Meet Me In The Bathroom - Please Kill Me but if Iggy was Julian Casablancas

dan, I still have most of my Acute CDs, good label

dan selzer was the one in the bathroom introducing people

Thanks.

I am the one person around then who never did cocaine, so my bathroom trips were pretty boring.

Creme Blush! I forgot about them, saw them on a bill at I think Southpaw. I liked them.

I found where Nicole Pinto from that band is now...

https://www.discogs.com/artist/5635352-Girls-In-Synthesis

I liked them, I spoke to her once at a show. Electroclash kept strange bedfellows. Alice Cohen of Philly synth-pop band the Vels was playing solo synth pop music on electroclash-adjecent bills during that era as well, also Twisted Ones type shows. She's still doing cool stuff.

the brooklyn/manhattan split and whatever storyline they tried to build out of that in the doc was done pretty clumsily... you could really feel the movie buckling under the weight of trying to build a coherent and compact thru line between all these bands. liars essentially show up randomly and without any explanation. they play almost the entire "maps" video in the movie but don't mention the thing about karen o crying being bcuz angus from liars didn't come to the video shoot or whatever. it was not done well

they play almost the entire "maps" video in the movie but don't mention the thing about karen o crying being bcuz angus from liars didn't come to the video shoot or whatever

― J0rdan S., Tuesday, November 29, 2022 12:17 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I heard there was some artist interference in the edit of the movie

― Position Position, Tuesday, November 15, 2022 1:11 PM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

(apologies for quoting myself)

i was at the studio last night and a bunch of 20something kids were raving about the strokes and arctic monkeys and the killers and eventually somebody asked me if I liked them and i had to say i hated all this shit

I guess I had stopped listening to hip indie between the Strokes first album and Arcade Fire/Arctic Monkeys/etc. so I just missed them completely but the real baffling ones to me are The Killers and Franz Ferdinand. They seemed like the death rattle of alt-rock radio at the time.

I never got the Strokes. To my old ear, they never did anything particularly novel or even interesting. To me, the most interesting thing about them is that the dad of one of the band members wrote "It Never Rains in Southern California."

i will cop to liking the white stripes, the occasional YYY song and the moldy peaches in small doses. the rest of them - interpol, lcd, hives, killers, arctic monkeys, franz ferdinand, strokes, ryan adams, liars, vampire weekend, TV on the Radio, Grizzly Bear, Phoenix - bleh.

oh yeah and arcade fire and the national too.
it confounds me because i like so much music but this whole "movement" was bleh as bleh could be.

cosign that except i'm cool w/arctic monkeys. most of those acts i don't find as boring as foo fighters or whatever but never had much interest. gonna watch the doc though.

the captions on my TV said simply "man," when a voiceover intoned that "all of a sudden there were so many bands" in the wake of Stokes, YYYs, etc in the NYC area, pushing the frankly bizarre idea that there were somehow not many bands around in the EV/Lower East Side/Wmsbrg axis in the late 90s…but I think this was Nick Zinner, who I otherwise would be fairly confident had a strong appreciation of JSBX, GvsB, Railroad Jerk and the Matador diaspora, much less Green Door/Coney Island High and many other factions involving rock bands playing G/B/D during the run up to 2001… which is to say that various, occasionally interlocking local rock scenes were quite healthy for a solid 15-20 years prior to 2000. I think this is self evident.

Maybe when Elizabeth goodman says "there was nothing of substance or excitement in the NYC rock scene until the bands I'm writing about (and socialized with) emerged," it makes for a clean and marketable narrative for her and her publisher's purposes. I guess it would not be quite as exciting to say "these bands got signed by major labels very quickly, and received fawning coverage from Legacy media, moreso than preceding scenes." Or for her to say "I got to NYC at this time and hung out with these guys, I wasn't present for preceding scenes, so I'm chronicling what I witnessed firsthand." But she indeed goes with the questionable "Jonathan Fireeater anticipated the Strokes et al, but they flamed out, adn then some other shit that wasn't in any way interesting happened, ho hum, whatever."

I’m avoiding this thread as I don’t want to read too much before I see it but for the Britishers, it’s available on Amazon Prime, Apple TV etc from February 24th.

What was weird about that line is it didn’t make it clear that there WAS an explosion of bands that moved to New York after the Strokes got hyped. I remember that well.

