Lenny Kaye (b. 1946)
From Shake It Up: Great American Writing on Rock and Pop from Elvis to Jay Z
Before Lenny Kaye became Patti Smith’s guitar player and all-around collaborator, he had already earned respect as a music critic and historian.
“I’ve been a rock journalist for fifty years,” he recently told a reporter for the Santa Cruz Sentinel. “To find the rhythm and melody in writing is, in a sense, like playing a great guitar solo. So I find a lot of cross-talk between each side of my brain; the analytical and the intuitive.” Now both 72 (they were born three days apart), he and Smith continue to tour. Kaye also hosts the radio program Underground Garage twice a week on Sirius while working on his next book, which chronicles the “flashpoints” of rock music history.
The two musicians met each other at Kaye’s day job, the Manhattan record shop Bleecker Bob’s. Smith dropped by and introduced herself after reading one of his magazine articles, which was originally published fifty years ago this fall. The article ostensibly recalls a brief period when acapella music was all the rage among the patrons of certain independent record stores, but today it evokes something different: a lost world in which local shops were hangouts for musicians and fans. Kaye’s place of employment became one such magnet: “Bob’s was more than a record store,” he says. “It was an important gathering place to introduce and hear the new and progressive as well as honoring the past, how music lives on to influence and discover its new forms.”
As our Story of the Week selection, then, we present the piece that permanently entwined the careers of two legendary musicians.
