The Strokes' 'Is This It': Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating
facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music,
and more. We are your two NYC rock renaissance men.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
Phone Day and I could have done a bunch of
more lyrical references.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
I'm Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan Roun Talk and today, Jordan,
we are talking about one of the turn of the
century masterpieces of modern rock and roll, a shot across
the bow of new metal that helped usher in what
we think of the l train centric musical vibe of
Post nine to eleven NYC, A dirt bag indie rock
opus that taught us all that rich kids could, with

(00:51):
the right tunes and production, convincingly cause play as legitimate
scuzzbags if the songs were good enough. That's right, talking
about the strokes?

Speaker 1 (01:01):
Is this it? I love this record, I love this band.
I love how much you love this record?

Speaker 2 (01:07):
Well, you know, for a long time I thought I
was labored under the delusion that I was unique, which
sounds like an LCD sound system lyric. But I'm saying
it seriously.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
I know I can tell by your glasses you think
you're unique.

Speaker 2 (01:21):
For a long time, I held this album so dear.
It is like like a record that and this was
stupid of me. I'm fully admitting that I'm a stupid
person for thinking this. I was like, this record is
speaking to me about how cool it is to be
in New York and how cool it is to be
a musician and play bars and hang out with your friends.

Speaker 1 (01:42):
And we did all those things together though well we
did all those things together.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
But also I researching this episode, I realized that's what
it did for literally everyone in the world, Like like
that whole Briany you know thing about only a thousand
people about the Velvet Underground record, but a thousand people
that did started a ten thousd bands or whatever.

Speaker 1 (02:01):
That is so true for this record and and anyone
within plus or minus five to ten years of our generation.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
Like I I you know, we talked about a little
bit on a previous episode. We talked about MTV two
as like a channel MTV two took over or launched
or whatever, and it took over from the box like
the request music video line, and for like the first
couple of months to a year of their launch. They
were broadcasting anything to fill airtime, so you wouldn't just

(02:31):
see current stuff. You would see like I saw like
the Beatles Penny Lane promotional clip. You would see like
the Rage Against the Machine video from like nineteen ninety two.
You would see like Primus, you would see old Ramones
music videos. And it was into this milieu that when
I was thirteen, I saw the Strokes video for Last Night,
shot by Roman Coppola on a sound stage live, and

(02:55):
I literally did not know what where. I thought it
was an old music video. I literally thought it was
something from the seventies. I would say that was the
family food style video. No, that's that's someday, which is
also very good because Someday gave me, oh, I want
to go hang out with a slash in a bar,
and that's what jump started my nascent trip to alcoholism.

(03:15):
But the Last Night video where they're shooting it on
a sound stage and it like literally looks like it
was shot for like five dollars, like straight to video.
It is live audio. You can hear when they knock out,
he knocks over the drum mic. You can hear his
his fabs drum stick hit the cymbal stand like everything
about that video, I was like, holy, what is this

(03:37):
band from the seventies. I had no idea that they
were a current band. And then my cousin Emily, who
has been like my big cool older cousin, she told
me about Tom Waits. She like lived in France and
Senegal and Shanghai. She when I was like thirteen or fourteen,

(03:57):
she gave me a copy of his this hit on CD.
It was the international version, so it had New York
City cops and I was just hook line and sinker.
Between the music video and the record, I was like,
this is the coolest anyone has ever been or ever
will be. And this is all I want to do
in my life is where ska jeans and retro T
shirts and get drunk in a bar and play in

(04:17):
a rock and roll band. And it ruined my life
and nothing has ever been the same since. And full
stop the Strokes? Is this it episode over? JOm I
said jokingly before the episode, this entire I'm going to
record all my audio for this on an.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
Extremely hot mic, like I'm Jane cast Obanco in two
thousand are cool. It's really interesting for me to hear
all this, having gone through a lot of that with
you over the last like five six years playing in
your band. I played bass in the Heigels band. You
joined me like ten fifteen years into this journey, did yeah,
And it never really occurred to me. Just in time

(04:59):
for the alcoholism and the death of music. Yeah, and
the part where no one has any money. Oh yeah,
yeah that's true. And right before the global pandemic shut
down all venues. Yeah yeah, we sure came in at
the right time. And you know what, all the time
we played together, we literally played like Mercury Lounge. And

(05:19):
I never talked about this band. Never talked about this
band together. No, no, no, because it's weird to me.

Speaker 2 (05:24):
Like I never I got into them, like right as
I was getting into punk rock, and for whatever reason,
punk rock was so much more just became like my
musical thing. Like I wouldn't say that anything that I
do musically is really like I'm trying to be the Strokes.
I just like it was like I love those songs
and the songwriting and I just love like that was

(05:45):
like my image. That was just like the poster on
my wall, like kids in the seventies grow up with
like Thin Lizzie and Black Sabbath and led Zepplin and
the Stones, and I was just like I had like
the Spin and Rolling Stone where it was like the Strokes,
like because I was into new metal like as an
idiot in central Pennsylvania.

Speaker 1 (06:03):
And but but all those bands.

Speaker 2 (06:04):
That I saw, like you know, like Limp Biscuit and Corn,
like they they tapped into that like hip hop maximalist
strain of like finances where it was like, you know,
they were all comparing their watches on MTV cribs and
they all dressed like like all their videos look really
expensive and stuff. But the Strokes were like the first
band where I was like, oh, this looks like they
could be like practicing down the street from me.

Speaker 1 (06:27):
Which is ironic because they were all very very rich
and came to the music industry very rich.

Speaker 2 (06:32):
Yeah, exactly. Most of them were extremely better off than
the guys in Corn who grew up in Bakersfield, which
is like a dusty, sun blasted hellscape.

Speaker 1 (06:42):
You know. Yeah, I don't know, it's funny.

Speaker 2 (06:45):
I always you have vaguely alluded to being a little
bit more of a white striped sky.

Speaker 1 (06:49):
Is that is? That is that accurate.

Speaker 2 (06:51):
It was my Martin short as as Jimny a little
bit of a white.

Speaker 1 (06:58):
Correct I mean overall, yeah, but I think I discovered
the Strokes first. I mean, as a guy. I've said
this on many occasions on this show. I basically spent
the nineties and early two thousands pretending like it was
the sixties. So I you know, at that time, I
had no idea what was going on in pop culture
at all. I mean, I definitely did not have my

(07:19):
finger on the pulse of the music scene at the
dawn of the twenty first century. But I do remember
the Strokes getting my attention because I was an am
an extremely massive Beatles fan. So seeing a full on
band with guitars with like sort of a vaguely unified
look like the Beatles in Hamburg, I was like, this
is thrilling, this is I mean, they were really to

(07:41):
me the first group that fit that description that I
remember seeing on MTV or hearing on the airwaves. I
mean here that it was like you said, new Metal,
Limp Biscuit or like team pop stuff like the Backstreet Boys.
I don't know, maybe Weezer. I dimly remember them being
around with the Buddy Holly video. Who in Corn was
the quiet one? Did you know I interviewed Corn. Isn't

(08:03):
that weird?

Speaker 2 (08:04):
They seem like they've gone through a lot of therapy
and come out the other side as better people.

Speaker 1 (08:09):
Oh yeah, no, they were very nice, but it was
I was. I was very frightened.

Speaker 2 (08:11):
Nonetheless, did they do that on the call? Is that
the band that did the I can't There's no way
I can do that. No, that's disturbed.

Speaker 1 (08:23):
Thank you. Yeah, I'm so amazed you figured out what
I was doing based on the cat.

Speaker 2 (08:28):
Cough that I just did. Oh uh yeah, No, disturbed,
that was down. Disturb it down the sickness, the that
that's from frequent leech. That's a breakdown from frequent leech.

Speaker 1 (08:39):
I love vocal tics. That's one of my favorite things.

Speaker 2 (08:42):
And I didn't realize with the strokes, so when they
were doing all the little like sounds that you hear
him doing, like off mic, like in New York City
Cops when he's like, ah, you can tell, but he goes,
he goes, he goes. Ah, I didn't. I didn't mean
to say that. I meant oh no, no, I didn't
really mean that at all. That was all so fucking

(09:04):
funny to me, Like everything about this band just hit
me as just like I was like, oh you give
me this like loosh kind of casual, like too cool
for school guy, and it just hit me at.

Speaker 1 (09:13):
The right time. It's ugh, I love it, love it
so much. Take us there, High Goal.

Speaker 2 (09:20):
Let's dive in well, from the album's genesis in a
literal Lower east Side basement under a methadone clinic, to
the technical aspects of the band's retro future sounds, to
the fist fights and drug addictions that followed. Here is
everything you didn't know about The Strokes, And is this ito?

(09:44):
It is impossible to talk about the Strokes without talking
about New York.

Speaker 1 (09:48):
New York is a character in The Strokes.

Speaker 2 (09:52):
No, I mean this is like if honestly, if like
Manhattan and like Annie Hall are like the image of
New York in a certain strain of generations popular consciousness.

Speaker 1 (10:00):
Is this It is like in.

Speaker 2 (10:02):
Other groups you know, I swear specifically New York immediately
pre nine to eleven, you know, fifteen twenty, whatever you
want to time it out years on from its nadier
in the late seventies, the whole Taxi Driver era where
you got punk rock, you got CBGB's, you got Son
of Sam, all the stuff that people love about New

(10:22):
York in the late nineties, For all of its other virtues,
the city was not.

Speaker 1 (10:29):
A hotspot for rock and roll.

Speaker 2 (10:31):
Dance music coming from the dance Aterria days and sort
of the and hip hop coming from kind of the
heyday of the Tunnel following the commercial dominance of Wu
Tang Clan coming in from Sad Island and the shiny suit,
bad Boy, Puff Daddy era of hip hop. That was
the commercial, commercial dominant sound of New York. Rock and roll, meanwhile,
had just come out of a phase of being dominated

(10:53):
by sounds from the other side of the country. Through
the eighties, it was hair metal. Really, the only East
Coast hair metal band was like bon Jovi.

