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

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: 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.

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

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Speaker 2: 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 the right tunes and production, convincingly cause play as legitimate scuzzbags if the songs were good enough. That's right, talking about the strokes?

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

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Speaker 2: 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.

00:01:17
Speaker 1: I know I can tell by your glasses you think you're unique.

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Speaker 2: 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.

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Speaker 1: And we did all those things together though well we did all those things together.

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Speaker 2: 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.

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

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Speaker 2: 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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.

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Speaker 1: 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 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 I never talked about this band. Never talked about this band together. No, no, no, because it's weird to me.

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Speaker 2: 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 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.

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Speaker 1: And but but all those bands.

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Speaker 2: 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.

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

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Speaker 2: 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.

00:06:42
Speaker 1: You know. Yeah, I don't know, it's funny.

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

00:06:49
Speaker 1: Is that is? That is that accurate.

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

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Speaker 1: 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 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 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 that weird?

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

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

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Speaker 2: 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.

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

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Speaker 2: 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.

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

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Speaker 2: 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 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.

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

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Speaker 2: 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? It is impossible to talk about the Strokes without talking about New York.

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Speaker 1: New York is a character in The Strokes.

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Speaker 2: 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.

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Speaker 1: Is this It is like in.

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Speaker 2: 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 York in the late nineties, For all of its other virtues, the city was not.

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Speaker 1: A hotspot for rock and roll.

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Speaker 2: 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 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.

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Speaker 1: 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.

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Speaker 2: 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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Speaker 1: 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 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.

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Speaker 2: 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 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, 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.

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

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Speaker 2: 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 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, and Avenue D dead, those being, of course, the terms for what you were looking for or what you were if you went there.

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Speaker 1: 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, not okay to go to. Oh yeah, because that's not the case anymore.

00:16:44
Speaker 2: Now there's like an air an American apparel, well not anymore American trader jokes.

00:16:48
Speaker 1: Yeah. Now it's like a.

00:16:51
Speaker 2: 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. 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 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 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, 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.

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Speaker 1: 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.

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Speaker 2: 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 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. 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.

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Speaker 1: 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.

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

00:20:18
Speaker 1: Why did you see so much Heroin? That's alarming anyway.

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

00:20:32
Speaker 1: But uptown.

00:20:35
Speaker 3: Up.

00:20:35
Speaker 1: 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.

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

00:20:57
Speaker 1: Earlier, I was gonna say, yeah, it sounds like Jim Morrison's singing through a cell phone.

00:21:00
Speaker 2: 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.

00:21:07
Speaker 1: 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.

00:21:12
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:21:44
Speaker 1: 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.

00:21:56
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:22:29
Speaker 1: Was a big deal. Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Stephanie Seymour, Giselle, Alexandro Ambrosio.

00:22:36
Speaker 2: 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 that's where he met Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond.

00:23:01
Speaker 1: 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. Oh yeah, there's a god.

00:23:26
Speaker 2: 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 Senior written?

00:23:50
Speaker 1: 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.

00:24:01
Speaker 2: 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. 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.

00:24:48
Speaker 1: 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.

00:24:54
Speaker 2: 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.

00:25:14
Speaker 1: Casablanca's Valenci Moretti, how can we direct your call?

00:25:18
Speaker 2: 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 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. 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.

00:26:21
Speaker 1: 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.

00:26:28
Speaker 2: Solo record, and I believe the launch of his sock and tie line.

00:26:34
Speaker 1: Oh I bet you that wasn't part of your fantasy, was it. Nope, sure wasn't.

00:26:40
Speaker 2: 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 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, 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.

00:27:36
Speaker 1: 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.

00:27:46
Speaker 2: 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. Splitting fears of my life. Yeah, splitting forty bucks among five people.

00:28:15
Speaker 1: 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 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.

00:28:49
Speaker 2: 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 a suit for their for his first rehearsal with the band, which I love.

00:29:15
Speaker 1: 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.

00:29:25
Speaker 2: 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, 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.

00:30:08
Speaker 1: What is it? Is it just the pasty white skin and the dark hair and the leather.

00:30:14
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:30:56
Speaker 1: 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.

00:31:02
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:31:42
Speaker 1: In this era circond ninety ninety.

00:31:45
Speaker 2: 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 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 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.

00:32:49
Speaker 1: See if I found that interview.

00:32:51
Speaker 2: 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.

00:33:09
Speaker 1: Well, I don't know. Maybe, I mean, you can talk about this jewing.

00:33:13
Speaker 2: 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.

00:33:28
Speaker 1: 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 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.

00:33:57
Speaker 2: 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.

00:34:05
Speaker 1: Now.

00:34:06
Speaker 2: 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 commercial success, and the interviewer says he closed Woodstock, and Julian Caussublankaz just says.

00:34:34
Speaker 1: Okay, it's a terrible interview.

00:34:38
Speaker 2: 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.

00:34:48
Speaker 1: 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 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.

00:35:22
Speaker 2: That exactly think this final Tap thing. They impressed me with their musicality, their confidence and their punctuality.

00:35:33
Speaker 1: 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 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 to work out every note of the guitar solos too.

00:36:21
Speaker 2: 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.

00:36:38
Speaker 1: But it's fascinating.

