Surprise! He’s Thriving on Sunshine
By MELENA RYZIK
Published: October 28, 2009
JULIAN Casablancas, savior of debauched New York City rock ’n’ roll, is sober now and living in Los Angeles. The shaggy-haired frontman of
the Strokes, who not so long ago could be seen stumbling home from East Village bars around dawn, a rightly sloppy paragon of the city’s resurgent downtown scene, is currently renting a white Spanish-style house in the Silver Lake neighborhood. He just bought a car for $1,000: a ’92 Cutlass with a garish neon-green-and-gray paint job. He likes driving around and listening to the radio. He likes the sunshine. He is smitten.
“It’s fun; I won’t lie,” he said on a recent visit back east. “L.A.’s kind of, like, seven really cool towns. It’s so laid-back. If you go in the right spot, you can walk around, and you don’t need a car. It’s a lot easier to eat healthy. And the weather!”
The move is temporary — probably — but it’s emblematic of the changes in his life in the last few years: from wild-living rock star to steady artist and mindful family man, with he and his wife, Juliet, expecting their first child. On Tuesday his first solo album, “Phrazes for the Young,” will be released on Cult Records/RCA. Cult is his own, newly started and self-financed imprint, with a handful of bicoastal employees. He wrote and arranged all the music and played much of it himself. In Los Angeles he’s been getting a band together and prepping madly for a tour that will include a series of residencies with elaborate stage shows. Evident ambition has replaced obtuse ennui.
“With this record the goal was always to try to take, like, cool, underground-type music and try to make it popular somehow,” Mr. Casablancas, 31, said over a late Saturday dinner at an Italian restaurant in the East Village. Far from the disaffection of the Strokes’ records, “Phrazes” seems mostly well adjusted. “I’m a happy guy,” he said, offering a dimpled grin.
Still, he added: “I never wanted to do a solo record, to be honest. I just felt like I had no choice.”
When the Strokes released their debut album, “Is This It” (RCA), in 2001, they were hailed as a second coming of the
Velvet Underground, an association fueled as much by their skinny-jean look as their stripped down, guitar-driven sound and deadpan vocals. That “Is This It” came out just a few exhales after Sept. 11 gave it added cultural weight: more than one critic saw it as an urban gathering point, Springsteen anthems from the indie set.
This was a heavy burden for five wan prep-school guys. Seemingly half their intended audience went into automatic backlash mode, carping about authenticity. The group — which includes Fabrizio Moretti, the drummer; Albert Hammond Jr., the rhythm guitarist; Nick Valensi, the lead guitarist; and Nikolai Fraiture, the bassist — responded in appropriately blasé fashion: with drunken nights, celebrity trysts and fights, behaving like the baby rock stars they were. For a myth-making moment, nothing could’ve been better.
Asked to describe their early days, the Strokes’ manager, Ryan Gentles, who accompanied them on their first tour, said, “I don’t know how to answer that without writing a dissertation.”
Though they didn’t quite realize it at the time, the success “happened fast,” Mr. Gentles said. “All over the world kids were reacting, and coming from where we were, just making the record on Avenue A and Second Street, in that little basement studio, that was really powerful.”
“Is This It” went platinum, but their next albums — “Room on Fire” (2003) and “First Impressions of Earth” (2006) — were less well received, each selling around half as much as the preceding record. And the group tussled over creative control; it was all with Mr. Casablancas. Though he was married — his wife had been the group’s assistant manager — and had given up drinking by “First Impressions,” the burnout was evident. “I’ve got nothing to say,” he sang on “Ask Me Anything.” “I’ve got nothing to give.”
As he struggled, his bandmates worked on solo projects and formed side groups; several also married or started families. Though the members, who met through various prep schools, had originally represented themselves as a buddy unit, now they seemed to be splintering. (Through representatives, the other Strokes declined to comment for this article.)
“I was a monster,” Mr. Casablancas said of his drinking. “I want to casually have a glass of wine or whatever; level-headed adults do. But I can’t.”
After the Strokes returned from a Japanese tour for “First Impressions,” they announced a break, and Mr. Casablancas retreated. “I was kind of like broken for like six months,” he said. “I just literally, today, for the first time, don’t feel hung over.”
The first lyrics he wrote for his solo album, for the song “Ludlow Street,” mine this period: “Everything seems to go wrong when I stop drinking,” he sings. “Everything seemed to go my way last night/Everything seems so wrong to me this morning/I know things will be brighter later tonight.”
The song is a sort of New York elegy, going through urban history from 1624 (“the Lenape tribes will soon get forced from their home”) to the hyperdevelopment of today. “On Ludlow Street, night life is raging,” he screams, “and it’s hard to just move along.”