Speaker 1 (11:02):
Is that broadly accurate? Yeah, I don't know if I
characterized them as hair metal, glam metal, pop metal, yeah,
git me ass metal. I hate bon Jovi. Um.

Speaker 2 (11:14):
So the eighties were hair metal right Sunset strip La
and the nineties. Conventional wisdom is that grunge came in
from the Pacific Northwest in a hale of flannel and
stubble and killed hair metal dead. And then probably concurrently
or a little later on, maybe a year or two,

(11:34):
you had the so Cow pop punk ska people coming
in from you have Green Day coming in from the
East Bay of the San Francisco region, and then you
also had like the so Cow stuff as typified by
let's say No Doubt. And so consequently, alternative was not
a New York centric thing at all, says Galaxy five

(11:57):
hundred and Luna guitarist Dean Wareham. Lizzie Goodman's monumental tone
Meet Me in the Bathroom. It's an incredible book, done
oral history style. She talked to everyone. Uh, it's it's
a great book for anyone interested in this era of music.
We're gonna quote from it a lot. Sorry, Lizzie, shoot ahead,
you on. Uh, but we don't We're not we don't

(12:19):
do that. We don't plan ahad jan. By the nineties
it was all about Seattle. Bands were moving to Seattle.
That is Gordon Raphael, who produced the Strokes Modern Age
EP that directly precedes Is This It? Then he produced
is This It? And then he produced Room on Fire.
He told Weiss in New York, it seemed like guitar

(12:42):
music was on the way out. It was mostly house, jungle,
drummond bass, hip hop. I remember an article in the
New York Times celebrating the death of rock and roll
the old man, that was the feeling in town. In
a different interview, talking about the same thing, he recalls
that New York Times feature having a cemetery headstone with
a guitar carved in it. So that was presumable that

(13:03):
that was the tenor of the times. And while there
was a thriving punk metal scene at the time in
places like C Squad and ABC No Rio, those were
bands like Nausea, like crusspunk bands, and then a bunch
of like NYC hardcore bands like Life of Agony and
Sheer Tear, these tough guy hardcore bands. They were not

(13:24):
gonna make it to TRL, so they were just not
even in the mainstream conversation at all. And then of
course you had CBGB's, who was also located on the
Bowery in Lower Manhattan. But CBGB's was honestly, at this
point kind of a diminished consideration at least as far
as major label music was concerned.

Speaker 1 (13:43):
Did you ever make it there? Nope? I closed like
the month after I moved to New York for school
in two thousand and six, and a bunch of my
friends went, like I think it was the last night
that it was in operation, and they went to just
kind of pay tribute as with you know, I'm sure
half of the eighteen year olds just moved there from
the suburbs like me. I didn't go because, honestly, I

(14:04):
think I was still fearful. You were afraid of a
lot of things. Yeah, I was, Yeah, and I deeply
regret it to this day. Honestly, I don't even know
what I would have worn to that really, which I
know shouldn't have been the biggest concern, but sure I
couldn't have worn on our gull sweater to CBGB's On
this last night.

Speaker 2 (14:21):
We recorded an EP with a guy who blamed Hilly
and CBGB for tanking the New York City music scene
because he realized that instead of he said he basically
his theory, which is kind of a sound one and
had legs, was that in the seventies and up and
into the eighties, up until the DJs took over, you
had a band. A band would come into a club

(14:41):
and the onus would be on the club to promote
the gig. The club would be like, we have Blah
Blah Blah and the Blooty Blas there for five nights,
and the club would go out and promote all of it,
and the band would just show up and play, you know,
two sets a night, and that was it. And then
Hilly kind of Hilly Crystal, a guy who owned G's,
They would kind flip the calculus where they would be like, Okay,

(15:02):
here's six bands that we shoved on to a single
afternoon into evening show, and we're not going to promote
it at all, and every band has to go out
and flyer and do all the promotional work for us.
I thought that was very interesting and also sad.

Speaker 1 (15:17):
Well, now CBGB's is closed and it's a very John
Varvadas store and you can see the CBGB's.

Speaker 2 (15:23):
Storefront and I think Newark International Airport not the actual storefront. No,
they've recreated it. But anyway, just one of many tears
will shed this episode for an era of New York
City that has passed us by spy. Part of this
was that then mayor and now absolute insane person Rudy

(15:45):
Giuliani hadn't quote unquote cleaned up the city yet. Parts
of the Lower East Side were completely off limits if
you didn't have a serious drug habit or a pistol.
The various acronyms for Alphabet City, which is part of
Lower Manhattan east of the numbered avenues were Avenue A
alcohol or adventurous, Avenue B, bold blow, Avenue C crazy, crack,

(16:09):
and Avenue D dead, those being, of course, the terms
for what you were looking for or what you were
if you went there.

Speaker 1 (16:18):
Yeah, that would have been helpful to know in my
college years. I'd never heard that very helpful series of acronyms.
And also I remember getting to New York in the
summer of two thousand and six and Alphabet City at
that time was still a place where you didn't go.
It's still so it's so weird to think back on
a time when there were parts of Manhattan that were like,

(16:40):
not okay to go to. Oh yeah, because that's not
the case anymore.

Speaker 2 (16:44):
Now there's like an air an American apparel, well not
anymore American trader jokes.

Speaker 1 (16:48):
Yeah. Now it's like a.

Speaker 2 (16:51):
Lot of politicians Giuliani side note, Rudy he basically got
credit for plans that were put in place by his predecessors.
His big show piece as mayor was the disnification of
Times Square. You know, so much pop culture that we
take for granted nowadays sprung from Times Square being disgusting.

(17:12):
I mean that was like the grindhouse era of Times
Square is where like you know, we get like the
Quentin Tarantino esthetic of modern brought yeah shaft and it's
like the Wu Tang clan went in there to see
Kung Fu movies. But the plan to clean up Times
Square was in the works in the nineteen eighties when

(17:33):
state officials and then Ed Cock, who was then mayor,
they used eminent domain to condemn and take control of
a lot of the vacant, decrepit buildings, which coincidentally housed
a lot of theater artists, musicians, and then the city
Council around that time instituted a study during the pre
Giuliani David Dinkins administrations that would allow them to pass

(17:57):
rezoning laws if they could prove that there were sex
related businesses harming residential areas. So as a result, the
city Council drew up stricter zoning laws that prohibited sex
oriented theaters, bookstores, massage parlors, dance clubs, all that from
operating within five hundred feet of homes, houses of warships, schools,

(18:18):
or even one another. And that law passed in nineteen
ninety five, two years into Juliani's term. So everything that
Juliani's credited for was basically except for nine to eleven, which.

Speaker 1 (18:29):
I can't approve he had anything to do with. I mean,
here's a question for you, how do you define or
quantify sex oriented businesses, harming homes and all the other
things you just mentioned, laces of worship, etc. The stains,
commercial break lett that.

Speaker 2 (18:55):
But you know, as you mentioned earlier, not a lot
of this gentrification, urban renewal, whatever you want to call it,
had trickled down into the East Village and Lower east Side,
and even less of that trickled across the bridge into Williamsburg.
Williamsburg in this era, even though it birthed bands like
TV on the radio and LCD sound System, and LCD

(19:15):
sound System might have been Lower east Side band. But
you know, popularly we think of this whole NYC rock
renaissance of the two thousand and sis being a province
of the Lower east Side in Williamsburg. But at the
time that was very much not the case. There was
a famous bar in Williamsburg around the time that I
used to go to when it was called the Levee
and it was just then like a metal dive bar.

(19:36):
But back back in the day, twenty three years ago,
it was called Coke's and they literally sold coke out
of it. You could just go and buy coke out
of their coke their coat closet. Try and say that
five times fast. You could buy coke at Cokey's out
of their coke closet.

Speaker 1 (19:52):
And they were never busted. Yeah, question mark. Yeah, Wow,
It's it weird that I've seen Heroin a bunch of times,
but I've never seen coke. Yes, I think my whole
NYU experience must have been a total failure. Maybe I
just need richer friends. You hang out with a very
specific crowd if that was the Yeah, a bunch of screenwriters.
Yeah no, the filmmaking department are the probably the ones that.

Speaker 2 (20:13):
Had the coke hanging out with Jerry Saltz, Like, uh,
William Burrows wannabes.

Speaker 1 (20:18):
Why did you see so much Heroin? That's alarming anyway.

Speaker 2 (20:23):
All of that said, the story of the Strokes begins
not in disgusting times Square, drug ridden, Alphabet City or
coaxlinging Williamsburg.

Speaker 1 (20:32):
But uptown.

Speaker 3 (20:35):
Up.

Speaker 1 (20:35):
What's the Motown's is the pop song uptown punk? No, No,
I'm thinking whatever. I think there's a runette song up
ten girl, That's what I was thinking of, Bill Jo.

Speaker 2 (20:47):
That's that is not a motown song. Nope, and I'm
keeping that son. Now it's just turning into Jim Morrison.

Speaker 1 (20:57):
Earlier, I was gonna say, yeah, it sounds like Jim
Morrison's singing through a cell phone.

Speaker 2 (21:00):
I was gonna say, we didn't get to your great
quote about Julian Casablancas sounding like Jim Morrison singing through
a Nokia flip phone, which I loved.

Speaker 1 (21:07):
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cut that off. That's okay,
but that's that's it was funnier coming from you.

Speaker 2 (21:12):
Strokes bassist Nikolai Freicher meant, Julian Casablancas at a bilingual
French school on the Upper East Side, which is either
a setup to a Wes Anderson movie or a joke
about some of the worst people you've ever heard in
your life. And they all met the Canopy both you
sure can, and they all met the other members of

(21:34):
the band at Dwight School on the Upper West Side,
or as someone puts it in, meet me in the bathroom,
dumb white idiots getting high together.

Speaker 1 (21:44):
You can't call your school the Dwight School and get
away with it. Paris Hilton went there, and so did
Robert Moses, terrible, the yin and yang of New York City.

