Over a remarkable half-century-plus career, Lenny Kaye has seemingly done it all. As the curator behind the beloved 1972 Nuggets garage rock compilation, he hinted at what would soon morph into punk rock – a movement he helped ignite as Patti Smith’s guitarist and chief collaborator.
Yet, despite his storied history and staggering resume (including producing more than 20 albums for artists like Suzanne Vega and Soul Asylum, not to mention penning books on topics ranging from rock milestones to 1930s crooners), the guitarist is checking off one more item on his “to do” list. At age 79, he’s making his much-belated debut as a solo artist with Goin’ Local.
“My daughter said, ‘Dad, I don’t believe you have a new job,’” Kaye says with a laugh. “It feels good to surprise people. I played the record for Patti, and she said, ‘I’ve never heard you sound like this.’
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“The truth is, I’ve never delved into this side of my artistic personality, but then again, you always have to reinvent yourself. Once you do something or understand something so completely, it’s good to move forward. And I believe that’s what I did.”
Keen statophiles will immediately question whether Goin’ Local does indeed qualify as a solo Kaye release. Back in 1984, while Smith took a prolonged break from music to raise a family, Kaye led the Lenny Kaye Connection and issued a zippy rock gem, I’ve Got a Right.
“That was a band record, and it was also 40-plus years in the past,” he says. “This record feels like a new persona, and it’s certainly different from what you might expect.”
He makes a point of declaring what his new album isn’t. “It’s not garage rock,” he says. “It’s kind of all over the place, and it wears its heart on its sleeve. In a weird way, it’s a very personal record.”
Goin’ Local has a warm, friendly naturalness to it that draws you right in. Kaye, handling guitar, pedal steel and vocal duties, offers up a collection of potent and poignant tunes that include dreamy ballads (This Love, Let’s Make a Memory) and surreal folk (World Book Night, Poppy) nestled alongside a number of sophisticated, riffy pop-rock beauties (Goin’ Local, A Friend Like You and Solstice, the latter a collaboration with Smith).
He might even have a regional radio hit on his hands with Pennsylvania Girls, a lilting pop ditty on which he lists the attributes – from his POV – of the Keystone State’s fairer sex.
“My girlfriend, Dawn Linden, is from Pennsylvania, and one day she said, ‘We just don’t get no respect,’” Kaye says, somehow managing not to imitate Rodney Dangerfield. He’s quick to stress that he gave Linden songwriting credit, and he claims that he will only perform the song in the state that inspired it. “I’m not going to change the words to ‘Illinois Girls’ or ‘Maryland Girls,’” he says. “It is what it is.”
Pennsylvania Girls glides along over Kaye’s simple yet evocative, echo-drenched guitar pattern. As always, his no-frills playing – gutsy riffs and sparky solos that don’t wear out the welcome – is defined by a striking economy of notes that emphasizes mood and texture.
Central to this stripped-down approach is his instrument of choice: the Unicaster, a 60th Anniversary Fender Strat modified to feature only a single Fralin pickup in the middle position and a lone volume knob.
“I wanted a guitar to be who I am,” he says. “I know a lot of guitarists never use the middle pickup, but I’m all for it. I never used the other pickups, and I was always hitting the selector switch by accident. My guitar tech, Barre Duryea, fixed up the guitar and even made a new pickguard for me. So now I don’t have all that stuff I don’t need. It’s just point and shoot.”
Let’s talk about your early guitar influences. I imagine as a young teen you spent a lot of time listening to AM radio.
Totally. There was AM, but there were also these fledgling FM stations out of the colleges that played folk. When I got my first guitar, which was an acoustic my uncle gave me, I started learning chords. I had this image of me being the lonely folk singer in the backyard. I loved Eric Andersen, and I kind of wanted to be him.
Of course, like most everybody in my generation, as soon as the Beatles presented a new role model of how to perform, my ambition moved to being in a band. The Beatles debuted on Ed Sullivan in February of ’64, and my first band show took place in November of that year with a group called the Vandals. We played the Rutgers Fraternity Row. I mean, the explosion of the guitar as an instrument of possibility was amazing during this time.
I’m certainly no virtuoso. I don’t pretend to be able to perform like Jimi Hendrix or Jimmy Page or Jeff Beck. These are larger-than-life figures, and you also need a certain physical dexterity to play like these people, which I don’t have. I’m untrained. I play by ear. But I think in some ways that’s really helped me with a performer like Patti, because come on, I wasn’t going to put a bunch of Chuck Berry licks behind her.
Was there ever a period when you aspired to play like some of the greats you mentioned – Hendrix, Page or Beck? And if so, when did you say to yourself, “That just isn’t me”?
The first time I played with Patti in February of ’71 at a St. Mark’s poetry reading, all I did was follow the way she breathed
It wasn’t a conscious decision. You play what you can. Back in the ’60s, I was in my band as a rhythm guitar player, and then I moved up to play six-string bass, which certainly helped my sense of melody and the underlying foundation of music. I was proud of the fact that I could sit rhythmically under something.
The first time I played with Patti in February of ’71 at a St. Mark’s poetry reading [February 10 at NYC’s St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery], all I did was follow the way she breathed and try to keep propulsing her flights of poetic fancy.
In a sense, that’s never changed. I do like to play solos, but it’s not going to be a flurry of notes. I approach them melodically and with a sense of narrative arc, which, of course, ties in with my other hemisphere of the brain as a writer.
