Lenny Kaye

About Lightning Striking Rock and roll was birthed in basements and garages, radio stations and dance halls, in cities where unexpected gatherings of artists and audience changed and charged the way music is heard and celebrated, capturing lightning in a bottle. Whether Elvis Presley’s Memphis, the Beatles’ Liverpool, Patti Smith’s New York or Kurt Cobain’s Seattle, Lightning Striking reveals the communal energy that creates a scene, a guided tour inside style and performance, to see who’s on stage, along with the movers and shakers, the hustlers and hangers-on, and why everybody is listening. Grandly sweeping and minutely detailed, informed by Kaye’s acclaimed knowledge and experience as a working musician, Lightning Striking is an ear-opening insight into our shared musical and cultural history, a carpet ride of rock and roll’s most influential movements and moments.

‘The writer I have always known him to be’ – Patti Smith

Lenny Kaye (1946) is an American guitarist, composer, and writer who is best known as a member of the Patti Smith Group and compiler of arguably the most influential compilation in rock ‘n’ roll history, ‘Nuggets’, the genre-defining anthology of sixties’ garage-rock that coined the term ‘punk’. Kaye started his first bands while majoring in American History in the 1960s. He wrote for various music magazines including Melody Maker and Rolling Stone when he met Patti Smith in 1971. Kaye stood at the cradle of Patti Smith’s distinctive sound as producer of her debut single and still performs around the world as part of her Group.