Speaker 2 (21:56):
See, yeah, right, it was always pretending to be a
good school. Strokes drummer Fabrizio Mornetti told Lizzie Goodman in
the book maybe in the bathroom, it's just a bunch
of rich people, And the Strokes, as practically everybody knows
by now, were in fact mostly a bunch of rich people.
Lead singer Julian Fernando casa Blancos was born in New

(22:18):
York City in August of nineteen seventy eight to John
Casa Blancas, the founder of Elite Model Management, which, for
those of you not in the know about the ins
and outs of New York City modeling management.

Speaker 1 (22:29):
Was a big deal. Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Stephanie Seymour, Giselle,
Alexandro Ambrosio.

Speaker 2 (22:36):
Yeah, big names, and his mom was nineteen sixty five's
Miss Denmark, the hell of a pedigree. Julian was sent
to the Institute Lerosi boarding school in Switzerland to improve
his grade his grades, to improve his grades when he
was thirteen, because he was just an underachieving delinquent, and

(22:57):
that's where he met Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond.

Speaker 1 (23:01):
I'm gonna send you little brats the Switzerland. I can't
believe he literally went to Switzerland. I think Sean Lennon
went to that same school. I'm pretty sure that they
all met there. I know that Sean Lennon guested on
Albert Hammond Junior's solo album Yours to Keep Back in
two thousand and six, and I think that Albert Hammond
Junior also is on one of Sean Lennon's solo albums.

(23:23):
Oh yeah, there's a god.

Speaker 2 (23:26):
I didn't think to jot it down, but when I
was doing this, Shan Lennon popped up in one of
the in one of these oral histories, is having made
like a crucial introduction in the band's history. They were like,
oh yeah, Sean Lennon introduced us anyway. Albert Hammond Jr. Is,
of course, the son of singer songwriter Albert Hammond, best
known for his nineteen seventy two hit single It Never
Rains in Southern California. Jordan, what else is Albert Hammond

(23:49):
Senior written?

Speaker 1 (23:50):
He wrote one More Time for Whitney Houston, among other
things that I don't know. And Albert Hammond Junior's mom
was another model. He had that going for him as well.

Speaker 2 (24:01):
And beauty queen uh drummer Fabrizo Already's dad was a
nuclear engineer and rounding out the yeah, the millieu of
high paying jobs. Nicko lenci I wasn't able to track
down exactly what his parents did. I found a twenty
eighteen interview with the Jewish focused online publication The Tablet.

(24:25):
He said his dad was in the import export business.
He said, basically, I'm pretty sure that it was some
illicit illegal Out of the whole band, Bassis Nikolai Freischer
seems to have been the only outlier. His dad was
a security card at the department store where he was
once caught shoplifting a Luke Skywalker doll aw.

Speaker 1 (24:48):
I mean, if you're going to shoplift from anywhere, shoplift
at a place where your dad's security guard at very
least will give you a head start.

Speaker 2 (24:54):
You can tell him then that you don't have to
take your allowance this week, and he can keep it
as a bribe. Casablancas Valenzia disturbed with how quickly you
came up with that. Casablancas, Valenzi and Moretti. They sound
like a very sexual law firm.

Speaker 1 (25:14):
Casablanca's Valenci Moretti, how can we direct your call?

Speaker 2 (25:18):
They started playing together as teenagers while attending Dwight School
in Manhattan. They later added Fried Shirt and in nineteen
ninety eight Albert Hammond Junior, who'd moved to New York
after finishing school in la The band played their first
gig in September of nineteen ninety nine, which is a
date that I want you all to keep in mind
when you consider their rise to stardom. Before the Strokes

(25:39):
had anything else going for them, they had chemistry. We
didn't play very well and Albert didn't sound great. We
didn't sound great, but there was a vibe there. Nick Valenci,
who everyone agrees was far and away the best musician
of the group, told Lizzie Goodman in me being in
the bathroom, I love Albert Hammond Junior. He seems like
a very sweet man. I interviewed him once for People magazine.

(26:00):
He was very, very cool and very low key. But
it is funny how everyone essentially sh on him when
he first joined the band. They were like, oh, Albert
couldn't play at all, but he was cool. But Nick Valenci,
by contrast, had like learned a bunch of like slash
guns n' rosa solo. It was just like a shredding
guitarist right off the bat.

Speaker 1 (26:21):
I have no idea that you interviewed Albert Hammond Jr.
That's really cool. I'm glad that you got to talk
to one of your heroes. That's great. It was for a.

Speaker 2 (26:28):
Solo record, and I believe the launch of his sock
and tie line.

Speaker 1 (26:34):
Oh I bet you that wasn't part of your fantasy,
was it. Nope, sure wasn't.

Speaker 2 (26:40):
Anyway, Just in terms of how Albert looked and how
he played and how he fit in with the group,
the dynamic was there from the get go. One thing
that I picked up on with these interviews is they
talked about how they made sure to hang out in public,
all four of them at once, for like that Beatles dynamic.
They were like, oh, you guys are going to like
you know two A or the library or like this

(27:02):
lower east side bar, like will go too. We have
to be seen as a group, and they would hand
out flyers together. They mailed postcards with like really like
like hand drawn stuff. And they grew up in this,
you know, the pre social media, pre digital era of
music promotion. So that was a big thing. They really
benefited from actual like on the ground technically in bars, networking,

(27:27):
and they got some connections from Julian casablancause his dad
owning a model in the agency. They would have models
occasionally show up to their shows, which is helpful.

Speaker 1 (27:36):
Obviously we didn't have that. We didn't know. We didn't
have that. We had Fleming, we had Mario's parents, we
had Fleming. Oh yeah, we had Chris Fleming, my friend. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:46):
But still this didn't really help in their early days.
Nick VALENSI were called to Pitchfork in twenty thirteen. We
were playing to nobody every two week in New York.
He estimated in that interview the band did up to
one hundred shows with fewer than a hundred people, to
which I say, try doing it for five years, you yachts.

(28:07):
Splitting fears of my life. Yeah, splitting forty bucks among
five people.

Speaker 1 (28:15):
Well, it must be said that the band's look also
did them quite a few favors as well. Julian Casablancus
later told GQ, when The Strokes first started playing gigs,
instead of getting into a costume for the shows, we
talked about how we should dress every day in real life,
like we're playing on stage, which I mean, granted, was
sort of how they were already dressing because apparently the

(28:37):
first time Albert Hammond Junior showed up to play with
the band, according to Nick Falensi, he was wearing a
puk suit. We were all wearing jeans and T shirts
and new balanced sneakers, and Albert showed up in a suit. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:49):
I think they talked about it being in the Music Building,
which is a big giant industrial rehearsal space in like
midtown New York where all of your favorite bands practice
and they all day jobs at that point. So the
practice was at like eleven thirty or midnight, and Albert
Hammond Junior showed up and everyone unanimously agreed that he
had a fever that night, but he was still wearing

(29:10):
a suit for their for his first rehearsal with the band,
which I love.

Speaker 1 (29:15):
And Julian Casablancis later said, you know, if anything, Albert
Hammond Junior influenced the style of the band. He was
nice and he had cool taste.

Speaker 2 (29:25):
As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with
more too much information after these messages. Wow, wow, unsurprisingly
for a bunch of you know, pretty tall, good looking guys. Again,

(29:47):
and I just want to say, I love the fact
that the Strokes are the New York City band that
you could pick out of a lineup of every other
band of this era. I don't know if you could, like,
I couldn't look at the White Stripe and be like,
they're from Detroit, but I could look at the Strokes
and be like, Oh, that band's from New York. You know,
that band has never seen west of the Susquehanna.

Speaker 1 (30:08):
What is it? Is it just the pasty white skin
and the dark hair and the leather.

Speaker 2 (30:14):
Yeah, they all look like they don't go outdoors that much,
and they're all like they all have cool, tight leather
jackets and disheveled dark hair, not a blonde hair on
a single one of them. But they partied a lot.
Let's just say, and they made a lot of female fans.
There was a band called Girl Harbor who once put

(30:35):
an image of Nick Valenci's naked butt on one of
their show flyers because they'd opened the curtain as a
show that they were playing and found him having sex
with a girl on their drum riser, and they just
put that on their flyer, and everyone talks about it
in all the interviews. They're like, yeah, that was the
flyer image for many many years.

Speaker 1 (30:56):
Now was it before the show or after the show?
I just hope it wasn't durrant or during. Yeah, that's
my next question.

Speaker 2 (31:02):
A small sampling of quotes from Meet Me in the
Bathroom about the band's pre fame era. I'm sure they
had better coke than I did. They were naughty. Those
guys knew each other before they even had sex for
the first time, which, if we're talking about Nick Valenci
was probably seven or something. He was thirty year olds
when he was seven. They're characters. I think Albert put

(31:26):
his balls in Nick's mouth. Albert loves to pull his
balls out. We knew it was a fun party if
Albert's balls came out at some point and lastly, boyfriends
didn't like The Strokes. I'm getting like slightly less problematic
Maddy Healy vibes from the Strokes.

Speaker 1 (31:42):
In this era circond ninety ninety.

Speaker 2 (31:45):
One, they would not have made it through the modern
social media era. There's an interview a couple of years
back where Julian Kazemlankus gave to Vulture where he was
just coming off as like the worst college freshman in
the world. He was talking about having read Howard's in
Like the People History of the United States for like
the first time, and the big thing that I remember

(32:06):
was he was like yelling at the interview, or not yelling,
I shouldn't say that, but he was talking with the
interview about how much he loves Ariel Pink, who I
believe within a few years would be outed as a
January sixth like Trump troll. But Casablancas' position that the
only reason that Ariel Pink wasn't accepted as a genius

(32:26):
in modern indie rock was that was social conditioning. And
he kept comparing him to David Bowie, and the interviewer
was like, Uh, yeah, man, I don't I think the
reason that David Bowie is considered David Bowie is because
he was David Bowie and Arial Pink is not David Bowie,
and Casablancas was like it just everything you're saying sounds
like one hundred percent social conditioning.

Speaker 1 (32:49):
See if I found that interview.

