How did Julian Casablancas embarrass himself in front of David Bowie
Most of the time, the adage “never meet your heroes” is a hundred per cent true. There’s rarely anyone at fault, it’s just life. It’s awkward enough to meet any random person for the very first time. It gets a whole lot worse when you build up an idea of someone based on their art, then when confronted with the reality of that person, everything tends to fall apart. Sometimes, though, like Julian Casablancas of The Strokes, when he met David Bowie, you’re the problem.
The Strokes’ frontman is a strange old beast. In 2001, he seemed set to be the guy to take rock and roll into the 21st century. He and his band looked the part, sounded the part and acted the part even before Is This It proved any naysayers wrong. His band was as legit as they got, and he was the Bambi-eyed, converse-clad mouthpiece of a generation.
He has since spent the next two decades being an unrepentant, slightly off-putting weirdo and seemingly trying to curb-stomp all the hipster cred he was enjoying at his band’s peak. Only a part of that is due to him having such a pronounced alcohol dependency that, in his own words, left him “hungover for five years” after he kicked the habit in 2009.
This is a guy whose blank-faced, NYC cool in The Strokes glossed over into smirking contrarianism fairly quickly. Erratic onstage behaviour. Bizarre interview answers. Solo albums with his band The Voidz are seemingly designed to contain the exact opposite kind of music that anyone interested in a Julian Casablancas solo album might want to hear. He was becoming a parody of himself with aplomb.
How did Julian Casablancas screw up meeting David Bowie?
So, it’s telling that when he met one of his genuine, bona fide idols, he didn’t make a spectacular first impression. In an interview with Adam Friedland, he spoke about the first time he met David Bowie. Granted, meeting *the* David Bowie would be a stressful occasion for anyone. The man’s a demi-god. However, Casablancas didn’t just blow it; he blew it by making one of the most core faux pas you can ever make when meeting a songwriter. He asked what a song was about.
That would be bad enough, but according to Casablancas, because he was “a punk kid” who was “probably drunk”, he tested out a theory that should have stayed in his most private ponderings. When given an audience with Ziggy Stardust himself, he asked if his song ‘Velvet Goldmine’ was about anal sex. Casablancas looks like he wants to open the ground up and swallow him whole when he says this.
Given that this is a man entirely content to throw out Mili Vanili’s covers to audiences of his solo shows, that must be saying a lot. According to the frontman of The Strokes, David Bowie wasn’t hugely phased by the question and started answering it like it was absolutely nothing. Which is fair enough, the man spent the entire 1970s hanging out with Iggy Pop; it’ll take more than that to freak him out.
Perhaps that’s the real reason you should never meet your heroes. Whatever you do, you’ll spend the rest of your life wishing you did something, anything else. At the same time, they’ll probably forget all about you within the same day.