In his stage show, which begins Friday at the Downtown Palace Theater in Los Angeles — a New York residency is planned for January — this song will be represented by a multimedia landscape of videos and sets depicting the neighborhood, which Mr. Casablancas will stroll through. It is over the top by design — he compared it to the “Radio City Christmas Spectacular” or a Disney show — so he can charge higher ticket prices, he said, to offset a series of free concerts he hopes to do.
“He has complete visions for the presentations of his music,” said Eliot Wadsworth, a Los Angeles-based employee of Cult Records, which is small enough to eschew staff titles. “When he’s working on songs, he’s also thinking about, how is this communicated live, what does this look like? It’s a more rounded experience than just what’s coming out of the speakers.”
Wearing a nerdy-chic cardigan, with large sloped eyes like a woodland creature’s and an early-Joan Jett haircut with a couple of bleached tendrils, the willowy Mr. Casablancas looks more like a Margaret Keane painting of a hipster than an authoritative taskmaster. Despite a posh upbringing — his father, John Casablancas, is the founder of Elite Model Management; his mother, Jeanette Christiansen, was a model; and he was also raised and heavily influenced by his stepfather, the artist Sam Adoquei — he is comfortable grousing about the gentrification of New York, his hometown. “What bums me out is, we’re looking for a cool place to live, but in Manhattan it’s almost like two streets left,” he said. But he doesn’t want to move to Brooklyn. “It’s obviously the social center of music nowadays; I don’t deny that,” he said. “But I guess, I don’t know, there’s always that psychological water barrier.”
In person, Mr. Casablancas was charmingly self-effacing, offering to share his food and repeatedly joking — let’s hope — about having no friends. At the end of the night, he bestowed a high five: talk well done. He seemed eager to be laid-back.
But he is also a workaholic and a perfectionist. When he first started out, he memorized all his songs before writing them down, as a test of their catchiness. Retreating, for him, means about four days without making music. He composes constantly, even on his honeymoon.
“I definitely get all sorts of communiqués from the middle of the night from a whole variety of time zones,” Mr. Wadsworth said. “Especially at a time like this, where the album is right around the corner and he’s in rehearsal and working on merch designs” — T-shirts, posters and more — “he works 24 hours a day.”
The album’s name comes from an early essay by
Oscar Wilde, “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young,” a series of epigrams that Mr. Casablancas hoped to emulate, in spirit at least. For musical inspiration he made himself a mix with “like a million weirdo songs,” he said. But he shunned his own offbeat musical impulses — because he didn’t want people to think, “O.K., this is his weirdo side thing,” he said — in favor of hooky choruses and standard chord progression. “It’s nice to be important,” he sings on “4 Chords of the Apocalypse.” “But it’s more important to be nice.” The synthy single, “11th Dimension,” is downright peppy: “Oh, I’ve got music coming out of my hands and feet and kisses.” The album is keyboard-heavy and full of polyrhythmic drumbeats, the germs of which can be heard on “First Impressions of Earth.”
Still, “we’re certainly not making any assumptions about the Strokes’ level of popularity automatically translating to Julian’s album,” Mr. Wadsworth said. “It’s musically different. We’re trying to be realistic, so we’re kind of reintroducing people to Julian on his own terms and with his own music and hoping for the best.”
Jason Bentley, the musical director of KCRW radio in California, said he was “a little surprised, but pleasantly so” by the album and would play the single, though he expected only hard-core Strokes fans to seek out the record. But, he added, “There is a chance that the pop appeal of these songs will establish a new fan base on its own merits.”
For his part, Mr. Casablancas is hoping that having all that solo control will allow him to ease up with his band. “The thing is, with the Strokes stuff, I used to do every detail, and now I just want everyone to get along and be happy,” he said. “With this I can do every detail without having to argue — not argue, but you know what I mean. Compromise.”
Talking about the band is the only time he bristles and becomes elliptical. The Strokes have worked on their next album; is it finished? “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s up in the air. It used to be defined, and then it got up in the air. Some people disagree on whether it’s ready or not. Everyone is so opinionated.”
He shared “Ludlow Street” with some band members, he said, but “they didn’t really seem to show interest or whatever.”
But whether his solo debut “fails or doesn’t,” he said, “I’ll always do Strokes things.”
Mr. Gentles said the band was set to record the next album, which he hoped would be ready next year. “There are strong opinions,” he said, “but I don’t think the formula’s going to change. The personalities haven’t changed. They’ve grown, but they haven’t turned into completely different people — which is a good thing.”
After dinner Mr. Casablancas walked out into the street. It was nearly 1 a.m.; it was drizzling. He misses Los Angeles weather, he said. His wife was at home in their East Village apartment; his friends were — well, what friends?
But the city had that on-the-make energy of a Saturday night, one that still gives him a charge, boozing or no. “I know things will be great later tonight, again,” he’d said earlier, describing his outlook. So he stepped out into the rain. “I’m going somewhere,” he said, with purpose.
He went home, to work.
newyorktimes
