Featured Conversation: Interview: Guitarist Lenny Kaye

Published on Jul 14, 2026

IHTOV is pleased to publish this interview regular contributor Joey Corey did with the incredible Lenny Kaye. 

Lenny Kaye might hold the world record for the longest time between his first solo single and the arrival of his first solo album (non-compilation). Over 60 years ago he sang “Crazy Like A Fox” as Link Cromwell on a 45 and his Goin’ Local LP arrives at record stores on July 17th via Yep Roc Records. 

Why the gap? Lenny’s been rather prolific in other ways over the decades. He was a renowned rock journalist in the ‘70s. He curated the seminal Garage Rock anthology Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968. He was part of the early days of punk rock as the guitarist for The Patti Smith Group. He also joined The Jim Carroll Band. He guested on R.E.M.’s Collapse Into Now album. He was a producer for numerous bands including Suzanne Vega’s first two records. He collaborated with Waylon Jennings on Waylon: An Autobiography. His book Lightning Striking: Ten Transformative Moments pinpoints major events in the history of rock music. Most importantly, Monday and Tuesday nights Lenny is the DJ inside the Subterranean Basement of Little Steven’s Underground Garage on Sirius XM. 

Back in 2024, I met Lenny Kaye at the School Kids Records in Raleigh for Record Store Day. He performed on the small stage and signed copies of Lenny Kaye & Friends: Live At The Cat’s Cradle A 50th Anniversary Celebration of Nuggets. It was a vinyl souvenir of the evening he shared classic garage rock tunes with plenty of pals including Peter Buck, Mitch Easter, Don Dixon, Alejandro Escovedo, Steve Wynn and Jeffro Holshouser of Hank Sinatra. Lenny and I spoke for a bit that day. At one point he mentioned he wasn’t sure what he was going to do when he was done travelling around the world celebrating the 50th anniversary of Nuggets with other musical legends. I told him he’d definitely find something. Which he did in the form of Goin’ Local.

Lenny returned to the Triangle in June to be part of Dexfest 2026 at Cat’s Cradle along with the Bad Checks, The Pylon Recreation Society, David J. of Bauhaus and others. This was the second annual concert paying tribute to the late Dexter Romweber of The Flat Duo Jets. Lenny Kaye performed several of the new songs from the album solo and then had a few friends join him on stage. This included Jeffro Holshouser and the rest of Hank Sinatra for a rousing new arrangement of “Crazy Like A Fox” and an astounding mash up of The Box Top’s The Letter” and The Velvet Underground’s “Run Run Run.”

After his set, Lenny Kaye graciously sat down outside the club with me for a few questions about Goin’ Local. I reminded him of our chat at Record Store Day when he wasn’t sure of his next project. “When did you decide, ‘I’m going to make a full-length record’?” I asked.

“I’ve been deciding it for a while. I have these songs, some of them go back like 15 or 20 years, so I just thought it’s time to have some artistic closure. Simple as that,  I like the songs.”

Goin’ Local has him working with a variety of musicians and not putting together a band. His fellow Patti Smith and Her Band member, Tony Shanahan co-produced and played bass on several tracks. Patti Smith Group drummer Jay Dee Daugherty joined for a song. Patti Smith co-wrote  Even with all his experiences with major label bands, Lenny has never been a music industry insider.

“I don’t understand the music business that well, so I don’t know how things get out there,” Lenny admitted. “I’m certainly not looking to have a, quote, hit. I’m just doing it really for my own sense of satisfaction and creativity.”

He did find a label with Yep Roc Records. They have released albums by Nick Lowe, Steep County Rangers and his old CBGB stagemates The Fleshtones. Lenny has been performing dates with labelmates Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. He’s enjoying the experiences.

“I like the fact that I have had a long tenure in the world of music, and I feel in a great way that it’s like I have a future, you know? I feel like a new artist, and that’s kind of an exciting thing at this juncture in my life. Is it interesting at this juncture to say, ‘I have a label?’ I love having a label. It really helps get things finished.”

The night of the show, Yep Roc (which is based in nearby Hillsborough, NC) brought over a few vinyl copies for Lenny to sign and sell at the merch table. I immediately bought a copy. The record is pressed with a mix of white and light blue vinyl. The record reminded me of a Moving Sand Art Picture toy that you rotated to make a beautiful image.

I asked him what it meant to actually see it and hold it on vinyl.

“I don’t care what storage medium it is. It’s completed. I like vinyl because the packaging is more magnetic. CDs sound pretty good these days. I just like having this record finished. I have to hand it to Yep Roc for giving me encouragement, telling me you want to put it out, because I’ve never had a record label behind me. So it’s like, yeah.”

The packaging features a front cover photo of Lenny taken by Bob Gruen. If you Google the two men, you’ll see that Bob has been taking photos of Lenny since the ‘70s when the Patti Smith Group formed. What was it like to work with Bob Gruen for his first album cover? 

“We’re really old friends,” Lenny said. “We’ve been hanging out on the local scene for 50 years…more than that. So there’s a real little rapport that we go into. We know each other. It’s just very loose. It’s not like a lot of planning the shot. It’s just like, okay, stand there, point and shoot, next. You’re hanging. So it was a good.”

Gruen’s portrait of Lenny is worked into a vintage photo of old New York City for the cover art. 

“I mean, the record cover does look great,” Lenny proclaimed. “It’s a really good idea, and like I said, I lived in one of those buildings 100 years later.”

Many of the songs inside the record jacket have a bit of a folk rock feel to them. His voice is soft in the delivery to give an intimacy to so many of the tracks.

“World Book Night” is a sweet song about the joy of reading and sharing the words. This song is perfect for anyone who needs a theme to their book oriented podcast. The lyrics about literary passion make perfect sense to hear from Lenny since he’s a published writer of quite a few tomes. What inspired “World Book Night"? 

“There was a holiday. I don’t know what it was, but book publishers had this thing called World Book Night,” Lenny said. “They gave out books for free to volunteers who would fan out across the city and give them out at subway stations. They’d go to the beach and just give them out randomly. And I thought that was a beautiful kind of concept. And so, I wrote the song. It’s not so much about that as about the beauty of all the many genres of books and all the places they open up in our intellect, in our culture.”

“I like books,” Lenny admitted. “When I go on the road, what I do first is go to the bookstore or the record store. I mean, it’s one of those things where you figure out how much you can grab. These days I’m very cautious about adding to my piles, so I haven’t done anything here, and I probably won’t.”

Both of us relate to getting older and wondering what happens to the record and book collection that we’ve passionately accumulated. “That’s why I have a song called ‘The Things You Leave Behind’,” Lenny reminded me. The song captures the anxious sentiment of how your collection will end up when you are gone. When he played the song two years ago at Record Store Day, he asked my daughter if she was going to keep my albums. She swore she wasn’t going to sell everything. 

As we sit outside the Cradle, I bring up Jula, a woman who has been listening to her late father’s 10,000 albums with short videos on various social media sites. I hope that my daughter might duplicate Jula’s journey through the vinyl in my record cabinet. 

“Well, I’m pretty sure my daughter won’t,” Lenny said, “But that’s not to say that my grandkids won’t.”

I can only imagine the massive collection he’s acquired. His grandkids will be overwhelmed by his platters that matter including his new one 

The album opens with the rocking title track “Goin’ Local.” Hopefully his boss Little Steven will rightly declare the track the Coolest Song In the World for the Underground Garage. The song seems to be finding hideaways for a special kind of rendezvouses. 

“What do you feel like you’re local to?” I ask.

“I’m kind of local to the places I live,” Lenny answered. “In the East Side and out in Pennsylvania. And both of them are pictured on my record. The front is on the Lower East Side, where I’ve lived for a while, and the back cover is where I live in Pennsylvania now.”

We didn’t have the time to talk about the song “Yes I Will.” But after reading the record’s press release; a few things need to be mentioned. The song brings him back to his Link Cromwell beginnings. “Crazy Like A Fox” was written by his uncle, Larry Kusik. Like his nephew who became part of a musical sensation, Kusik went on to write the lyrics for “A Time for Us,” the Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet and the Oscar nominated “Speak Softly Love,” the Love Theme from The Godfather. Lenny wanted to collaborate with his uncle once more. Kusik wrote the lyrics to “Yes I Will” while suffering serious health issues. Lenny put music to the lyrics and sang it to his uncle. The next day, his uncle passed. Lenny’s uncle truly wrote one last Love Theme for us all to enjoy.

Unlike our conversation back in 2024, Lenny Kaye knows exactly what he’s going to be doing after Goin’ Local.  

“I’m already starting another record,” Lenny said. “This one, I spent the last year and a half finishing it. Now it’s time to move forward. I have another four songs in the hopper, a couple songs left over that I haven’t addressed, and I’m just having a good time at this point. I have nothing to prove, so I can just do it from my own sense of bemusement.”

He’s also working on a completely different album. 

“I also have another band, they’re called The Drift,” Lenny declared. “I call them a goth-psych jam band. It’s me and two other guys, the drummer’s into Rush, and the bass player’s into industrial music, and then there’s me. It’s a heavier, darker version of what I do, and I have eight songs recorded so far, and we’ve got another two in the practice room. So I’ll finish that probably next.”

He also has a third release on the closer horizon. During the Spring, he went into the studio with Hank Sinatra and recorded “Crazy Like A Fox.” The plan is for the single to be released as part of the Black Friday Record Store Day in November.  

“The original “Crazy Like a Fox” on one side, and the Hank Sinatra’s version on the other,” he announced.

I asked if the original “Crazy Like A Fox” had a B-side? 

“Yes, there was, It was called ‘Shock Me’.” Lenny began to sing, “‘You say you’ve got the kind of love you’re talking about, so come on baby, show me what you’re putting out.’ I played bass on it. It was the first time I was ever on a record. You know, my uncle wrote it, it was a quickie B-side, but there are some people who are fans of that one more than “Crazy Like the Fox.”

It seemed a bit strange talking about a single that never happened with a guy who was part of major hits. He played guitar on “Because the Night” and was a producer on “Luka.” But “Crazy Like A Fox” is part of Lenny’s life with lines that came to describe him. “There seems to be a common thread, as you saw tonight,” Lenny said. “That song, in a weird way, it defines my life, surprisingly enough. Even though, who knew?”

I was curious if during the CBGB era; did anyone know about Link Cromwell? 

“People knew about it,” Lenny admitted. “I mean, I didn’t advertise it, but they reissued it in 1976 on Ork Records (the original home of Television). For a record that wasn’t a hit, it’s had like three or four different editions. Norton Records put it out. It just keeps on keeping on, much to my surprise.”

“Were you happy that you could put it on the Nuggets boxset, too?” I asked.

“Damn right,” Lenny declared. “It deserved to be there. Link Cromwell deserved his place in the sun.”

After six decades, Lenny Kaye also gets his solo place in the sun with Goin’ Local.

Joe Corey III is part of the Casino Audiophiles. He also recently released his book ‘80s Teen Flick Festival: Deep Cuts, a fictional movie festival that mutates into a memoir of his life during the decade. The book includes the night Dexter Romweber told him about The Cramps.