Lenny Kaye – In Person

Magic City Books and the Bob Dylan Center are proud to welcome Lenny Kaye, founding member of The Patti Smith Group, for a special lunchtime in person book event to celebrate his book, Lightning Striking, on Friday May 6.

This free event will happen in the Algonquin Room at Magic City Books at 12:00 pm on Friday May 6 as part of the opening weekend of events for the Bob Dylan Center.

Rock and roll was birthed in basements and garages, radio stations and dance halls, in cities where unexpected gatherings of artists and audience changed and charged the way music is heard and celebrated, capturing lightning in a bottle. Musician and writer Lenny Kaye explores ten crossroads of time and place that define rock and roll, its unforgettable flashpoints, characters, and visionaries; how each generation came to be; how it was discovered by the world.

Lightning Striking is available at Magic City Books or you can order a copy online, https://magiccitybooks.square.site/product/lightning-striking/744. Online orders will be shipped out after May 6 when they will be signed by Lenny Kaye.

About Lightning Striking

An insider’s take on the evolution and enduring legacy of the music that rocked the twentieth century.

Memphis 1954 • New Orleans 1957 • Philadelphia 1959 • Liverpool 1962 • San Francisco 1967 • Detroit 1969 • New York, 1975 • London 1977 • Los Angeles 1984 • Norway 1993 • Seattle 1991

Rock and roll was birthed in basements and garages, radio stations and dance halls, in cities where unexpected gatherings of artists and audience changed and charged the way music is heard and celebrated, capturing lightning in a bottle. Musician and writer Lenny Kaye explores ten crossroads of time and place that define rock and roll, its unforgettable flashpoints, characters, and visionaries; how each generation came to be; how it was discovered by the world. Whether describing Elvis Presley’s Memphis, the Beatles’ Liverpool, Patti Smith’s New York, or Kurt Cobain’s Seattle, Lightning Striking reveals the communal energy that creates a scene, a guided tour inside style and performance, to see who’s on stage, along with the movers and shakers, the hustlers and hangers-on–and why everybody is listening.

Grandly sweeping and minutely detailed, informed by Kaye’s acclaimed knowledge and experience as a working musician, Lightning Striking is an ear-opening insight into our shared musical and cultural history, a magic carpet ride of rock and roll’s most influential movements and moments.

Lenny Kaye is an American guitarist, composer, record producer, and writer, and is a founding member of Patti Smith and Her Band. In 2011, he was awarded the honor of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by le Ministre de la Culture et de la Communication of France. He was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2021.