Lenny Kaye is one of rock ’n’ roll’s national treasures. He’s the guy who never has to pay for his drinks in bars from Stockholm to Shanghai, thanks to “Nuggets,” his now-essential compilation of what were obscure garage rock classics that became the foundation of punk rock and a lingua franca for the spirit of DIY. He’s the kind of guy who should have been given a Guggenheim Fellowship because of his galactic range of interests, knowledge and influences and for his input and his contributions to rock ‘n’ roll as an art form. 

Kaye was writing about music — for publications like Rock Scene, Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone — when the discipline was still nascent. If you read his early writing, which is well worth your time to hunt down (like this review of The Rolling Stones’ “Exile On Main Street,” in 1972), he brought knowledge and curiosity and genuine enthusiasm; even if he didn’t like something, he still gave it his serious consideration. 

It was that exact spirit of inquiry, within an article about the history of the doo-wop revival, that caught the attention of another doo-wop aficionado from South Jersey. She tracked him down and they became friends, hanging out and listening to music. One night, she asked him if he thought he could make a guitar sound like a car crash for an upcoming poetry reading she was doing, and that’s how Kaye joined forces with Patti Smith.

Lenny was at Patti’s side until she bowed out of public life and rejoined her when she returned — but he’s never sat still. Across the years, he put together a band (The Lenny Kaye Connection), accompanied Jim Carroll as he tried to work out his rock ‘n’ roll form, wrote Waylon Jennings’ biography, produced Suzanne Vega’s first two solo albums (among others), has a country and western alter ego, wrote introductions and liner notes and seemingly offered and participated in hundreds of other contributions across the decades. Lenny Kaye was the kind of cool, level-headed rock ‘n’ roll maven who was both important to and part of our history. His openness and curiosity — still, turning 80 later this year! — makes him the music fan’s music fan. 

The only thing Lenny Kaye somehow hadn’t done was release a solo record, which he rectified in July of 2026 with the release of “Goin’ Local,” out on Yep Roc on July 17. “Goin’ Local” is a collection of deliberate compositions across a range of styles, whether straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll (the title track), ballads (“This Love,” “Let’s Make A Memory”), folk rock (“The Things You Leave Behind”) and sweet ditties (“World Book Night,” “Pennsylvania Girls”) that might seem light until you find yourself humming them later after only listening to them once. There are bulletproof pop melodies, gentle riffs, solid construction, and engaging stories. And that’s the result of a formidable quantity of skills acquired over half a century immersed in the rock ‘n’ roll trenches, whether as a listener, critic, producer, or active participant. 

“Goin’ Local” was assembled both from songs he started 15 years ago with friend and bandmate Tony Shanahan (who has a co-production credit and also plays on half the tracks), and another half dozen that were written over the last few years. “I don’t write a lot of songs,” Kaye told Salon, “I believe a song has to need to be written, if only for one to figure out a situation or to understand the dynamic of a relationship, or something occurs to me that needs framing as if in a picture. So if I write one or two songs a year, I’m happy with that, and I bring them to fruition. But I just continue to sit there with the guitar, and come up with something that is meaningful to me and hopefully, whoever listens.”

The title track is a perfectly crunchy, rock ‘n’ roll number about haunting the East Village’s watering holes and the people you meet (and the challenges of maintaining a cross-borough relationship). Emphasizing the ‘local’ point, the album’s cover is a black-and-white historical photograph from the early 1900s, taken from the New York Public Library’s historical collection, with Kaye imposed into the frame, standing under elevated train tracks. Look closer and you can just make out the street number of the Lyceum Concert Garden (“Follies of the Day!”), which was located on the Bowery at number 302. That’s across the street and about half a block away from where CBGB’s would find itself decades later, and also just happens to be adjacent to another landmark: “If you stand in front of CBGB and look in the 10:00 position, that’s where I lived,” Kaye confirmed.

One of the record’s highlights is a co-write with the musician who stood to Kaye’s right onstage for more than 50 years. “Solstice,” where he shares writing credits with Patti Smith, possesses the same kind of metaphysical shimmer that’s often intrinsic to a Patti Smith composition (think “Ghost Dance” or “Beneath the Southern Cross” to name two other relevant co-writes from the pair). As to how the song ended up on “Goin’ Local,” Kaye said, “As the song developed, Patti thought it certainly suited my new persona,” he told Salon, “and she urged me to sing it. I mean, she could have sung it quite well, but she urged me to take it under my wing and express it. And she felt it appealed to a certain sense of the celestial that I have in my solo persona.”

