Watch The Strokes make their ‘Saturday Night Live’ debut in 2002
Back in 2002, The Strokes made their Saturday Night Live debut in the best possible company. On January 19th, 2002, Jack Black hosted for the first time, appearing alongside his Tenacious D bandmate Karl.
The actor-musician who would go on to reach a whole new generation of fans with School of Rock and would’ve stolen the show, too, had Julian Casablancas, Fabrizio Moretti, Albert Hammond Jr., Nick Valensi and Nikolai Fraiture not been on top form. In this footage, you can see them performing ‘Last Nite’ from their debut album, 2001’s This Is It.
Responsible for securing The Strokes their first bout of significant airplay, ‘Last Nite’ is a hodge-podge of classic guitar band influences running on start-of-the-century energy. On release in 2001, fans quickly pointed out its similarity to Tom Petty’s ‘American Girl’ and the Strokes later confessed: “Yeah, we ripped it off!”
Casablancas was decidedly upfront about the band’s reappropriation of past rock hits. That was, after all, sort of the whole point of The Strokes. In the studio, the frontman told producer Gordon Raphael that he wanted This Is It to sound like a time warp, as though it had been made by a ’60s garage band that’d somehow found itself in possession of modern recording technology.
Just before UK label Rough Trade snapped up The Strokes, Raphael felt sure the band were destined for disappointment. Looking back on that time in a retrospective interview for NME, the producer said: “The songs were incredible, and I was really impressed, but then I got sad for them in my heart,” he says. “I was like, ‘Don’t they know no one in New York will listen to them? If they take this music to a label they’re gonna throw it in the trash can as soon as they hear guitars. They’re just born 20 years too late.’”
Raphael was quickly proven wrong. On release, This Is It soared to the top of the charts in the UK and America. After bagging some of the most lucrative festival spots of the season, the band landed appearances on Letterman and Saturday Night Live, burning their scrappy image into the hearts and minds of a generation sick to the back teeth of nu-metal.
Check out their phenomenal SNL performance below.
