(Photo: Roger Deckker)

After lunch, Casablancas brings me by Adoquei’s Union Square studio to meet him. They hug each other warmly and Julian introduces us. I am immediately disarmed by Adoquei’s beatific smile and his serene aspect, and Julian seems to shed years in his presence, becoming shy and talkative and smiley. He shows me some of his favorite paintings—nudes, still lifes, and portraits, including a large crucifixion-like image depicting the death of Martin Luther King Jr. The figure in the backward baseball cap cradling King’s head is clearly Julian. Julian is effusive in his praise and keeps trying to get the prices, but Adoquei fends him off fondly. “Your money’s no good, mon.”

Whether it’s his stepfather or his friends, Julian exerts a certain pull over those around him. At Dwight, Fab and Nick say, he always stood out. “He had this fantasy right from the start of who he wanted to be,” says Fab.

“He seemed really cool,” Nick says. “But also shy and grouchy.” Inspired in part by Nirvana and Pearl Jam and by Nikolai’s Velvet Underground album, Julian was determined to form a band. Valensi was already an accomplished guitarist, and Julian convinced Fraiture to take up the bass. Looking around for another guitarist, Julian happened to get a call from Hammond, whom he’d known when both attended Institut Le Rosey, a boarding school in Switzerland. Hammond had just arrived in New York to attend film school. And, as it turned out, he could play a little guitar.

The five of them seem to be incredibly tight and to enjoy operating as a gang. The first time I saw them offstage was at an NME cover shoot in November, where they were all dressed in Santa hats and reindeer antlers and joshing around like slightly self-conscious schoolboys posing for the poster for the class play. Only Nikolai seemed somewhat removed from the spirit of things, in street clothes and a long scarf. Two things struck me: the boyish, Beatles-like camaraderie and the fact that the coolest and most sartorially self-conscious band in America didn’t mind posing in Santa suits.

For all the warmth and team spirit, though, the paradox of the Strokes is that they are a democracy under a dictator. When you hang out with them, it quickly becomes apparent that Julian usually keeps the others waiting, the last to appear in the hotel lobby for the after-party or the photo shoot, the last to get in the van or the limo. He’s a curious combination of diffident and supercilious, sounding tongue-tied and loquacious within the same sentence. He tells me he wants more input from the band, but he seems afraid to give up control. Though he has always shared songwriting royalties with the band, he has tended to dominate the creative process. For the Room on Fire sessions, it was said that he was loosening up, though it wasn’t entirely clear if that was true. Now everyone agrees that First Impressions is their most collaborative effort to date.

“I used to wait until everything was done and walk in with kind of a finished product,” he says. “I used to do more on my own, and now I’d bring the songs in less finished and let them brew a little bit. Let them simmer and let the other guys think about them. Because we had more time. We had this deadline with Room on Fire, and there wasn’t as much time. There was a certain amount of pressure, a sense that we had to get another album out before people forgot about us.”

The more I hear about the tour schedule, the party protocols, and the onslaught of fame that followed the release of Is This It, the more amazed I am that Room on Fire got recorded at all. All the usual vices were tried on for size: Substances were abused, public misbehavior was duly reported. “We were hitting it pretty hard,” admits Moretti. Julian punched out a music exec in Paris and then, back in New York, he tried to kiss reporter Neil Strauss, according to Strauss’s notorious Rolling Stone cover story—which the band hated. The story, however accurate or distorted it may have been, presented a seemingly convincing portrait of Julian as a kind of booze-fueled Jekyll and Hyde. There was a brief period in 2002 when it was still possible for New Yorkers to observe the boys behaving this way in their pre-fame native habitat. Watch Julian crawl out of an East Village dive just before dawn! See strong, silent Nikolai hurl a garbage can at a car! Which is no less than we expect of our rock stars. For a bright, shining moment, it seemed like they had created the kind of downtown music scene that we’d all been looking for since Television was playing CBGB.