Songfacts®:

• This is a track from The Strokes' frontman Julian Casablancas' debut album, Phrazes For The Young.
• This drinking song is named after The Velvet Underground's Lower East Side hangout. Casablancas explained to Q magazine October 2009: "That song is a time travel through one New York street. It was also the first song I demoed. I recorded it to see if I was completely insane or whether I could make pleasurable music for anyone else. The song came out with an old-time saloon vibe and weird Caribbean drums and I thought, Oh I can do this."
• The track contains the lyric: "Everything seems to go wrong when I stop drinkin'/ Everything seemed to go my way last night." Casablancas told The Observer October 4, 2009 that he doesn't drink at all now, but there was a time when he was physically sick if he didn't drink. Now, he says: "I'm happy. I'm like a happy person. Everything feels like it's on the right track, where in the past it felt like a random track… I kind of lost control."
• The album title is a nod to Oscar Wilde's article Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, which was first published in the Oxford student magazine The Chameleon in December 1894.