, who was a booker at the Mercury Lounge when he came across the Strokes and decided to sign on (he’s often referred to as “the sixth Stroke”). While the band spread the word and established themselves on the club circuit, Julian spent hours writing songs—words and music, guitar solos and bridges, everything meticulously worked out—and still does.

“Julian eats, breathes, sleeps, and shits music,” Valensi says.

“We’ll show up at the studio at noon, and he’ll be there in the studio till four in the morning. He doesn’t stop. Long after everyone else has gone home, he’s still like remixing stuff, trying out different things. He’s like an android. I get to the point where I can’t listen to music anymore and I have to stop, but Julian doesn’t. His ear is so sharp. He’s the one with the ear for detail in this band. Creatively, he is a force to be reckoned with.

He’s difficult to work with, and a lot of times he has difficulty communicating, but he’s so creative.”

Certainly Casablancas has some kind of hellhound on his trail.

He didn’t have much use for his teachers at the Dwight School, where he landed after leaving the Lycée, or for anything they tried to teach him. He credits his stepfather, Ghanaian-born artist Sam Adoquei, for giving form and shape to his angsty teenage dreams. Although he carries around a name made semi-famous by his father—with whom he says relations have warmed, after years of friction—it is Adoquei whom he can’t stop talking about. “He’s an amazing guy. He taught me everything about art and philosophy. He taught me that the best artists were the ones that worked the hardest.” Adoquei also gave him a copy of the Best of the Doors, yet another touchstone for the Strokes.After lunch, Casablancas brings me by Adoquei’s Union Square studio \ 65

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to meet him. They hug each other warmly and Julian introduces us. I am immediately disarmed by Adoquei’s beatific smile and his serene aspect, and Julian seems to shed years in his presence, becoming shy and talkative and smiley. He shows me some of his favorite paintings—nudes, still lifes, and portraits, including a large crucifixion-like image depicting the death of Martin Luther King Jr. The figure in the backward baseball cap cradling King’s head is clearly Julian. Julian is effusive in his praise and keeps trying to get the prices, but Adoquei fends him off fondly.

“Your money’s no good, mon.”

Whether it’s his stepfather or his friends, Julian exerts a certain pull over those around him. At Dwight, Fab and Nick say, he always stood out. “He had this fantasy right from the start of who he wanted to be,” says Fab. “He seemed really cool,” Nick says. “But also shy and grouchy.”

Inspired in part by Nirvana and Pearl Jam and by Nikolai’s Velvet Underground album, Julian was determined to form a band.

Valensi was already an accomplished guitarist, and Julian convinced Fraiture to take up the bass. Looking around for another guitarist, Julian happened to get a call from Hammond, whom he’d known when both attended Institut Le Rosey, a boarding school in Switzerland. Hammond had just arrived in New York to attend film school. And, as it turned out, he could play a little guitar.

The five of them seem to be incredibly tight and to enjoy operating as a gang. The first time I saw them offstage was at an NME cover shoot in November, where they were all dressed in Santa hats and reindeer antlers and joshing around like slightly self-conscious schoolboys posing for the poster for the class play. Only Nikolai seemed somewhat removed from the spirit of things, in street clothes and a long scarf. Two things struck me: the boyish, Beatles-like camaraderie and the fact that the coolest and most sartorially self-conscious band in America didn’t mind posing in Santa suits.

For all the warmth and team spirit, though, the paradox of the Strokes is that they are a democracy under a dictator. When you hang out with them, it quickly becomes apparent that Julian usually keeps the others waiting, the last to appear in the hotellobby for the after-party or the photo shoot, the last to get in 66 /

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the van or the limo. He’s a curious combination of diffident and supercilious, sounding tongue-tied and loquacious within the same sentence. He tells me he wants more input from the band, but he seems afraid to give up control. Though he has always shared songwriting royalties with the band, he has tended to dominate the creative process. For the Room on Fire sessions, it was said that he was loosening up, though it wasn’t entirely clear if that was true. Now everyone agrees that First Impressions is their most collaborative effort to date.

“The Strokes are a democracy under a dictator.”

“I used to wait until everything was done and walk in with kind of a finished product,” he says. “I used to do more on my own, and now I’d bring the songs in less finished and let them brew a little bit. Let them simmer and let the other guys think about them. Because we had more time. We had this deadline with Room on Fire, and there wasn’t as much time. There was a certain amount of pressure, a sense that we had to get another album out before people forgot about us.”

The more I hear about the tour schedule, the party protocols, and the onslaught of fame that followed the release of Is This It, the more amazed I am that Room on Fire got recorded at all. All the usual vices were tried on for size: Substances were abused, public misbehavior was duly reported. “We were hitting it pretty hard,” admits Moretti. Julian punched out a music exec in Paris and then, back in New York, he tried to kiss reporter Neil Strauss, according to Strauss’s notorious Rolling Stone cover story—which the band hated. The story, however accurate or distorted it may have been, presented a seemingly convincing portrait of Julian as a kind of booze-fueled Jekyll and Hyde.

There was a brief period in 2002 when it was still possible for New Yorkers to observe the boys behaving this way in their pre-fame native habitat. Watch Julian crawl out of an East Village dive just before dawn! See strong, silent Nikolai hurl a garbage can at a car! Which is no less than we expect of our rock stars.

For a bright, shining moment, it seemed like they had created the kind of downtown music scene that we’d all been looking for since Television was playing CBGB.Then, within less than a year of each other, they all settled down with girlfriends and pretty \ 67

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much left the party behind. As if they didn’t realize that sex and drugs were the whole point of rock stardom, let alone of that period known as one’s twenties, they’ve shacked up and sobered up by their mid-twenties. Albert hooked up with Catherine Pierce of the alt-country duo the Pierces, whom he pursued for more than a year after seeing her onstage at the Mercury Lounge with her sister. Nick fell in love with Amanda de Cadenet, an English actress and photographer who was formerly married to John Taylor of Duran Duran. Nikolai recently married his longtime girlfriend, Illy, with whom he had a daughter last year. And, as all readers of Us Weekly know, Fab has been going out with Drew Barrymore for the past three and a half years.

