Lenny Kravitz Looks Back on His Four-Decade Career, Being ‘Chewed Out by Robert Plant’ and His Star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame
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Mid-day on a Friday not long ago found Lenny Kravitz sitting cross-legged on a couch. He was wearing jeans and a mostly unbuttoned denim shirt (naturally) and was barefoot (again, naturally) and he was perched beneath a canvas giving Basquiat vibes, though he didn’t know the name of the artist who’d painted it — he was staying at a friend’s house.
Kravitz — who’ll receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on March 12 and release his 12th album, “Blue Electric Light,” on May 24, just two days before his 60th birthday — owns a townhouse in the 16th arrondissement of Paris (there’s a Basquiat in the entrance hall and a strict no-shoe policy), as well as a nearly 1,000-acre former coffee plantation outside of Rio de Janeiro, and a haven on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera (he’s said the first thing he does when he gets there is shed his shoes). But friends’ houses have figured heavily in his life since he was 16, when he threw some things in a duffel bag and left his parents’ Los Angeles home in order to go see a Buddy Rich concert rather than be grounded by his disciplinarian dad. In those days, when there wasn’t a couch to surf he slept in a Ford Pinto he rented for $4.99 a day.
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Kravitz recalls all this and much more in his 2020 memoir, written with David Ritz and titled, like his 1989 debut album, “Let Love Rule.” The book starts with a recurring childhood nightmare and ends with a dream realized: Kravitz at 25, married to Lisa Bonet and father to baby Zoe, having finally found his way musically and releasing that first album. In striking detail he recounts his encounters with musical inspiration: a Jackson 5 concert at Madison Square Garden at age six, when Aretha Franklin swept by him in the audience dressed in white mink; a Los Angeles afternoon spent cutting school, smoking pot and hearing “Led Zeppelin IV” for the first time (“this music was electrifying every cell in my body”); a teenage encounter with Miles Davis, whose third wife, Cicely Tyson, was one of Kravitz’s five godmothers (“one encouraging word from him was worth ten thousand words from anyone else”). He also delves into his deeply two-sided Gemini consciousness (Black and white, Jewish and Christian, New Yorker and Angelino), and his bond with his mother, actress Roxy Rocker (who starred on “The Jeffersons” TV series from 1975 to 1985) and his difficult relationship with his father, Sy Kravitz, a former Green Beret who became a TV news producer.
“It was the best form of therapy I could ever have,” he says now of the memoir. “It enabled me to do things like forgive my father on a level I hadn’t [before].” His mother offered him unwavering support and an example of grace that he drew on when he eventually found fame himself. But his father was demanding and disapproving, and one of the memoir’s most surprising moments comes as Kravitz wrestles with near-murderous rage when he discovers his father’s infidelity. (His mother, he learns, knew all along.) Writing the book, Kravitz says, “gave me the ability to see my father as a human being who was trying to do the best he could with what he had, with what he experienced. Everybody becomes a character on a page — you’re able to pull back. I was like, ‘I like this guy.’ It humanized him. And I was able to find new love for him.”
Kravitz also recounts his struggle to find his way musically as he came of age in the electro-pop ‘80s. “I was experimenting for so many years in my teens,” he says now. “I was playing for other people, playing bass in this band, drums in that band, guitar in that other band, just trying to find my way. I didn’t even see myself being the front guy.” A friendship with Berry Gordy’s son Kennedy meant he almost ended up as the vocalist on “Somebody’s Watching Me,” the 1983 pop smash Kennedy released under the name Rockwell. Kravitz changed his own name to Romeo Blue and partnered up with Tony LeMans, a friend from junior high with so much talent and style Kravitz saw himself as LeMans’ wingman.
A&M Records offered a deal, wanting to develop LeMans and Kravitz as a duo, a sort of Black Duran Duran. Kravitz didn’t know exactly what he wanted, but he knew it wasn’t that. He describes the music he eventually came up with for “Let Love Rule” — a back-to-the-future blend of Curtis Mayfield and John Lennon — as something he channeled rather than consciously created. “It came to me, it presented itself,” he says. “I listened and transcribed it — translated it, transferred it, whatever you want to call it — onto the tape. It found me. And I didn’t have to search, I didn’t have to think. When that download came for ‘Let Love Rule,’ that was the first time I knew that was my sound.”
