The Melt is a newsletter by, about and largely to entertain Jason Diamond. Hopefully you also like it and will consider subscribing and sharing this post.
We hardly ever consider who controls memory. That is, we each think we remember things as they happened, but sometimes fail to consider all the books we read or conversations we had, the movies we watched or just that fact that we’re humans, we’re individuals; we see things one way and another person may have experienced it in a totally different light.
The best example of this I can think of is 2001. You won’t be able to escape talk of that year anytime soon, maybe ever. It’s what the late-1960s were to Boomers except in one year. Mostly for its geopolitical importance, but also because even if you could somehow block out the tragedy that defines the year and the ramifications it had on the last two decades, 2001 was still incredibly strange.
Case in point: The Strods. One of my all-time favorite made-up scenes that wasn’t really a scene. I mean, it was a scene, and I remember it, but it wasn’t a thing. It was something Spin made up for the June, 2001 issue, and, in hindsight, it was brilliant.
People might not recall this, but everybody was obsessed with the party Shout! for a moment in time, especially in the lead to the Strokes first album coming out. Most of the people that went to the party looked like members of the Strokes even before the band’s first album was unleashed into the world. But in other places beyond NYC, the people that looked like, well, anybody in that image above, stood out in any city. They were the ones that would DJ and bartend the same bar and start bands and be like “We’re influenced by Al Green, Neu! and the second Television album” and then you’d hear them and it was all just ‘70s Rolling Stones ripoff except they definitely weren’t the Rolling Stones, and that’s what made it all so fun.
2001 was my big blank year. It was when I mastered the art of screwing up. I was 20 and ruined nearly everything I touched, and, to be honest, I’m glad I did it then because I learned all the big life lessons I needed to learn when I was young and I’m also glad it was stupid shit, nothing that hurt anybody besides myself. I spent a lot of time traveling that year, starting in Chicago, then a brief stay in L.A., then NYC, over to Europe, eventually ending the year at a really weird party at some mansion on the water in Miami. By that point we were all totally numb and the whole look/vibe of sleazy 1970s rockers held a certain appeal to people whose normal response to tragedy is hedonism. Nearly everybody I knew did lots of cocaine. It was a lot of really intense energy to be around. I was drinking a lot of gin and tonics at the time and reading a lot of Kathy Acker and Dennis Cooper. I remember feeling very dried out and sluggish while everybody else was zipping around. I wasn’t as big into hydrating then as I am now.
I also remember watching the whole Strokes thing in real time and having absolutely no idea what to make of it because, in theory, they were everything I wanted since they dressed like I dressed and were influenced by bands I liked. This is hard to even contemplate now, but I remember an older friend, a staunch Gen. Xer telling me “They have good songs, but you can’t trust that shit. They just appeared out of nowhere.” And that was sort of true. It felt like somebody just sort of flipped a switch and everybody was suddenly talking about this one band.
Of course, that’s just how I remember it. My friend Zachary Lipez has a more bird’s-eye view of the whole thing with the Strokes over at Abundant Living, and I’d suggest spending some time with that. The closest I get to “being there from the start” was using my fake ID to get into a Guided by Voices show at the Empty Bottle on a very cold February night in 2001. A friend of mine who knew more than me said we should go for the opening band because she wanted to check them out. That band was the Strokes and I honestly do not remember anything about them, because I was too busy being 20 and having a pretty good head of hair and talking to this girl the entire time. Nothing happened with the girl, but I did bump into another friend who convinced me to leave the show and go to a house party up the street. We could pop back by the Empty Bottle after the show or whatever. When we eventually got back to the Bottle, GBV was still playing. From what I heard, they ended up playing until like 2 in the morning or something. They played 45 songs in all, with the Strokes joining them for some of them. I remember standing outside the Bottle in the glow of the Old Style light and the friend I was with talking to a local “scene” guy who knew everybody and everything and Did soul records and dressed incredibly well, and the scene guy told us “I heard one of the Strokes dad’s paid for the whole band’s tour and the only reason GBV took them on the road is because Bob Pollard secretly wrote all their songs or something.”
I don’t know why I’ve held onto that silly little piece of unsubstantiated scene gossip for the last 20 years, but I always remember that moment, standing there in the freezing Chicago night as Guided by Voices played inside.
That was basically the start of 2001. A whole other year, century, time. I liked that first Strokes album, but, in typical Gen. X / geriatric millennial / whatever being born in 1980 makes me, I was “over it” by the end of the year, or at least saying I was. And if memory serves me well (and, again, it probably doesn’t), by the next year, most of the people I knew were over it as well. I mean, the Strokes were huge, and they kicked off the whole “garage rock revival” with the White Stripes and a hundred really bad bands major labels figured would be “the next big thing” even though the Strokes weren’t that big in hindsight. We all moved on to whatever else. I moved to Miami where I DJd at a party every week that got 500 people to pay five bucks to dance to a mix of Brit pop, ‘80s, soul, and a mix of “garage rock” and “electroclash.” It all sounds so quaint now, seeing hundreds of people go absolutely apeshit to “Common People” and then a song by Ladytron and then “I Want You Back” by Jackson 5. There was no unifying theme to the music, but there was a lot of “This is cool in NYC right now.” I got by because I dressed the part, like one of the people at Shout! or like a Hebrew version of the Strokes: Beatle boots and tight jeans and some t-shirt I found at a thrift store and paid a buck for. I had a Jewfro then. Within a year it was thinning and the dream slowly began to die. I moved to NYC and that was it. I found myself at Shout! a few months into 2003 and I remember thinking, “Man, this has really gone downhill fast.” The crowd was really lame. It was really, well, Manhattan. The Strods were all gone. Making music like the Strokes had become passé. My friends and I would go to Lit or some lost Lower East Side club and we’d see bands trying to look or sound like them and it was all really funny to us. We’d get drunk and go back to Brooklyn and feel like everything we liked was better than anything anybody else liked.
I hope I remembered it all right because today it all feels really quaint.
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