Tristan never raved about Isolde the way these guys talk about their women. “She’s so beautiful,” Fab says of Barrymore, “she must have the gardens of Babylon inside of her.” And he gets so excited when she calls one night that he insists on putting me on the phone just to share the love.

Finally, in the summer of 2004, Internet chat rooms started buzzing with the rumor that Julian was engaged to Juliet, who had worked for the band for several years; they were married in February 2005.

“Drinking absinthe with Fab until six in the morning was my only glimpse of the Dionysian touring life.”

When I joined the band at the Metropolitan hotel in London last month, I found one wife and two girlfriends in residence, along with two kids. Juliet had just returned to New York, and Drew was doing reshoots in L.A. Drinking absinthe with Fab until six in the morning was my only glimpse of the Dionysian touring life. “Dude,” he said the next afternoon when we ran into each other. “I passed out with my cheek on my bed, kneeling on the floor—my knees are, like, fucking aching.” And the famed bar at the Metropolitan, known for late-night post-concert binges, seemed similarly played out.Domestic tranquillity is anathema to rock-and-roll mythology, if not necessarily to rock-and-roll reality; hearing the Rolling Stones play in the late seventies, you might have questioned the value of a full-on program of 68 /

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drugs and debauchery, in terms of the musical product, and the Strokes seem to have understood the pitfalls of this far earlier and less painfully than the average gang of guitar slingers. “If I were 13, I would not want to hear this,” Nick says about how they’ve all settled down. “But I’m tired of bars, I’m tired of these drunks and cokeheads. I’m trying to live responsibly. Do I want to live out this rock-and-roll cliché, or do I want to be a healthy, morally responsible person? Being healthy is not easy when you’re in a band, but that’s who I am. I’m not going to act like Sid Vicious.”

In Julian’s case, that realization appears to have had an especially dramatic effect on his life. After Room on Fire, he quit drinking, which radically altered the internal dynamic of the band, though it’s hard for any of them to talk about. When you discuss what the last few years have been like, the question of his drinking is the elephant in the room. By Julian’s own account, he first got drunk when he was 10 and later had run-ins at school. By the time he was in the Strokes, the drinking was out of control.

“Domestic tranquillity is anathema to rock-and-roll mythology” “Julian’s become a lot more communicative since he quit drinking,” Fab tells me one night over Heinekens in the Wiz Kid offices. The subject keeps coming up with the others, albeit timidly. “Julian quitting drinking had a big effect on the dynamic of the band,” Nick says at one point. “Instead of the four of us excluding Julian and getting together and venting and airing our concerns, he’s a part of it now. He’s a lot more approachable and communicative. He’s letting us know what’s on his mind.”

Albert, who was the last to join the band and admits to still feeling insecure about his role in it, doesn’t want to go near the subject. “He’s my best friend, and it’s great to see him happy and being aware of everything,” he says.My last night in London, I’m supposed to have dinner with Julian at nine. So I skip the Franz Ferdinand concert to which Hammond and Moretti have invited me. “Dude, did you see that sunset?” Fab asks when he spots me in the lobby of the Metropolitan on his way to the concert. “It set like it was the last time on Earth. Like, ‘Good-bye, humans.’ ”

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“I hate them all I hate them all.

I hate myself for hating them So I’ll drink some more.

I love them all.

I’ll drink even more.

I’ll hate them even more than I did before.”

—“On the Other Side”

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Moretti is temperamentally the opposite of Casablancas, the joker, the glass-half-full guy—the warm emotional heart of the band. He keeps the beat, Ringo to Julian’s manic-depressive Lennon. One imagines he’s gotten them through some rough spots. Last night we pledged undying friendship and talked for hours about music and books and our girlfriends. Trying to recall what he said, I can barely read the few notes I managed to scrawl out: “We were playing a show in Indio, California. Ryan [Gentles, the Strokes’ manager] introduced me to Drew. I came down to the lawn, and I was really intimidated. She was talking about Stephen Hawking. She said, ‘Do you like Prodigy?’ And I said, ‘They scare me.’ And she said, ‘Well then, look at me.’ My God, I love her.” At one point, Fab started quoting from Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House. Watching him leave now for the concert, I can’t help wishing I could join him.

Waiting in my room, I get periodic calls to stand by for my meeting with Casablancas. At 11:30 p.m., after watching a TV movie about Michael Jackson that portrays him as a Christ-like figure, I order room service from the Nobu downstairs. When he finally calls my room, it’s 2 a.m. “You wanna meet downstairs?” he asks. “Or we could have breakfast tomorrow.”

Let’s not and say we did is what I want to tell him. I’m too fucking old to be waiting around on some egomaniacal 27-year-old who’s flexing his self-importance after studying Chapter Two of Rockstar 101, by Mick Jagger. And come to think of it, Jagger was only twenty minutes late when I met him for a profile in the mid-eighties.

At least now I won’t feel awkward asking Casablancas about his drinking; if I’d had to bring it up at ten over a pleasant dinner with a couple of glasses of Burgundy inside me, I might have felt bad. Now I’m almost relishing the prospect of making him uncomfortable. So much for my theory, developed over the course of the previous week, that all the shit I have read about hiserratic and imperious behavior was largely attributable to all that drinking he used to do.

And, indeed, after he sits down in the lobby of the Metropolitan at ten past two, he seems taken aback by the question of his drinking, even after I put a positive spin on it and tell him how the other guys in the band all say he’s much easier to work with \ 71

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now, that it’s the best thing that’s happened in the history of the band. “Yeah, whatever,” he responds. “If they say so.” He looks like he’ll have something to say to the guys tomorrow when he sees them, and I feel bad for them in advance because I like them and I can see that they live with a tyrant.