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Then there’s the delightful “World Book Night,” a song that Kaye performed live via livestream from Electric Lady with Smith during the days of the COVID-19 lockdown, on the anniversary of their first performance together at St. Marks On The Bowery in 1971. “I wrote it originally when there was a kind of strange day set aside called ‘World Book Night.’ Publishers would give books to people and they would spread out all over the city or wherever they were and just hand them out for free, at subway stations or on the beach, and I thought that was a beautiful thing,” Kaye explained. “. . . It’s just my tribute to the written word, how it feels putting those words one after another after another, and the readers out there who find them and find something of themselves within the pages of a book.”

On the note of physical media, there’s “The Things You Leave Behind,” a song that Kaye’s been playing at the occasional solo show for a while now. It’s a wistful, country-folk paean that offers both a wry yet realistic assessment of the disposition of collections someone leaves the planet. “Gonna pick up the pieces and your life and theirs/who gets what and why/we all cart around a whole lot of baggage/that would better be left/by the side of the road/books and records, old clothes and photos. . .” and of course, in Kaye’s case, guitars.

Even at 79 — he’ll hit octogenarian status in December — Kaye confesses he hasn’t slowed down as a collector. “I haven’t cut myself off yet, but I’ve been more discerning,” he tells Salon. “That said, I always come home from being on the road with a few well-chosen records and a few well-chosen books that I will read one of these days.”

Does he still have a holy grail?

Kaye laughs. “Absolutely not. At this point my holy grails are things I have yet to discover. I found most of the things I really needed to have, but every once in a while you’re exposed to a new record, and sometimes it’s not that great to just be able to go on eBay and poke the bid. You want to find it. You want to find it in context.”

He’s on a roll now: “The other day I was in the East Village and I went past a store on E. 2nd Street called Ergot and I walked in and they had 12 Umm Kulthum 45s from the ’60s and I just put my money down, came home with them, and they’re all fascinating. I have certain genres that I always check out: I’m particularly into Jamaican gospel now, which is kind of primitive and not reggae, very illuminated, great singers. I’m into Egyptian music too; I really like the music of the Middle East. And of course then there’s the rock band that I’ve never heard of that really needs to be part of my collection.” He pauses. “I always think, like the song, about cleaning it up or at least culling it so I could get all the records off the floor and onto the shelves.” 

Kaye was good friends with Tom Verlaine, the late Television guitarist whose epic collections of books are still being distributed and caused hour-long lines when they were first put up for sale, and whose music equipment is next for dissemination. Salon asked Kaye if he had any clue to the extent of his friend’s collection, or its future plans for disposition? 

“No, but I’m very excited because it’s kind of a way for me to perhaps move my accumulations into the world at large,” he said. “I knew that Tom loved records, books, all of the above, and often would find the weirdest, which is of course great. I think it’s wonderful that his legacy of intellectual curiosity is being moved into the world at large so other people can be illuminated by his quest for the unusual.”

On the subject of holy grails, there’s the first recording by Lenny Kaye, “Crazy Like A Fox,” released under the nom de guerre Link Cromwell. That was the result of Kaye’s uncle Larry Kusik, who was a working film songwriter (his credits include the love themes from both “The Godfather” and “Romeo and Juliet”), trying to get in on the burgeoning protest music movement in the 1960s. He recruited his nephew to sing the vocals and although the song didn’t chart (it got re-released a decade later under the auspices of Ork Records, the label that launched in order to release the first Television single), it did give the young hopeful Kaye the conviction that he could find a way in the music business. And decades later, that’s Uncle Larry’s lyrics behind the plaintive and gorgeously intricate “Yes I Will,” the album’s closer. 

So while “Goin’ Local” is technically Kaye’s first solo record, back in 1984, there was another project, the Lenny Kaye Connection, a quartet which gigged around New York City and environs. They released one album, “I’ve Got A Right,” not on a major label but instead on Giorno Poetry Systems, a record label started by downtown poet John Giorno. The Connection reunited back in 2022 for a show in honor of Kaye’s 75th birthday, but the record’s been out of print for some time. Salon asked Kaye if there were any plans to reissue it, even just on streaming. 

