Lenny Kaye: ‘Boom! I saw the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show and everything changed’
Recently, Lenny Kaye posted a photograph of his younger self on his Instagram feed. Aged 12, he is standing on a street in Flatbush, Brooklyn in the summer of 1959, a tall, skinny, bespectacled kid who looks both nerdy and cool. In his new book, Lightning Striking, which maps the course of rock’n’roll through the cities that helped define it, he writes of that moment.
“My sleeves are rolled up on my short-sleeved shirt. My hair is parted on the left side, combed to the right, held in slope by Wildroot Cream-Oil. I’m wearing a pair of rippled soled shoes. There’s a key chain looped along my right leg, into my front pocket, a stylistic remnant of the zoot suit era… I’m clearly catching up with the times, standing outside my apartment building in Brooklyn in the last year of the 50s, the moment before I enter my teens.”
Kaye’s teens spanned the 1960s, a decade in which he stayed in step with the dizzying pop cultural thrust of the times, from protest folk to the Beatles-led British invasion of America and on through Tamla Motown soul, primitive garage rock, baroque westcoast psychedelia and stripped-back, east-coast proto-punk. “I was into it all,” he says now. “I had grown up listening to doo-wop because that’s what you heard on the radio where I lived, but when I got my first acoustic guitar in the early 60s, I sat in the back yard and longed to be a lone folk singer. Then, boom! I saw the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show and everything changed. The world tilted. Formatively, that was my time and place. It shaped me.”
Now 74, his hair still long, but now ash grey, his frame still as angular and stick-thin as it was in that monochrome snapshot, Lenny Kaye remains a proselytiser for rock’n’roll, his enthusiasm undimmed by the passing decades. A few hours after we meet, he will walk onstage at the Royal Albert Hall alongside Patti Smith, the singer with whom his destiny has been entwined for 50 years, and play to an adoring audience of old and young fans alike.
They first walked on to a stage together on the night of 10 February, 1971, at St Mark’s Church on East 10th Street, New York. There, she performed her raw, provocative poems, while he provided “interpretive” electric guitar backing. “It was a bit controversial,” she recalled in an interview last year, “because we had sort of desecrated the home of poetry with an electric guitar, but on the other hand it got quite a good reception.”
Four years later, the classic first lineup of the Patti Smith Group – Kaye alongside Ivan Kral (guitar and bass), Jay Dee Daugherty (drums), and Richard Sohl (piano) – made their live debut at the CBGB club in Manhattan’s East Village. In Lightning Striking, having written in depth about the birth of rock’n’roll in Memphis in 1954, the post-skiffle Liverpool scene from which the Beatles broke, and the LSDfuelled summer of love in San Francisco in 1967, he arrives at that year when, for him, the personal and the pop cultural aligned: New York, 1975.
“It was kind of strange looking back at that time,” he says. “See, when I was a kid, I had a big psychedelic poster of the Fillmore West (the late-60s rock venue in San Francisco) on my bedroom wall. I used to gaze at it and almost feel the atmosphere of the place, because I sensed that it was where something new and wondrous, but still insular and mysterious, was emerging. Then, six or seven years later, I’m standing on the sidewalk outside CBGB, this rundown bar on the Bowery, with a bunch of misfits who were all in bands, and, much to my surprise, I’m thinking: something similar, but very different, is happening here.”
What was happening was the beginning of New York punk, the influence of which would inform the more orthodox, but culturally seismic, London punk explosion in 1976-77. “The UK scene derived so much from their impression of New York punk,” says Kaye, “but the reality was the CBGB bands were all different from one another. They shared a sensibility that had elements of punk, but it wasn’t about playing a very narrow type of music or looking a sort of way. It didn’t have that unity of style and definition that would characterise the London scene to a degree.”
Throughout Lightning Striking – from the birth of American rock’n’roll in the early 1950s to the emergence of Norwegian death metal in 1993 – Kaye places great importance on the notion of the local. “It’s the heart spring,” he elaborates, “the place where an idea takes root that grows into a scene. It could be a bar or the almighty garage, anywhere you pick up a guitar and then find a bunch of like-minded souls.”
While that is certainly true, the seismic moments he describes in often scholarly detail were also created by maverick entrepreneurial producers and managers, whether Sam Phillips, the founder of Sun Records in Memphis in the 1950s, or Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols’ svengali, in London in 1976. In a fascinating chapter on New Orleans in 1957, Kaye celebrates the creative genius of a lesser-known businessman turned recording engineer, Cosimo Matassa, whose tiny studio was in the back of his family’s shop in the French Quarter. Unlike Sun Studios, which, as Kaye notes, is “preserved in amber”, the room where Matassa made musical history remains part of a working laundromat, where photographs of Little Richard, Fats Domino and Professor Longhair are framed on the walls “over the folding tables where socks are paired”.
It was here that Fats Domino recorded The Fat Man, a contender for the first rock’n’roll record, in 1949, a full five years before Elvis recorded That’s All Right, Mama. And here, too, in 1957, that
Little Richard, in Kay’s words, “loosens the bounds of rock’n’roll” with the salacious Tutti Frutti, which still sounds like one of the wildest singles ever recorded more than 60 years later.
