Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011

“Stewart Lipton: Our fling lasted on and off between girlfriends for our whole career, sort of. I don’t think she would be that excited about me telling you that. Erin Norris: How is Stevie, by the way? I fucking hate his guts.”

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“Growing up, everyone was always talking about how scary and evil New York was, which made me want to go even more.”

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“We were all—every kid in the crowd and every person on stage—chasing the same thing: a feeling of rebellion, of possibility, of promise, of chaos. We had to find it so we could figure out how to be ourselves, and we couldn’t locate it without each other.”

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“New York is an apparition generated by those who come together to breathe life into something not quite temporal, something that has to be conjured. And it’s not possible without the particular alchemy generated when every last person who happens to be there at that precise moment—the famous and the anonymous—come together serendipitously.”

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“I became addicted to the city. It just became an addiction.”

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“TUNDE ADEBIMPE: Failure is the best. After you fail, you’re free.”

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“Then the giant consolidation happens in ’98, ’99, when all the labels that were out there signing everything in the world got merged. We went from five to three pretty quickly, didn’t we? And then there were hundreds of records that never got released. Bands got dropped. You could write a book about the bands who got signed to labels and never had an album come out in ’97, ’98, ’99, 2000. That’s a whole story. So what’s really interesting is this moment that we’re talking about, for the bands we’re talking about, the evil warnings of getting swallowed by the system had actually really just happened to a bunch of artists.”

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“You know how they say Black Flag got in a van, and they brought punk rock to the world? The Strokes got on a bus, and they brought “downtown cool” to the world. Along with the Internet, they were changing everything, not just music. They were changing attitudes. The Strokes were making New York travel with them. I saw kids in Connecticut and Maine and Philadelphia and DC looking like they had just been drinking on Avenue A all night. Sixteen-year-old kids in white belts and Converse Chuck Taylors with the greasy hair—hair that had been clean a week ago. Those kids had probably never even smelled the inside of a thrift store before Is This It came out. They found a band that they wanted to be like. They found their band. APRIL”

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“(Page 91) LUKE JENNER: Julian Casablancas showed up one night to fight that dude, because he had said something derogatory about the Strokes. That guy was huge, like the high school quarterback. Jack White and Julian Casablancas, those dudes will fuck you up.”

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“KAREN O: I was at the tipping point, you know? NICK ZINNER: Initially my reaction was go go go go go. I’m a Sagittarius—momentum, movement, traveling, being busy, that’s my natural habitat. It’s what I like doing best. Whereas once things started to accelerate and get crazy, that’s when she first started to buckle. It affected her physically, emotionally, in every single way. She is Sagittarius/Scorpio cusp. So with her there’s this kind of push-pull. JON SPENCER: We used to call them the “Maybe Maybe Maybes.” That was the joke. Once when we were in England, they came to us in a dressing room and said—somebody had a cold or something—and said, “Would it be okay if we didn’t play tonight?” I didn’t know what to say. How do you respond to that? I think I may have said, “Well, yes, I don’t care.” It just seemed so weird that they were asking permission and I couldn’t believe that they would even do that. When we started with Pussy Galore, it was always incredibly hard early on, and a lot of it was just miserable, but you got to play. You know—no money, terrible food, sleeping on people’s floors, playing the worst shitholes around; you could feel like crap but you’d still play. So that was a little weird but also cute, I guess.”

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“hdfsdklfjdls.”

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“so now there’s a whole nightclub full of people chewing Juicy Fruit.”

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“The Strokes are one of those bands that other bands are going to reference for the rest of rock and roll.”

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“I have the track. It’s good. It’s awesome. It sounds somewhere between, like, Liquid Liquid and “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer. I played it for people; I remember people saying, “Oh my God, this will be amazing.” TIM GOLDSWORTHY: She had the icing off of two Magnolia cupcakes and four cans of Red Bull, did some really strange ad-lib vocal takes, and then just disappeared and was never heard from again.”

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