Lenny Kaye & the Jay Vons – LOUIE of the Week

In the world of garage rock musicologists, many of us think of Lenny Kaye as a virtual GOD. He’s had a remarkable career as a musician, producer, and journalist. In 1972, he assembled NUGGETS- one of the first, and certainly one of most influential anthologies to document mid-60s American garage rock.

Steve Huey provided a nice one paragraph introduction of Lenny over at AllMusic.com:

Wearing the hats of critic, musician, compiler, and producer over the course of his long career, Lenny Kaye is an undervalued contributor to the genesis of punk rock. As guitarist of the Patti Smith Group, Kaye’s primitivist noise and capacity for loosely structured improvisation made him the perfect accompanist for punk pioneer Smith’s earthy free-verse poetry. With his work assembling and annotating Nuggets, the seminal double-LP compilation of ’60s garage rock and psychedelia, Kaye also united and codified a musical movement that had mostly slipped under the radar, and exerted a powerful influence on punk and its back-to-basics, D.I.Y. spirit.

It was very nice to find a recent YouTube clip of Lenny doing THE SONG, backed by the Jay Vons at Otto’s Shrunken Head during a “Copy Cat Night.”

It shall be this week’s LOUIE!

Thank you again, Lenny!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8J11kbuQTE

Here’s a second angle from the show!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dxm1H23ptQ4

Share some love at Lenny’s website at
LennyKaye.com