1Lenny Kaye has known and consistently worked with Patti Smith since. . . 1971! Before the two met, she was just a poet who loved rock’n’roll, and he was an unemployed guitar player working in a record shop to pay the bills, but also a rock writer who had compiled the seminal double album Nuggets1—and one of the first writers to use the term ‘punk’. They started as a duet: Patti reading her wild poems while Lenny was experimenting noises with his guitar.2 The rest is history.

2I met him in Paris on July 8th 2004, just before he got on stage with the Patti Smith Group for the Solidays festival. The show would be a perfect Best of, from ‘Dancing Barefoot’3 to ‘Gloria,’4 the band also playing some excellent covers like ‘Not Fade Away’5 or ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’6

3I interviewed him for a guitar magazine that went bankrupt, and therefore never ran the article, and for a book on US punk that has still to see the light of day. . . So, this interview remained unpublished. Here are some excerpts of it. Patti Smith was not the main subject matter, but Lenny Kaye spoke freely and at length about her and everything else, never showing any sign of restlessness, event though he was about to hit the stage. Although this man is a legend for many rock fans, he was very humble, friendly, generous and passionate about music. Just as we finished—because somebody told us it was time to—he led me backstage where we bumped into Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine in the middle of a chat. He introduced me to both as if we were old friends. . . A charming man.

4Stan Cuesta: In the Sixties, you were already a musician, but you also started to write about music.

5Lenny Kaye: I always liked to write. I wrote about music for the Rutgers paper, the university paper, and I also was very influenced by Crawdaddy, the early Crawdaddy writers, Richard Meltzer, Sandy Pearlman, John Landau. It struck me at that time as music was suddenly becoming more mature and, as the music got more involved, that you could write about it not being just like, ‘This is somebody favorite color.’ That actually you could write about the music with the same artistic intensity as the music itself, which was not done in rock before. Even when the Beatles came, it was always very fan magazine orientated. Which is great, but. . . I like to think about music, I have the literary and I have the musical. And I also felt that as a writer, I knew what being in a band was like, I could write about it from inside the band, which many rock writers didn’t have. I could see what they were trying to do, on their own terms. I think of it as the left and right half of the brain.

6Stan Cuesta: Is it possible that listening to too much music and writing about it could prevent you to create some?

7Lenny Kaye: Well, I’m very lucky because, in some ways, I’m a musical illiterate. When I play, I’m not thinking about what I’m playing. I have the luck to be able to move into the emotion. For many writers, when they play music, there’s an element of self-consciousness to it. It’s been my great luck with Patti, because what we did in the beginning was improvise, and when you improvise, you have to open yourself up to music, so that you feel it. When I’m feeling music, I’m not thinking about it. When I’m producing a record, the band always knows when a take is happening, because I start to get up from my seat and I just start moving to it. It’s like I can short-circuit my brain when I need to. I think of it as luck because. . . I’m not that technical a player, but I can feel and hear the inner movement of the music and I’ve always tried not to think about what I play too much until after. I can go back and see what I was thinking, if I have to put some things together but I believe very much in musical instinct and intuition. It’s really what brought Patti and me together because she would chant and sing, and I would kind of follow her and we would get into these waves and movements and improvisations. It took me a long time to learn how to play up to what I’m hearing, but I felt like this is my particular skill as a musician. You know, I’m not gonna be a jazz guy some day, I certainly will never be able to read music, I can’t be a studio player, I never really ever learnt the Chuck Berry lick. But over these forty years, I’ve learned how to play my guitar, in terms of my inner music and that’s a great skill. And I’m a record geek, so I love to go to record fairs and find weird records, see how they fit and have a good time with them, and enjoy really trashy hit singles and really deep artistic creative people, and be a friend to music. . . I mean that’s basically what I like. And I found that I have to. If I’m just playing and performing, I miss something. When I’ve been on the road for two months, there’s nothing that I want to do more than go home, get in the basement with the computer and find the music and words. There’s not a lot of difference between the flow and rhythm of a sentence and the flow and the rhythm of a guitar solo.

8Stan Cuesta: You have said that when you met Patti and started playing with her, nothing was happening at the time. . .

