Chapter 47: Strokes versus Stripes

RYAN GENTLES: For the VMAs that year, right after the Radio City shows, MTV wanted to have a battle of the garage bands, between The Strokes, The Vines, and The Hives. They wanted The Strokes to play on the main stage. Julian was like, “No, I’ll go play on the Video Music Awards—but I just want to play my song and we’re done, that’s cool, I won’t do this weird thing where I play a thirty-second snippet and then The Vines play theirs. We’re not competitors. I like those bands, but some of the songs I don’t like, and I don’t want to make people think we’re part of that scene.” That’s Julian. Everyone’s like, “He’s crazy, you have to make him do this.” And I say, “All right, I’m going to bring him to lunch and we’ll try to talk him into it.” “Fine, we’ll show him.” Then we get to lunch and he’s like, “No.” And eventually they’re like . . . “Okay.”

ALBERT HAMMOND JR.: When MTV wanted us to do the VMAs, we said, “Okay, we’ll play the VMAs, it sounds awesome, we saw it when we were kids.” When it was “Oh, you want us to do it as a medley with the Vines and the Hives?” No. I didn’t want to be defined by these other bands, which is nothing to say against those bands, it’s just a decision. It’s so early on in your game, you’re trying to push really hard to be perceived bigger than you are, so you can push forward. It’s a catch-22. You learn.

PATRICK MATTHEWS: Before we played the VMAs, we first came to New York in early 2002. We played Mercury Lounge, and later, CBGB. The Strokes were there. I remember one of them had a joint and offered it to me and I just didn’t like joints, so I didn’t take it. Another time, at a music festival in Scotland, I was standing in the back stage area and Albert walked past and he put his hand out to shake and I dropped my cigarette like a hopeless rube. They were really intimidating.

Chapter 49: Rock Is Back ?

JULIAN CASABLANCAS: The Vines, The Hives, and White Stripes and us, I think those four bands was the initial vibe.

PELLE ALMQVIST: I realized something very important: a musical movement is a style of pants. Think about it: San Francisco 1967—you know what pants that is. New York, 1977—you know what pants that is. Disco? You know the pants. There were baggy pants and ripped jeans in the nineties. Nirvana had them, Soundgarden had them, and Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam, they all had the same pants. They don’t really sound that much alike but they had the same pants, so obviously it’s a musical movement! Then there was Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park. They had the same pants. It was obviously a musical movement! And then we had The Strokes, The White Stripes, and us with tight pants. It’s a musical movement! For the record, our pants came from a company called Tiger of Sweden. They’re good pants.

MATT PINFIELD: I remember when I first saw The Hives play it was like, “Who the fuck are these kids?”

HAR MAR SUPERSTAR: It’s totally weird rock-and-roll circus theater.

JACK WHITE: The first time we met The Hives was on Top of the Pops in London. We hadn’t been introduced yet, but while we performed our song on the stage across from them, The Hives all stood in a row on their stage with their hands behind their backs, motionless. I loved them so much for that! Still one of my favorite things I’ve ever seen in my life. It wasn’t approval, or politeness, or a battle-of-the-bands competition move or anything, or maybe it was all of that, or maybe they were just trying to make us laugh, which they did! Gorgeous idea.

PELLE ALMQVIST: A lot of what we’ve done is trying to set an example for other bands to do and then they can do it instead of us. But no one ever really takes the torch, so we still have to run with it.

JACK WHITE: Howlin’ Pelle is incredibly funny, one of the funniest people I’ve ever met.

PELLE ALMQVIST: That whole garage rock revolution happened in Sweden earlier, in the late nineties. By 2000, there was a bunch of Scandinavian garage rock bands making their way in Europe. But we always felt like we were our own thing. We put out our first record in ’97. We did a bunch of touring in ’98. Put out some records and then, in 2000, we put out Veni Vidi Vicious, which is what made it happen for us.

MARC SPITZ: The Hives had cred coming in because Alan McGee, fresh off Oasis success, signed them to Poptones.

ISAAC GREEN: Alan McGee had started Creation Records and had some of the biggest bands ever in England, including Oasis; disappeared; closed Creation; and then started the Poptones label, which was very millennial, almost dot-com-ish.

MARC SPITZ: They eventually signed to Universal for some ridiculous amount of money, but they had respect out of the gate because of the UK cool-hunter thing.

