LENNY KAYE: RIGHT ON, WRITE ON, RITE ON!
NEW YORK—If anybody’s got a right, it’s Lenny Kaye. As rock’s foremost young (mid ’30’s) historian-cum-performercum-songwriter, the man who brought us Nuggets, Rock Scene’s “Ask Doc Rock,” the cofounder of the Patti Smith Group and the ultra adorable one-year-old Anna Lee Witt, Lenny is currently involved in more projects per month than most music people dare to even dream of.
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LENNY KAYE: RIGHT ON, WRITE ON, RITE ON!
The Beat Goes on
NEW YORK—If anybody’s got a right, it’s Lenny Kaye. As rock’s foremost young (mid ’30’s) historian-cum-performercum-songwriter, the man who brought us Nuggets, Rock Scene’s “Ask Doc Rock,” the cofounder of the Patti Smith Group and the ultra adorable one-year-old Anna Lee Witt, Lenny is currently involved in more projects per month than most music people dare to even dream of.
In fact, “Doctor, my dreams have been very strange lately,” were Lenny’s first words to the press. His solo LP on the Giorno Poetry Systems label, I’ve Got A Right, recalls a dreamy, highly textured emotional state, fully feeling and listenable in a classic rock/country/rave-on sense. “The songs that I write, the songs that I sing, they could be hits 10 years ago, or 10 years from now. It’s the emotion behind the song that I’m after...” Lenny Kaye’s musical tastes embrace the width and breadth of eclectic American music; he rocks, he folks, he sings da blooze.
“I’ve Got A Right” is a great title song, a powerful statement on many levels (f’rinstance, “I don’t mind sayin’ that I don’t mind prayin’/But I don’t like to be told how”). Recorded over a three year span, consisting largely of original or co-written tunes, released on a poet’s label, this tasteful album embodies one of Lenny’s life-long goals whilst giving listeners 33 minutes of relentless delight. (Send $8.98, postage paid, catalog GPS 032, for the stereo Lenny Kaye Connection LP, to: Giorno Poetry Systems, Institute Inc., 222 Bowery, New York, NY 10012.)
“After the Patti Smith Group made their last performance at the end of ’79 I kind of had a choice of what to do. It was at that time that I decided to get my band together (the Lenny Kaye Connection) and picked up a bunch of the interests that would take me through the ’80s, as it were.”
Namely? “I learned a lot about songwriting from country music...I’d gotten so much out of R&R by the time the ’80s began that there really wasn’t very much left for me to learn. So I found, over the past couple of years, that my interests have opened up into a much broader American music...I’ve always tried to have a very open mind. I mean, I’m associated a lot with the ’60s because of Nuggets, but that’s just really one type of music that I like.”
. Equally important are Lenny Kaye’s contributions to music as a fanatic and accurate chronicler: “I’m an historian, but I’m not nostalgic for the past. To me, it’s only functional in terms of how it relates to the present.” Mr. Kaye has been working on a recently issued series of “compilation records for Elektra, which have been giving me an opportunity to trace whole bodies of music.”
Listen and learn, ’cause these anthologies form the basis for American music as we know it—sans jazz, regrettably.
At home, he may seem like Mister Mom, but on record, on stage, and in his musicology, Lenny Kaye is verily Mister Music.
L.E. Agnelli