9Lenny Kaye: It was a very quiet time. It wasn’t that nothing was happening, it’s that all the bands that characterized the late sixties, especially for me the San Francisco bands—I loved the Grateful Dead, especially loved Quicksilver Messenger Service and John Cippollina, my favourite guitarist—all seemed to have. . . grown up. . ..

10Before the New York Dolls, there was no New York bands, zero! That’s amazing to think of, now that you open up The Village Voice and see hundreds and thousands of them! There was no place to play, no club had national bands, but with the Dolls, all of a sudden you started to feel the people getting a little scene together and then it kept going, and all of a sudden you got a real scene. And the best thing about the early CBGB scene was that all the bands were different from each other. They weren’t like one thing, they were all figuring each other out, Blondie was different from the Ramones, different from Television, different from us. That makes for an exciting moment in time. But when I met Patti, really, there was no thought we were going to have a band. I mean how could it be? I mean: she’s a poet, I’m a, you know, scratchy guitar player, no drummer. . . How could this even make a record? When we made our first little 45, ‘Hey Joe’/‘Piss Factory,’7 that was an experiment, to see if the magic that we were creating on stage—we could feel people’s intense interest—whether we could translate that to a record. We didn’t know. It took us two years to have a drummer! But then, as each player came in, as Ivan came in to play the other guitar, as Jay Dee came in to play drums, the musicians sounded like us. It was a great thing. When we first decided to have another guitar player, we put an ad in the paper and saw who came around, and there were blues musicians, guys who played really great. But when Ivan came in, he just played with us, very strong. He was nervous, he didn’t know what the hell we were about, we’re there playing ‘Gloria’8 for fifteen minutes, you know, and he’s like just keeping up with us. It was a surprise because we realized we didn’t have to change our sound, we could expand our sound, and that took us a long time, but by the time we actually arrived at making Horses,9 we didn’t sound like anybody else, but ourselves, whatever that was, probably we still figured it out.

11Stan Cuesta: How come you never had a permanent bass player?

12Lenny Kaye: We had one for a moment around Radio Ethiopia,10 but it made the band too big. I mean to me, when we got past three people—myself, Patti and Richard Sohl—the improvisations that we could do, slow things down, make it loud, soft. We could move the music anywhere. When we got Ivan, we could still move the music anywhere, but there was another piece of communication. When we got Jay Dee, all of a sudden the band had five people, counting Patti, that’s a lot to communicate. When we had a bass player, for us there were just too many people on stage!

13Stan Cuesta: And another keyboard player?

14Lenny Kaye: Bruce Brody, yes, around Easter.11 Richard kind of came and went, sometimes. But he was our keyboard player, I mean, he was the one who understood Patti the most. This is very hard to get members in our band. It’s not just playing. Patti has to trust you.

15Stan Cuesta: How did you work, writing songs with Patti? Is it different today?

16Lenny Kaye: The process is generally, we work within the band’s world. Someone would bring in a riff, a song or a chord progression, and then we play it, as a band, and see what grows and see what attracts Patti’s interest. Sometimes songs just grow out of a little lick and sometimes, they are actually constructed with parts, and then we’ll like see what works and what doesn’t. On the last record, for ‘Jubilee,’12 I had pretty much the whole song and then Jay Dee came in and added a little coda at the end. Or someone will bring in a completed song, but it’s mostly how it appeals to Patti.

17Stan Cuesta: Has she already got words?

18Lenny Kaye: No, she usually sees what the music suggests. Sometimes she has ideas for songs but usually, as we play it, something will occur to her and she’ll follow the trail of it. It’s a very organic process. In the beginning, all we had was little chord progressions and we would play them over and over and over until a song like ‘Free Money,’13 until all of a sudden we’d all hit a move at the same time, and the next night we’d hit the move again at the same time and all of a sudden the song would organically construct itself. Even today, in ‘Gloria,’14 there’s always these little hits and moves and things. We don’t say, ‘Hey, why don’t we do an emphasis here? ’ It’s more like ‘Hey, that was kinda cool, let’s remember that.’

19Stan Cuesta: How did it start again with Gone Again15 in 1996, after a long break, with Jay Dee and you, plus two new musicians?