Speaker 2 (32:51):
I had no idea about Ariel Pink. Oh yeah, yeah,
I can't remember if he was Indie. I think he
might have been in DC. I don't know if he
was at the Capitol. Whoa yes in conversation joining Casablancas
in twenty eighteen. Oh wait, yeah, this is the quote.
This is the uh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (33:09):
Well, I don't know. Maybe, I mean, you can talk
about this jewing.

Speaker 2 (33:13):
Casablanca says, everyone knows David Bowie now, but I bet
he was pretty underground in the seventies. I think Aeriel
Pink will be one of the best remembered artists of
this generation and now nobody in the mainstream knows him. Well,
that didn't pan out, Uh, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (33:28):
Yeah, I mean Bowie I think was smaller than we
expect prior to like the Let's Dance era in like
eighty three, when he really embraced MTV. Yeah, I think
he was more of I really know what the equivalent
would be these days. I mean, I guess it's an
Apple's the Oranges comparison, given the way that you know,
the music industry has evolved, so I guess there really

(33:49):
is no modern comparison. But yeah, I think he was
smaller than in terms of sales and in terms Oh
I forgot about this. Oh my god, I forgot.

Speaker 2 (33:57):
About this exchange. Oh my god, I forgot about this.
Julian Casablanca says, Jimmy Hendrix. People don't realize that it
took years for him to get the acclaim that he has.

Speaker 1 (34:05):
Now.

Speaker 2 (34:06):
You look at the charts back then, and he was
at number three hundred. He didn't have hits. And the
interviewer says, Jimmy Hendrix was very popular during his lifetime,
and Julian Casablanca says, no, you're seeing it through the
review mirror. The interviewer says, but Electric Lady Land was
a number one album, and Julian Casablanca says, I don't know.
From what I've seen, I thought he never had any

(34:26):
commercial success, and the interviewer says he closed Woodstock, and
Julian Caussublankaz just says.

Speaker 1 (34:34):
Okay, it's a terrible interview.

Speaker 2 (34:38):
And my point is that had this band come up
in the era when people were constantly having pressure to
come up with soundbites, I don't think it would have
worked out for them anyway.

Speaker 1 (34:48):
Sorry, where were you? Yes in this? This is the
millu This cocaine and sex on stage and putting balls
in your bandmate's mouths and all the things that our
band never got up to. This is the milieu in
which the songs that would become this is it start
to coalesce. The first songs that really stand out are

(35:08):
Last Night, of Course and the Modern Age, both of
which Casablancas wrote under the thrall of lou Reed and
The Velvet Underground. And before long the band started to
pick up steam in terms of both confidence and competence.
That's a great sentence you wrote.

Speaker 2 (35:22):
That exactly think this final Tap thing. They impressed me
with their musicality, their confidence and their punctuality.

Speaker 1 (35:33):
And around the same time Albert Hammond Jr. Who, as
you mentioned earlier, little help on the old six string
there wasn't wasn't all that proficient. He wasn't all that competent.
As you said, he met a guitar teacher named Jp
Bauersack at Richie's Guitar Shop in the East Village, and
he became their guitar teacher, Albert's guitar teacher and Julian
Casablanca's guitar teacher and Bowers. He talked to Lucy Goodman

(35:57):
for meet me in the bathroom. He said, well, Julian
was mostly leading on me for was that he wanted
every note planned out, nothing left the chance. They were
one of the first bands I knew that practiced and
their rehearsals to a click track, which basically is a metronome,
and not only once a week, but four or five
nights a week. They were deadly serious about being super tight,
so every note had to be worked out. Julian wanted

(36:19):
to work out every note of the guitar solos too.

Speaker 2 (36:21):
It's really interesting when you think about the band being
this New York City rock icon, because so much of
their rhythmic feel comes from the idea that the drums
should sound like a machine, not just in terms of
the pulse, but in terms of the actual sound of
the drums, as we'll get to in a minute.

Speaker 1 (36:38):
But it's fascinating.

Speaker 2 (36:40):
To me that they did come out of this New
York They came out of this milieu of New York
City being dominated musically by hip hop and dance music,
and that they're credited with like this rock revolution thing.
But they were like, they were like, oh, we got
to play all these songs to click, and the drums
have to sound like they're processed, which is like a
thing that goes back to like ZZ Top Records of

(37:01):
being like, oh, we have a live drummer, but we
want this to all sound like a drum machine.

Speaker 1 (37:06):
You know. Well that's what I remember. Dave Grohl was
being interviewed by I think it was Pharrell, and he
was demonstrating his drumming on it might have been smells
like Teen Spirit. It was some big Nirvana song and
he was like, no, that's a that's a disco drum
and he started playing it and singing whatever the Nirvana
song it was, and then he started playing it and

(37:28):
it was some huge disco track I forget which and
it was the exact same drum passage. Yeah, I love
the drums on this were on the record are so good.

Speaker 2 (37:36):
Also, playing to a click is hard, not just as
yourself practicing your instrument, but as a band, getting four
or five people's rhythmic feels bock together, that's nuts. Gordon Raphael,
who as I mentioned earlier, produced the band's first EP
and their two full length, told Weiss. I went to

(37:57):
a show at Luna Lounge in New York and there
were two new bands playing. The second band that played
was The Strokes. Because I had my own studio and
I was a relatively fresh producer, I had a business
card and I approached them after the show. The first band,
which I actually liked a little better, didn't call me,
but Albert came to look at my studio and as
they're playing their music in the studio, I'm going, wait

(38:18):
a minute, this is really good. I didn't get that
feeling when I saw them live, but in the studio
it came together. They told me, in very cryptic form,
what sound they wanted, like, imagine taking a trip into
the future and finding a band from the past that
you've never heard before. What would that sound like? I
sort of drew a blank on that.

Speaker 1 (38:39):
I kind of love that description. I know it's kind
of pretentious, but I really enjoy that. I had a
radio show in college and it was kind of the
same premise. We leased our station airwaves from the un
so it had to be, you know, in quotes, educational radio,
which translated to stuff that you couldn't hear anywhere else.
So you had to play like really obscure stuff in

(39:00):
order to not get in trouble with I don't know,
the FCC or the un or somebody that some big name.
We didn't want to piss off, and so I played
super obscure oldies that were super super catchy because I
wanted to create the effect of an alternate universe Top
forty show from the sixties. That's where Dick Duve comes from. Right,
That's where Dick Duve came from. That's my DJ alter.
You go, yeah, yeah. If you could go to www

(39:21):
dot Dick Dubay dot com and see a lot of
my old old radio show recordings and playlists, plug Dick
Dubay there happy too. Anyway, the band had attempted to
record before, and they'd shop the results around to labels
but didn't pan out. Albert Hammond I love this. He
kept a small collection of rejection letters, some of which
he framed and hung on his wall. John Lennon used

(39:44):
to do that too, But apparently when he was coming
back from his five year period of semi retirement in
the seventies where he was raising Sean again, all roads
lead back to Sean Lennon in this episode. Some label
thought he was pasted it and they sent him a
note that was like, all right, John, quit messing around

(40:05):
ten thousand dollars midimum guarantee for a beatle, and he
just thought that was hysterical. He framed that and put
that on the wall. Anyway, when the band arrived at
the studio, producer Gordon Rafael told Pitchfork, Julie let me
know up front that they never had good luck with
recording and didn't like the process. And Rafael was admitted

(40:25):
repeatedly over the years that he didn't really think that
the band was anything special or onto anything. He said,
when the Strokes first came to my studio, I thought
this is really cool music and just shook my head
and thought, sadly they're about twenty years behind. Why were
they doing that with their guitars. Everyone knew the guitars
weren't cool.

Speaker 2 (40:43):
It's funny because as much as they got this immediate
backlash of being like rich kids and everything a lot
of people just talk about how hard they worked. They
were all really committed to it in terms of just
the rehearsal and coming into the studio and hitting it
really hard and playing live and you can hear live
bootlegs from the time. They were really serious, hard charging band,
even though they did kind of have this dissolute area

(41:06):
of being.

Speaker 1 (41:06):
Just dirt bags.

Speaker 2 (41:08):
But the results of that session, the Modern Age EP
was picked up by the legendary UK indie label Rough
Trade in the latter half of the year two thousand,
a year after they played their first show. By December,
following some local out of town touring, the Strokes kickoff
a residency at the Lower East Sides famed the Mercury Lounge,

(41:30):
which was pretty much a de regular hot spot for
any of these bands that you all know and love
now the aias Inner Paul, like with Arlene's Grocery, it
was just like where everybody hit and pretty much everybody
interviewed remembers this residency that they did as just like
the calm before the storm, like the high point of
their of their pre fame career.

Speaker 1 (41:50):
We played there. That was the high point for us,
our pre fame career. I thought our high point was elsewhere.
I thought that was a good show. That was a
good show. Yeah, it was a big There were a
lot of people there that felt like a beast, like
a couple hundred.

Speaker 2 (42:04):
I think it was like forty again, I believe a
show for which we were paid like forty dollars.

Speaker 1 (42:12):
Despite filling the room.

Speaker 2 (42:13):
I don't have figure. I didn't keep figures on our shows,
thank god. Yeah, Jordan tell us about the Mercury Lounge.

Speaker 1 (42:19):
Yeah, Mercury Lounge, a legendary Lower east Side venue, apparently
has an interesting history. The building that houses it was
once the home to servants for the Astor Mansion, which
was located not even that nearby over on Fifth Avenue,
and it was connected to this mansion by a underground
labyrinth of tunnels.

Speaker 2 (42:38):
Jesus Christ, I think your commute sucks. Imagine walking under
the Lower east Side to get you a tunnel. Yeah,
clean your rich person toilet bowl. I'm just really proud
that I titled this next section in It.

Speaker 1 (42:56):
In It It in it because.

Speaker 2 (43:00):
It's about the UK, it'sbout the bridge, it's about the
British people loved the Strokes, especially at the.

Speaker 1 (43:05):
Time that scans. It's kind of got a glam vibe.

