u/Jay-LES

Nikolai Fraiture gets honest about what still has the power to derail a Strokes show

On the heels of their performance at Coachella, I thought I'd revisit this conversation I had with Nikolai about what it actually feels like to perform when something goes wrong on stage. He's pretty candid about how differently the band handles it now versus the early days — and there's a moment where James Brown comes up that puts it all in perspective.

Listen to the full conversation here: https://youtu.be/I2Za6DcaF7E

With Your Favorite Toy just out, I've been going back to a conversation I had with Chris after Taylor died. We talked about what it was like doing press with that elephant in the room — which territories he avoided, and what it felt like watching the internet theories pile up. His words: "it's all wrong... and it's disrespectful."

The part that stuck with me was when he said losing Taylor made him reconsider everything he thought he knew about Jim Morrison, Randy Rhoads and any number of rock tragedies.

He gets why people are fascinated - Chris and I grew up in the same Santa Barbara scene and we've both lost a lot of people from that world. But this one was obviously different.

Felt like the right time to share this with the new drummer and album out.

This clip of legendary female surfer Lisa Andersen starts as a funny North Shore story — Lisa trying to quietly buy a pregnancy test at Foodland and failing spectacularly in the way only Hawaii makes possible. If you've ever been in that store you already know exactly how that goes.

But it goes somewhere else pretty fast.

• She was 22 and competing on tour when she found out. The question of whether to keep going was real.
• The father was the head judge for the tour. The conflict of interest implications of that in a sport where judging determines your livelihood are not small.
• This was all happening before social media existed — meaning the surf world processed it the way small, tight communities process things: quietly, messily, and with everyone knowing anyway.
• She went on to win four world titles.

Lisa doesn't dramatize any of it. That's partly what makes it worth watching.

watch the full conversation here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNH5UGRKI5E1AUBWAk-OkrA?sub_confirmation=1

Grew up in the San Fernando Valley with a Korean best friend next door, Jewish kids two doors down, a Black friend around the block. Not a diverse neighborhood by design — just the neighborhood.

His point: that's how skateboarding has always worked too.

• He argues skate culture never organized around race or background — it sorted on what you could actually do
• The only line he's ever seen drawn is whether you push mongo
• He's not making a speech about it. It's almost offhand, which is why it lands harder than if he were

Short clip. Curious if this holds up to people's actual experience in skating or if it's more complicated depending on where you grew up.

Listen to full conversation and other episodes with Arto Saari, Tony Hawk, Stacy Peralta and others here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNH5UGRKI5E1AUBWAk-OkrA?sub_confirmation=1 

I interviewed Andy for my podcast recently. We got onto the subject of Sheffield, the community they grew up in, and how that first album was basically written about the people around them.

He told me the night that inspired A Certain Romance: they threw a gig in their practice room, invited some other bands, a fight broke out between their friends and another band's friends, most people left, and they ended up playing to about eight people in an empty room anyway.

That night became the song.

He also said something that stuck with me about fame — that for British musicians it feels like a negative by-product of success rather than the point of it. "A negative by-product of success is fame. That's what it kind of feels like." His words, not mine.

The full conversation is on my channel. He's got a photography book out right now called I Bet This Looks Good on Your Coffee Table — candid shots from 2005-2007 if anyone's interested.

You can listen to the full conversation here: https://youtu.be/N5RVz1c5HTE

I interviewed Jeff for my podcast and didn't fully grasp the scale of it until I started going through the conversation afterward.

It started with one park in Missoula. No grand plan, just a thing he did. That was years ago. Now there are 27, with 10 more towns already lined up for the next three years.

Some of the kids from the first parks he built were 11 at the time. They're in their 20s now. A group from the Browning Blackfeet Reservation is about to drive 1,200 miles to follow him to a grand opening at Standing Rock.

Montana has one of the highest suicide rates in the country. He didn't say that to make a point. It just came up.

The clip is short — about 5 minutes. Felt like the right place to share it.

With Ten turning 35 this year, I've been thinking a lot about this conversation I recorded with Jeff Ament for my podcast — specifically this clip where he unpacks his relationship with the word "grunge" in real time.

A few things in here that I didn't expect:

• He's pretty clear that "grunge" always felt like a Sub Pop/Mudhoney/Melvins term to him — not Pearl Jam's. He was in Green River with Mark Arm, so he felt connected to it, but he and Stone always wanted to push further out the moment a sound started to define them.
• He knew Chris Novoselic five years before Nevermind existed. The way he frames the scene isn't nostalgia — it's more like a neighborhood he grew up in.
• The part that actually stopped me: he talks about the people who are gone now — Kurt, Layne, Mark Lanegan — and how the resentment of being grouped together has flipped into something closer to wanting to champion them. Hard not to feel that.
• He calls it "the last real scene" and then immediately asks if I'd seen Meet Me in the Bathroom — which says something about how he's still measuring it.

Short clip, about two and a half minutes. Felt like the right moment to share it given the anniversary.