“Well, you never know,” Kaye said. “Right now I’m kind of pointed to the future. I’ve listened to that record recently and I do songs from it. I still do ‘I’ve Got A Right’ and ‘Record Collector,’ which I often play when I appear at record stores, but at this point I’m future-oriented. I mean, it came out 42 years ago. It represents a much younger version of myself, and right now I’m more in tune with who I am today. That doesn’t mean that it might not see a reissue along with some of the bonus tracks that got left by the wayside in those days, but right now I’m really moving into the future.”

He continued, “I have studio time booked and Dennis Dyken from the Smithereens is going to come up and play on a couple of songs that I have under construction, and that to me is where my fascination is. I think the Lenny Kaye Connection has merit. It is kind of my debut solo album, even though it was within a group context. But to be honest, I’m more about the future. I mean, Patti has that great quote, ‘Progress isn’t the future, it’s keeping up with the present,’ and my present is unfolding at actually quite an unexpectedly rapid rate, so today, I’m just gonna ride that pony.”

In 2022, Kaye’s book “Lightning Striking: Ten Transformative Moments in Rock ‘n’ Roll” was published. It wasn’t the long-awaited memoir folks might have hoped for, but it was a sterling example of the kind of careful scholarship Kaye excels at, where he can maintain a 30,000-foot view over music history while diving deep into specifics and individual historical moments. This was Kaye’s fourth book, along with the other considerable inches of print he’s logged over the decades. Salon asked Kaye if there were any plans for more long-form writing.

“I think I mostly got it out of my system for ‘Lightning Striking,’ that seemed to cover all the bases, though I just did a foreword for a Led Zeppelin biography called ‘When Giants Walk The Earth’ by Nick Walls. So I still write. I have some vague ideas, but right now more on the musical side of my personality,” Kaye said. “You know, writing is time-consuming and very solitary and I’m enjoying making music and following that inclination in my personality. I’m not ruling out another piece of writing. But again, you go into any bookstore and there’s millions of volumes, so just like a song, it has to mean something.”

But he’s not saying no. “I would like to assemble a collection of some of my writings. But that means I have to go into the file cabinet and be shocked by some of my early attempts at explicating rock ‘n’ roll . . . when I finish this next solo record, and see the Adrift project (his “goth psych jam band, a power trio”) through to its record, perhaps I’ll feel like I’ve done that and I can return to the one word after another, after another, after another. I do believe that in writing, there is a rhythm and melody within a sentence, just like there’s a narrative arc in a guitar solo.”

Across the last 60 years or so, Kaye has toured the globe, worked with amazing musicians, and witnessed multiple incredible moments. Salon asked if he had one favorite thing that he’d gotten to do because he was Lenny Kaye.

“It’s really hard for me to say ‘favorite things,’” he explained. “My favorite thing is, I like to go and hang out, and see what the serendipity and pinball of the night shows me. I mean, I’ve done incredible things as a musician. The Dalai Lama put a scarf around my neck at Glastonbury, and I’ve also stayed up till four o’clock in the morning with Tom Clark singing songs at the Treehouse at 2A. To me, they’re all kind of a thing. But what my favorite thing to do is see what my inclination is in terms of the next sentence or the next song or the next guitar part. The fact that I can continue to do that is really my favorite thing.”

Kaye’s always had an optimistic, positive attitude, and that has not changed. “Right now I’m a solo artist, which is kind of fun. I’m up there like a folk troubadour, singing the songs, reading from the book, and making some well-timed joke,” he told Salon. “It’s portable and there’s a certain sense of being able to control the song. I do like the power of a band behind me, but I’ll see how that begins to reveal itself. I’m having a good time.”

He continued, “I feel good. I’m a new artist! That’s what cracks me up. I feel whatever I’ve done in the past, this is a new mode of presentation for me. And it feels very much at one with who I am at this moment, drawing on the experience of, at this point, sixty years of playing that guitar, and yet I feel an excitement because I’m entering uncharted territory. And that, to me, is what makes life exciting and revelatory.”

“Goin’ Local” is out now via Yep Roc and Bandcamp; you can keep up with him on YouTube and Instagram.

The post How Patti Smith helped Lenny Kaye find his solo voice appeared first on Salon.com.