Speaker 2 (43:10):
Oh they just love I mean, you know they start
this as much as you and a lot of other
people are Anglo files. The British music press are New
York of files. And thanks to the strength of The
Modern AGP, which was released in January of two thousand
and one by Rough Trade, and a big picture spread
that was in NME, one of the big influential weekly

(43:31):
music publications in the UK, the band basically sparked a
bidding war for their debut record again like a year
in change. After they played their first show, NME put
out The Modern Age the song on a free CD sampler,
back when there were such things. By the time the
Strokes hit the stage in the UK, they were already superstars.

(43:53):
Leslie Lyons told Lizzie Goodman. The pictures were already all
over the English press and their shows were backing up
what people were seeing in the pictures. It's like the
Mercury Lounge residency was a big bang and the particles
just started spreading far and wide at an accelerated speed.
They played a show in Camden on that tour and
the band's UK publicist, Jacob Blackman told Wece they came

(44:14):
on about forty five minutes late, and everyone was like, Oh,
they're just trying to be super cool New Yorkers, but
actually Julian was absolutely shitting himself. Of course, that was
a super special show and pretty much half the media
in London turned out for it. At that stage, there
weren't loads of celebs there. I remember the bloke who
played Norman Cheers was there, George went George Watan in Camden.

(44:39):
I wasn't able to verify that. He continued, but the
celebrities and the models followed very quickly. It wasn't long
before Kate Moss and Sadie Frost and all that lot
were begging to get into their dressing room, but Blackman continued.
One of the things I really remember about that first
tour was the fights. There was a fight almost every
single day. There were a lot of jealous people. I

(44:59):
was sitting to Fab, the drummer, in the venue, and
some guy made some comment like, you see New York wankers.
The next thing I knew Fab had decked the guy.
That happened all the time. Whatever happened overseas, the band
came back to the States, and they were pretty much
immediately beset by label attention. Great quote from Nick Valenci,
I don't know who was paying for the drugs.

Speaker 1 (45:21):
It wasn't me, as it should be.

Speaker 2 (45:25):
Band manager at the time, Ryan Gentles, a guy who
uh whose nickname was Weezer from everyone because he had
horn room glasses, which is just like that kind of
tragic thing that happens to you in high school and
sticks with you your entire life. They said they ultimately
went with RCA because they were the only label that
would let the band own their record outright when they

(45:46):
were done with it. Famously, they signed a five album
contract with RCA, resulting in at least two contractual obligation records,
Looking at You, a record called Calm Down Machine possibly
also angles another record that isn't very good, but we're
not talking about that. We're talking about is this It,

(46:07):
which came together in March and April of two thousand
and one with Gordon Rafael at Transport Terrom was the
name of his studio in Alphabet City on the Lower
East Side, located again under a methodone clinic, but Rafael
was actually the second producer on the scene. He told
The Guardian in twenty fifteen, Julian took me to dinner

(46:28):
and said, rough trade one of them to record an
album with Gil Norton, who'd produced Pixies and Foo Fighters
and sold six million copies of ever recording he'd made.
Julian said that if I told him I was a
better producer, I could record the album. I couldn't do that,
so he stood up and said, phew, now we have
to use Gil Norton. A few weeks later he called

(46:52):
it hadn't worked out with Gil and.

Speaker 1 (46:54):
Mark Ronson spoke to Lizzy Goodman for meet me in
the bathroom and he had kind of a tangent run
in with the Strokes and Mark Ronson around this time
in the late nineties and early two thousands was a
huge hip hop DJ. He played it at the Tunnel,
which was a very famous hip hop club. I believe
he was the first person to ever play Hypnotize Biggie's

(47:17):
Hypnotize in public. You mentioned that, yeah, I think yeah.
Biggie gave him like a white label promo copy of it.
He had a small recording studio on Second Street between
Avenue A and B, which was in the same studio
where the Strokes had just recorded talking to Lizzie Goodman.
He said, there were these jazz guys. They had two
other rooms in that same basement, and they said, I

(47:39):
hope you were a little better neighbor than the last
kids we had. And I said, who were they? They said,
this fucking man, these kids, they were just pizza boxes everywhere, beer,
their friends coming in. They're making massive amounts of noise.
And I asked what were they called? And he said
The Strokes. He sampled someday, Mark ronson, Yeah, the drum beat,

(47:59):
Oh for what rhyme fest them blue Collar, a song
called Devil's Pie. I mean anything to you. You made
all those words up. But these sessions for the Strokes
may have been messy, but they weren't exactly fraught. Ryan
Jensel's The Strokes manager, says that he remembers watching a
lot of mall rats in that basement studio. Gordon Rafael

(48:20):
smoked a lot of weed, and Julian Casablancas wanted to
go at like sixteen hours at a time, and those
off of been reported that most of the songs on
the record are first takes. Rafael told NM that that
wasn't true.

Speaker 2 (48:32):
Instead, much of the drama came down to Julian Casablancas's
gnostic explanations for music production. I love this, Ryan Gentel's
told Lizzie Goodman. Gordon is such a great interpreter of musicians.
Julian won't say that high hat is too trebly, turn
the bass up or the trouble down. He'll say, I
need the high hat to sound like the rich guy

(48:53):
who hangs out at the party and doesn't talk to girls,
waits for them to come and talk to him. Or
it's too much like the way sleeping bum smells on
a Friday night when he's had too much booze. I
don't want it to smell like that. Gussie it up
and shave him. That's the snare drum sound I want.

Speaker 1 (49:10):
I'm going to do a quick sidebar on inarticulate musicians
who made producers want to tear their hair out and
or strangle them. When the Beatles were recording Being for
the Benefit of Mister Kite on Sergeant Pepper, George Martin,
the Beatles producer, recalled this bit of direction from the
song's composer John Lennon. He'd make wooshing sounds and try
to describe as the best part and try to describe

(49:32):
what only he could hear in his head, saying that
he wanted the song to quote sounds like an orange yep.
That's acid for you. Yeah. Tom Waits would do that
a lot. I think he.

Speaker 2 (49:42):
I think he once said that he told the he
told the bassis to play like your hair's on fire
or something like that.

Speaker 1 (49:49):
I like, okay, that that that actually like is instructive,
though I feel at least as your bassist was a
high strung I never told you that. You never told
me that, but it was imploied. And Brian Wilson, another
one of my heroes, was a little more together in
the studio, but he would say things like I want
the strings to sound like they're crying, or I want

(50:11):
the percussion to sound like jewelry.

Speaker 2 (50:14):
This record was pretty bare bones, honestly, for becoming such
a huge tone for mic indie rock. But you know,
a lot of people would say, like, of course, it
sounds like it was made in a basement. It sounds
like the whole thing was made in the trunk of
a car. But you know, whatever, man, people pay a
load of money to get that sound these days. But no,
this was actually just done an abasement twenty grand this

(50:37):
record car Wow, which is nothing you're ass that, No,
they come in less than that. But for a major
label record back in the day, I mean Santana Supernatural
cost into the millions.

Speaker 1 (50:54):
Oh sure, yeah. I think.

Speaker 2 (50:58):
That was the record where Clive Davis was like flying
in people to work on, like engineers to work on,
like twenty four hour shifts, so that no one would
ever not be working on it. None of the songs
used more than eleven tracks, which is so interesting because
that meant, you know, if you think of in terms
of studio technology, the way things have progressed in this
the last century of recorded music, from four track to

(51:21):
eight track to sixteen track to twenty four track. None
of the songs on this record used more than eleven tracks.
Accounts differ whether they used three or four drum mics
plus one mic in the room and then they close
micd all the amps obviously, but you know, to get
that drum sound, Raphael had come in from like industrial

(51:45):
electronic music, so he put a lot of distortion pedals
on the drums. He's like rat guitar pedal, that's an
actual model of guitar pedal the pro co rat to
try and blow stuff out, and they would even at
some point rearrange the drum set for better separation, which
is an interesting technique that goes back to Joy Division.
When Joy Division was recording Unknown Pleasures, Martin Hannett made Stephen.

Speaker 1 (52:12):
Morris Steven Morris.

Speaker 2 (52:14):
Yes, When Joy Division was recording Unknown Pleasures, Martin Hannett,
the producer, made Stephen Morris record the drum parts individually
to a click, so that meant not record by yourself,
that meant record literally each drum separately. So he talks
about having to keep time on his like thigh while
he played just the tom part, just the floor tom part,

(52:37):
just the snare part, and the way that by recording
them separately they could achieve maximum separation. But what Gordon
Raphael and Fab Moretti did was and he said, this
was Fab's idea. He said, maybe if I put the
high hat four feet away from the snare, mic, I
can play the high hat with another hand and still
keep time, but there won't be any bleed. So he
literally rearranged the drum set so that he could play

(53:00):
the high hat with more separation. Uh, And that was
how they got this sound of the whole kit being
played live but still achieved that separation of the sounds.
There's another great quote he talks about for making Room
on Fire, and I didn't include this in here, but I.

Speaker 1 (53:15):
Just want to.

Speaker 2 (53:16):
I want to read it out now where he talks
about there's a track on there that uh, he said
the high hat sound wasn't quite right, and Julian Casablancas
was needling him about the high hat sound, so he
was like, all right, uh, Fab go in there and
hit the crash symbol once. So Fab goes in there
and hits the crash symbol exactly once, and he and

(53:38):
and so Gordon Raphael digitally you know, routes it so
that every time the high hat hits in this song section,
that single crash hit would also hit as an overdub.
So it's like, it's so fascinating to me. I love again.
And this goes back to this stuff I was talking
about with Wolfpeck and the stuff I was talking about
with Dap Tone, where it's just like this stuff that
you hear that you initially are like, well that sounds

(53:58):
like garbage. There's so much thought that goes into it.
I love it.

Speaker 1 (54:03):
Both guitarists played through two twelve inch speaker Fender hot
Rod Devill's, which became the absolute bog standard guitar amp
you saw everywhere in Brooklyn for the next twenty years.
They played through Jekyl and Hyde overdrives, the pro Coo
rat distortion pedal, the MSR microamp. Albert Hammond Junior played

(54:23):
a Fender Strat. Nick Valenci played an Epiphone Rivera. But
other than that, their guitar setups were pretty similar. I
love the guitar sound on this record. They talk about
how to build these parts. Neither of them would play
complete chords. You know.

