Ask Lenny Kaye to describe himself and the first thing to come out of his mouth is “cultural historian.” That may come as a surprise to those who immediately know him as the longtime guitarist for the Patti Smith Band, but he was writer way before that legendary partnership evolved.
Of course, he’s been a musician since long before that — his dad taught him to play the accordion when he was six — although he does note that “piano would have been more useful.” He spent his early teen years in Brooklyn enamored with doo-wop, but by the time he was 16, living in New Jersey, he bought a guitar and a songbook (from — where else? — Izzy Young’s Folklore Center in the West Village) and set out to become a folk singer.
With a kick in the butt from The Beatles, it wasn’t a big leap from there to his first band, “The Vandals,” with whom he made his performing debut in November 1964 at a fraternity at Rutgers University where he was majoring in American history.
“I spent four hours caterwauling for bros who were more interested in beer pong and girls,” he recalls. “It was almost ego-less.”
The bullet points of his career are varied and well known, such as the first gig accompanying Smith at the St. Mark’s Church in 1971. It was supposed to be a one-time thing but, as Kaye says, “the rest is history.”
He’s recently been celebrating the 50th anniversary of a two-disc set that he titled “Nuggets (Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era),” a classic compilation of garage bands with a psych bent that he put together with the aid of a bunch of index cards and a few joints. A new edition of the set recently allowed him some closure, he reports: “I was finally able to get the rights to ’96 Tears’ — I couldn’t get it the first time around.”
In addition to a career in rock criticism that includes tear sheets from Fusion, Crawdaddy, Cavalier, Hit Parader and Rolling Stone, he’s authored several books as…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply