Lightning Striking: Ten Transformative Moments in Rock and Roll

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"Lightning Striking" by Lenny Kaye

Who connects the dots better than Lenny Kaye? Equal parts writer, historian and musician, he compiled the original collection of garage bands with the double album Nuggets and has collaborated as guitarist with Patti Smith since her groundbreaking career began decades ago.

Kaye is the perfect choice for time-travelogue guide. With Lightning Striking: Ten Transformative Moments in Rock and Roll, he deftly moves between the cities where 10 big bangs occurred. The American ground zeros of Cleveland, Memphis and New Orleans in the ‘50s set the stage with “Not only epic characters, but those hovering off-frame, there for the instamatic and then gone.”

After one of the biggest strikes in Liverpool, Kaye enters the slipstream himself, as an embedded participant recalling trips to San Francisco and Woodstock before writing about the loudest strike in Detroit 1969, OK? Where there was “war across the USA.” The keen observer will note MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith’s Mosrite guitar on the book’s dust jacket.

In hindsight, the natural progression to The Clash and Sex Pistols in London comes off as a tidal wave, but it’s the prior chapter that is the prize in the crackerjacks. In NYC 1975, Kaye is more than a fly on the wall. His recollections of an era that predate the metamorphosis of dive bar CBGB, are part of the very foundation that “alternative” music will be constructed.

Ever restless, the searcher in Kaye takes the reader to Los Angles and Norway where he proves genres hair- and black metals both meddle with a sound that traces its nom du rock to a William Burroughs novel. In Seattle he excavates the roots of grunge and puts faces on those who made the scene happen as well as those determined to burn out before they would fade away.