Lightning Striking
Ten Transformative Moments in Rock and Roll
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- ¥2,000
Publisher Description
“We have performed side-by-side on the global stage through half a century…. In Lightning Striking, Lenny Kaye has illuminated ten facets of the jewel called rock and roll from a uniquely personal and knowledgeable perspective.”
–Patti Smith
An insider’s take on the evolution and enduring legacy of the music that rocked the twentieth century
Memphis 1954. New Orleans 1957. Philadelphia 1959. Liverpool 1962. San Francisco 1967. Detroit 1969. New York, 1975. London 1977. Los Angeles 1984 / Norway 1993. Seattle 1991.
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. Musician and writer Lenny Kaye explores ten crossroads of time and place that define rock and roll, its unforgettable flashpoints, characters, and visionaries; how each generation came to be; how it was discovered by the world. Whether describing 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 magic carpet ride of rock and roll’s most influential movements and moments.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kaye (You Call It Madness), longtime guitarist of the Patti Smith Group, delivers his magnum opus, a rollicking tour through rock and roll history. He traces rock's "geographic and temporal journey" by looking at key moments in different locations—from Memphis to Liverpool and London—where, he writes, "elements of chance, cunning, inspired personalities... and bystanders" transformed the genre. He whisks readers back to Alan Freed's "raucous" 1952 Moondog Coronation Ball in Cleveland, which pumped out "original r&b hits before they made over by white artists"; highlights the many British Beat groups spawned by the Cavern Club in Liverpool in 1962; drifts through San Francisco's Summer of Love in 1967, when the Grateful Dead played to a sea of spectators hopped up on "cotton candy, corn dogs, LSD"; and explores the evolution of sounds in the 1990s in the "bucolic fishing town" of Bergen, Norway, "the nexus of black metal's most notorious incidents." Touching on a dizzying array of famous and obscure musicians, bars, and clubs—and injecting the narrative with his own vivid memories of playing in such legendary places as Manhattan's CBGB—Kaye brilliantly captures the ecstasy of what it was like to be there, or, as he puts it, "the had-to-be of there." This memorable history is electrifying.
