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