“Music exists in the present tense”
AN AUDIENCE WITH LENNY KAYE
“I grew up in the ’60s when hair was a real statement. You would walk into a diner and take your life in your hands”
It’s a house full of rabbit holes,” grins Lenny Kaye, rummaging around in his basement to show off his “IT’S latest purchases: four crates of Detroit techno 12”s bought at auction and a boxset of obscure Philly soul. Surrounded by books and records, not to mention a 1965 Ludwig drumkit and a vintage sheet music collection – “even though I don’t read music!” – Kaye admits that it’s not a bad place to be locked down.
Still, he describes his recent return to the stage with Patti Smith at the Royal Albert Hall as an “ecstatic” moment. “I love playing live, I love the excitement in the air and the way the audience sends it back to you. Music exists in the present tense.”
This year marked the 50th anniversary of Kaye and Smith’s first tentative steps towards poetic rock’n’roll sublimation, breathlessly recounted, which documents the explosion of 10 epochal music scenes from Memphis in 1954 to Seattle in 1991. It confirms Kaye as that rare creature in rock: both instigator and chronicler, an instinctive guitarist as well as a compelling storyteller. “A great sentence has rhythm and melody, and a guitar solo has a narrative arc,” he suggests. “When those things fold in together, that’s who I like to be.”