20Lenny Kaye: We had called Patti when Fred passed away16 and offered her whatever she needed for help. She was talking to me about wanting to make a record, and at first it was going to be a very acoustic record, very small scale. And we thought of it kind of like as an Appalachian mountain record. I knew Tony Shanahan from New Jersey, we were from the same hometown. And actually, during the years in the 1980s that I wasn’t playing much, he would invite me down to play in a little jamming group in New Brunswick, our hometown, called The Slaves of New Brunswick. He said, come down, have an amplifier and just play along. At that time, I was really kind of trying to get my solo things out there and I was getting really depressed by the music business. I produced a lot of stuff too, I enjoyed doing that. It’s kind of the true musical literary thing, you’re listening but you got to be feeling something. But I went there every Wednesday and played. And it reminded me why I started playing in the first place: to have fun. To tune up. You know the kids there, they’re not paying any attention, they’re getting drunk, they’re picking each other up. And I just realized what music outside the music business was like. And I’ve always tried not to forget that from then on. In the end, I’m up there, I’ve got a guitar in my hand, I’m going to enjoy that night, if there’s 2 people or 40000 people out there, I don’t care. It’s another night that I’m a musician. And Tony was a great bass player, so when Patti wanted to have a bass player, I thought, he would be good, he’s a nice guy. She thought of course he was a big Italian from New Jersey, you know like Tony Soprano! (Laughs) Then she met him and realized he was a pretty cute and nice guy and very sensitive. And Jay Dee, you know, has always been there for Patti.

21Stan Cuesta: He played on Dream of Life17 in 1988.

22Lenny Kaye: With Fred, yes.

23Stan Cuesta: You did not?

24Lenny Kaye: No. Fred was a great guitar player and I didn’t want to get in their way, basically, they had quite a thing. Fred was one of my hero guitar players! I’d loved the MC5, I saw them about five times, just one of the greatest bands ever.

25And then, like anything, it grew, and then Oliver came into the band. It was interesting having a second guitar player, especially with a bass player, it was a whole new experience, because Patti wanted the band to be different.

26Stan Cuesta: There was no mention of Ivan Kral getting back?

27Lenny Kaye: No, you know, that was then as they say. Ivan had gone on a different path. And Patti doesn’t like to repeat the past. She really wanted a band that sounded like. . . today. And I thought it was a good way to have continuity, with Jay Dee and myself, and new people, Oliver and Tony. And as a keyboard player, I don’t think there was anybody that could replace Richard Sohl. He had such a great technique, classically trained, new show tunes, he could improvise, do everything but never showed it off. He had so much technique that he didn’t have to display it. He could just go plonk-plonk-plonk for hours at a time if you wanted. A very unusual musician and totally in tune with Patti. And I think that it was very wise of her to make a new step for a new time, to not recreate the past. Because we’re not a band that’s about nostalgia. We like our past, but we like. . . our future. That’s how you move forward.

28Stan Cuesta: You’re very lucky not to have lost that after such a long time on the scene.

29Lenny Kaye: Well, you know, I’m sure there were times when I have lost it, when you just stop remembering why you play music in the first place, when you start thinking ‘my record hasn’t sold this much’. I’m just happy to be playing, really. I love playing, for 40 years, that’s a miracle! I’m very grateful, especially when I come to Europe. We just came out of an Italian tour where we played cities I’d never heard of. I never heard of La Spezia before and there I am, playing to 2000 kids who are mouthing the words to me and I’m thinking man! you know, thank you. That’s all I think. And I have somebody carrying all my equipment to the stage, ‘thank you!’ Somebody there tunes my guitar! I’m very grateful for the chance to be able to play music and especially with such a magnificent artist as Patti, who always keeps your eye on the prize, always brings out the righteousness of why we do it, you know, not to get girls, or to have wild times, it’s to live in the music. She’s a real artist, and a challenging artist. You know, in the course of our show, we go from total noise to a beautiful soft acoustic song that has its heart on its sleeve, that’s the kind of range I like. You know, I’m a punk rocker, believe me, I like to take the guitar and hammer it into an amplifier and turn up on ten and ride the feedback. And I also like to put on a tuxedo and get my little Gibson 295 and sing ‘Where The Blue Of The Night Meets The Gold Of The Day’18 with all the minor chords in it. Music is a gift. From where, I don’t know, but to actually be able to be a part of the human race that is a musician. . . Everybody has a job in this world, there are people who are great cooks, and others have to make the cars go right, or design a tent. I’m lucky, in the human organism, I got to play music and I’m saying ‘thank you’.