"It wasn't like we sat down and said, 'Let's shoot for this,' " Hammond adds. "It was the opposite--like, 'Gimmicks don't last. They're great to boost you up fast, but then they go away.' Pretty much it was just Julian trying to write good melodies, but with balls, and it just so happens that those songs remind people of the seventies. Stuff like Limp Bizkit and Korn--that's not balls to me. That's fake, like putting steroids in your body."
"Being on the road is like a vacation: You get to see different towns, and you play shows. But recording was painful; it sucked out my soul."
Fake versus genuine--it's an issue that plagues the Strokes in some corners of the New York rock scene, where other bands that are clearly jealous of this group's rapid ascent can be heard mumbling about "spoiled rich kids" and the sort of unbelievably lucky breaks that just don't happen for "the rest of us." Ressentiment, Nietzsche called it--a spirit of revenge that festers in the weak, prompting them to seek vengeance against the strong, the noble, and the talented. As if Fred Durst is somehow more worthy of success than Julian Casablancas; as if much of the best music throughout rock history hasn't been made by upper-middle-class art-school students like Pete Townshend, John Lennon, and Joe Strummer.
In reality, the Strokes' "overnight success" was at least three years in the making. It's understandable why the five band members are a little defen-sive when stressing just how hard they've worked: They spent countless all-nighters honing their material in a cramped and smelly rehearsal space in midtown Manhattan's Music Building (rent: $300 a month), emerging with red eyes, squinting in the morning sun, as they stumbled to dead-end day jobs that they were only recently able to quit.
The group had been gigging regularly all over the city for a year and a half when it got its first real break, winning an influential fan in Ryan Gentles, then the booker at the hipster haven Mercury Lounge. "I'd get a lot of the same kind of shit in there day and day out," Gentles says. "I was a musician, and I got that job because I wanted to help bands, but very few came along that you actually wanted to help. When I got the Strokes demo, I was just so floored--out of all the submissions that came in, 20 or 30 a day, nothing ever stuck out like that. I actually took their tape home with me and played it over and over again for weeks."
Gentles, who's only two or three years older than the guys in the Strokes, eventually quit his job to manage the band full-time. "Initially, I was just like, 'Do you guys need some help?' " Gentles says. "And as it escalated, my phone started to ring more for them than for booking the Mercury Lounge. If I hadn't quit, I would have been fired. Now I know I say this as a manager, but this is a band with amazing songs, the right persona, the right character--everything they do is right. It's not an accident that it works, because they work so hard at it. Julian in particular is his own worst critic. Every good piece of press he gets only makes him think, Shit, I've got to work harder, I've got to write better. He's always trying to outdo himself."
Before leaving the Merc, Gentles used his clout to land the Strokes some high-profile gigs, including a weekly residency at the club and opening slots on national tours with Ohio's underground heroes Guided by Voices and rising British favorites the Doves. The Strokes made the most of these openings: Wherever the guys played, they won fans among listeners, club owners, and local promoters.
The buzz was starting to build, and it could be heard as far away as London, where Geoff Travis was in the process of resurrecting his influential indie label, Rough Trade. One of Gentles's pals at the Mercury Lounge played Travis a Strokes tape over the phone, and the label head was hooked. "After about 15 seconds, I agreed to release it," Travis says. "What I heard in the Strokes was the same thing that all the writers and the general public are now hearing: the songwriting skills of a first-rate writer and music that is a distillation of primal rock 'n' roll mixed with the sophistication of today's society--the primitive in the sophisticated, to paraphrase Jean Renoir. It also has an unmacho quality that embodies grace and love, and it touches me. I just felt it was the best record from a rock-'n'-roll band out of New York City that I had heard since the CBGB's era."
Travis wasn't the only Brit to fall for the Strokes. In support of The Modern Age EP, the group played two sold-out tours of the U.K. The English music press tried to outdo itself with superlatives, and the Strokes landed on the cover of the weekly New Musical Express. "They like white boys who play rock 'n' roll over there," Casablancas says dismissively by way of explanation. But by the time the music industry's largest annual gathering, the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin, rolled around this past March, even the notoriously clueless American major labels were taking notice. After entertaining several offers, the Strokes finally signed with RCA in the late spring because it was the one company that didn't balk when the band said it would never make a video.
‘'They like white boys who play rock 'n' roll over there,' Casablancas says dismissively by way of explanation. "
The Strokes guys are charmingly naive and old-fashioned in more significant ways than their fondness for Bay City Rollers haircuts and vintage 1975 guitar tones. The power of the group stems from the live interaction of five friends who know and love one another and who communicate best through loud music. Turn it up, drown out the rest of the world, and find catharsis through thrash--it's a formula as old as rock 'n' roll itself. When it came time to record Is This It, the challenge was to capture the power and immediacy of this approach for digital posterity.
"It was like a nightmare," Casablancas says. "I mean, I've seen interviews with musicians where they say that touring is hard. For me, personally, being on the road is like a vacation: You get to see different towns, and on top of it you get to play shows. It's like a dream come true. But recording was painful; it sucked out my soul. We only had a short period of time, and it was concentrating for ten hours every day for a month and a half until 5 or 6 a.m., trying to focus on tones. I've never been so mentally fatigued as when I was finished with that album."
The band eventually hit its groove by alternating recording sessions with another club residency, this one in Philadelphia. Whatever the angst that went into the creation of the album, the end result is a wonderfully raw and organic statement that virtually explodes from the speakers. Is This It is indeed one of the best rock records out of New York in a decade; hell, in these pop- and rap-rock-dominated times, it's one of the best rock records, period. But whether it will move units and connect with the Total Request Live masses is anybody's guess. Gentles, Travis, and the rest of the Strokes support team cringe at the mere mention of other hyped New York bands like Jonathan Fire*Eater, which debuted amid a flurry of empty major-label hype and corporate bucks before being quickly and justifiably forgotten.
To their credit, the five Strokes remain blissfully unconcerned about questions of business, just as they've mostly managed to ignore the distractions of buzz. "The art and the business side are very confused--they're perceived to be the same thing, which they're not," Casablancas says. "I really don't worry about where we fit in the business. I think we're somewhere in the middle--somewhere between hardcore and the cheesy, commercial, melodic stuff. And that's somewhere I want to be--I think all the really good artists were like halfway between commercial and intellectual."
He pauses and laughs. "But you know," he says, "I really don't like talkin' about this stuff. I'd really rather sit down with you and have a beer."