And yeah there were obviously scenes happening in NYC and good bands but it was a noticeable change. There were indie rock bands and wanna be heartbreakers type bands and alt folk and ladybug transistor and fly ashtray type stuff and no neck but there really wasn’t a lot of excitement. Strokes got hyped and electroclash and dance punk happened and every band moved here and it was very much more exciting. And terrible.

I moved back here after college in 97. Almost moved to Chicago instead because that’s where things were happening when I was in Chicago. Weasel Walter and Jim O’Rourke both told me how lame Brooklyn and New York were. Guess where they both moved a few years later?

At some point in the early 00s I was at an art opening with Nick Zinner, who as mentioned had been around, playing in bands, trying to make it with Champion of the Future. I did “Nick, is it me or are things getting more exciting? Like was I just not going out before and not noticing things?” And he said “no, it definitely is”. And I think it was that post strokes feeding frenzy that brought a lot of bands, good and bad, and a lot of attention.

That matador Coney Island cooler etc rock scene was healthy, but it wasn’t EXCITING in the same way.

CHALLENGE of the Future, with Aaron Diskin of Lycaen Pictus and Golem.

xxpost Veronica otm. there was a vital LES/EV/Wmsbrg scene - yes, mainly Matador related but lso strong ties to The Beasties/Grand Royal and the local Techno scene based in Liquid Sky records(more of a dn'b thing) /Temple Records/Satellite/Sonic Groove... I had/have friends who were active in those circles either in bands or scenesters or writers and I hung out a bit as a music fan and pal. Wasn't too surprising once LCD popped up - sort of a natural progression from the scuzzier but fun ( to me) "pigfuck" bands to stuff like Jonathan FE then Strokes.

Seeing some cool bands playing at Tonic or the Cooler is one thing, a few years later there were hundreds of bands and parties happening at the same time and downtown Manhattan was teaming in a way it hadn’t for years.

typed my response before reading Dan's but yep Dan is otm.

I’d think people like me and the captain here have good insight because there was a LOT more walls between the dance and rock worlds back then and not that many people with feet in both, and obviously we did, which is why we met.

si.

But people were always down to check out what was happening on "the other side" musically. haven't seen the doc but places like Rubulad were essential in opening minds and moving pasty asses to things they normally would've avoided.

Lots of stories from that time and some cool memories. It wasn't a total bust. When it was fun it was great to be in NYC.

I obviously have a ton of memories from the BK scene running parallel to this, but when I see those old Todd P posts with like an insane number of shows happening every week, I realize I could have been hitting everything way harder! Didn't really anticipate everything going away someday

Todd’s another who moved here then, and he didn’t really take off until Fitz from the twisted ones moved to Berlin a few years later.

Feel like I am a decade older than a bunch of you so my, um, heyday, was in the early nineties hanging around the EV and some scum rockers, watching the Reverb Mofos perform in a squat as it were. Not that I romanticize that era just didn't care much for the scene in this movie anyway, except for some recordings I would have purchase at Other Music. Most of which I probably typed upthread anyway.

I've never been much of a Nardwuar fan so idk if this is normally his vibe but the clip of him interviewing Juliana Casablancas and smugly making fun of him for going to school in Europe, laughing in his face about his dad, calling him phony like it was a big gotcha scoop, etc was very assholish & hard to watch

(or Julian Casablancas, even)

Yeah that was a real "??"... I don't know that interviewer or his schtick, so I was like "Who is this clown?"

Btw – https://pitchfork.com/news/the-moldy-peaches-reunite-announce-first-european-shows-in-20-years/

Nardwars whole Schtick is to be annoying and confuse people who assume he doesn’t know anything then he whips out some esoteric knowledge. Like when he’s interviewing RZA and pulls out some obscure kung fu poster as a gift or something, that’s kind of charming. But yeah playing gotcha with the strokes is a pretty low bar and that came across harsh.

ttly agree re: that nard clip, it was jarring to see him in that specific mode. that is not typically the vibe he has evolved into

Narduwar was totally passive aggressive punk comedy before he got into the delighting rappers thing.

xxxxx-post... you're quite right to mention Black Dice's LCD Connections etc. I should have qualified the Chase comment with "of the big indie rock bands". YYYs always seem tapped into noisier/weirder currents than The Strokes or Interpol. DFA initially came through in the UK via clubs like Optimo and Trash, so I always saw them as part of a different, more hipster/underground scene than The Strokes, but maybe the reality on the ground was different.

