As a contributor to The Post and Courier, South Carolina's largest newspaper, I profiled dozens of popular musicians, including Nikolai Fraiture, bassist for critically acclaimed New York band The Strokes.
Strokes' bassist enjoyed crash-course in pop stardom
by Michael Lovett
Publication: The Post and Courier, May 25, 2006
What's so great about the Strokes is what's not there.
Absent from the New York City quintet's carefully-honed rock music is the flab - the pointless melodramatics, the perfunctory guitar solos, the 34-piece string sections - that junks up so much of the music drooling out of stereo speakers today.
In a recent interview with Preview, The Strokes' bassist, Nikolai Fraiture, revealed the necessity behind his band's stripped-down rock-'n'-roll invention. "I think our straight-ahead style can be attributed to playing in New York," said Fraiture, "When we first started out, the gigs we played, you had 25 minutes to make your mark."
"We didn't want to do any dilly-dally, no pussy-footing around," continued Fraiture, whose band plays tonight at The Plex in North Charleston. "We wanted to get straight to the point, so we spent hours in the practice studio getting the songs just right."
On the Strokes' January 2006 release, "First Impressions of Earth" - which has already produced the hit singles "Juicebox" and "Heart in a Cage" - the songs come together like picture puzzles, each picture assembled from five distinct pieces, each piece trimmed to fit snugly with the others.
The others, by the way, are drummer Fabrizio Moretti, rhythm guitarist Albert Hammond Jr., lead guitarist Nick Valensi and vocalist/ songwriter Julian Casablancas - an impossibly talented group of childhood friends and prep school miscreants who came together as a band in 1999.
"I never played the bass before I joined the Strokes," said Fraiture, 27. "When I was 18, my grandfather wanted to give me a graduation present, so I said, 'I'll take a bass,' but I didn't play it right away. I lent it to Julian and Fab and Nick to mess around with for awhile, and then when I was 19, they gave it back to me and said, 'We need a bassist.' "
"I took a crash course on the bass," continued Fraiture, down playing his quick mastery of the instrument, "We were all just starting out, so we weren't very good. But we helped each other out, and eventually we started sounding a little better."
In fact, the band started sounding a whole lot better, a whole lot sooner than anyone expected. The Strokes' string of shows at Manhattan hotspot Mercury Lounge in December 2000 created such a buzz that the venue's booking manager, Ryan Gentles, quit his job to become the band's manager. A year later, the Strokes' RCA debut "Is This It?" had been named "Album of the Year" by Time magazine, and Casablancas had been hailed as the new Kurt Cobain. (Here in the USA, we take our pop stars like our hamburgers - served quickly, and in large portions.)
Despite his band's quick success - or because of it, perhaps - Fraiture has no trouble remembering the days before he made it big, when he was an uninspired student at New York's Hunter College, working two jobs, baby-sitting his little sister and recuperating from a strange case of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever contracted while on vacation in New Orleans.
"At that time," recalls Fraiture, "I was like a lot of kids in college. I was just there because it seemed like the thing to do. For me, music was the only thing that seemed concrete. Everything else was direction-less. School was a joke. None of us had any interest in the jobs it was preparing us for.
"We never set out to make a lot of money playing music. But for us, music was the only thing we wanted to spend our lives doing."
If you go
Who: The Strokes w/ Apples in Stereo
When: Tonight, 8 p.m.
Where: Center Stage at The Plex (2930 Aviation Ave., North Charleston).
Cost: $27.50
Info: 225-PLEX (7539) or visit, www.theplexonline.com, www.thestrokes.com.
Tickets: www.etix.com