Back again

No surprise that Kaye had originally come to Smith's attention through an essay he'd written for Jazz and Pop magazine on the evolution of doo-wop. That piece, reprinted in The Penguin Book of Rock & Roll Writing, explores the ways in which music creates culture rather than culture's role in creating music, reversing the usual tack of the musicologist. Kaye went on to demonstrate that process in action, not just by making culture-forming music with Smith, but by compiling lost gems from the previous decade of American proto-punk psychedelic garage rock on the two-LP Nuggets compilation that Elektra issued in 1972. You could hear the impact of Nuggets reflected in the attitude of punk's Ramones-led first wave, then trace its development up through the mid '80s, when it launched a full-scale underground revival of retro-punk rock.

Kaye went on to play guitar with another poet turned rocker, Jim Carroll, on Carroll's 1983 album I Write Your Name (Atlantic) and subsequent tour. After that he moved into producing, manning the board for Soul Asylum's underrated major-label debut Hang Time (A&M) and Kristin Hersh's beguiling solo release Hips and Makers (4AD) and most recently co-producing Patti Smith's new Gone Again (Arista, due in stores June 18). He's also back playing guitar with Smith, who comes to Great Woods this Saturday, along with original Patti Smith Group drummer Jay Dee Daugherty. After the Great Woods show Kaye will bring Daugherty and bassist Tony Shanahan over to one of his favorite Boston-area haunts ("It's got the best jukebox," he says), the Green Street Grill in Central Square, for a little post-gig club set.

Over the phone from his Manhattan apartment, just across the street from CBGB's, Kaye discussed the past, present, and future of the music that's defined his life and culture. Here's some of what he had to say.

Q: It must feel good to have the Patti Smith Group back together again.

A: It's not back together by any stretch of the imagination. The Patti Smith Group was a band that existed in the '70s. This is more like Patti solo, though it's certainly a new gathering of people. There are some elements of the past, but we have no desire to repeat what the Patti Smith Group did in the '70s. I'm not unaware that part of what's driving our engine at the moment is the sense of punk revival. But we're not in that place now, even if it seems like a fairly simple equation.

Q: The mainstream interest in all things punk is not necessarily a bad thing for Patti Smith.

A: It's not a bad thing for a lot of people. But the original punk, out of New York, had about as much to do with Rancid and Green Day as Lionel Richie. Bands like Blondie and the Talking Heads were called punk because it was an easy term to use. But they were all very different. The thing that's punk about what's happening now is that there are so many bands. I don't know what it's like in Boston, but I know that you open up the Village Voice and every club has five or six bands every night, none of whom you have ever heard of. There is a lot of musical ferment. That is all I really care about. I like action. That's was our whole thing when we started the Patti Smith Group. We didn't want anyone to sound like us. We didn't even know what we sounded like. We just wanted rock and roll to keep going.

Q: Well, there are elements of Gone Again that seem to suggest a certain continuity with that era, don't you think?

A: People can say that but I think they are underestimating the depth of feeling that Patti embodies as an artist. You know, when an artist is in it for life, as I believe Patti is, their work takes many different forms. To me, there's a vast difference between the work we did in the '70s -- our attitudes, our mode of attack, our sense of ourselves -- and the things we are doing now. But I don't dwell on the differences or the similarities. It's like a house of cards. You can't take any cards out of the middle and hope that the ones on the top will balance.

Q: Obviously people change and, one hopes, mature as they get older and better at their craft, but what are the specific changes that you see in yourself and Patti?

A: We are less combative, though I don't think we've really mellowed or stepped back from the work that we do. Rock and roll is traditionally a youth-driven medium. But I believe it's like the blues, where you don't learn how to really play until you've been doing it for 25 years. Trying to recapture your spark of youth is a futile thing. The whole point of this exercise is to grow. So I'm not nostalgic at all. I love the past. I pay tribute to the past. But I have no desire to walk across the street and be in CBGB's in 1976. I've been there. It's like Nuggets. People are always coming up to me and saying, "Oh man, here's my garage band." Well, sorry, but I was in a garage band once. I know what that's like. The whole point of doing a piece of art is to step out into territory where you don't know what's going to happen next, where you challenge yourself.