Speaker 2 (54:39):
They talk a lot about how they were influenced by television,
which whenever you hear bands talk about like interlocking guitar parts,
they're usually talking about like the first television record, and
you can see it in live videos. They're both like
when they're playing last Night, which is a song that
ostensibly has kind of like the same guitar rhythm through
a lot of it, they're playing different voicing of the

(55:00):
same chord, or they're playing one person will play like
a partial voicing on the lower strings and the other
person will play a different voicing on the higher strings.
And what that does is kind of creates the effect
of like a pianist playing where one guitarist is playing
like the left hand of the piano and the other
guitarist is playing like the right hand voicing of the piano.

(55:20):
And anchoring all of this is Nikolai Freischer playing bass.
Although I think in this in the Last Night No
in the Sunday video, I think he's playing a Rickenbacker bass,
but he's playing a Fender Jazz for this recording through
the iconic setup of an Ampeg SVT head and an
Ampeg eight x ten cab. While we're talking about the

(55:42):
bass on this record, it's fun to note that Julian
Casablancas would later said, there are some basslines on our
first album that Will were one hundred percent ripped off
from the Cure.

Speaker 1 (55:51):
We were worried about putting out the album because we
thought we'd get busted. Which I don't think you can
copy a bassline, because the bassline too, I saw her
standing there. The Beatles song is a direct rip of
Chuck Berry's I'm talking about You. It's the same bass bar.

Speaker 2 (56:08):
Well, it's funny you say that because I just did
some googling. Well, I saw you put that note in,
and I was reading from Bass Musician magazine about the
Blurred Lines copyright case and about how they brought up
the baselines in those two songs to try and prove
copyright infringement and arguing about how the feel of the

(56:29):
baselines and the rhythmic anticipation that the way the baselines
were structured were enough to constitute copyright infringement, and one
of the lawyers pointed out, no, they're both just kind
of doing the the Curtis Mayfield Superfly. They're both just
doing this Superfly basedline. Oh yeah, boom boom boom, boom boom.

(56:54):
So that you can copyright baselines in certain instances when
they constitute feature of the song, like you could probably
copyright the come Together bassline because it's such an iconic hook.
You could possibly copyright. Well, no, I don't think you could.
And this is where it gets so blurry, And this
is where it gets so interesting about this horrifying future

(57:15):
that we live in where you can litigate this kind
of stuff, because like, let's talk about a bassline like
cheks good Times, you know, boom boom boom, that bassline
is also another one bites the dust right boom bomb bomb.
That bassline is also in a Lizo song, but all

(57:36):
it is is those three quarter notes. And then Wolfpack
wrote their own song that's a response to it called
three on E, which is literally just bump, bump, bump,
and then you do a variation on that. So there's
all these instances of how you can take like something
that is a recognized piece of musical common language and
put a twist on it, but you might not be

(57:57):
able to copyright it exactly. Something like Day's long View
is really interesting because that's such an iconic bass hook,
but that's such a common way of navigating those chord
shapes that if you've got a really good lawyer who
is maybe also a bassist, he could just say there's
no way you can copyright that as a baseline, because
it's just outlining.

Speaker 1 (58:16):
A chord a specific way.

Speaker 2 (58:18):
One of the things I was reading about is really
interesting with this the Blurred Lines case is that the
lawyer in that case, uh is this guy Howard King,
and he actually represented zz Top when John Lee Hooker
sued them over the song Lagrange, which is the John

(58:40):
Lee Hooker pattern and in that case, zz Top won
that case by successfully saying, oh, this is like a
blues rhythmic idiom, Like, you can't copyright that rhythmic feel.
Decades later, this guy is now representing, Uh, he's defending
Robin Thicke, And for so I know, music copyright is

(59:02):
so fascinating to me.

Speaker 1 (59:03):
Wasn't that that blurred lines lawsuit? Wasn't the argument from
the the Marvin Gay side basically, you you stole the
groove and the spirit of the song, you stole the
vie of the song. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (59:17):
So, and that's why thankfully they lost, because if you
start copyrighting vibes like you're just everybody's you know. But yeah,
it's fascinating and it all comes down to ultimately, anybody
who's trying to comment on this from any kind of
expert position, you know what it comes down to the judge.

Speaker 1 (59:35):
It was like what most recently won? Yeah, the most
recently decided? Where did Vanilla Iceland on the ice ice
baby versus under pressure? That's a great question. Uh, it
was settled out of court. Ah.

Speaker 2 (59:50):
And then and then after the fact that Bowie and
Queen were given credit for the sample.

Speaker 1 (59:55):
Okay, yeah, he wised up. He Yeah, wasn't he the
one that was dangled out of a balcony by his ankles? Yeah,
by Shug, but that was over something else.

Speaker 2 (01:00:08):
But he's the one who he's He became like the
you know, the big public face of it because he
gave that idiotic interview.

Speaker 1 (01:00:14):
Where he was like, he was like different. Yeah, he
was like, there's goes ding ding ding ing ding ding
and ils goes ding ding ding ding ding ding digga
ding ding ding diga ding ding. It's different.

Speaker 2 (01:00:25):
It's different, right, yeah, And it was like, we're gonna
laugh you out of the music industry. But speaking of
people that the Strokes ripped off.

Speaker 1 (01:00:33):
Yes, the bands knew that last Night sounds like Tom
Petty's American Girl, Julian Casablanca said in a two thousand
and three Spin interview. People would say, you know that
song American Girl by Tom Petty, don't you think last
night sounds a little like that? And I'd be like, yeah,
we ripped it off. Where you been? And in the
same interview, he copped to stealing his phrasing in the

(01:00:55):
Room on Fire single twelve to fifty one from Kim
Gordon singing in the song youth song Bull in the
heather this He's honest. Yeah, and Tom Petty He's sort

(01:01:37):
of a frequent source of theft for musicians. In addition
to the strokes with American Girl, there's the Red Hot
Chili Peppers stealing ganking as you wrote, Last Chance with
Mary Jane, the guitar part which they then borrowed for
Danny California.

Speaker 2 (01:01:54):
Egregious, the worst one, not just because I hate that band,
but holy do they sound the same.

Speaker 1 (01:02:01):
You know what I'm talking about? Right? I actually don't
know if I do. Oh my god, I'm a huge
Tom Petty guy. Oh few, despite his pension for Rickenbacker's. Okay, well,
all right, go ahead, do read the last part. And then,
of course, the biggest one that I remember most recently
is the suspicious similarity between Won't back Down and Sam

(01:02:23):
Smith Stay.

Speaker 2 (01:02:24):
With Me, Stay with Me, and uh won't back Down.
So this is Last Dance with Mary Jane and this

(01:02:47):
is Danny California. They just made it dumber, They just
jack They made it browier.

Speaker 1 (01:03:05):
We talked about sublimes, what I got versus Lady Madonna. Yeah,
admittedly this must.

Speaker 2 (01:03:18):
Have been so much more complicated when they didn't have
like all of recorded music at their fingertips. But some
of that stuff is like because the whole thing in
copyright cord is that you have to prove that you've
never heard the song, right, And I'm like, there's no
way in God's green earth that the four straight white
men in Red Hot Chili Peppers had never heard Last
Dance with Mary Jane when they wrote that, Like, I'm sorry,

(01:03:40):
you guys heard that song, Sam Smith. I buy a
little bit more because they're British and there's more plausible
deniability there.

Speaker 1 (01:03:48):
But like, anyway, though, Petty was cool with it. Yeah,
he gave a quote in Rolling Stone in two thousand
and six saying the Strokes took American Girl for last night.
There was an interview that took place with them where
they actually admitted it. That made me laugh out loud.
It's like, Okay, good for you, it doesn't bother me,
bless them. Yeah, be chill about it. We're gonna take

(01:04:12):
a quick break, but we'll be right back with more.
Too much information in just a moment. Wow. Another great
thing that I love about is this.

Speaker 2 (01:04:29):
It is the vocal sounds, which are just a huge
touchstone for kind of a lot of Indie going forward,
Indian vocal sounds going forward, just the low fineness of
it and grit. And they got that either just by
pushing a mic an Audio Technical four three three a
very hard through an Avalon seven three seven tube pre amp,

(01:04:52):
or by using a twelve hundred dollars Noyman TLM one
oh three on a PV keyboard amp, tiny PV keyboard
amp with an eight inch speaker that Julian Casablancas used
for all of his home demos. He brought it into
the studio and was like, yeah, Mike, this and that's
where you get the really out of control like.

Speaker 1 (01:05:14):
Kind of stuff. Love it, great vocal sounds. Rafael.

Speaker 2 (01:05:17):
One of my other favorite quotes about the recording process
of this album is Gordon Rafael talking to The Guardian.
He says, Julian had so many ideas and a freakishly
controlled concept of rhythm and timing. Even when he'd drunk
thirteen beers and was asleep on the couch, one eye
would open and he'd go the high hats not right.

(01:05:37):
One thing that complicated the sessions was that the ink
on the band's deal with RCA wasn't dry yet they
didn't sign fully until a week and a half into
their time of Rafael, which meant that they'd already completed
stuff by the time that they had officially signed, and
the label was not thrilled with what they had. Rafael
told Sound on Sound. Having RCA America, a major label

(01:06:00):
coming to see the Strokes recording in a basement with
Gordon Raphael, the untested producer, was a very eye opening
and interesting process from the get go.

Speaker 1 (01:06:09):
They wanted it out of my hands. They did not
like the sound of the EP, the modern age. They
did not think the album was going to be professional enough.
They were very worried.

Speaker 2 (01:06:17):
They actually got to hear the new recordings after they
signed the piece of paper, and what Julian did was
have the A and R guy come down and played
him the material on a boombox in the waiting room.
Then I watched the A and R guy smile and
put his arm around the band members, and he shook
my hand and said good job. But I felt the
vibe of, oh, what are we gonna do now? How
are we going to get this thing turned around right?