“I didn’t feel so mentally altered,” he ventures.Yeah, yeah. He tries to stare me down, and normally he could, but it’s not working because I’m in such a bad mood I can stare right back until finally he blinks. After a long silence, he amends his last statement. “The problem was that it was taking away from my time. Now I’ve got so much time, I have all these songs popping out.” And after another long pause: “I’d lash out when I was drinking. I said things I shouldn’t say. I’d say everything that was on my mind.” Another long pause. “I drank a lot since I was 14.

I couldn’t really take it any further. I reached that turning point somewhere in the darkness.”

After that he seems to register my poisonous mood and apologizes for being late. He starts talking to fill the silence. “I’ve been doing interviews all day,” he says. “The British press can be so annoying. They jerk you off with one hand and smack you with the other.” (The British press has always loved his debauched rock-star ways; in naming Julian to its “Cool List,” the NME remarked that “nobody holds a half drunk bottle of Heineken quite so stylishly.”)

“It’s like an inner struggle for me, between saying I don’t give a shit and trying to make it work.You want to do the right thing, but I’m sick of people thinking I’m difficult.”

I suggest that making people wait five hours probably doesn’t predispose them to be sympathetic.

“I reached that turning point somewhere in the darkness.”

“I’m really sorry, I fell asleep,” he says. “It’s just been a bad day.

I’m a little bit sad. People in our camp are making me feel bad about doing it the way I want to do it. They want me to do cheesy things. I feel like I’ve given up a lot of my fantasies, just in terms of how we do things. I just want to do things differently, and to a lot of people that’s annoying. I like weird stuff.

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I always hoped if we had a big success it would be on our own terms.” He’s chewing on his thumbnail, looking seriously depressed.

I tell him I have no idea what he’s talking about.

“It’s like holding a fish, putting your finger on the stuff that really matters.You hear the great ones and just try to understand them.” He looks out over the lobby, opens and closes his mouth as if despairing of getting it right.

“Like music videos,” he says finally. “They really hurt the song.

It’s like the movie and the book—when you hear the song, you think about the video, which is good for selling it but not how I want to think of the experience of music. It would be better to have your own idea of the song.” He seems to reconsider. “It’s fine,” he says, in a forget-everything-I-just-said tone. “It’s okay, it’s totally cool. I feel slightly confused about certain things.

Practical and tactical things. When you try to make everyone happy . . . in the end you’ve got to make yourself happy.”

“It’s like an inner struggle for me, between saying I don’t give a shit and trying to make it work.”

I feel like I’m trying to decipher the lyrics to one of his songs, which are suggestive and elusive. In “Juicebox,” the current single, the words go: Everybody sees me, But it’s not that easy, Standing in the light field, Standing in the light field, Why don’t you come over here?

We’ve got a city to love.

When he sings it behind the bass, drums, and two guitars, loose expressions like these create their own argument, but right now, without any booze or melody or the other Strokes, it makes for awfully cryptic conversation. I tell him he’s going to have to be more specific.

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“My opinion is that huge iconic success seems to damage people.

Some people got damaged by drugs. Some got destroyed by being on top of the world. I saw this TV movie about Michael Jackson tonight,” he says. “What do you think? Do you think he’s guilty? I don’t know. He’s got enough evil forces working around that you’ve got to wonder.”

I think it’s interesting and weird that he identifies with Michael Jackson.

“I think,” he says, “I will always be desperate to figure these things out.”

At this point he goes off the record. Two hours later, it’s 5:30 in the morning. I’m exhausted, but Julian seems refreshed, and in the putrid predawn light of the hotel lobby, he looks serene and youthful. As we take the elevator up to our rooms, Julian says he feels better, having divested himself of a litany of doubts and complaints and fears; everything will probably be fine, he says.

It was like listening to a stranger talk about his marriage for a few hours—ultimately the details aren’t that important, but you can’t help hoping they work it out and stay together in the end.

When we get to my floor, Julian surprises me by giving me a hug. “Later, man,” he says, and the doors close between us.

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“Everybody sees me, But it’s not that easy, Standing in the light field, Standing in the light field, Why don’t you come over here?

We’ve got a city to love.”

—“Juicebox”

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ANG LES

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01. Machu Picchu 02. Under Cover of Darkness 03. Two Kinds of Happiness 04. You’re So Right 05. Taken For A Fool 06. Games 07. Call Me Back 08. Gratisfaction 09. Metabolism 10. Life Is Simple In The Moonlight

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Angles

By David Fricke Rolling Stone

“Don’t try to stop us/Get out of the way,” Julian Casablancas sings with a snapping relish at the end of Angles, the Strokes’ new album, in a song called “Life Is Simple in the Moonlight.”

That’s a rich sign-off for five guys with peculiar ideas about momentum. The New York band’s last record, the ambitious and wobbly First Impressions of Earth, came out five years ago.

Angles took nearly two years to write and record, including one mostly scrapped set of sessions. The Strokes’ body of studio work over a decade on four LPs, not including the solo projects: 46 songs. “I’m putting your patience to the test,” Casablancas sings in the first song here, “Machu Picchu.” No shit.

But this is what comes from waiting: 10 songs built mostly from basic rock-combo parts, charged and scarred with an exacting attention to musically and romantically turbulent detail. With its sudden-U-turn songwriting and curt execution, Angles is the best album that Casablancas, guitarists Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr., bassist Nikolai Fraiture and drummer Fabrizio Moretti have made since 2001’s Is This It, the cannonball that inaugurated the modern-garage era.

Angles is also the Strokes’ first true giant step forward from that record. They tighten the striving that was spread thin across First Impressions with proven martial jangle: Fraiture and Moretti’s stoic grip on the beat; robotic-Yardbirds crossfires of crispy-fuzz and brittle-treble guitars. “Machu Picchu” is a sly union of cocky menace — a bony city-reggae gait, wet with echo — and the kind of rapid-strum fury that came with the choruses on early Who singles. In “Two Kinds of Happiness,” a motor-pop groove that recalls the smooth futurist lure of the Cars goes to exciting pieces: Casablancas’ dry, ragged howl hanging over a tense, stuttering rhythm and a field of stabbing-dagger guitars.