Punk in the Big Apple is a subject that has been exhaustively—and some might say exhaustingly—documented over the years, yet a new reissue by the venerable Chicago crate diggers Numero Group accomplishes the mighty task of finding a fresh angle on the late 1970s scene. The set gathers the entire catalog of the short-lived boutique label Ork Records, founded in 1975 by the Warhol cohort, film buff and would-be impresario Terry Ork. It was primarily a vehicle for a band he was managing called Television, but he soon released foundational punk and postpunk singles by Television, Richard Hell and Alex Chilton with compelling obscurities by the Erasers, the Revelons and Prix. Spread across two CDs or five LPs, this modest catalog totaling 49 songs reveals a scene as it was coalescing and figuring out a new set of rules for rock ‘n’ roll. It’s easily one of the best reissues of 2015.

So what is this guy Link Cromwell doing on here? His pair of tunes stands out among the gritty, grotty punk anthems: “Crazy Like a Fox” is a folksy protest song about rejecting workaday conformity, more “Eve of Destruction” than “Blitzkrieg Bop.” And “Shock Me” is a jittery volt of garage rock energy, much rawer than the A-side but still not exactly the sound you associate with CBGB. Their inclusion on this set, however, is crucial. Both songs were recorded in the mid 1960s by a musician who would later have a profound impact on punk rock and in fact on all subsequent rock. Link Cromwell was actually the stage name of Lenny Kaye, who is one of the most influential men in rock history, even though most people have never heard the name.

Kaye recorded those two songs for his uncle Larry Kusik, who had written “Crazy Like a Fox” with Ritchie Adams. Both were professional songwriters and musicians, the former penning “Speak Softly Love” from “The Godfather” and the latter a member of the Fireflies and later the Archies. Link Cromwell was their attempt to cash in on the popularity of Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction,” although “Crazy” barely sold a handful of copies. Kaye continued making music, forming a band called the Zoo and writing for “Rolling Stone,” “Crawdaddy” and “Fusion,” among other publications.

In the early 1970s he started playing electric guitar while his friend Patti Smith recited poetry. Eventually, the project cohered into the Patti Smith Group, which self-released its first single, “Piss Factory,” on their own Mer Records. It not only inspired the music of New York but also the business by which that music would be disseminated. Power to the people, indeed.

Perhaps even more crucially, in 1972 Kaye assembled a collection of garage-rock tunes from the 1960s, tightly wound rock anthems full of bristly defiance and angst and attitude by bands like the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, the Count Five, the Standells and the Electric Prunes. The psych explorations and hippie noodling of the late 1960s rendered that sound obsolete, but Kaye still heard something explosive and timeless in those Fuzztone guitar riffs and Farfisa organ rave-ups. He called his compilation “Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968,” and while its initial pressing wasn’t what you would call a blockbuster, the right bands heard it.

“Nuggets” was the foundation for punk rock in New York City and college rock in Athens. It was expanded in the late 1990s and fomented the garage rock revival that gave us the White Stripes, the Hives and Reigning Sound. Even today acts like Ty Segall, Royal Headache, Thee Oh Sees and Total Control owe a debt to “Nuggets.” It’s impossible to overstate the influence of that compilation, which arguably invented the concept of the reissue and possibly even the mixtape. Punk wouldn’t have existed without garage rock, and “New York, New York” wouldn’t exist without “Nuggets.”

Link Cromwell ended up on Ork because Terry Ork asked if he could reissue it—a request that reveals the influence of ‘60s garage rock on ‘70s punk.

Recently Kaye related the story to Salon: “One day Charles [Ball, who ran the business side of Ork Records] said to me, Can we put out your old ‘Crazy Like a Fox’ single? And I thought, why not? That’s how I got included in their great discography. My song is an anomaly because it’s not really from the time covered by the new Ork set.”

That certainly makes the song stand out. It connects this new punk scene with an older sound and style.

Absolutely. They all listened to “Nuggets.” In a weird way, “Nuggets” was a philosophical throwback to a time when rock ‘n’ roll was pretty open-ended and was still figuring itself out. I think that’s a good comparison to what was happening at CBGB at the time. Both were these interim periods when there are a lot of different stylistic things coming into the music and everybody’s having a good time putting them together in odd ways. So the bands that clustered around CBGB looked at the “Nuggets” album as a role model, I think. I grew up in that garage rock era, so I partook of that sense of experimentalism and excitement.