(01:06:39):
I could feel that from the moment that we met,
and he elaborated on that vibe in an interview with Pitchfork,
explaining that at one point RCA's Steve Rabvowski, Sorry Steve,
he heard what the band of bit up to, and
then Strokes manager Ryan Gentils called Gordon Rafael and said
that this guy, Steve rab Blowski told Ryan Gentels, here's

(01:07:02):
a list of producers that if you switch from working
with Gordon Raphael, RCA will cover the cost of the
went over budget. In effect, they would pay the band
to start working with different producers. And he he was
mixing this as he kind of went, but then when
they got to the mastering stage, they had one more hurdle. Mastering,

(01:07:24):
for the layman is the final step of the recording process.
It's where you get the mixed tracks and you basically
finalize everything for an album and you make sure everything
sounds consistent, everything's eq to a certain way to sound
like it's all of a piece. It is the final
hurdle to clear in any recording process. And Gordon Raphael

(01:07:44):
told Pitchfork, when we finished is this it, we had
to go to Sterling Mastering Labs to master hard to
explain the song and the B side for the first
single release, I pushed play, and to my surprise, my
little eight track basement computer recording sounded stunning. At that moment,
RCA's Steve Roblovowski stood up with the head mastering engineer

(01:08:05):
from Stirling and said, guys, this is some of the
most unprofessional sounding music I have ever heard. This is
not going to sell, and you are really doing damage
to your career by trying to release music that sounds
this way. My heart just sank because I just celebrated
the fact that it sounded exactly the way I wanted to.
I wanted to cry. Then the mastering guy, Greg Cowby

(01:08:26):
stood up and said, that's right. They're not going to
understand your music in Kansas anyway. Why make it more
difficult by having that distortion on the voice? Be sensible.
I picked up my computer, said I disagreed, and left
the building. But there was one trick from the mastering
process that did stick, and it's in fact the sound
that opens the record. Raphael told Weiss we didn't use

(01:08:48):
tape during the process of making the record, but the
engineer at the mastering lab said, why don't we put
it on tape and see if you like what it does.

Speaker 1 (01:08:55):
By the second or third song. Julian said, what's that sound?
What are you doing?

Speaker 2 (01:09:00):
Engineer said, I'm rewinding the tape. Julian said, why don't
you stick that on the first.

Speaker 1 (01:09:04):
Song of the album. That'd be a really interesting way
to start the album. So that that opens is this?

Speaker 2 (01:09:12):
It is the sound of the master tape being rewound
before a take that they did not use while they
were recording. They only came in at the mastering step.

Speaker 1 (01:09:21):
And now we've got to talk about the cover art
of this is It. There are two main covers for it.
The one that was released everywhere but the United States
was a photograph by Colin Lane of his then girlfriend's
leather gloved hand resting on her as ju Heigel wrote
dari Air and Hip. Colin Lane told The Guardian that
it was late nineteen ninety nine or two thousand and
he had a Polaroid big shot with ten photos in

(01:09:43):
it that he wanted to use. His girlfriend was getting
out of the shower and they had a Chanel glove
left over from a previous shoot and the result was
that very arresting black and white photo. Lane said he
met the Strokes in January two thousand and one on
assignment from Face magazine and hit it off with them
after photograph them on the roof of the Lincoln Building
in Midtown, New York. And he's he explained to The

(01:10:04):
Guardian a few weeks after they signed with RCA. They
invited me to hang out and shoot a few shots
around the city. So we piled into an old Winnebago
and their art director called to hassle them about choosing
an album cover. They were flying out to Australia the
following day and the deadline was approaching. Luckily, I'd brought
my portfolio with me and they asked if they could
click through. When they asked, I love this. When they

(01:10:25):
asked if they could use the ass shot, I couldn't
believe it. It's an all time quote right there. However,
for the American version of This Is It that was
released in October two thousand and one, the cover art
of This Is It was changed to a different photograph.
This is the one I know, and chances are, if
you're listening to this, the one you probably know too.
It's a photograph of sub atomic particles tracking in a

(01:10:45):
bubble chamber. And this I didn't realize this the same
image appears on the cover of The Scientists as Rebel
by theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, and a portion of this
image also appeared on Prince's nineteen ninety app Graffiti Bridge.
That's quite a history for that image. ARCAA product manager
Dave Gottlieb commented the replacement was quote straight up a

(01:11:07):
band decision, while manager Ryan Gentil said that Julian Casablancas
had phoned him just before the Japanese and European versions
were released and said, I found something even cooler than
the ass picture. Meanwhile, the Strokes two thousand and three
biography by Martin Roach mentions that the fear of objections
from America's more conservative retail industry like you know your Walmarts,

(01:11:30):
was a major factor in the artworks alteration, but photographer
Colin Lane he backed the story of Julian changing his mind.
He told GQ in twenty nineteen, Julian fell in love
with this new image of the subotanic particles and liked
it more than my ass shot. Luckily for me, though,
my photograph was already in the printing presses, and I
guess they'd already printed a ton of albums, so RCA

(01:11:51):
told Julian they could have the other cover with the
Adams for North America, but it was too late for
the rest of the world. Yeah. I always assumed that
that was a conscious I was like, Okay, America is
not going to really want this sort of BDSM style
album of cover, so this just covers up a little
more abstract. I love both of them.

Speaker 2 (01:12:09):
I thought the first one was and I never was it.
So I read somebody called it a tribute to spinal Tap,
but I wasn't. Couldn't pin that down, but sniff the.

Speaker 1 (01:12:18):
Glove or the glove or whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:12:20):
Yeah, I also look like a helmet Newton. Yeah yeah,
but I love the subatomic particle shot. The bigger problem
for is this Its release was, as with a lot
of things nine to eleven. The record had originally been
released in July two thousand and one in Australia and
August of two thousand and one in the UK, remember,

(01:12:42):
not yet two years after the band played their first show,
and while it was originally slated for September twenty fifth,
two thousand and one in the States, the release was
pushed back over the song New York City Cops, which
memorably features the chorus New York City Cops, they Ain't
too smart. Dave Gottlib, the former VP of marketing at RCA,

(01:13:04):
told Lizzie Goodman, I remember an email coming in from
somebody who worked with retail, and he had written this
paragraph about how he had put the Strokes record on
and it got to New York City Cops and it
made him angry because he was looking out of his
window and seeing the ashes of the Twin Towers and
this song made him take the CD out and throw
it away. So, out of a desire to not.

Speaker 1 (01:13:23):
Be insensitive, the band pulled the song from the CD
release in the States, although the vinyl had been pressed
and had actually come out on September eleventh with that
song intact. This was on finyl. I feel like two
thousand and one was like the era, way before it
got cool again to have stuff out on vinyl. Yeah,
I don't know the Strokes.

Speaker 2 (01:13:42):
Would I guess, yeah, exactly. I think it might have
come down to them. Their personal reference is this. It
was an immediate critical favorite. Joe Levy of Rolling Stone
called it the stuff of which legends are made in
early accurate review, and Nammy reviewer John Robinson called it
one of the best debut LPs by guitar band during
the last twenty years in a perfect ten review. It

(01:14:05):
was named the best album of two thousand and one
by Billboard, CMJ, Entertainment Weekly, NME, Playlauder, and Time, while Magnet,
Q and The New Yorker notched it highly in other
end of year best album lists Mojo, New York Times,
rolling Stone, USA Today, the list goes on and on.
It was number two behind Bob Dylan's Love and Theft

(01:14:26):
at I Think the Passant Job.

Speaker 1 (01:14:28):
Review, which is the.

Speaker 2 (01:14:31):
Yearly Village Voice survey of critics music critics reviews, and
it was named Best Album of the Year at the
NME Awards and Best International Albums at the Meteor Music Awards.

Speaker 1 (01:14:46):
As you probably gathered, the press loved the Strokes and
What's not the Love. They were young, they were good looking,
and in a rock oriented music critic world sick of
new metal and not yet adjusted to hip hop's commercial dominance,
Strokes were seen as savior. Rolling Stone and Spin fawned
all over them, as did the British press, and once
the band's touring schedule caught up with the coverage, they

(01:15:07):
really did set down the blueprint for the so called
rock renaissance at the time, the Rising Tide of which
lifted the White Stripes, Interpol and Kings of Leon, along
with also rans like the Vines and the Hives. And
I remember this reading the music press around this time
as a you know, high school kid, wanted to know
more about guitar bands. Around this era, every single band

(01:15:29):
became the blank strokes. Kings of Leon were the Southern strokes.
Vampire Weekend were the Ivy League strokes, The Killers were
the Vegas strokes.

Speaker 2 (01:15:38):
Yeah, other who who else? Was another stroke? I guess
that was kind of it. We kind of ran through
all of them. Inner Ball were just like the Goth
stroke I had to pol were the Goth strokes.

Speaker 1 (01:15:49):
Which I'm trying to figure out if white stripes stood
on their own though, Yeah, yeah, well it's interesting. Were
the ancestual strokes, the incense, the insists strokes? Oh that's
terrible strokes. Drummer Fab already briefly dated Drew Barrymore, which
is weird. She's an interesting getting history. Got the Tom

(01:16:12):
Green from the Strokes justin long maybe yeah, oh yeah, oh,
I think it is David Cross. I think David Cross.
He was like, no, no, no, she didn't date him.
He opened for them, And I think Irving plause at
one point, and I think in me be in the bathroom,
I think it's him who was like, yeah, I knew
Fab was gonna get his heart broken by Drew and
I just didn't say anything. But they dated for like

(01:16:33):
five years. I didn't know that. Wow. Courtney Love also
came into the band's orbit and wrote a song called
Julian but I'm a bit older than you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
This is the point at which the behind the music
narrator's voice would turn grave as he began describing the

(01:16:54):
downward slope of the band's fame. All of their drinking
would catch up with them on their European tour, and
Albert Hammond Junior's drug use also started spiraling out of control.
A lot of people blame Ryan Adams. He's basically the
villain of me in the bathroom. Would you like to
explain Ryan adams influence on the New York rock scene
at this time?