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The Strokes arrived at the start of this century perfectly formed, as rigidly pure as the zero-blues propulsion of the early Velvet Underground. But Casablancas once said his favorite Velvets album was 1970’s Loaded, their most expansive LP, with its emotionally incisive songwriting and luxuriant pop-hit and ballad dynamics. Angles is the Strokes’ spin on that ambition.

They shoot wide in “Games,” which has too much electronics, as if the track lost its way to Casablancas’ 2009 solo album. “Call Me Back” is closer with better risk: terse-chiming guitars in a psychedelic suspense of indecision and no drums. In the bridge, Casablancas sings in a whispered falsetto, like he’s leaving messages in someone’s ear as they sleep.

Casablancas is one of rock’s most interior singers, writing in confrontational dialogue, then singing from behind the guitars, through what sounds like cheesecloth. “There’s no one I disapprove of/Or root for more than myself,” he declares in “Life Is Simple in the Moonlight.” That bravado, cut with doubt, sums up his band’s greatness and dilemma. The Strokes invented their own rock. They also want to be better. And that takes time.

“ ‘I’m putting your patience to the test’

No shit.

”

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Different Strokes

By Melena Ryzik

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\ Different Strokes

For just a day the Strokes have gone dandy. In white tie and black, the last defiantly downtown rock band gathered here a few weeks ago to shoot the video for their new single, “Under Cover of Darkness.” Set in a gilded 1930s movie palace with fraying edges, it was a complicated affair. For a central shot the band members were positioned around an elegant dining table, complete with candelabra, chopping away at their instruments.

But the red velvet thronelike chair at the head of the table was empty. Where was Julian?

Julian Casablancas, the singer and insistent frontman for the group that a decade ago revived louche New York City rock ’n’ roll, was in a dressing room, listening for the first time to the final mix of the Strokes’ fourth album, “Angles,” due on March 22 from RCA. He was pleased. Hallelujah.

In the finished video the camera focuses on the empty chair as his vocals kick in. Later he struts around in rock star gear while his four band mates, in formal wear, play on, oblivious to one another. None of the Strokes quite understood the premise of the video. The director, Warren Fu, a longtime collaborator, wanted to keep it mysterious, he said.

“I think we’re supposed to be dead,” Fabrizio Moretti, the evergenial drummer, puzzled over a beer on the set. “It has something to do with ‘The Shining,’ I think?”

Nikolai Fraiture, the bassist, serious and dutiful, had read the treatment. “We’re supposed to be like the bartender in ‘The Shining,’ those kind of characters that are kind of ghostly, floating around,” he offered later. “Julian may be alive.”

Nick Valensi, lead guitarist, wide-eyed and deadpan: “I thought he’s the ghost, and he doesn’t know it. And Fab is like Haley Joel Osment.”

Mr. Casablancas? “They’re all ghosts, and I’m not,” he concluded, a few days after the shoot. “At the end we’re all ghosts. Or something like that.”

Ask the Strokes for one explanation, and you’ll get them in multiples, a lesson that the band, and its fans, have learned well since the group formed in 1998. Then it had a unity of purpose: cosmopolitan former prep schoolers dedicated to throwback \ 81

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and the downtown lifestyle that went with it. There was a moment for the rebirth of New York cool and these skinny dudes suddenly — nimbly — fit into it, molded it, inspired haircuts for it; even the backlash, questioning their authenticity, seemed of a piece.

But over the years, as age, fame, addiction, solo projects and creative foment interceded, their vision striated. With “Angles,” their first album in five years, the Strokes are embracing a new equilibrium, one that weighs each member’s voice more equally.

Or something like that.

“It’s just to get everyone happy,” Mr. Casablancas said evenly.

“Operation Make Everyone Satisfied.”

That state was difficult to achieve, professionally and personally, as the band is lately willing to admit. The result is an album with 10 highly worked-over songs that are identifiably the Strokes — those counterpoint guitar riffs, Mr. Casablancas’s dyspeptic vocals, with their late-night energy and lyrical self-doubt, a few synths and downbeats for modern measure — but with a distinction. For the first time the material was written not just

by Mr. Casablancas, who was absent by design, but by all the members. And it was recorded not in a studio in New York City but in a bucolic setting upstate. They’re not the mature Strokes, exactly — “If I say that,” said Albert Hammond Jr., the rhythm guitarist, “it almost sounds so boring, doesn’t it?” — but they’re close.

Whatever they are, an audience seems ready. The band has sold out headlining dates at Madison Square Garden and will play, with Kanye West and others, the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in Indio, Calif., in April. They’ll follow that with performances at Jazzfest in New Orleans and Bonnaroo in Tennessee.

The group’s free show in an Austin, Tex., park is expected to be a highlight of South by Southwest this month.

The release of “Under Cover of Darkness,” heralded as a return to the Strokes’ old-school sound, crashed the group’s Web site.

Music blogs and industry fans like Lisa Worden, the music director of KROQ-FM, the Los Angeles radio station that was an early champion, are agog with anticipation. She put the Strokes’ single into rotation immediately, “because we love them,” she said.But, she added, it was too soon to tell if the song would be 82 /

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a hit with listeners. “We’re still finding out the anticipation of the KROQ audience,” she said. “It’s been a long time” since it had to consider the Strokes.

In the decade since their debut, “Is This It,” went platinum, both the music business and the dominant aesthetic have shifted.

Where once the Strokes were a welcome deviation from a mainstream of slick pop, rap metal and electronica, now they are part of a wave of indie-minded, guitar-heavy bands, which they helped usher in. Even as sales expectations have dwindled — a No. 1 album can now mean just 40,000 copies sold — online distribution has given bedroom acts as much exposure as major label finds.

