Gordon Raphael on the Three-Day Session That Became the Strokes’ First EP

Gordon Raphael’s name sits on the front of the Strokes’ first three records, but his introduction to the band was closer to an accident. Watching them play in New York, he was more taken with the opening act. He handed over a business card anyway. A few days later, guitarist Albert Hammond Jr. turned up at his studio to size him up.

What followed was a weekend at Raphael’s Transporterraum studio in New York that became The Modern Age, the three-track EP released ahead of Is This It. “I gave the Strokes a three-day, three song deal,” he recalls. “So come in on Friday, leave on Sunday night with three songs in your hands.” He was not expecting an audience. “I thought it was just going to be a little demo and never even expected it would be heard by the public.”

The arrangement held. Raphael went on to produce Is This It in 2001, Room on Fire in 2003 and large parts of First Impressions of Earth in 2005, becoming the band’s steady studio presence through the years when a generation of leather-jacketed guitar groups formed in their wake.

His own route there began in Seattle, collecting Hammond organ, synths and string ensembles as a teenager before joining Medusa in the late seventies. It was that band’s leader, recording symphonic rock on a four-track reel-to-reel with an Echoplex and a phase shifter, who pushed him toward studio work. Raphael’s account of the Strokes reads less like a scene igniting than like a small room, a cheap deal, and a producer learning on tape.