Speaker 2 (01:17:14):
Oh boy, Well, Ryan Gentel's also managed Ryan Adams. But yeah,
there's a lot of people who make a lot of
They basically say that Ryan is just a terrible influence
on anyone he came in contact with, you know, not
just for drinking but also drugs.

Speaker 1 (01:17:29):
I mean, the guy was.

Speaker 2 (01:17:32):
Basically Some people have made the assertion that he got
Albert Hammond Junior hooked on heroin, which is pretty heavy.

Speaker 1 (01:17:39):
But anyway, oh I neglected to mention that Julian Casablancas
also punched an RCAA executive in the face because he
didn't want to perform in front of a live audience.

Speaker 2 (01:17:50):
Who among us rock and roll what's most interesting to
me in the review mirror about the Strokes and is this.
It is the sense that the record didn't do that well,
like given all of these people interviewed, given all the
people who talk about it. In my personal life, David
Long shout out college roommate, who are my best friends?

(01:18:11):
This is one of his favorite records. It took five
years for this to sell over six hundred thousand copies
in the UK, which is not that much in a
pre downloading, super pre digital world. It took that same
amount of time for this to even get over a
million units in the US. Put that in perspective. The
band had already released another two full length Records before

(01:18:35):
is this it went platinum. This is for a major
label band. I think RCA signed them for five albums.
According to the somewhat dubious site best Selling Albums dot Org,
is this it has now sold one point seven million copies,
which is like, I don't know in modern eras, that's
like Juana Dell Records first month, right, something like that.

Speaker 1 (01:19:02):
And I bet you the seven hundred thousand that it's
cleared in the last like fifteen years are all on
vinyl from like Urban Outfitters. Yeah. Somewhat depressingly, while I
was researching this, I had learned that Julian Casablanca sold
his own stake in the Strokes catalog last year to
a publishing company. Already it's way too early for that
kind of move. Yeah. Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:19:24):
JP Bauersock, the band's guitar teacher, who is credited in
the liner notes for the first two records as Guru
which I Love, told Pitchfork that he thinks the music
industry's contraction in the wake of the initial wave of
digital downloading may have been to blame for The strokes
perceived failure to capitalize on their hype. He said, when
the music industry goes into that kind of period, where

(01:19:45):
do you think they're going to put their money on
an up and comer or the new R Kelly record.

Speaker 1 (01:19:49):
Ooh.

Speaker 2 (01:19:51):
When times are tough and profits are down, you focus
on the moneymakers, and moving less than a million units
is not a money maker. Not helping was the fact
that the band was obstinate about a lot of stuff,
to the consternation of the people in their orbit. They
turned down six hundred thousand dollars for Heineken to use
either last night or someday in an ad. They refused

(01:20:12):
to play the two thousand and two MTV Video Music
Awards because the network insisted on having them share the
stage with The Hives and The Vines. The pitch was
that each band would get a minute and a half
to play. Ryan Gentles told Pitchfork at the time, no
one said no to the MTVVMAS. The producers actually made
me get Jullian on the phone to explain why he
would not play on the stage with those bands. It's

(01:20:33):
nothing against them, he said, I don't think we're in
the same genre and I'm not going to do a
band off with them. That was pretty much the last
time we were played on MTV.

Speaker 1 (01:20:42):
I didn't realize until researching this episode that the two
main Strokes videos, and probably more the one for last
Night and Someday, were directed by Roman Coppola, France's son
and Sophia's brother. That's it, that's it, it's like that. Yeah.
Writer Andy Greenwold told Lizzy Goodman for me me in
the bathroom, the Strokes really weren't that big. Everyone needed

(01:21:04):
them to be big and desperately wanted them to be big,
but they kind of weren't. At Moby, who was in
the band's New York City orbit, also added the Strokes
never sold that many records, but they made really good records.
The reach, the awareness of them was so much greater
than the record sales. Again, like you said earlier in
this episode, it's the Brian you Noo quote about the
Velvet Underground. They may have sold only a thousand records

(01:21:25):
for their debut, but each of the thousand people that
bought their debut record went and formed a band or
something else that was equally hugely influential. So the Strokes
also fell victims to the Classics sophomore album Morass. The band,
of course, had their entire lives that come up with
material for their first album, and then about a year
maybe two tops to come up with something that would

(01:21:47):
at least equal, if not better at all, while being
on the promotional hamster wheel of touring and doing interviews
and all sorts of not especially inspiring things. So, although
you actually like their sophomore album, Room on Fire, Room.

Speaker 2 (01:22:01):
On Fire goes, and it's worth noting that they're the
I think their third or second biggest sandwiched in between
Last Night and Someday on Spotify is Reptilia, which is
the song from Guitar Hero that has like some of
their best guitar work. Sorry, I'm actually arguing with David
Long right now on Instagram.

Speaker 1 (01:22:21):
Oh what do you do? What would you do? He's
just saying that they're more relevant now than they were
since the two thousands because Billie Eilish, I guess, I
guess their most recent record one album of the rock
of the year, rock something of the year, Rock of
the ages, Rock of the ages. That's an interesting point.

(01:22:42):
So I'm still fighting with him. I'm very interested in this.

Speaker 2 (01:22:46):
Well, he's saying that like this, this record, the New
Abnormal that came out in twenty twenty. I get it's
that it has their top streamed thing, their top stream
singles from that on Spotify, But I was like, I'm sorry,
there's no way.

Speaker 1 (01:23:00):
I'm just saying they never topped. Is this it? And
he's arguing with me and he's wrong. What was I
gonna say?

Speaker 2 (01:23:05):
Former A and R executive Brian long Total Lizzie Goodman.
I remember when their second record came out. We really
liked them and we were championing them, but we were
all wondering if they could develop in a way that
would make an interesting career. The analogy we used to
make was will they end up making a London calling?

Speaker 1 (01:23:19):
Could they be that?

Speaker 2 (01:23:21):
Or is it going to be just cutting different colors
from the same swath of fabric? And that's kind of
like what happened. There's this common knock that the band's
sophomore record, Room on Fire, was is this it version
one point five?

Speaker 1 (01:23:32):
Great record?

Speaker 2 (01:23:33):
But the band was also disintegrating internally for the sadly
common reasons of drugs, alcohol, and ego. In a twenty
fourteen GQ profile, Julian Casablanca said a band is a
great way to destroy a friendship and a tour is
a great way to destroy a band.

Speaker 1 (01:23:49):
Oof hang on, but apparently getting into a debate about
the Strokes on Instagram dms, it's also a great way
to destroy a friendship. Yeah, David's wrong. Whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:24:04):
Jack White gave an interesting quote about all this to
Lizzie Goodman. He said, sometimes being thrust out there pushes
you to hurry up and figure yourself out and do
away with years of fumbling. That happened to the Strokes.
They had to get it together fast. Meg White and
I had three albums out and an almost too realistic
view that nobody was ever going to care about our music.

(01:24:24):
We were assuming that we had a life of playing
in bars for thirty people in our future. The extra
time to get our things together was good for us mentally.
All that said, by the time the band got to
their third record, First Impressions of Earth, they had switched
producers away from Gordon Raphael. He told Pitchfork, I believe
they saw all the bands that came in the door
behind the first record that were selling three times more

(01:24:44):
than them, and were wondering if it was a production thing.
At the time, they were getting married and having children
and wondering how they could go higher than they did.
That record was made in various fits and starts, in
assorted stages of isolation from one another. Most people agree
that it is an uneven record with lot of good
songs that can sound like they came across from a
different band after touring on. The band deliberately didn't make

(01:25:06):
any follow up plans after first impressions and went on
something of a hiatus, and then they would take five
full years for a follow up angles, during which time
everyone went their separate ways. Julian started the voids, everyone
recorded solo albums, etc.

Speaker 1 (01:25:20):
And etc.

Speaker 2 (01:25:21):
But ultimately none of that can take away from Is
This It. In two thousand and nine, n Emmy named
it as the greatest album of the decade. It placed
second on a similar list compiled by Rolling Stone. Two
songs of it featured on their one hundred best Song
of the two thousands list. In January twenty eleven, Rolling
Stone conducted a survey among their Facebook fans to determine

(01:25:44):
the top ten debut albums of all time. Is This
It came in at number ten as the most contemporaneous
entry on the list, behind Pearl Jam's nineteen ninety one
debut which I think speaks volumes and as like Casablanx's
beloved Velvet Underground on the record's greatest influence lies with
other musicians. Fellow New York City ats icon LCD sound

(01:26:07):
System founder James Murphy called is This It My record
of the decade, and Brandon Flowers of The Killers said
it was so perfect that it depressed him when he
first heard it. Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys put
his love of the record into song, singing I just
wanted to be one of the Strokes in their twenty

(01:26:27):
eighteen song Star Treatment. Meanwhile, Lizzie Goodman in Meet Me
in the Bathroom wrote, almost every artist I interviewed for
this book from all over the world said it was
the Strokes that opened the door for them. Another musician
named Ian Devaney summed up is this its appeal for
the Grammys website. Their music just makes it so much

(01:26:49):
easier to put up with everything about living in New
York that is irritating and tedious. People still moved to
New York from very pleasant places that are very far
and away, specifically to place themselves inside the world that
exists in these songs.

Speaker 1 (01:27:03):
Play.

Speaker 2 (01:27:03):
A song from is this It in a crowded dive
bar late at night, and people lose their minds. It's
the apex of their notion of what New York life
would be. I'm surprised I made it through that without crying.
I know, great record, great band, Okay city.

Speaker 1 (01:27:22):
Folks. Thank you for listening. This has been too much information.
I'm Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan Runtagg. We'll catch you
next time. Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio.
The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtogg.
The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show

(01:27:44):
was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtogg and Alex Heigel.

Speaker 3 (01:27:48):
With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
us a review. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen your favorite
shows and

Speaker 1 (01:28:07):
Tahm

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Strokes' 'Is This It': Everything You Didn't Know