“Where once the Strokes were a welcome deviation from a mainstream...now they are part of a wave of indie-minded, guitar-heavy bands, which they helped usher in.”

In some circles the Strokes have retained their appeal. “D.J.’s play ‘Last Nite’ all the time,” the young disc jockey Mia Moretti, in demand on the fashion-art-celebrity scene, said of the band’s best-known single. Ms. Moretti (no relation to the Strokes drummer) added that she would play new Strokes songs at her regular gigs at New York clubs. “I think they’re still very sexy,” Ms. Moretti said of the members, now in their early 30s.

When the Strokes began, though, “guitar music was extremely unfashionable” in New York, recalled Gordon Raphael, who produced their first two records. Still, in early 2001 the British music magazine NME gave their debut EP “The Modern Age” a glowing review, starting a hype cycle in England. Kate Moss came to an early show in London, and by the time the unsigned group returned to New York, buzz had spread. When the Strokes opened for the Doves, a British act, at the Bowery Ballroom, “there were record company limousines around the block,” Mr. Raphael said. (That was, of course, when record companies still employed fleets of limousines.) RCA won what was said to be \ 83

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aheated bidding war. After “Is This It” came out, “I looked around the East Village, and there were tons of boys with leather jackets carrying guitars on their backs,” Mr. Raphael said.

Sometimes they were the Strokes themselves; in the early days they could often be seen marauding together downtown. “We lived in each other’s pockets for several years straight,” Mr. Valensi said. “We’ve been on tour and shared beds. I won’t get into it, but we’ve been uncomfortably close.”

Yes, all the clichés of rock stardom applied, including notable girlfriends. Mr. Moretti dated Drew Barrymore; Mr. Hammond, the model Agyness Deyn; and Mr. Valensi, the photographer Amanda de Cadenet, whom he eventually married.

But out of sight they rehearsed as much as they partied. On the day the LP of “Is This It” was released — Sept. 11, 2001 — they went to their rehearsal space to practice, Mr. Moretti recalled.

That their debut coincided with the Sept. 11 attacks became part of their mythology as a New York band, and they joined acts like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol in a resurgent local scene.

“Out of sight they rehearsed as much as they partied” Inevitably, though, the follow-ups were not as popular as “Is This It,” and by the third Strokes album, “First Impressions of Earth,” there was evident tension. Despite Mr. Casablancas’s newfound sobriety, Mr. Fraiture called that their worst recording experience. After a 2006 tour the group’s manager announced an open-ended break.

It was more open-ended than anyone expected. In the yearslong interim all but Mr. Valensi started side or solo projects; they focused on their families — Mr. Casablancas, Mr. Fraiture and Mr. Valensi are married with children — and splintered between New York and Los Angeles. Interviewed individually over several days in New Jersey and the East Village, each Stroke admitted he’d had his doubts about managing another album, and how it would be received.

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tokind of start over again at a lower level,” Mr. Valensi said.

Around 2007 he, Mr. Fraiture and Mr. Moretti returned to the studio. “We were trying to, by example, get the ball rolling,” Mr. Fraiture said.

By 2009, he added, “it was kind of the last ditch — either this is happening, or it’s not.” What drew them too was their fiverecord contract with RCA; “Angles” is the fourth under that deal. All five members finally returned to the Music Building — where they’ve had dingy rehearsal spaces for a decade — to write, giving periodic thumbs-up updates about their progress.

But soon enough Mr. Casablancas went back on tour to promote his solo album. And just as they were to begin recording, Mr. Hammond had to leave.

“I went to rehab,” Mr. Hammond said. “I just kind of hid, in drugs — a lot of drugs. I had to go fix myself.”

“I just kind of hid, in drugs — a lot of drugs. I had to go fix myself.”

When Mr. Hammond returned, the group members began working anew, engaging the producer Joe Chiccarelli (My Morning Jacket, the Shins) at a Manhattan studio. But the tracks they recorded there did not suit them. “It just sounded boring,” Mr. Hammond said, though his band mates had softer assessments. (Mr. Chiccarelli is still credited.)

The Strokes repaired to Mr. Hammond’s place in upstate New York, living and recording together for weeks. “Our first three records, we recorded them in Manhattan in a super urbane vibe where you just order Chinese food and like walk to work, and, I don’t know, call your weed delivery service,” Mr. Valensi said.

“This one, we were pretty much in the middle of nowhere. We’d wake up early in the morning and, I kid you not, there would be a family of deer in the front yard like five feet away from the porch. I remember Nikolai, in between takes, literally chopping wood.” They each supplied material: Mr. Valensi wrote the album’s first track, “Machu Picchu” — the first time he has contributed a song.And where was Julian? Still on the road. “I definitely wanted to step back as much as possible,” Mr. Casablancas \ 85

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said. He believed his style would be a roadblock. “I’m just very opinionated,” he said over tea near his East Village apartment.

Even without him the process was tortured. “There’s many versions of every song,” said Gus Oberg, Mr. Hammond’s friend and producer who wound up producing most of “Angles.” “It took a long time to get everyone to agree.”

Mr. Casablancas eventually weighed in. “I would say roughly 60 percent of what they did I thought was rad and I didn’t touch, and then 40 percent I would either alter it or it got left behind,” he said. “I try to keep a high standard.” He wrote and recorded lyrics independently, borrowing lines from his band mates occasionally, and trying to maintain that equilibrium. Having a solo outlet helps.

“I think ‘collaboration Strokes’ is more on the side of just poppy than what I am interested in personally,” he added. “I’ll take what I can get, so I’m happy.” (Not totally. Asked if he was excited about touring, Mr. Casablancas said no. He was most animated talking about raising his infant son; he and his wife, Juliet, prefer “co-sleeping” to having a crib.)

By now the Strokes are used to the obsessive interest in their band dynamic, and self-correct for it. In interviews each took pains to note he was only speaking for himself. All said that their problems stemmed from poor communication.