CONOR MCNICHOLAS: After The Strokes, the record labels saw the shift, so you had this weird international garage rock culture emerge, where you had The Hives from Sweden, you had The Vines from Australia, you had the whole Detroit thing. We were desperate, fucking desperate for anybody who could play guitar. So many of those bands were shit, but we just needed stuff to fill the pages, and the kids needed something to get excited about.

SARAH LEWITINN: The Vines all met because they were working at the same McDonald’s down in Sydney, I think. Which is funny because all Craig, the singer, ever ate was McDonald’s. Kinda makes you think they were destined to be famous in America, right?

MARC SPITZ: The Vines were just goofy kids.

STEVE SCHILTZ: Nobody knew at the time that Craig had Asperger's. He just seemed batshit crazy.

PATRICK MATTHEWS: Craig was very quiet but he was also very funny. We were friends because he was funny and he liked music, but I think the whole nutcase thing definitely comes from smoking pot, because he didn’t really have a temper until pot came into his life. 

PELLE ALMQVIST: We had nothing to do with anything contemporary in rock and roll at the time. We thought our success would come in punk rock clubs all over Europe, but that would be pretty much it. The aim was to make a record that we were really proud of. No one would buy it, and then we would get jobs.

PATRICK MATTHEWS: We had really ambitious managers. Nothing probably would have happened if it hadn’t had been for those managers.

MATT PINFIELD: People wanted the three-or-four-minute punk rock songs. That’s the great thing about garage rock. And because of The Strokes, all these bands also knew then that they could start a career overseas and bring it back. Not since the Ramones and Blondie had that been a factor. These bands knew you could get really big overseas.

PELLE ALMQVIST: I was so happy when that first Strokes EP came out that I e-mailed them—“Hey, I’m in a band too. Love it, love it, love it.” Then we did a European tour with a bunch of other bands—twenty-two people in a tour bus. Super illegal. And the first show was at a club called Molotow in Hamburg, Germany. It’s a room that fits maybe 200 people and there was a line of like 6,700 people outside. We sold all the T-shirts we had bought for our entire European tour that day. That’s when we realized that, you know, this might actually work. The world was starting to make sense.

PATRICK MATTHEWS: We recorded Highly Evolved from July 2001 to Christmas Eve, in L.A. We were signed to Capitol and it was all organized for us, so it wasn’t so difficult. Someone just said, “You’re going to record here with this guy,” and we were like, “Cool! He recorded Beck!” “And then you’re going to stay in this hotel and it’s all taken care of.” It all came down to our managers. Someone else was skillfully manipulating the press for us, getting a lot of stuff in NME and getting us that buzz-band reputation. We were just playing. We went to England, played a couple tiny places with the Libertines. We did a promo tour in America.

STEVE SCHILTZ: One of their many managers saw Longwave at Gig on the Green and he liked the band. We did one tour with them; it was in Europe and I remember we had a bus. One of the few times we had a bus, and that was exciting. Immediately Patrick was the guy we talked to. I remember being in some city, just sitting in a dressing room talking to Patrick about how he had to make a decision about going back to med school or not. Craig just seemed batshit crazy. And Hamish, the drummer, was very sweet and very, like, hired gun—he gave our drummer a copy of Modern Drummer magazine, like, “Hey, I’m done with this if you want to check it out.” And our drummer was like, “Pfff.” I mean, not to be a dick but we’re like, “What?” and then like, “No, man.” We found out he had been in some, like, Beatles tribute band before that. He was like Topper Headon from The Clash. When Topper Headon joined The Clash, all of a sudden he started wearing letter jackets and the sailor’s cap. He had, you know, an identikit.

MATT PINFIELD: The Vines obviously had a Nirvana kind of thing that did very well. I liked part of that record. I loved the title track, “Highly Evolved,” I just didn’t know if I thought the guy was legit. You know what I mean? But I love those songs.

IMRAN AHMED: The Vines felt quite on the fence of whether they were actually any good or not. I thought Craig Nicholls was such an intriguing character, but there wasn’t much depth coming from him. He was pulling silly faces in NME every week. In hindsight, with him being diagnosed with Asperger's, it all makes a bit more sense. At the time it just felt odd. He clearly wasn’t well.

MARC SPITZ: I did the Vines’ first piece for Spin. I was backstage at Letterman with the band and their friends and people from their label and publicity team. The band and I were in a locked room for most of the time before the performance, just filling the room with a wall of weed smoke. I was taking notes and studying Craig and he was really stoned and calm, almost catatonic. And then they go out and Letterman was like, “Here they are, kids . . .” They play “Get Free” and by the middle of the song it sounds nothing like the single and Craig is just braying like a donkey and then they finish the song and he knocks over the cymbal stand with his guitar neck, and throws the guitar at the drummer. The drummer throws up his sticks like, “Fuck this,” and Craig runs onto the set and flings himself into the guest chair, then gets back on the mic and starts screaming. Letterman called them “troubled teens” and asked Paul Shaffer if Craig was all right.

