The Strokes' amiable, ruddy-faced security man, dressed in crisp English sporting gear, ducks into the dressing room of Portland, Maine's once-grand State Theatre to see if singer Julian Casablancas is ready to meet some jailbait.
It's been 15 minutes since the band burned through the opening night of their fall 2002 Wyckyd Sceptre tour. As usual, there was no encore. Just a confident march backstage, a brief analysis, and another strange after-party.
"I don't care," replies Casablancas, shrugging, a bottle of red wine in his hand. "I have a girlfriend." Indeed, he is faithful to New York-based painter Colleen Barry, even if he doesn't much resemble a responsible gent--or a rock star. In fact, you'd probably give him a money game if he wandered into a pool hall dressed the way he is now--yellow polyester shirt; appalling blue-and-white-striped tie; tailored suit pants with the right cuff ripped open; tattered red Chuck Taylor Converse All Stars. Then you'd wonder if he was a hustler when your bank disappeared.
For all the angst and confusion in his lyrics, Casablancas is brimming with confidence tonight. He's a billiards buff, and opponents go down one by one while he strikes Tom Cruise-in-The Color of Money poses. "You are about to get fucked in the ass, my friend," he tells me before gracefully sinking another game-ending eight ball. The guy owns his own cue, and one gets the feeling he doesn't lose much. Not these days.
"Nick Cave is not party music!" proclaims guitarist Albert Hammond Jr. as he enters, an inside-out Journey tour jersey clinging to his skinny torso. All kinky hair and sleepy eyes, he immediately frets over the sequence of his home-burned CD mix. "Change it," he begs. Nikolai Fraiture, the largest but least imposing Stroke, ambles in and takes his regular post, an empty corner. As the room fills with Marlboro smoke, rangy guitarist Nick Valensi (taking snapshots) and drummer Fabrizio Moretti (grinning, fresh off a stage dive) wander over.
Smoggy finally opens the door, and a dozen 16-year-old girls surge forward clutching paper for autographs. Their hometown may smell of New England chimney smoke, but these girls have their Lower Manhattan ensembles down--thrift-store tees, leather jackets, tight vintage cords. They're too young to drink or shag or do anything, really, except gawk at the politely indifferent, chain-smoking, pool-shooting, beer-drinking, new princes of rock'n'roll. And they are thrilled.
Reclining in the black T-shirt, stick-tapered trousers, and high-top Adidases that he will wear for the next five nights, Valensi starts to protest Spin's choice for Band of the Year. "The White Stripes are Band of the Year," he insists, lamenting that he missed Jack and Meg White's free afternoon show in New York City's Union Square today. You sense that he's not just being humble. He really believes the White Stripes deserve the honor.
But he's wrong.
PACKING TWO GUITARS, a bass, drums, five pairs of Converse All Stars, and miles of streetwise New York style, the Strokes are 2002's Band of the Year. Like the White Stripes, they are a great rock group that seems to get better with every show. But during the past 18 months, on the strength of a debut, Is This It, which has sold around 750,000 copies in the U.S. (and more than 1.4 million worldwide), it was the Strokes who led the movement to recast the way rock looks, sounds, and sells.
"They're the ones who made that positive change," says comedian David Cross (the Strokes tour is named in honor of the ultra-stoked gay metal band Cross cocreated with Bob Odenkirk on their HBO sketch comedy program, Mr. Show With Bob and David). "They paved the way for bands like the White Stripes. They were just way better than n� metal. It got to a point where those douche-bag assholes lacked anything to say, so they just got more piercings and played louder."
Says Casablancas simply: "From the beginning, our goal was to make something that was less popular but that would be appreciated later."
"Our music didn't fit in between Puddle of Mudd and Staind," says Valensi. "Record-company people, radio people, journalists, they all told us, 'The recording quality isn't good enough to have any mass appeal,'" Fraiture remembers.
But their music did get on the radio. And on MTV. And like Nirvana a decade ago, the Strokes sneaked into the mainstream, this time on a wave of Internet buzz and U.K. media frenzy heard across the Atlantic. "Last Nite," a smart, tough, punkish single oozing urban ennui, seemingly willed itself onto modern-rock playlists. Its follow-up, "Hard to Explain," became a cult classic when bootlegger the Freelance Hellraiser mashed it up with the vocal from RCA labelmate Christina Aguilera's "Genie in a Bottle." Heretofore obscure acts like the Hives, the Vines, and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club became headliners, beloved by girls who had recently screamed for 'N Sync and by newly horny boys who realized they weren't gonna get laid at a Papa Roach show.
"We'd been stuck in a musical rut for a while," says Perry Watts-Russell, senior vice president of A&R at Warner Bros., "and this is the new movement--bands that are reminiscent of things that came before, but doing it in a different way. I've signed a band called the Sun, and I would say that was influenced by the fact that the Strokes and Vines have gone on to success."
At once modish and skanked-out, the Strokes unwittingly forged a new aesthetic out of nothing more than the unwashed clothes they picked up off their bedroom floors and threw on before a night at the local bar. "You're talking about jeans and a fucking T-shirt," Cross says. "I live in the East Village. People in the East Village dress like that." But what of the L.L. Bean-ers in Maine who now look like they're hanging out on Avenue B or the kids in England who are blowing a week's wages to look like they've just been foraging on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn?
"Our style happens to be one of not giving a shit," says Moretti, wearing the same worn Coca-Cola T-shirt and collarless denim jacket he'll keep on all week. Though Hammond insists that he's been dressing the same "since I was 18," everyone from Courtney Love to Avril Lavigne has adopted his new-wave skinny ties and badges (Love, ever quick to pick up on a zeitgeist shift, quickly wrote the song "But Julian, I'm a Little Older Than You" as a Strokes endorsement). And in the year following September 11, downtown New York City became a (rock) center of the world for an entirely different reason: The Strokes live there.
Hammond wore a Yeah Yeah Yeahs badge during a January Saturday Night Live performance, and a major-label bidding war ensued for the Brooklyn trio. Other New York bands like Liars, the Rapture, Interpol, and Strokes tour openers the Realistics started getting taken to lunch. "The guys can't acknowledge it," says Strokes manager Ryan Gentles, 25, a former booker for Lower East Side rock club Mercury Lounge. "But when I see CBGB T-shirts being sold at, like, Wal-Mart in Omaha, I know that's because of us."
In England, where the band's three-song The Modern Age EP (a demo released in January 2001) hit the charts, the Strokes could probably kick the Queen in the shins with their dirty Chucks and remain beloved. But some Americans seized on the theory that the son of a notorious playboy (Julian's father, Elite Model Management founder John Casablancas, has been divorced from Julian's mother for years) who was educated at Manhattan's private Dwight School and briefly at posh Swiss boarding school Le Rosey, couldn't possibly write a decent rock song.
"I never lived with my dad," Casablancas stresses. "Everything we got, we've worked for." It's clear from his tone of voice that he's uttered this disclaimer an awful lot.
"If you think you can't go to a good school and make good art, then you'd have to forget Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, John Lennon, Pete Townshend, and Joe Strummer," says Cross, who opened the Strokes' New Year's Eve 2001 show at Harlem's Apollo Theater. The fact that Hammond's dad, Albert Hammond Sr., is a singer/songwriter whose credits include the Julio Iglesias and Willie Nelson kitschfest "To All the Girls I've Loved Before" wasn't exactly cred-building. But it hardly warranted the rumors that the bandmembers' parents hired songwriters for Is This It and called in favors to get them a deal with RCA.