here's a deep Interpol connection...their current bass player is Brad Truax, who used to work at Mondo Kims and was in Andrew Deutsch's band Home, then was the road manager for Animal Collective. He's a respectable figure. I was happy how the movie treated Carlos...I didn't have the best history with him, though he's the only bandmember I met. The story I always tell is that I first met him when I was DJing at Black and White with Joshua Zucker, doing a Factory Records tribute. He came in and asked to look through our records, was nice enough. Not long after he was DJing at Barmacy with a woman named Meagan who had a new wave party called Atomic I think. I showed up with Karen O and Karen's good friend/my ex-girlfriend/later YYYs and Rapture co-manager Lauren, ie the person who invited me to join ILX in the first place because people were discussing the Homosexuals. I thought I'd be friendly so I walked up to Carlos and asked if he had any Ultravox, who I had been listening to a bunch around then and he responded indigently along the lines of "no I just have the popular stuff I don't dig deep like you and Joshua". I was just trying to be friendly and show a little interest in the activities! And Ultravox! It's not like I was requested [insert name of actually obscure and or rare band here]. And that was all before I ended up having a crush on and painfully brief fling with woman he had dated a few years before and was still hung up on him. Despite, or because of that, he was friendly the few times we spoke after.

I thought you were gonna say that he said the opposite (“I don’t touch that popular stuff”).

Now I wanna listen to The Homosexuals

Maybe there will be an extended version of the book featuring the Homosexuals, when Toddp and I set up their first shows in NY, Bruno backed by the Fuses from Baltimore (later versions would be backed by the guys from the Imaginary Icons and finally Apache Beat).

They did a manhattan show but then Todd and I set up the show at Tommy's Tavern in Greenpoint. When they showed up Bruno and Chuck were like WTF is this, shitty bar in the middle of nowhere neighborhood you can't even get to by train (without taking the G of course.)

By the time the show was over Bruno was ELATED. He said something like "that was what it was like in 77".

Same thing happened when I had Metal Urbain at Mighty Robot. These old guys coming back after so many years, playing New York for the first time and being bummed it's not some fancy venue, but then having an amazing time with great energy playing a DIY show.

watched this last night, it's alright. living in CA at the time my only tangential connection to any of this scene was frankly via ILX and going to see the Rapture with Lauren when they came to SF. I did see the Strokes and Interpol the first time either played SF and those were incredibly fun and short sets. But this scene on the whole has always seemed to be one that celebrates itself and the MTV connections are funny, because MTV is the worst example of this behavior: constantly covering itself, lionizing everything it's ever done as iconic. But is it really? Or does it just seem that way to you because you won't stop talking about yourself? Anyway, Ryan Adams is and always will be a douche.

Were you at the Strokes' Fillmore set in SF, with Moldy Peaches opening (Oct. 2001)?

Indeed I was, it remains the only strokes show I’ve ever seen

We were there too! Weird vibes in the crowd… I remember a fight breaking out near the stage.

Oh you’re right, I remember that too. This was around the same
Time there seemed to be lots of fainting at shows I went to as well.

Two Tascams shown in the first ten minutes, will this push my Portastudio 424's value to even greater heights?

i'm glad someone pointed out how weird the monologues sound up above, I thought it was just me (I was extraordinarily stoned while watching this). my guess they just edited out a lot of 'umms' and 'ahhs' between words but it's extremely poorly done, to the point where it almost sounds like entire sentences are constructed from different recordings of words. maybe it's just very bad post-production audio treatment.

maybe it's extremely heavy and shitty noise reduction run across all the dialogue in one track

VH1 wouldn't have aired something this dull to fill an afternoon in 2006.

the only time i saw the Strokes was they were opening the 7th street entry for Doves, the hype hadn't really reached Minnesota then so it felt like maybe they thought they should get a huge reception but the crowd was just like who are these guys? anyway, they played really well and I remember wanting to check them out. I remember me and my friend thought they reminded us of the Smiths a little bit which is a weird though in retrospect.

Julian was super duper wasted, there's these three little steps down to the pit area from the bar/merch booth. i was coming up, he was coming down. he tripped and fell into me, i managed to hold him up with his lit cigarette about 5 inches from my face. he just slurred hey sorry man and moved on.

Holy shit, I totally forgot I saw them open for Doves. That would have been, like ... 2001? I have no recollection of them. I did seem them open for Tom Petty, which I recall being ... fine.