At 79, Lenny Kaye isn’t the oldest artist to make a debut album (that honour goes to Sun Ra Arkestra’s Marshall Allen at a sprightly 100 years old) but Kaye may be the individual with the most varied musical reach to take his sweet time in producing a solo album.
By the time he took up the role for which he is best known, as Patti Smith’s guitar-wielding co-pilot, he had already dabbled in the college fraternity gig circuit (where he first covered “Gloria”), released protest song “Crazy Like a Fox” (using the alias Link Cromwell), forged a career as a music writer for august journals Rolling Stone, Jazz & Pop, Crawdaddy and Melody Maker, and was there or thereabouts when Creem editor Dave Marsh first coined the term “punk rock”.