As guitarist in the Patti Smith Group and compiler of psychedelic touchstone Nuggets, his place in
music history is secured. His new book charts the story of rock’n’roll, city by city
Recently, Lenny Kaye posted a photograph of his younger self on his
Instagram feed. Aged 12, he is standing on a street in Flatbush, Brooklyn in the summer of 1959, a tall, skinny, bespectacled kid who looks both nerdy and cool. In his new book, Lightning Striking, which maps the course of rock’n’roll through the cities that helped define it, he writes of that moment.
“My sleeves are rolled up on my short-sleeved shirt. My hair is parted on the left side, combed to the right, held in slope by Wildroot Cream-Oil. I’m wearing a pair of rippled soled shoes. There’s a key chain looped along my right leg, into my front pocket, a stylistic remnant of the zoot suit era… I’m clearly catching up with the times, standing outside my apartment building in Brooklyn in the last year of the 50s, the moment before I enter my teens.”