Cover Story: The Strokes - Elegantly Wasted

"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."

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."

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.

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 heavy-grinding 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.

(Excerpted from RS 935, November 13, 2003)