May 21, 2004

Giddy at the Park, in the Spirit of Tar Beach

saw this band on Wednesday night, and its front line was like a rock-museum hologram. There was Bob Dylan in 1965, with electroshock hair, narrow sports coat and Stratocaster. And Johnny Thunders of the 1978 Heartbreakers, slight and graceful, obscured by long, bushy tresses, with a jutting nose. The bassist was Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead, from way back, when he wore a headband onstage. I couldn't place the singer: Ray Davies? Simon Le Bon?

No, it was the Strokes, in Central Park, playing the first concert of SummerStage and a final hometown concert of their own tour. But just as in the film "The Royal Tenenbaums," in which the family members look as if they come from different eras and live together in a hard-to-place part of Manhattan, the confusion of references fuzzes up your mind: you're not going to get anywhere trying to identify with this movie. So you shift your attention to pure matters of form.

It's all formal pleasure with the Strokes, too: it comes down to elements of contrast and control. Their songs are short, tight coils, made with two-part riffs that balance chords and single-lines. Their guitarists, Albert Hammond Jr. and Nick Valensi, use opposite-sounding instruments, a biting solid-body and an echoey semihollow-body. The drummer Fab Moretti plays understated, locked-in patterns, like a constant exercise.

The lyrics are knowingly negligible: terse lines on dating frustrations that grow more mundane as Julian Casablancas's voice ascends to a hoarse shout. And the constant overmodulation on his microphone — it's the same way live and on records — scrapes against the spartan cleanliness of the group's sound.

Finally, the Strokes seem to stand for nothing but form (and narrow-cut clothes); their songs have no moral universe. But Mr. Casablancas filled in the gaps between songs. Giddy, combative and nostalgic, he gushed about being back home, pointing out spots in the park where members of the band had once gotten into trouble and reminiscing about seeing Sonic Youth there long ago.

Though almost no city landmarks are mentioned in their songs, this is a band all about rediscovering New York at this time of year. It's a rock evocation of crisp sunlight on a Stanford White building, new emotional energy after winter's grim punishments, the sudden possibility of having a party on the roof.

They were in the right place at the right moment. And after a tight 75 minutes, stopping at 10 on the dot with "Take It or Leave It," Nikolai Fraiture hurled his bass in the air and sealed all that exactitude with a loud, anarchic thunk.