Lenny Kaye - Lightning Striking: Ten Transformative Moments in Rock and Roll

For Rylan and Emmet

My Rock and My Roll

Lightning is striking

Again and again and again and again

LOU CHRISTIE

I WAS BORN WITH ROCK AND ROLL.

One of my earliest memories is hearing Little Richards Tutti Frutti over the radio in our Brooklyn apartment, rolling on the floor in uncontrollable laughter and joy in its infectious, unbridled release and madness.

I grew up with rock and roll.

The music marks each stage of my awareness, a life lived in parallel with its intimations of immortality. It has charged and challenged the way I perceive and understand the world about me, continuously renewing vows taken at the junction where the spark of a vibrating guitar string jumps the gap to a magnetic pickup and becomes electricity.

I grow old with rock and roll, traversing its leap to faith over a lifetime spent in quest of Spinal Taps mystical 11, turning it uppermost.

The odds of being struck by lightning are 300,000 to 1. I think thats an underestimate. Ive been struck by lightning many a time, many a place.

* * *

EVERYWHERE MAKES MUSIC. Everywhen makes music. But where and when space and time align, undercurrents spinning into whirlpools, stars binarying, trends signifying and amplifying, a mile marker notches the road map of musical cartography. An energy locus. In these key moments, each with its inner dynamics and outer radiances, flashpoints irradiate station and crossroad, border and bridge, the beginning of again.

Lightning Striking traces rock and rolls geographic and temporal journey, its kulturati impact and shifts in style and identity, as it moves from epicenter to epicenter, the stopovers where music evolves and renews, distinct with elements of chance, cunning, inspired personalities, major players, hustlers, and bystanders.

The impulse to convert sound waves and microtones into repeatable scales, a heartbeat into recognizable rhythms, at times adding word-based lyrics or singing beyond lyrics, defines cities of ethni- and filters emotions. Music accompanies, commemorates, backtracks, and soundtracks, fills silence in the air, and moves us consciously or unconsciously whether were listening or not. Shapes of sounds, how theyre made, their tonal quality, the instruments chosen to express, the blend of different sources and the way an octave splits its defining notes; this belongs to the moment. As Lerner and Lowe put it in their ode to dimensional mating, Who Knows Where or When.

Each time and place, no matter how unique, offers a similar narrative of invention and diaspora on the way to mutation. There is an onrush of accidental-on-purpose discovery, of insular triumph, and then archetype, after which decadence. Like the moral fable of empires, this ebb and flow spirals a staircase ascending or descending, depending on taste and circumstance. Musical generations usually have a life span of half a decade, with most of the action happening in the terrible twos. Catch em while you can.

These conflagrations usually begin as a consequence from what came before; reactively predicated. Old guard, new guard, each feeling theyre the guard dogs of future past. Nineteen seventies Nashville countrypolitan, with its sleek strings and carefully contained contraries, schisms into outlaw country; the pole-dance of 1980s hair metal gives way to shambolic grunge in the 1990s. Does rock and roll even exist anymore or is it a continuum of revival?

Within each scenario, musically inclined characters intermingle, form alliances, give each other encouragement and head, dream up a mood and performance that reflects cultish identifiers, garb and gadget, guitar tone and preferred aphrodisiac; and gathers a like-minded audience. Those onstage mirror those off, evening the odds. The moment calls forth a mood-swing pendulum hardening into definable style, eventually becoming the clich that will mark it in the future, even though its still a-borning. Outlanders and immigrants infiltrate hit charts as they step into the spotlight, planting seeds of demise in their ascendance.

Change never arrives unbidden. Mainstream and substrata inextricably mix, helped along by wild-card prophets and profiteers, who sometimes cant stop long enough to realize what theyre doing, or realize it all too well, understanding after the fact.

Most social histories, this one included, usually work from the top down, the visionary artists who embody transformation. Brian Eno, speaking at the Sydney Luminous Festival in 2009, upends this concept with what he calls scenius,... the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of genius. He adds, Lets forget the idea of genius... lets think about the whole ecology of ideas that give rise to good new thoughts and good new work. Not only epic characters, but those hovering off-frame, there for the instamatic and then gone.

* * *

WISHING I COULD BE THERE.

Ive always been drawn to a scene, its shared togetherness, its come-hither weave, its stars, its character actors and bit players. To feel the adrenaline rush of excitement and possibility as convergence coalesces into where-its-at. What was it like on Fifty-Second Street in Manhattan, when jazz clubs lined the block in the late 1940s, and the high-flying sounds of bebop came out of the Onyx and the Three Deuces; or when, after hours, the goateed gang would gather at the Baroness Nica de Koenigswarters suite at the Stanhope Hotel and she would ask them their three wishes. How did it feel carrying an acoustic guitar along that much hitchhiked song-and-cinema intersection of Bleecker and MacDougal in the folk sixties? The somethings happening here that Buffalo Springfield caught in the air when Los Angeles rioted on the Sunset Strip? Or more revealing to my own lifeline, what was it like tripping in San Francisco on that New Years Eve ushering in 1967, when the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver Messenger Service headlined the Fillmore. The poster on my New Jersey wall from that show, bought at an East Village psychedelic shop, made me want to journey there, to see its beacon firsthand.

Then, as luck and the alignment of the stars would have it, I entered my own scene, which centered on CBGB, a small Bowery bar in Manhattan in the mid-seventies, and became the place Id always wished Id be.

What was it like? The had-to-be of there. To play your part. Going somewhere as it meets arrival, crossing the porous border between past and future when music is remade in its own image.

* * *

BY THEN, EVERYONE IS BEMOANING shoulda-been-here-when. When it was only spending the night at the local, cold beer, importuning, watching who cavorts in front of you. At the Cavern, the Grande, CBGB, the Roxy, other stations of my particular cross to bear. My route chosen; or did my route choose me, from the music I learned to play, the space-time crossroads where I grew up, when I came of age, race-religion-gender, my fault lines and high times, the reveal of who Id be. Definitions define limit, Mayo of the Red Krayola taught me on The Parable of Arable Land in 1967, all my yet ahead. I identify rock and roll when asked, but thats just ancestry. I sing all kinds, as Elvis will say in a couple of pages.

You cant be everywhere at once. Sometimes it doesnt matter if youre there or not. Kool Herc on a Bronx playground, Fugazi at D.C.s 9:30 Club, Green Day at Gilman Street, that Happy Mondays all-nighter at the Hacienda in Manchester; Lagos, Kingston, Koln. Maybe next pilgrimage. There is always refraction, heard and misheard from afar.

You, making a loud noise in the night.

A strobe of incandescent bolt.