When they became a band, “I think we were trying hard to seem

“I try to keep a high standard.” like it came naturally,” Mr. Moretti said. “And I think now we embrace the fact that it’s hard work.”

Which is not to say that the Strokes, onetime paragons of youthful debauchery, are killjoys. They are still fun to be around. In one of the last shots for the video, the boys, now all in black tie on an orchestra stage, were to bow to one another. They did take after take after take, because they couldn’t do it without cracking up.

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“Over the years, as age, fame, addiction, solo projects and creative foment interceded, their vision striated�

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COMEDOWN MACHINE

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E 01/ Tap Out 02/ All The Time 03/ One Way Trigger 04/ Welcome To Japan 05/ 80s Comedown Machine 06/ 50/50 07/Slow Animals 08/ Partners In Crime 09/ Chances 10/ Happy Ending 11/ Call It Fate, Call It Karma

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Comedown Machine Album five from the New Yorkers who kick-started the noughties indie revival is full of big riffs, fuzzed-up vocals and the sense that they might actually be enjoying themselves By Dan Stubbs For the past decade, fans of The Strokes have watched the band fading away before their very eyes. Not just through a series of albums produced with decreasing care, but with a bunch of increasingly lacklustre concerts too. They don’t even bother to tour any more, promoting 2011’s ‘Angles’ with a handful of festival shows at which the five members looked like they’d rather be sharing a stage with a corpse.

Yet the fans still hold out hope. The Strokes are the band that kick-started the noughties. Without them, there’d have been no indie revival, no New York scene, no Arctic Monkeys, probably.

And sales of Converse would have been waaay slower. The band’s initial impact was so monumental that, each time they release an album, we secretly hope it will be as Earth-shatteringly awesome as ‘Is This It’. But is it really fair to judge a band by an unmatchable past success?

In the build-up to this fifth album’s release, the signs weren’t good. The sleeve – an old RCA reel-to-reel tape box – seems phoned in, not iconic like the ‘Smell The Glove’-inspired artwork of their debut. It transpired that the band would be doing no press, and no tour dates have yet been announced. To top it off, there’s the title: ‘Comedown Machine’. Bummer.

When a track leaked, popular consensus decided it sounded like A-Ha’s ‘Take On Me’. ‘One Way Trigger’ has bleepy-bloopy synths, chugging guitars and Julian Casablancas singing like a girl. But this is when things got exciting. For one thing, ‘Take On Me’ is one of the greatest pop songs ever written. For another, it suggested that Julian Casablancas’ latter-day affinity for ’80s synthesizers might finally marry with the guitar-based thrills of six-string powerhouses Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. By way of confirmation, the album opens with a squally guitar riff that gives way to tropical-sounding pop: ‘Tap Out’ is The Strokes via Phoenix, with a monster chorus.

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‘All The Time’ follows, with Fab Moretti’s thumping drums and heaps of guitars. Then ‘Welcome To Japan’, with its disco-lite beat, guitars mimicking Casablancas’ vocals and catty lyrics that ask, “What kind of asshole drives a Lotus?”

‘80s Comedown Machine’ slows the pace, built on a squeezebox loop that could happily soundtrack a Nationwide advert, before ‘50/50’ aptly marks the halfway point with its big riff and fuzzed-up vocals.

And you breathe a sigh of relief, because so far this is good.

Then it gets a bit weird. The second half is Bee Gees time, Julian cracking out the high register for ‘Slow Animals’ and ‘Chances’, which sounds like a Daniel Bedingfield B-side. ‘Call It Fate, Call It Karma’ is like something drifting in from a Bakelite radio on a Hawaiian beach, and ends the album on a curious coda. In the middle there’s ‘Partners In Crime’, possibly the catchiest song The Strokes have ever written, with its journalist-friendly chorus: “I’m on the guestlist”.

And that’s ‘Comedown Machine’. Not an important album, or one that will define the times. People who want another ‘Is This It’ won’t find it. People who want another ‘Room On Fire’ might not even like it. It’s flawed, it’s imperfect and it’s downright odd at points, but it is packed with belting tunes.

Most of all, it’s fun – a great achievement considering it hasn’t looked like fun being in The Strokes for years. If this is what the ‘Comedown…’ sounds like, we want some of what they’re coming down from.

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The Strokes, New York City, and the Photographer Who Was There for It All Cody Smyth watched his friends transition from dive-bar regulars into one of the biggest rock bands in the world

By Alejandra Ramirez

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How have The Strokes even made it this far? Think back to 2001, when the New York City rockers released their debut album, Is This It. That title, diffident and self-critical, didn’t exactly match the profile of a band pegged for ubiquity or longevity. An even bigger sign of the band’s imminent demise was the fact that critics held them to messianic expectations, hailing them as the second coming of The Velvet Underground. (Is This It’s postpunk roots and no-frills production also made comparisons to Television and the Stooges inescapable.)

But the actual Strokes were something much simpler than all that: a great rock band. In the early 2000s, they helped New York feel exciting again and made everyone forget the solemn adage “rock ‘n’ roll is dead,” even if just for a moment. Fifteen years and four albums later, the band’s influence is clear, easily recognizable in the burn marks left by Julian Casablancas’ hangover dispatches or the ragged distortion of Albert Hammond Jr.’s guitar.

It may seem like The Strokes rocketed to stardom in a matter of seconds, but their fame didn’t happen overnight. Just ask the band’s longtime friend and photographer, Cody Smyth, who began chronicling their story in the late ‘90s. Smyth stayed with the group as they transitioned from leather-jacketed bar regulars to festival headliners, snapping as many photos as he could along the way. Next year, he’ll be releasing a photography book tentatively titled The Strokes 1996–2016, which he describes as “a 20-year document of some close friends that became one of the world’s biggest rock bands.”