Were you surprised that “Nuggets” had so much resonance?

Well, the thing sold so few copies on its initial release! But it’s found a home among people who appreciated the spirit of the music. I suppose it was one of the templates of a kind of feeling within rock ‘n’ roll at the time that bands needed to rediscover their original motivations—why you make music in the first place. It’s not really to be professional musicians or to have a career, but to find a voice. Surely the bands on “Nuggets” and the bands at GBGB had that same spirit and were trying to return to what I call the original sin of rock ‘n’ roll. They were trying to find their own way.

Every generation seems to find “Nuggets” at a certain point, even now with the current wave of garage rock bands.

Two things about “Nuggets.” One, there is a sense of innovation and rediscovery within it. Second, it’s just great records. It’s not so much about the Fuzztone guitars and Farfisa organ as it is about these incredibly well-crafted and well-performed records. Even though they have a veneer of primitivism, they’re not as simple as they look. They’re unique. They come out of your speakers and they transcend genre. One of the things that I love about the Ork set is that it’s not as genre specific as people these days think of punk rock as being. When you say punk rock, the Ramones template comes to mind. But to me the bands on “Nuggets” were all over the place stylistically, and I think that’s true of the earlier bands at CBGB and the ones that Terry collected for his label. There are a lot of different kinds of music at work—a lot of people discovering themselves. And that’s what makes it worthy of its lavish presentation.

The Ork set definitely conveys a sense of community centered around Terry Ork, all of these bands orbiting around this very charismatic character.

It was a community. It was an underground collection of individuals who got to know each other and encouraged each other. That’s one of the things Terry was so good at—helping people become themselves. He certainly had that role in Television. He wasn’t much of a musician. He wasn’t even much of a businessman. For him to run a label was a stretch of his talent. But he took care of some of the practicalities, from finding his bands places to play to encouraging them once they got there. He was a good soul, a merry cherubic human. I never think of him as serious. When I think of him, I think of him as being somewhat mischievous.

And that seems to come through on the Ork set, even though he doesn’t play a note on it.

There was a certain playfulness, a sense of being far enough from the mainstream that you had no choice but to find your own path. All of these bands were essentially misfits, and that’s why the scene at CBGB could grow and develop unnoticed. No one was paying much attention, so people could take their time figuring out whatever new direction they wanted to follow or whatever new idiosyncrasies they wanted to adopt.

The focus is on these really intriguing bands, some of whom were caught in motion going on to the majors and some of whom would not be documented at all, like the Erasers. I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the Erasers had it not been for Ork. It’s great to hear “Little Johnny Jewel” and “Blank Generation” and to hear Richard Hell moving away from Television to his solo vision. It’s great to hear Alex Chilton between incarnations. But really, for me, hearing some of these other bands is a great thing, because otherwise they might be forgotten by rock history.

One thing about “Nuggets” is that it’s not your top-shelf groups. Maybe some of them became big, like the Standells. But a lot of them were the also-rans. That’s where I like my rock ‘n’ roll arrow of interest points—toward those bands that are off to the side. In a way they tell the tale of the scene much more than the successful bands.

I think that’s what “Nuggets” instilled in me: this idea that you didn’t have to be the Beatles to make good or important music. You could be nobodies and still have an amazing song.

Exactly. The Beatles are at such a level, they’re just the Beatles. In a weird way they’re disconnected from their times. But you listen to some of those Merseybeat bands and you get a real sense of what it was like in Liverpool at a certain moment in time. As a rock historian, I like to see the oddballs. I’m doing a little investigating into New Orleans in the late ‘50s, and I know Little Richard and Fats Domino and all those guys. But when I find a piano player like Archibald or this guy I’m really into now, Roy Montell, who has a song called “That Mellow Saxophone,” that’s really the fun stuff. In some ways they’re more revelatory and insightful that the major players in the scene.

You were in Patti Smith’s band at the time, and her first single, “Hey Joe”/”Piss Factory,” was massively influential, even from a business standpoint. Releasing it on your own Mer Records label showed that you could do this on your own and on a smaller scale.

