Last weekend I watched the Strokes’ Coachella set and for a brief moment I was transported back to the early aughts when I still lived on the Lower East Side. This was before social media algorithms or when bands like Geese could pull a psyop to draw fans to their shows.   In the year 2000, you still had to do it the old-fashioned way. By playing gigs that people actually paid to see. And one of those places where we went to see actual music play and drink copious amounts of alcohol and do worse things in the bathroom was a venue called Arlene’s Grocery.  On any given night, two versions of the future might share a bill. One of them was an embryonic version of the Strokes, still figuring out how to play and scowl at the same time. Totally unaware of how big they were about to get.  And the other was my cousin Max’s band: LiquorCake. To a very specific stratum of New York, LiquorCake was bigger than the Strokes.…