Consequence of Sound recently spoke with Smyth about his plans for the book, his early memories with the band, and what he sees in The Strokes’ future. With new music due out soon and a headlining slot at Governors Ball Music Festival this summer, that future may be as photogenic as the past.

So what’s the history behind this book you’ll be releasing?

I met Nick [Valensi] and Julian and Fab [Moretti] and Nikolai [Fraiture] back in ‘95 in high school. We became close friends instantly. So it started back then as me just photographing friends because my parents grew up in that industry. It started from that and grew into a whole document.A close family friend of mine \ 93

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who is the publisher of Lesser Gods knew I had been photographing them. He had worked for MTV Books, and I think he knew that I had this document that had been unseen … that I have been just holding for myself more or less for almost, like, 20 years. So I met up with him, and he just looked over a few of the photos I had and thought that there is definitely enough here for a story to be told from the inside — not really looking to profit off it. It’s sort of this 20-year intimate document of traveling around with them, but the book came about because of him being interested in it and seeing other pictures besides what’s on my website.

Since then, I’ve reached out to the guys in the band, and they know about my work and have always championed it. They were all super cool with it and really excited and happy about it.

This seems to be very different from most photography books regarding bands. Most just showcase the musician at the peak of fame, rather than attempt to chronicle their career.

That’s sort of what I have unintentionally tried to capture with my work. Like us just in high school, goofing around Central Park or messing around late at night doing what we shouldn’t be doing. Early on, I knew they were going to do something with it, even very early on when they were playing at bars in New York like Baby Jupiter and Arlene’s Grocery. I just wanted to keep capturing that and enjoy what was happening as well.

“Music was always a big connector for us.”

I didn’t want the photos to come off with the intention of being seen or published. [They’re] a document of friendship from an inside and outside perspective — being there with them, being friends with them, seeing how songs progress and knowing how they think.

Any thoughts on a title for the book?

I’m not sure yet. I’m trying to stay away from song lyrics of theirs. There was one title I thought of that would be a play off their first album, Is This It. I want it to be straightforward and good-looking. I don’t want it to be cheesy.

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You talk about meeting Nick, Fab, and Julian in high school. How did your friendship start?

Well, once I met Nick and Julian in the winter of ’95, we were somewhat inseparable. During school, after school, and on weekends, we all hung and did what NYC teens did in those days. We were always on bikes and going back and forth to someone’s house. We basically had Central Park as our backyard, so we spent a lot of time hanging out in the park. Back in those days, almost everyone we knew hung out at a spot called the Meadow in the park. We would go to see music shows at Roseland or CBGB’s sometimes, too.

We laughed a lot, did some illegal stuff, got into some trouble, and just always wanted to hang with each other. Another great memory we all have is spending long vacation weekends at a very close friend’s family beach townhouse. It was about an hour train ride out to this spot on Long Island. We would do what teens did without any parental supervision on those weekends.

But we would cook, play basketball, ride bikes, hit the beach, and bum around the town since you could walk it. It was a great escape from the city every now and then. At all these moments, a guitar was usually there, and Nick or Julian or even myself would be playing. Music was always playing. Music was always a big connector for us.

They seem to be real big supporters of you, but were there ever times when you felt like the dynamics began to change as the band got bigger?

Yeah, they have always been champions of mine as friends. There was never a moment of them telling me to get out or anything.

Once in awhile, Julian at sound check would tell me to back away, but that was early on, and because of that I ended up getting this great photograph of a whole empty ballroom they played in. So from that one moment when he told me to “Get out of my face, not right now,” it allowed me to understand that he was working. I didn’t want to interfere, so it forced me to get another shot and to back away from it. All the guys are really supportive, especially Nick. He’s like my brother. They’re all artists, too, so they understand.But going back to your question, I did notice that those dynamics would sort of start to change.

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photographers would come on board who were their friends and acquaintances, and there were moments where things would get heavy. But the aspects mostly have changed in regards to [the band’s management] and the politics of that. My buddy Nick has always welcomed me on board like, “We have a spot for you on the bus, dude, don’t worry about it,” or “Just come, it’ll be fun.”

Once I’m there, it’s like family.

There was shit I saw, but it’s bound to happen. Being friends with them for 20 years comes with also getting on each other’s nerves once in awhile. There was always a pass or a laminate, though. Even as they grew bigger and got regular security guys — like this guy Rob, who I might have a photo of in the book — everyone knew that I wasn’t a hanger-on. Even other managers or people who came on board knew that I had no ill intention of just making quick-cash pictures to sell to social media.

Was there ever a moment early on when you were like, “OK, this band has the potential to make it”?

There wasn’t really a specific moment or anything, but I do remember this one instance back in ’99 when they were playing smaller venues in New York. There weren’t a lot of fans there yet. When Albert came on board back in ’98 or ’99, I remember thinking, “OK, this is going to be something tight and something cohesive and energizing that New York hasn’t felt in a long time.”

I’m only 38, but the early 2000s were some really great years for music in New York.

There is one moment I will always go back to, though. It was at a show probably in August of 2000 or 2001 at Mercury Lounge. There was no air-conditioning, and it was brutally hot.

They were spraying West Nile spray all along New York, like the streets and the main avenues, so they turned the AC off.

There was a crowd gathering because there were a couple of otherbands — I think the Yeah Yeah Yeahs might have just been starting. There were a lot of friends, and at that show I remember all of us sort of just felt it kick in. I don’t know if it was the

“This is going to be something tight and something cohesive and energizing that New York hasn’t felt in a long time.”

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AC or the vibe or the summertime, but it was that show.You could feel it and all the friends could feel it, and that’s where everything sort of just took off.

What are some of your favorite photographs that you’ll be including in the book?

One of my favorite ones is this photograph where they’re lined up along 8th Avenue. They had a practice building over on 8th Avenue in New York and they were going to Philly for the night and I told them, “Let me get a group portrait, I haven’t done one yet,” so we all met up. That’s one of my favorite photos only because of the whole night that followed. I ended up going to Philly with them, and the Oasis brothers showed up at this tiny club and we stayed up all night.