I understood how to do it. I loved the a cappella doo wop labels that record stores in the tri-state area were doing at the time. That was where independent labels began. You don’t have a route to the major labels, so you might as well put it out yourself. It’s not so different from today when people are making their own CDs and selling them at gigs. You can see what you sound like and figure yourself out. Out little Mer Records didn’t have any other releases, because we weren’t businesspeople. It was an experiment to try to create, if nothing else, a rare record of the future.

You’ve talked about artists coming into their own at CBGB, but it sounds like you had come into your own a bit earlier than most of the people on Ork Records. Did that give you a different perspective on punk?

I was probably four or five years older than most of those people, which is enough for a generation. I did serve my rock ‘n’ roll apprenticeship in the ‘60s. I was in what would be known as a garage band, and it was called the Zoo. I played mostly on the fraternity circuit, which stretched across Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York. If you saw “Animal House,” then you saw the type of band I was in. We were playing “Shout” for 20 minutes while the fraternity brothers swam in beer. You played four sets a night. I remember when I played the Delta Kappa Epsilon house—the D Kaps, which was the football players’ house at Rutgers, where I went to school—they would give us an extra $25 if we didn’t take a break. So we were up to $125! It’s a great way to learn your craft and a good way to go through college. I always think of rock ‘n’ roll as my true major.

To play in the ‘60s, when the whole playing field was changing so radically, was amazing. My first band started at the end of ’64, and when the Zoo broke up in around ’67, there had already been quite an evolution in how the music was regarded. I think the same can be said for the early ‘70s into the late ‘70s. The whole sensibility of what rock ‘n’ roll could be and who could play it changed radically. I have to laugh when I remember when the Zoo started. There were a couple of British Invasion songs in our repertoire, but mostly it was songs like “What’d I Say” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’.” By the time we broke up, we were sitting on the floor cross-legged playing raga rock. That’s a pretty large leap. I never thought I would be continuing it after college, which is why my subsequent career is so amazing to me.

Was there a moment when you realized that you could make a career out of music?

Yeah, about a year ago. You just keep doing it until you realize you’ve made a life of it. It’s really something to have this Ork box come out. You realize what a long life it’s been. It’s quite a commemoration. I certainly didn’t see Ork Records as such a thing. It’s like somebody putting out records with your friends, people helping themselves. But now you look back and it’s really quite a body of work.

When Ork put the “Crazy Like a Fox” single out, how did it do? Did it sell particularly well?

The single has been released on so many compilation albums and has been rereleased many times, so it’s just amazing how little impact it ever makes. It’s a cool single, though. I just performed at the Ponderosa Stomp under the name Link Cromwell, and it was his first appearance in 49-and-a-half years. I’m pretty amazed by his longevity. The single has never been a hit, but it continues on. In a weird way, it’s my own tale. It’s the theme song that tells the story of my life. “While they’re working on the inside, I’m having fun on the outside.” The song gave me a sense of myself as a musician, as a performer, as someone who could be that “Crazy Like a Fox” person. And I’m grateful that Terry and Charles helped move it along its lifeline. And in retrospect, I think it’s just a good song—a tribute to my Uncle Larry, who was a great songwriter. “Speak Softly Love,” the theme from “The Godfather.” “A Time for Us” from “Romeo & Juliet.” He was a great encourager of me at a time when I needed a little bit of encouragement.

Did you ever consider “Crazy Like a Fox” for “Nuggets”?

No. I never would have been so self-serving as to put it on. In a way it’s not really a Nuggets-y song. It’s not a band coming out of nowhere. It hasn’t got a great Fuzztone guitar solo, which is probably de rigueur for “Nuggets.” But it’s still a very hooky song. I especially have an affection for the flip side, “Shock Me,” since the bass playing on it is my first instrumental appearance on record. I didn’t play on the A side, but I played bass on the B side while my uncle tootled along on harp. It ‘s just a great little slice of folk protest.

Now that you’ve dusted off Link Cromwell for Ponderosa Stomp, do you have any further plans for him?

I have no idea. Sometimes in my imagination I invent a little lifeline that Link Cromwell might have had, had that song been a hit. There would have been the lost years in the desert, and then he would have tried to stage a comeback and re-create that hit. But to be perfectly honest, I’m happy with the way things have turned out. If the song had been a chart success, my whole life would have been written differently. Everything happens for a reason.

The post Punk pioneer Lenny Kaye reflects back on “the original sin of rock ‘n’ roll” appeared first on Salon.com.