PATRICK MATTHEWS: Someone asked Craig about the Letterman performance and he goes, “Well, the buildings seemed really big in New York and I was a little bit homesick,” and that was his explanation for it.

SARAH LEWITINN: Yeah, and later that night Craig was jumping in trash cans and pouring water on his head and running down the empty streets of the Lower East Side shouting.

IMRAN AHMED: But the songs were brilliant. And they stand up. If it hadn’t been for The Vines, there wouldn’t be an Arctic Monkeys—they’ve gone on the record in the past and said, “One of the reasons we formed the band was because of The Vines.” If you were twenty-one, The Vines are just great. The Vines played their role. They were important; they were fun; they were, like, trashy; it was an intriguing story. All the other bands talked about them.

MARC SPITZ: The Hives would have seemed like the more high-concept of the two but they were actually much less manufactured. The Hives were punk rock kids from Stockholm who had this atypical sophistication and beauty. The arrogance is a put-on. The rock scene in Stockholm is like this Nick Hornby wet dream. Everyone is sensitive and a record collector and drop-dead beautiful. The Hives knew B-sides. They knew Peel Sessions. They were really formal, even when they were out eating and drinking. Very studied and polite. And live, Pelle and Niklas, if you watch them, are basically controlling the crowd like DJs. They’re more like a Kraftwerk type of band than a Stooges type of band. It’s puzzling that they’re pretty much the best live band I’ve ever seen because even though they’re sweating they’re computing.

PATRICK MATTHEWS: At the MTV Video Music Awards that year when they did the Battle of the Bands, we shared a dressing room, and the singer for The Hives is quite haughty. He sort of strutted around.

PELLE ALMQVIST: I know other bands turned it down. I wish they asked us first. You get a feeling that The White Stripes would have said no. But we felt ruthless enough to just say, “Fuck it.”

PATRICK MATTHEWS: That was another thing organized on the record company level, and it was just ridiculous. The Hives were on the jutted-out stage right and we had the entire main stage, where mine and Craig’s amps were twenty meters apart, and then they had, like, you could ring up and vote or something. Ugh.

PELLE ALMQVIST: The VMAs felt kind of corny, but we got to meet J.Lo.

PATRICK MATTHEWS: The gift bags were great. I remember that they had a PlayStation, some hair gel, and like twenty-five different kinds of cocktail salt.

JENNY ELISCU: At the time I remember not really caring for The Vines. I liked The Hives but I just thought, like, “Now everyone’s a Strokes. Is that what’s going to be happening now?”

RYAN ADAMS: The Strokes were going to maybe be on the cover of Rolling Stone. It was going to be them or The Vines and they did The Vines. As a fan of those guys, and as a friend, but mostly just as a Strokes fan, I remember thinking what a travesty that was. That was just a huge mistake.

PATRICK MATTHEWS: I remember getting phone calls from someone at Capitol to organize the photo shoot for the Rolling Stone cover, and I remember saying to her, “I know you’re joking but I’ll turn up to this photo shoot.” She kept going, “No no no, we’ve got the cover.” It was like I was being tricked.

MARC SPITZ: The cover line just read: “Rock Is Back.”

ROB SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I wrote that story. That’s still a little traumatic. It was just sitting in a room with this dude from The Vines doing bong hits constantly and literally the only topic that would get him going was talking about The Strokes and The White Stripes.

PATRICK MATTHEWS: Rob had a really calming influence on Craig.

MARC SPITZ: The cover of Rolling Stone was still a big deal. It always is. They are sometimes late to the party but there’s still no greater confirmation that you are in the center of culture at that moment. So seeing The Vines on the cover over The Strokes or The White Stripes was a little strange. It was kind of like the fourth band in the queue cut to the front of the line when nobody was looking. And The Strokes, etc., were reduced to “with,” like they were guest stars on a sitcom called Rock Is Back. Starring The Vines . . . with a special appearance by Jack White as . . . the caretaker.

ROB SHEFFIELD: This was a cover shoot where we had to airbrush eyeballs into Craig Nicholls’s eyelids because he was incapable of opening them at the photo shoot. So the cover is the other three members of The Vines holding him upright while he makes a dazed expression. Rock is back? Yes it was.