Just as it is with guitar solos, a well-crafted sentence has rhythm and melody. I’m not going to demonstrate how many notes I can play in a millisecond. I’m going to try to make it sing like a vocalist sings and to compliment how the song understands itself.
It takes a certain degree of maturity to develop that kind of philosophy. When did you figure it all out?
I’m still figuring it out. You get better incrementally. At least I didn’t peak early. I’ve moved slowly.
It’s why, in a certain sense, I can arrive at this solo album. It’s part of the long path of who I’ve become and the music I’ve absorbed as I’ve moved through many genres and attempted to understand what makes them tick. I can borrow from all of them within my own musicality. I felt an accumulation of who I am as a musician in the making of this record.
People tend to mythologize New York City during the ’70s, particularly the early years that gave rise to punk. What kind of snapshot can you offer of that time?
I get asked that, and I have to tell whoever’s asking the disappointing truth – that it was like another night hanging out with your friends at the local bar.
You didn’t have that sense of “Oooh, this is special,” especially in the early years when the New York Dolls scene morphed into the CBGB scene. That’s not a big scene. There weren’t a lot of places to play, nor were there 500 groups milling around. You’d have these misfits and renegades congregating around the only club that would allow them to hang out and actually get up on the stage.
A few years later, when all the bands had found their members and they’d defined their personalities and understood what they wanted to be, it started moving faster. Then it got a name – punk. The Ramones template became what people perceived as punk. And then it became a stereotype and a cliché.
Your longtime association with Patti Smith could fill an entire interview, but to pare it down to a bite-sized piece, did she ever verbalize to you in so many words what she required of you as a musical collaborator?
She’s never said it in so many words because sometimes we don’t like to say things, but I bring total belief to her. I believe in her art, her vision, her sense of honesty, her sense of righteousness. I will travel to the ends of the Earth to make sure that what she wants to do on stage is realized. She calls me her knight.
I’ve never been the best technical player in the band, but I know how to unfold what she’s doing and improvise with her and help her to have a foundation to understand where she’s going. To me, that’s a valuable thing, and it’s probably the reason why we’ve made music so successfully over half a century. I allow her to be who she hopes to be.
That’s true no matter what music she’ll move to. We both love two-and-a half minute songs with good choruses that make you want to get out on the dance floor, and we also like fields of experimental improvisation that often blur beyond the boundaries of music, rhythm and melody into what the free jazz guys call “out there.”
You’ve produced a number of artists – even had hits like Suzanne Vega’s Luka. I imagine you have a pretty good bedside manner, being that you’re an artist yourself.
You know, anytime I’ve worked with another artist, whether it was Suzanne Vega or a lot of the English acts I’ve done – James, Microdisney, the Weather Prophets – I thought it was a great honor to be asked to be somebody’s mirror in the recording studio. Sometimes – a lot of times – artists are going through a vulnerable time, and as a producer you need to either bolster their confidence or try to steer them away from something that’s going to sink the record.
Sometimes you have to be the bad guy and tell them, “That’s good, but it could be better.” Artists aren’t always ready to hear that.
Or not ready to do it. But here’s the thing: as a producer, I always thought that I don’t want to be there for the next record. If I’ve done my job right, you’ve gotten all my moves and you need to evolve unless the entire construct changes. Every once in a while, I’ll pull out records I’ve produced.
I just listened to This Boy’s Heart by Martin Stephenson & the Daintees. 30 years later, I’d kind of forgotten about it, and now, listening to it with fresh ears, it was amazing to feel Martin’s heart in every phrase. Another group I enjoyed working with was Soul Asylum on Hang Time, which I think is a classic.
In addition to the Unicaster, what other guitars are we hearing on Goin’ Local?
I have a really nice ‘68 Les Paul that Caesar Diaz sold to me. He was surprised that I didn’t have a Les Paul, and he sold me a great one. There’s a nice Mosrite 12-string on the record, and a Collins D2H acoustic, which is one of the most beautiful-sounding acoustics around.
I do play some humble pedal steel – there’s a Sho-Bod pedal steel on the record. One of the things about pedal steel is that even the most simple thing you can play on it sounds brilliant.
What are we talking, amp-wise?
The smaller, the better. We all went through the ’70s where you needed a very large crew to carry everything up on stage. But I like small amps like Fender Deluxes and Princetons. I have a great little Fender Princeton, and my Deluxe has a Celestion in it, which gives it a little more grunt.
I have a couple specialty amps. I’ve got a Silvertone 1482, which is a wonderful amp. I just happened to walk into my local guitar store, and they had one. I thought, “Oh, this is mine!”
I have an old Magnatone Troubadour 213 that has a real vibrato on it. I used it on some stuff on the album to get that bell-like sound. My very first amp when I started playing was a Magnatone 280 – the stereo model that Buddy Holly used. I bought it from a guy down the street who kind of started playing guitar and stopped. He also had a Les Paul Standard, I believe, but in those days, Les Pauls were scorned. It was all about Fenders.
Are you planning to tour behind this album?
I don’t do it as much as I used to. I don’t even have a band at this point. I like to go out solo. It’s almost like I’m returning to my folk roots; I can get up and sing my songs. I do play electric when I do that, but it’s just me. I’ve spent my entire life trying to avoid having a formal job. I want to continue to enjoy it and not take it that seriously.
To be honest, at this point in my life, I’m just grateful to play music and find magic within the creation of a song or surprise myself with a guitar solo and a note that I haven’t hit yet. In a weird way, it’s taken me 60 years to get to this point, and I’m just enjoying it.
