Lenny Kaye: a brief interview about a long collaboration

INGRID SISCHY: Lenny, I wanted to talk to you because of your history with Patti, and also the work you've just done together. Tell me what bonds you to her?

LENNY KAYE: I've been standing to the left of her onstage for decades now, and I'm still amazed at how large a scope she has and at the themes she deals with, which are really the ultimate themes of life. I've always been totally honored that I could help her get her work to whatever place she wants to move it to - and I'm happy that she's doing it so forcefully now. I know of no other artist who can go to the extremes she can. She can move comfortably from total ferociousness and electric energy to the other end of the dynamic scale - to complete emptiness. With her you can hear one small note banging against the other and all the emotions in between, from incredible dissident noise to the most beautiful heart on the sleeve.

IS: That is a perfect description for the new album, and the way the record moves, beginning with major rock 'n' roll.

LK: Originally, this album was going to be like a small, intimate acoustic set grouped around Patti's newfound guitar playing, and as we started performing over the last year in a very small fashion, we kind of grew back into rock 'n' roll. And I think the thought was to address that, and to make sure that we were represented as a forthright rock band as well as everything else that we are.

Essentially, if you strip away all the other stuff, we are a rock band. But because we start generally from so far off the mark, getting to rock 'n' roll is a kind of journey in itself. Patti likes to find her way there on her own terms. Being a rock band doesn't mean that you can't bring it back, that you can't sit down and really quiet it. Chiaroscuro, I call it - you know, that light and dark, that whole sense of dynamics.

IS: In actual fact, the new album defies categorization. I heard folk, I heard country, I heard poetry, I heard what I can only call classical beauty. In other words, I heard stuff that's bigger than any one genre. There are no gates to keep people out.

LK: To me, one of the things that has always gotten Patti across as a poet is the fact that she speaks the language of the people. You don't have to fight to understand her poems, as one often has to with poetry. I think one of Patti's gifts is the fact that she does articulate a lot of people's deepest longings, and I hope we've done that as a band, too. When we were performing earlier this year, a reviewer referred to us as a bar band, because they didn't like the fact we did these cover versions of "Wicked Messenger," or whatever. And I thought, We are a bar band. That, to me, is highly elevated. Because what else are we doing but going down on a Friday or Saturday night and helping to bring people out of their world, into the world of dark, light, and insight? That's why artists were invented: to really speak to these deep things rolling around and to people's fears of the great unknown - which is death - and to reconcile that with the beauty of life.

IS: I can't remember where it is on the record, but there's a song where you can hear this incredibly optimistic tinkling sound - like a tinkling of possibilities.

LK: Patti believes in that. She's never really had a different message. You know, from her song "Land" on the album Horses - "Dip into the sea of possibilities." She believes in human possibility and extraterrestrial potential. Patti had a very difficult childhood. She felt like an alien being dropped down and she looked for her way out. She found it, in poets and artists, in the same way that people find hope in her music. It's a great circle, isn't it? We've never hesitated to pay tribute to those who've given us inspiration. We used to have a little phrase for it. I don't remember where it even came from, but it goes: "The guardians of history are soon rewarded with history themselves."

IS: What do you think of this word comeback?

LK: I don't think of us as "coming back" because we never really stopped working. I've been making records for the fifteen years that I wasn't with Patti, and she certainly worked with her husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith, unceasingly, as well as doing her own work all along.

You know, in this world there's too much stuff to absorb. You go to a bookstore, there's a hundred-thousand volumes, of which at least fifty thousand are great. You go to a record store, you can't possibly even keep up with the records. So if you have something to say, let it be important, and wait until the right time. Don't waste time filling in the gaps in your shallow periods. Sometimes it's better just to get out of it for a while.

IS: How many records have you made together?

LK: Six - from 1974 to this new one. We made a single in 1974 that Robert Mapplethorpe funded. It was our attempt to go into the studio and figure out what the heck we were about and to see whether the interest that we felt in the audience's attention could be translated onto record. So we recorded "Piss Factory" and a version of "Hey Joe" at Electric Ladyland. Making "Gone Again" at Electric Ladyland over twenty years later was a kind of spiritual coming home for us. The studio looks considerably different now, but we felt a certain comfort in returning full circle to where we started. Our record before this one was Wave in 1979. If you listen to the song "Frederick" you hear a person saying goodbye. "Bye-bye, hey hey / Maybe I will come back someday / But till then, on the wings of a dove / Up above to the land of love." Patti had known Fred since our Horses tour. We met him in Detroit, and from the moment they met, that was it. She moved to Detroit to be with him, and the group had done pretty much what we'd set out to do. We'd maintained our ideals, we'd toured the world, we'd done our share of inspiring, and received our share of inspiration. And when it came to the time that we were going to become a human jukebox and go out and make money off our hits, we had the sense to knock it on the head. Patti might have knocked it on the head a few months before we might have, but it seemed almost inevitable. It was time to go see what we could do on our own - all of us. Maybe it wasn't easy - after working so hard to build something up, you felt a certain sense of loss. But for me, there was never a time when I thought, What if?