Albert Hammond Jr., musicianArrived: 1998
Getting a job at Kim’s Video was harder than joining a band. It was ridiculous: You had to know someone. But I had just moved from L.A., trying to get away from my friends who were slow and didn’t want to do anything but get fucked up. I finally met this guy name Aurelio from the band Calla, and one day he called and said, “Hey, there’s a position for you, do you want it?” I was like, “I’ve dropped off tons of résumés, now I can just get the job?”
It was only a month after living here that I met Julian Casablancas. His father had a modeling agency called Elite, and I walked in one day after recognizing his name on the door. We quickly moved into an apartment on 18th Street. We each had a bathroom, which was the reason why we got it (he’s a mess, I’m neat). When I met Julian, I told him I played guitar. He said, “That’s funny, we’re looking for a guitar player.” So I tried out, but what I didn’t know is that he had already decided I would be in the band.
We were really ambitious. It’s all Julian and I spoke about every night. We set a goal of playing shows within a year. At first, we didn’t go out anywhere cool—just Rudy’s, which was near the studio and had free hot dogs and $5 pitchers. But slowly we’d go to bars like Don Hill’s and Bar 13 to promote, handing out flyers with stuff from weird seventies soft-porn movies like Emmanuelle. They started to recognize us—“Oh, there’s the guys from the Strokes hanging out”—and as a group the five of us were a pretty striking image. We were really cocky. Not in a bad way, we just believed in ourselves and so we were always balls to the wall.