Q: I read a review you wrote of Green Day's Insomniac last year and I liked the way you equated punk with the blues. How does that apply to an artist like Patti or yourself?

A: We've resisted form because we don't really fit any place. We were kind of a punk-rock group in some respects, but we also slowed things down. We also had songs, if you can call them songs, like "Radio Ethiopia" that were not punk rock. They were more like free jazz. We liked reggae, we liked '50s doo-wop ballads. You name the genre and we've probably planted our feet in it somewhere. On Gone Again you will hear all of the places we've been musically: hard rock, noise, agitation, and then incredible beauty. Soft songs that wear their heart on their sleeve. There's even an Appalachian folk song in there.

Q: It is interesting to hear that coming from the person whom a lot of people credit with outlining the dimensions of '60s garage with Nuggets.

A: The thing I like most about the Nuggets bands, aside from the fact that I was in one when I was a teenager, is the sense of desire they embody, the feeling of "I want to be in a rock-and-roll band." That's why I go across the street to CB's four or five nights a week. I know two chances out of three that there is going to be some maniac person up there living out their idea of rock and roll. I like the sense of yearning that I hear in those bands. Looked at musically, some of them are not that great. The Count Five never grew. The Seeds had one song and that was it. But they loved the music.

I had to learn that lesson for myself in the '80s. I had a band called the Lenny Kaye Connection, I really worked hard to get a deal, and for whatever reason I was never in the right place at the right time. It depressed me and I stopped playing for a while. I did get into record production, which is certainly an honorable field. Then, around the turn of the '90s, Tony Shanahan, who is the bass player with Patti, invited me to a weekly jam session that he was running in my hometown of New Brunswick, New Jersey. So I'd leave CB's where some band, Anyband USA, was hoping some A&R person was going to come discover them, and head to New Brunswick, where I'd play for two, three hours. And suddenly I remembered why I started playing in the first place.

Q: It's easy to lose sight of that.

A: Exactly. It's easy to get sucked into all the ephemeral stuff and forget really what turns you on the most is turning that amplifier up and having that guitar tuned, or not so in tune, and hitting a chord and all of a sudden you can feel that feedback start to move right in front of you. It's like plugging into a wall socket.

Q: What did you think of the garage-band revival that Nuggets sparked in the '80s?

A: What I like about revivals is when the bands think they're going back to something, but they get it really different. It's like that game telephone, somebody repeats what somebody else says and after a while the bands think they're saying the original thing, but it's really twisted out of proportion. Like the Rolling Stones take on the blues. I thought the garage revival didn't do enough of that. There are a lot of different styles within the Nuggets thing, but as the revival started it got a little stratified.

Q: Do you think it had an influence on contemporary alternative rock?

A: Oh yeah, to me, the whole Seattle thing was just a revival of the Sonics doing "Strychnine."

Q: I re-read your essay on doo-wop recently and realized that if you replaced "vocals" with "guitar" and "doo-wop" with "indie rock," you'd still have a coherent story.

A: Yeah, and if you changed "vocal groups" to "guitar bands" and the locale from the street corner to the garage, then you'd have the story of Nuggets. It's that same impulse of people wanting to turn their lives into song. And I hate to say it, but it's also my story. I was just some mutated kid who liked beatniks, growing up in the middle of New Jersey. If rock and roll hadn't come along, I probably would have been in one of those doo-wop groups. These stories happen all the time, in any town that you go to. And sometimes the towns that are furthest from the stream.

Q: Isn't that what's happened in towns like Athens, Minneapolis, Chapel Hill, and Seattle over the past decade?

A: Exactly, and there you get that crossing of genres, which I love, because then the mutation happens. That's really important to us as a band. In the course of a live performance we can go from total ferocity to hearing the head of a pin dropping on top of a ride cymbal. I like the fact that as a band our personality is ever shifting. I'll always love Patti's phrase about that. She says that "progress isn't the future, it's keeping up with the present."