Cover Story: The Strokes - Elegantly Wasted

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 reggae-sounding 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 starting 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.

"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, Casablancas runs into an old friend, a large Puerto Rican with dreadlocks named Nestor.