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White Rabbit snares Lenny Kaye's 'shared musical and cultural history'
White Rabbit will publish Lenny Kaye's “carpet ride of rock 'n' roll’s most influential movements and moments”.
Lee Brackstone, publisher at the Orion imprint, has acquired UK and Commonwealth rights in Lightning Striking from Caspian Dennis at Abner Stein.
Kaye is an American guitarist, composer, record producer and writer, and is a founding member of Patti Smith and Her Band.
Lightning Striking will be published by White Rabbit on 16th November 2021 in hardback, export trade paperback, e-book and audio. It will be published by Hachette US on the same day.
The publisher said: “Musician and writer Lenny Kaye explores 10 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 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 carpet ride of rock 'n' roll’s most influential movements and moments.”
Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream has called the book “a true testimonial and epic love letter to the soul saving power of rock 'n' roll”.
Brackstone said: “If rock 'n' roll is a religion, this is the Gospel of Lenny Kaye: witness, participant, evangelist. The man responsible for the 'Original Artyfacts' [Kaye 's original 1972 compilation of psychedelic and garage rock] infuses the story of the most radical 20th-century artform with romance and mythology and the result is a book that I, and I am sure many others, will revisit, reference and wonder at for the rest of our days.”
Kaye said: “I sure enjoyed my grand tour of rock’s holy sites, and I hope you do as well. I was privileged to travel down these many rabbit holes, just like the White Rabbit, and Lee Brackstone was encouraging, knowledgeable, and an inspirational editor to see the rhythm and melody of my words through his eyes.”
