Kravitz: the last rock star standing

It was a packed Club Soda on a cold March night in date-revealed-later, where a rising but little-known cat named Lenny Kravitz — with no pedigree but a seemingly bottomless bag of organically absorbed moves from the rock/soul canon — turned his emerging single Let Love Rule into a 20-minute moment.

“Oh my god, I remember that show. Yes I do!” Kravitz says, as we both recall the oneiric suspension of the call-andresponse that he presided over like a benevolent shaman. And then recall that it was nigh on 30 years ago. That’s quite the lesson in longevity. Settling on it as a “very special gig,” he broadens out: “It was very interesting what happened with that song — and it did become a chant, a call-and-response thing. All over the world, very odd. Here you are writing this music, no one knows who you are …”

Hard to recall that point in time. Because over the course of those three decades, 11 studio albums and 58 (!) singles, through collaborations with everyone from Bowie to Prince to Madge, Kravitz has endured as a kind of last rock star standing. And very much done it his way.

Which might never have been the case. When U2 was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005, Bono, in one of the last Smart Bono moments, observed how the record industry had changed (read: cratered) since their arrival. That if the stumble of their second album, October, had occurred in 2005 instead of 1981, there would never have been a War. They’d have been dropped. Could Lenny Kravitz be signed in 2019?

“Well, you would know better than I,” he laughs. “But you know, very interesting. I don’t know. Things are opening up out there musically, along with the stuff we’re being fed, you know? So I think I’d have a shot.” Even back in 1989, there were issues. Kravitz showed up on the scene as a multitalented multi-instrumentalist kid with a Jewish surname shopping around some demos. Labels shrugged. Not black enough and not white enough.