A few other photos that I took of Albert in the Radio City Music Hall bathroom … Those always stuck out to me because they

“It was that show. You could feel it and all the friends could feel it, and that’s where everything sort of just took off.” were about to play with The White Stripes, and everyone was excited and it was a point where I wanted to get individual portraits of them wherever they were, however I could. Albert was the first to go, and I just remember somebody telling me the bathrooms of Radio City were really majestic-looking bathrooms, so I took him down there and we were just shooting the shit and taking some photos.

The White Stripes and The Strokes? I would imagine that to be a pretty crazy show.

It was! It was really packed and everyone was really stressed out. I think it was 2002, but I remember the vibe being really high-energy, and a lot of people were excited that the two of them were playing together. The band were super-stressed but so cool about me wanting to get shots of them.They were happy to do it, and it’s that sort of aspect I want to put in the book. My buddy Nick could have easily been like, “Look, we’re all stressed and it’s a pain in the ass,” but he didn’t, which is great. While I’m

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taking photos, I’m also very much just a fan. There was some times when I didn’t take my camera, just to enjoy it.

I wanted to talk about a couple photos in particular. There’s one of the band at Lyric Diner. They look exhausted.

That was New Year’s Eve in ’99, and I think it was very, very late. I don’t even know if we were out doing anything crazy that night. They weren’t even known yet. They probably look exhausted because that’s when they were really, really practicing a lot and playing a lot of shows at bars. I was always sort of looking for those really candid moments. It also looked very linear to me, growing up in New York looking up at the buildings, trains, and streets. It was the way that everyone was standing in the photo. We were just hanging around as friends and kicking it. It was sort of unknown what would happen in the future.

There’s also this funny photo where I guess Nikolai is holding a knife and Albert is drinking a beer. They seem in their own worlds.

Everyone was backstage. And Nick is at the piano, and I honestly don’t know why Nikolai has the knife in his hand, but I remember he was throwing it at the wall, I think. I remember we were in LA at the Gibson Theatre, and the Eagles of Death Metal were opening up for them. That was the type of show where everyone was sort of everywhere … In that picture, it was sort of like them acting like themselves for a moment.

There’s also one that comes off as the quintessential “about to walk onstage” photo, which you find often in books.

I believe this was in San Diego. Eagles of Death Metal were opening for them. I was staying with Nick back in LA, and we decided to drive down instead of take the bus with the other guys. It was pouring rain the whole drive down there, which took about three hours. We had planned on getting there earlier, but it didn’t happen. By the time we got there, Nick had to be on stage in like 10 minutes.I really had no time to shoot, besides some side-stage live shots. So I shot them walking out of the dressing room to the stage. Once again and years later, I still had that little point-and-shoot camera on me that I was using.

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The next picture is really grainy. Everyone seems so into it, especially Albert, and the club looks small, too.

This photo was taken in 2000 at a now-closed but amazing bar called Don Hill’s in the city. We would hang out there a lot that year, both when they played and possibly more when they didn’t. Some friends we knew would throw a party there called “TisWas.” This was the early days, so it was another show where it was basically friends.

I still have it, but I was using a little point-and-shoot 35mm camera called a Yashica T4. Great little camera! A lot of times when I just wanted to hang out and not focus on shooting so much, I carried this on me. Energy was high in this show, and it was just

“When we see each other, it’s like family.” great to watch. I was standing up front snapping pictures on my point-and-shoot, drinking a beer, and smoking a cigarette — back in the old days when you could smoke in bars. Processing the film a few days later, I was beyond happy with what I got…

Not really worrying about anything really paid off in the end.

I’m also fairly certain this was one of those 6 a.m. nights, but that was pretty common in those days.

What’s everyone up to these days?

Everybody is sort of in their own place. Like, I go out to LA and spend a lot of time with Nick and his family. It’s very much us just hanging out doing normal shit, like going to a baseball game or going to see Jerry Seinfeld. If not, we’ll just hang out by the pool and chill out. Nikolai is sort of with his family, but I would actually see him a lot because his daughter went to school with my younger brother and sister, so I would see him all the time in the West Village. Or we would see each other at the playground or the neighborhood. Albert and I will text, too. I would say Julian is the most reclusive out of everybody, but when we see each other, it’s like family.

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What do you see the trajectory for the band being in the future?

I see them still making music years from now and still touring.

Even though they have taken a few years between material to do their own stuff on the side … They know it’s magic when they get together. And when they don’t play for five years and headline a festival with large amounts of people still showing up, that says something. I see them getting into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, for sure.

Aside from being their friend and looking at it from the standpoint of a fan, I do see them being one of the most influential bands of the past 15 years. Like I said, they and The White Stripes sort of ushered in this new wave of rock ‘n’ roll that was missing for a long time since the early ‘90s.

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“We were just hanging around as friends and kicking it.

It was sort of unknown what would happen in the future.�

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FUTURE PRESENT PAST

01/Drag Queen 02/Oblivius 03/Threat of Joy 102 /

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All content found in these pages is the original property of its creators and owners.

Articles, interviews, and other texts were collected and organized for the compilation of this book, which was created as a student design project.

Some texts have been condensed, reformated, and edited to increase readability.

Special thanks to the following companies and individuals whose content has been included: Alejandra Ramirez, BBC Music, Consequence of Sound, Dan Stubbs, David Fricke, Jay McInerney, Melena Ryzik, Neil Strauss, NME, NY Mag, Olli Siebelt, Prefix Mag, Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone, The Face, The New York Times This book was printed, bound, and distributed by Blurb Inc. It was produced in the United States of America on acidfree paper.

Megan Baggett designed and edited this book for educational purposes, and it is not commercially sold.

Digital versions can be found on Behance.net and Issuu.com.

Typefaces used include Futura Condensed Extra Bold and Perpetua.

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