If you grew up watching Pretty in Pink, St. Elmo's Fire, or Less Than Zero, Andrew McCarthy was the sensitive one. The guy who could actually talk to girls. The one who seemed emotionally available in ways the other guys in those movies weren't.

Turns out that was mostly acting.

I sat down with McCarthy after he spent 10,000 miles driving alone across America for his new book Who Needs Friends. What he kept finding in the strangers he met on the road was the same thing: men everywhere living in quiet isolation, with no language for it and nobody to tell.

A few things this community will probably find interesting:

• The gap between the character and the person. McCarthy spent a decade being one of the most recognized faces in America and describes it as a period where almost nobody actually knew him. The guy who played sensitivity on screen was apparently working through a lot of the same stuff the rest of us were.
• Why male friendships collapse. He gets specific about the age at which it happens, why stoicism became a cover for emotional avoidance, and what genuine connection actually requires from men who were never taught to ask for it.
• It's not a self-help conversation. This isn't about loneliness as a trend piece. It's about the specific gap between the life he built and the one he wanted — which is a much more honest framing than most of these conversations manage.

Full episode. If the Pretty in Pink angle brings you in, the conversation will keep you there

With Jimmy Kimmel and Trump going at it again — Kimmel's "widow glow" joke, Trump calling for him to be fired — I keep coming back to this clip I recorded with Dick Cavett about the man who figured out how to avoid all of it fifty years ago.

Every late night host now tells you exactly where they stand. You just pick the one that agrees with you. Carson spent thirty years making sure you had absolutely no idea.

I sat down with Dick Cavett and asked him about it. He remembers one exception: Carson, mid-show, looked into the camera and called a sitting American governor "shocking and shameful and disgusting." The governor was George Wallace. Then Carson said "we'll be right back after this message" — and never did it again.

A few things this community will appreciate:

• The rule. Bob Hope told Carson — or someone did, Cavett isn't completely sure — never let them know your politics, never make a joke about one side, because you'll lose half your audience. That guided Carson for three decades.
• Bob Hope's cautionary tale. Hope's super-patriotic Americanism eventually got old. He lived long enough to watch the audience he thought was his get sick of him. Carson saw that coming.
• Cavett's version of it. He was always somewhat more willing to be political than Carson, which got him compared — unfavorably by some — to the man who never flinched. The comparison itself is worth sitting with given what late night looks like now.

Short clip. If it lands I'll put up more from the full conversation.

Check Your Head just turned 34 last week — felt like the right moment to share this clip from a conversation I recorded with Glen E. Friedman.

Most people know Glen from the images themselves. This gets into how they actually got made — specifically his relationship with the Beastie Boys and what it took to shoot that album cover.

A few things this sub will probably want to hear:

He almost didn't do it. When the Beastie Boys first came to LA he still thought of them as a punk band — and not a particularly good one. He'd already shot Black Flag, produced the Suicidal Tendencies record, and didn't think they warranted his time. What changed his mind was watching them cross over into hip-hop and realizing they were doing something he hadn't seen before.

The leverage dynamic. Because Friedman was established before they were, he had something most of their collaborators didn't — the ability to say no on set. He gets into why he refused to follow their instincts when he disagreed, and why that friction is exactly what produced the images that lasted.

The Check Your Head cover specifically. He breaks down what he was trying to pull out of Adam Yauch for that shoot — why he pushed back on the initial direction and what he was actually going for. It's a rare account of the creative back-and-forth behind one of the most recognizable images in hip-hop.

It's a short clip — a few minutes pulled from the full conversation. If it lands I'll drop the rest.

I recently sat down with Andy Nicholson for an episode of my podcast, The Plug w/ Justin Jay. What I didn't expect was that one of the best moments would come from my own archive.

Eighteen years ago I was working with The Strokes when we went backstage after an Arctic Monkeys show. I had my camera, I shot it, and that photo sat untouched until I pulled it out mid-conversation and showed it to Andy for the first time. His reaction said everything.

We also get deep into his new photo book I Bet That You Look Good On Your Coffee Table — how he made it, how he thinks about images versus how musicians think about moments, and what it actually felt like to be in that room when those two worlds collided.

With Pos fresh off performing Feel Good Inc. live with Gorillaz across the UK and Ireland, seemed like the right moment to share this conversation we recorded.

We got deep into a few things this sub will care about:

The streaming blackout — Pos walks through the Tommy Boy / Warner Brothers legal nightmare in detail. The sampling clearance issues, what the lawsuit actually meant for access to their catalog, and how a whole generation of fans grew up with zero legal way to hear De La Soul. He doesn't sugarcoat how bad it got.

Cabin in the Sky — The album was made in the shadow of losing Dave (Trugoy the Dove). Pos talks about the private moment that convinced him carrying on wasn't optional, and what it actually felt like hearing Dave's verses locked into a finished record after he was gone. Heavy conversation.

The new generation pipeline — Gorillaz and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse are genuinely how younger listeners found De La Soul. Pos has a clear-eyed take on that.

Also gets into the Nas, Slick Rick, and Killer Mike features on the album, 35 years of AOI philosophy, and why TikTok virality and what De La built don't really coexist.