“Even though New Orleans doesn’t have a big bang moment like Memphis,” says Kaye, “I think a case could be made for it being the real birthplace of rock’n’roll. There was so much going on there, but it was almost underground for a long time because the music of New Orleans is essentially African American music, which is probably why it took longer to make it into the crossover pop charts.”
Although race is an abiding presence, Lightning Striking is essentially a history of rock music, with Kaye choosing not to include reggae, of which he is a huge and knowledgable fan, hiphop or contemporary R&B. “My viewpoint is rock-centric which, given who I am, is unsurprising,” he elaborates. “I could have gone to Kingston, Jamaica, and I would have liked to, but you can’t go to every destination. I also feel that with some genres, like hip-hop, I’m just a visitor. I wish I’d gone to see Kool Herc in the Bronx in the 70s, but I would have been a tourist. As for the music in the book, I know it deeply. I know the inner workings. I know how it affected me and continues to do so. And I know how each development impacted on the rock’n’roll music that followed.”
Lenny Kaye’s own rock’n’roll life began in the mid-60s when he played guitar with various obscure groups, including the Zoo and the Vandals, before recording a single, Crazy Like a Fox, under the pseudonym Link Cromwell in 1966. Nothing came of those early attempts at musical immortality, so by 1969, and with degree in American history, he was instead writing for various music magazines including Hit Parader and Jazz & Pop. When Patti Smith read his piece, The Best of a Cappella, a homage to the doo-wop he loved as a boy, she sought out his number and called him to tell him how much she loved his writing. Soon afterwards, she began to turn up regularly at Village Oldies, the record shop where he worked, the two bonding further over their shared love of 50s vocal harmony groups such as the Cadillacs and Dion and the Belmonts. “One night she came in with a strange request,” he writes in the book. “She’d heard I played a little guitar and asked if I’d back her at a poetry reading…” He still seems a little surprised that he agreed to do it.
“When Patti came calling, I was a writer hoping to be a record producer,” he recalls. “When she told me what she wanted to do, I had no thought of where it would go. We started out with an idea: Patti would do a poem that we would follow with a song, and that song would flow into another poem. That was it. We had no ambition to be a rock’n’roll band, and thank goodness, because by the time we turned into one, we finally sounded like us. It took us a long time to balance all the elements and coalesce as a group, for the clouds of cosmic dust to become a planet.”
The rest, as they say, is history. I tell him that I witnessed the Patti Smith Group’s first British gig at the Roundhouse in London in 1976 and can still remember how disorientingly exciting it was in the way it harked back to the Beats and yet sounded so new and audacious. “It was a strange time, because we had just released Horses and it was a weird record,” he says. “From the start, we had an expansive view of what we could do, so we didn’t fit in to the punk scene. Our music had the spirit and the sense of taking charge of one’s personal growth in a way. That’s still very much the case.”
Had Lenny Kaye not been involved in the making of one of the greatest debut albums of all time, he would still have a place in rock history for another record that, in its own way, was just as influential. While working at Village Oldies, he had been approached by Jac Holzman, founder of the visionary Elektra record label, to compile an album of obscure but influential records from the 1960s. The result was the extravagantly titled Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era,a double album of raw garage rock and psychedelic tracks made between 1965 and 1968, including classic songs by the 13th Floor Elevators, the
It took a long time to balance the elements and coalesce as a group, for the clouds of cosmic dust to become a planet
Seeds and the Electric Prunes. Released in 1972, it single-handedly defined the garage rock genre and has remained a touchstone for several generations of rock groups, from the Ramones to the Teardrop Explodes and Primal Scream.
“Those records belonged to a lost underground until Lenny Kaye compiled Nuggets,” says Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie. “He kept that music alive and ensured it would be passed on. When we discovered it in the 80s, after post-punk singers like Julian Cope [Teardrop Explodes] and Ian McCulloch [Echo and the Bunnymen] had enthused about it in the music press, it gave us an incredible insight into the psychedelic intensity of garage rock, not least because Lenny’s archival research was so deep. It’s not called Nuggets for nothing – he was mining pure gold.”
Kaye tells me that his original idea for Nuggets was to release it in a series of single albums themed around cities – “the New York garage sound, the LA garage sound and so forth”. That organising principle has finally borne fruit with Lightning Striking, a book that merges the same kind of deep musical knowledge that defined Nuggets with a joyous celebration of rock’n’roll that cannot help but seem elegiac.
Does he think, I ask in conclusion, that the form has exhausted itself ? “Well, there will always be great interpreters of the tradition,” he says, resignedly, “but it has become more about interpreting than innovating. There is still great rock music, but it’s not substantially different to what went before. But, you know, music is a way to transport yourself. If you listen to classic blues singers like Charley Patton or Robert Johnson in the right headspace, you can almost live it, because it sends you right back there to the corner of some San Antonio hotel room with the noise coming in from outside on the street. You can close your eyes and hear the atoms colliding.”
• Lightning Strikingis published by White Rabbit on 16 November (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply