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.
“Indeed,” he says. “That was one of many comments. ‘It’s rock ’n’ roll, but it’s full of soul.’ They thought I was talented but didn’t know … what I was.”
He did. In that era, Kravitz was offered fairly lucrative label deals if he changed his style and substance, because while the record industry may exemplify corporate philistinism, it still recognizes raw marketable talent. He turned them all down. “And being a kid with no money, living on the street and hustling, it still amazes me that I did that. But I couldn’t change who I am.”
So he demoed Let Love Rule, playing everything but the organ and sax on it, on vintage instruments and equipment. Labels now heard it. He was signed, and self-produced (a rarity for a debut artist). The single comes out — and hilariously, it has no guitar solo (it’s Karl Denson on sax). The rest, c’est l’histoire.
The love outside the U.S., including in Montreal, came fairly quickly — as did the criticism. That he was some kind of hippie doppelgänger or worse, a cloned Borg of every classic rock/funk/soul move. But the “retro” label that was slapped on his back seems now to have been a lazy stab at what is not generic genre-smushing, but a latter-day universality.
You’d have to concede that point looking at the collaborations. He’s not just played with everyone from Guns N’ Roses to Jay-z, he co-wrote Justify My Love for Madge, co-wrote God Gave Me Everything with Mick Jagger, dropped a guitar solo into Bowie’s The Buddha of Suburbia, has an unreleased bunch of Prince collaborations in the Paisley Park vaults. And you have to see their live duet on American Woman . I mean, for the clothes.
He opened for U2 and died as Cinna in The Hunger Games (spoiler, sorry). Rather than rehash all the “retro” slags (also semi-guilty at times), I offered the notion of an organic musician in a decidedly inorganic time.
“Organic,” he muses. “I’ll take that. Yeah, well, you have to be who you are. That’s what I’ve always been. Even in the beginning, getting my record deal, trying to get out there.”
Those criticisms persist even unto Raise Vibration, yet another resolutely listenable Kravitz album and the one he’s been touring on for a year.
The album was barbed by some critics as “stylistic schizophrenia” for juxtaposing songs that sound like Marvin Gaye with ‘80s electro. Schizophrenia — as opposed to, you know, variety. He snorts slightly.