00:36:40
Speaker 2: 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 being like, oh, we have a live drummer, but we want this to all sound like a drum machine.

00:37:06
Speaker 1: 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 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.

00:37:36
Speaker 2: 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 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 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.

00:38:39
Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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 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 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.

00:40:43
Speaker 2: 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 of being.

00:41:06
Speaker 1: Just dirt bags.

00:41:08
Speaker 2: 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, 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.

00:41:50
Speaker 1: 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.

00:42:04
Speaker 2: I think it was like forty again, I believe a show for which we were paid like forty dollars.

00:42:12
Speaker 1: Despite filling the room.

00:42:13
Speaker 2: I don't have figure. I didn't keep figures on our shows, thank god. Yeah, Jordan tell us about the Mercury Lounge.

00:42:19
Speaker 1: 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.

00:42:38
Speaker 2: 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.

00:42:56
Speaker 1: In It It in it because.

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

00:43:05
Speaker 1: Time that scans. It's kind of got a glam vibe.

00:43:10
Speaker 2: 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 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. 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 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. 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 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.

00:45:21
Speaker 1: It wasn't me, as it should be.

00:45:25
Speaker 2: 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 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, 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 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 it hadn't worked out with Gil and.

00:46:54
Speaker 1: 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 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 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, 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 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.

00:48:32
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:49:10
Speaker 1: 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 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.

00:49:42
Speaker 2: 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.

00:49:49
Speaker 1: 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 the percussion to sound like jewelry.

00:50:14
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:50:54
Speaker 1: Oh sure, yeah. I think.

00:50:58
Speaker 2: 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 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 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.

00:52:12
Speaker 1: Morris Steven Morris.

00:52:14
Speaker 2: 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, 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 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.

00:53:15
Speaker 1: Just want to.

00:53:16
Speaker 2: 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 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 like garbage. There's so much thought that goes into it. I love it.

00:54:03
Speaker 1: 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 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.

00:54:39
Speaker 2: 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 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. 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 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.

00:55:51
Speaker 1: 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.

00:56:08
Speaker 2: 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 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. 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 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 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 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.

00:58:16
Speaker 1: A chord a specific way.

00:58:18
Speaker 2: 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 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 so fascinating to me.

00:59:03
Speaker 1: 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.

00:59:17
Speaker 2: 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.

00:59:35
Speaker 1: 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.

00:59:50
Speaker 2: And then and then after the fact that Bowie and Queen were given credit for the sample.

00:59:55
Speaker 1: 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.

01:00:08
Speaker 2: 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.

01:00:14
Speaker 1: 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.

01:00:25
Speaker 2: 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.

01:00:33
Speaker 1: 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 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 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.

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

01:02:01
Speaker 1: 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 Smith Stay.

01:02:24
Speaker 2: With Me, Stay with Me, and uh won't back Down. So this is Last Dance with Mary Jane and this is Danny California. They just made it dumber, They just jack They made it browier.

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

01:03:18
Speaker 2: 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, you guys heard that song, Sam Smith. I buy a little bit more because they're British and there's more plausible deniability there.

01:03:48
Speaker 1: 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 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.

01:04:29
Speaker 2: 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, 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.

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

01:05:17
Speaker 2: 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. 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 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.

01:06:09
Speaker 1: 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.

01:06:17
Speaker 2: 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? 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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.

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

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

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

01:09:12
Speaker 2: 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.

01:09:21
Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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.

01:12:09
Speaker 2: 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.

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

01:12:20
Speaker 2: 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, 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, 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.

01:13:23
Speaker 1: 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.

01:13:42
Speaker 2: 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 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 at I Think the Passant Job.

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

01:14:31
Speaker 2: 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.

01:14:46
Speaker 1: 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 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 became the blank strokes. Kings of Leon were the Southern strokes. Vampire Weekend were the Ivy League strokes, The Killers were the Vegas strokes.

01:15:38
Speaker 2: 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.

01:15:49
Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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?

01:17:14
Speaker 2: 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.

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

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

01:17:39
Speaker 1: 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.

01:17:50
Speaker 2: 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? 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 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.

01:19:02
Speaker 1: 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.

01:19:24
Speaker 2: 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 do you think they're going to put their money on an up and comer or the new R Kelly record.

01:19:49
Speaker 1: Ooh.

01:19:51
Speaker 2: 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 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 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.

01:20:42
Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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.

01:22:01
Speaker 2: 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.

01:22:21
Speaker 1: 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. So I'm still fighting with him. I'm very interested in this.

01:22:46
Speaker 2: 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.

01:23:00
Speaker 1: 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?

01:23:05
Speaker 2: 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?

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

01:23:21
Speaker 2: 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?

01:23:32
Speaker 1: Great record?

01:23:33
Speaker 2: 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.

01:23:49
Speaker 1: 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.

01:24:04
Speaker 2: 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. 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 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 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.

01:25:20
Speaker 1: And etc.

01:25:21
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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 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.

01:27:03
Speaker 1: Play.

01:27:03
Speaker 2: 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.

01:27:22
Speaker 1: 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 was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtogg and Alex Heigel.

01:27:48
Speaker 3: 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

01:28:07
Speaker 1: Tahm