On Friday night, in the middle of the Santa Fe Springs Swap Meet, a large stage at this California open-air market stood in front of sprawling picnic tables and food vendors.
The swap meet, on the border of Los Angeles and Orange Counties, usually hosts tribute bands that pay homage to Rock & Roll Hall of Fame-enshrined acts like Metallica or Mexican American icons like Jenni Rivera. But that night in March, Juicebox, Southern California’s premier Strokes tribute band, gathered an enthusiastic, multigenerational audience ready to celebrate the group that epitomized innovative downtown New York City rock in the early 2000s. Leather jackets are everywhere.
Deep into the show, when the group played “50/50,” a forgotten track from the Strokes’ 2013 full-length “Comedown Machine,” a mosh pit broke out, warning the crowd from the venue. As Juicebox left the stage after performing 47 singles, album cuts and B-sides over the course of three sets, the chants began, shouting one more: “¡Otra! Other! ¡Otra!”
The members of Juicebox, like the crowds they draw, are predominantly Latino, though the band’s founder and drummer, Jason Wise, is a 38-year-old self-described “Jewish dude.” from Queens. He moved to Los Angeles in 2010 and fell in with a group of mostly Latino musicians he met through Craigslist who loved early 2000s rock bands as much as he did. Six years ago, Wise started Juicebox, which now features lead vocalist Edgar Rene Espino, guitarists George Campos and Renzon Sanchez and bassist Tony Perez (who recently filled in for John Leal ). It usually plays twice a month, booking gigs all over Southern California.
Wise discovered the Strokes when he was in his midteens and they have been his favorite band ever since. “They are a huge part of who I am as an individual and to be a part of spreading fandom and the love of the Strokes to other people is something I never tire of doing,” he said. “If I wasn’t in this band, I’d be going to these shows.”
The Strokes themselves remain a major act in Latin America, with a long tradition of supporting rock music. When the band performing “Reptilia” for the festival crowd, it was greeted with stadium-sized fútbol chants.
It’s no surprise that an area like Los Angeles County — where 49.1 percent of respondents (or more than 4.9 million people) in the 2021 census identified as Hispanic/Latino — is home to a large number of Latino Strokes fans.
But Jeanette Diaz, a journalist and publicist from Los Angeles, believes that the pull of the Strokes is especially strong among first-generation American children of immigrants, who may have complex feelings about their identities and which culture they belong. The band “can just do what they want to do and it’s accepted, and a lot of people are trying to find that,” Diaz said. “It’s this idea of adapting on your own terms, which many Latin kids aspire to, perhaps unconsciously.”
Some members of Juicebox say they feel a closeness to the Strokes partly because of the representation. (Drummer Fabrizio Moretti was born in Brazil, and guitarist Albert Hammond Jr.’s mom is from Argentina.) “I see pictures of Fab and I’m like, I’m playing soccer with that guy, he looks like someone i know. ,” said Sanchez, the Juicebox guitarist whose own background is half Lebanese and half El Salvadoran. “And a guy like Albert, who has big curly hair, that’s my brother. I see myself in the Strokes.”
The most obvious antecedent to this fandom is that for the Smiths, the maudlin but soulful Manchester band that broke up in 1987 but continues to enjoy a passionate following among Mexican Americans today. This relationship is subordinate articles, documentaries and books for over 20 years, and it has also inspired tribute bands, including long-running ones Sweet and Fluffy Hooligansled by Jose Maldonado, who is often called “the Mexican Morrissey.”
José G. Anguiano, an associate professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, said he has seen similar phenomena in the region’s goth, metal and rockabilly worlds. “As people move away or grow older in certain subcultures or music scenes, like in Los Angeles, Latinos move in to take the reins,” he said. “It’s really nice, they’re taking the reins, not just in terms of being fans, but also fronting these tribute bands and producing their own music. They participate fully in all senses in these subcultures.
In 2022, rising El Monte, Calif., band the Red Pears Strokes’ “Automatic Stop” is covered for Unquiet Live’s YouTube channel. In the video, their guitarist and vocalist, Henry Vargas, introduces the song as “Los Estrokes.” The Red Pears didn’t think it was weird that they knew so many Latino people who were in the Strokes because they all came to the group through Latino friends. But it was each band member’s individual love for the Strokes that helped them come together and shape their sound.
“In our city there are a lot of punk, ska and metal bands,” Vargas said in an interview. “We’re just branching out, trying different things.”
Before joining Juicebox in 2022, Espino, the band’s lead singer, was in another Strokes tribute band for six years, but had never seen the real deal play live. He says he’s always been a bigger fan of the Arctic Monkeys, whose frontman, Alex Turner, is famous. started an album with the lyrics, “I just wanna be one of the Strokes.”
“I’m living his life right now,” Espino joked.
Sanchez, 26, is the Juicebox member most interested in the re-creation. In a skinny tie or polo shirt, he plays a white Fender Stratocaster close to his chest, like Hammond Jr. His mind was opened to the Strokes when he was 14, after two brothers he used to be in a band with introduced him to the song “The Modern Age.”
But an even younger crowd recently embraced the Strokes with the Rick Rubin-produced album “The New Abnormal,” from 2020, which spawned a TikTok hit with “The Adults Are Talking.”
On a Friday night in late May, a crowd thronged Knucklehead, a dive-y bar on an unappealing block in Hollywood. Juicebox is on the bill with an Arctic Monkeys tribute band called Polar Primates for Burning room, a club night dedicated to indie and alternative music of the early 2000s. The Strokes’ time playing small New York City venues like the Mercury Lounge loomed large in their history, but honestly, it lasted barely a blip. Juicebox shows like these allow fans born late or on the other coast to reimagine themselves in the moment.
In a phone interview a few days earlier, Room on Fire DJ and promoter Miguel Ponce, 29, explained that he learned about the Strokes from a friend on his high school baseball team, but it took a while time before he truly got it. “I heard the song ‘Ize of the World’ and I didn’t know what it was, but it just hit me, dude,” he said. “I don’t know how they do it, where it doesn’t look like they’re trying, but they really are.”
Ponce started Room on Fire in March 2022, but the previous installments didn’t attract a lot of people. After he played Juicebox for the first time this past January, the party began to take off. “I started to see the true potential of what I could do,” he said.
Before the pandemic, Ponce booked shows with local acts in Downtown Los Angeles. He already knew how much influence the Strokes had. “Most of the indie bands, they would dress like Julian Casablancas,” he said. “There’s no shame in that.”