'Music belongs to the moment': Patti Smith's guitarist Lenny Kaye is 'Goin' Local'

Lenny Kaye has been Patti Smith's guitarist since their early days, when he was a rock critic, and she was doing poetry readings.Bob Gruen/Shore Fire Media hide caption Lenny Kaye has been Patti Smith's guitarist since the early days, when he was a rock critic, and she was doing poetry readings.

It all started in 1971, he says: "I went over to the loft where she was living with Robert Mapplethorpe and she read me her poems and I just kind of put some rhythmic energy behind the poems....

It was not meant to be anything."Kaye remembers New York City at that time as a hotbed of artistic creativity."Theater, film, you name it.

In that little 10-block circuit of the East Village, so much was happening," he says."We didn't have a band for another three years.

We developed organically, and that to me is what made us so special.We sounded like ourselves by the time we had all the pieces of a real band."Kaye's collaboration with Smith continues to this day.

He credits Smith with teaching him to trust his musical sensibilities — and to always keep evolving."You have to keep moving forward, you have to be true to your art.

You can't be blinded by fame or money," he says.Now 79, Kaye is releasing his first solo album on July 17.

He says the songs on Goin' Local offer a snapshot of his musical consciousness: "I do a lot of things, and a lot of times I kind of duck into somebody else's soundscape.But I thought it was time for me to really understand who I am as an artist."As for the album's title, that reflects Kaye's love of local music: "Music happens in the local and then sometimes the world discovers it.

And I love that pattern and evolution of how music happens totally at the grassroots, one-on-one, and then perhaps gets figured out." Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye perform at an event at the Brooklyn Public Library in New York, May...