Julian Casablancas on the influence of Velvet Underground: “They taught me just to be myself”
All rock and roll builds off what has come before. While every artist will try to add their own distinct sauce to their music whenever they enter the studio, it’s only natural to pull from the artists who came before them to guide them down their musical journey. Although The Strokes have had many different sonic guides throughout their time together, Julian Casablancas thought they should have taken more influence from one rock juggernaut.
From day one, it’s not like The Strokes had any shame in stealing from the giants of rock and roll. While the band were responsible for bringing rock and roll back to street level in their early days, they got there through shameless rip-offs in the process, reworking Tom Petty’s ‘American Girl’ to create their first major single, ‘Last Nite’.
While the sonic similarities may have been apparent from the first few bars, the attitude was far more aggressive. Considering that most rock and roll was either catering to the nu-metal or pop-punk crowd, the New York band helped usher in a revival of garage rock, following in the lead of acts like The White Stripes to create fantastic rock songs with as little adornment as possible.
Even the band’s first album, Is This It, was considered too rough around the edges for a handful of record labels. Before they had even gotten signed, the group had developed a reputation for being the antithesis of what rock was supposed to be, constantly getting ridiculed for their unprofessional approach to recording.
Then again, The Strokes weren’t doing anything that The Velvet Underground hadn’t done decades before. When the New York art-rock scene was still finding its feet in the late 1960s, Lou Reed was pioneering what both hard rock and punk would become, twisting the traditional rock and roll format to sound far more aggressive on tracks like ‘Heroin’ and ‘Venus in Furs’.
While the band wouldn’t see as much commercial success in their time, artists like David Bowie and Iggy Pop would consider them foundational to their sound, eventually collaborating for Reed’s solo smash, Transformer. Even though Casablancas may have wanted to evoke the spirit of the rock and roll giants, he admitted that he never got close enough.
When talking about the band to Rolling Stone, Casablancas admitted wanting to steal from them more than they did, saying, “In the beginning, the Strokes definitely drew from the vibe of the Velvets. I listened to Loaded all the time when we started the band, while I was writing my first songs. I honestly wish we could have copied them more. We didn’t come close enough. But that was cool, because it became more of our own thing. They taught me just to be myself”.
Compared to the feral sounds of Reed’s musical excursions, Casablancas would take his material in a more melodic direction, filling songs with ‘The Modern Age’ and ‘Soma’ with some of the catchiest melodies to come out of the indie scene. The goal may not have been to become the biggest band in the world, but Casablancas’s insistence on doing whatever he wanted came from The Velvets.