Kravitz — who’s said the music for his last album, 2018’s “Raise Vibration,” came to him in a series of dreams — was establishing a process of being wide open to intuition and the unconscious. “That’s still the main way music comes,” he says. “So much of it is in dreams.” But finding that process was a process in itself. “It has continued just like that every album up until now. But that first time, those first couple, you’re not used to it and you don’t know if it’s going to stop. I remember in the middle of ‘Let Love Rule,’ for a couple of weeks I’d go to the studio and — nothing. But I learned that’s the way it is. If there’s days or a week, because I’ve exhausted myself, you have to then stop and chill and wait. Now, when I don’t hear anything, I don’t just go [to the studio] and wait. The studio’s there, so when I hear something, I go. Trust me, I’m in there a lot.”
His Jedi master in all this was none other than Prince, who first reached out to Kravitz out of the blue after the release of “Let Love Rule.” “I never understood where he got the number from,” Kravitz says. “We were friends from then till the end.” Prince had become a touchstone for Kravitz when he was still in high school. “When I saw Prince, I saw myself — or at least the me I wanted to be,” he writes in his memoir. And the two shared much: both Geminis, both deeply rooted in the twin worlds of hip-shaking funk and electric-guitar theatrics, and both spiritually rooted in Seventh-day Adventistism. (Though he’d come to understand God in his own way, at 13 Kravitz had a born-again experience at a summer camp at Loma Linda University, a Seventh-day Adventist school, and began to attend the Berean Seventh-day church. He sometimes saw Richard Wayne Penniman, better known as Little Richard, preach there.) “Prince taught me a simple but profoundly bold thing,” Kravitz says. “He liked to play with words, and he said, ‘You know the word recreation is re-creation.’ We don’t think about what the word really is because of the way we say it. Recreation to us is like tennis or pickleball or bowling — a hobby. But the word is re-creation. He would say to me, ‘When you need that time, take it because you need to re-create, and it’ll come. So go do something else. Take your mind off it for a minute, and you will re-create.’”
“Let Love Rule” was a dreamy, jammy romp that channeled butterflies and zebras and moonbeams direct from the ‘60s and ‘70s, and it was distinctly out of step with 1989, a year dominated by Bobby Brown, Paula Adbul, Guns N’ Roses and Milli Vanilli. Though European concert crowds grew swiftly, it took longer for Kravitz’s stardom to catch up with his bell-bottomed swagger back home. Photographer Mark Seliger, who would become a close collaborator, remembers that around this time both he and Kravitz had apartments in lower Manhattan. “We did a shoot for GQ and I made him help me move a couch,” he says. “And that’s the way Lenny is — he’s one of those guys that you could take a great rock star picture of, and he’ll also help you move your couch. He’s super humble, funny, very comfortable with who he is at any given time. There’s no apologies at all.”
It was 1991’s “Mama Said” that would deliver the first of Kravitz’s five Top 40 hits, “It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over.” A sweet-and-sour swirl of ‘70s soul philosophizing and ‘60s pop sharpness that confirmed Kravitz’s growing mastery of the studio, it was written as his marriage to Lisa Bonet faltered, and it reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. “That’s when I had to stop taking the subway,” Kravitz says. “I was still trying to take that train — I grew up on the subway, I loved it — and all of a sudden I couldn’t do it anymore. I’d be walking down the streets of New York hearing the song coming out of cars — when you’re waiting your whole life to do that and it finally happens, you can’t believe it.”
By the time he was touring Europe for 1993’s “Are You Gonna Go My Way?,” his teenage inspiration, former Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant, was opening for him. “That made no sense to me at all,” Kravitz says. “I thought [the promoter] was fucking with me. And then, every night having to go on after ‘Whole Lotta Love’ was just the most ridiculous thing ever.” Once again, as he had as a teenager, he found himself learning from Robert Plant, though more directly. “I was taking things a little too seriously with the sound, because that’s the kind of character I was in the studio,” he recalls. “But live is a whole other thing — it’s about being out of control — and he saw that I wasn’t having fun. I came off the stage one day and he chewed me out: ‘You motherfucker, what’s wrong with you? You’re not having any joy.’ The first thing is: I’m being chewed out by Robert Plant. But the fact that he liked me enough to be real with me and tell me how ridiculous I’m being, as though I was his little brother, that cemented it for me. I love that man.”
In 1998, the guitar-crunch of “Fly Away” would provide Kravitz’s second Top 40 hit — although it very nearly never saw the light of day. Kravitz had already turned in his fifth album, “5,” when he went in the studio one day. “I was messing around with an amplifier, and all of a sudden I started playing this riff, just fucking around. And I said, ‘You know what? Let me get down the drums and bass. I might as well just put this little groove together.’” At the time his daughter Zoe, then 10, was living with him in the Bahamas. “I was driving her to school every day, and I would blast this track. And after a few days, I heard the song, went in, did the vocal. Done.” It might have ended up a discard or B-side, except for a visiting friend who heard the song’s potential. “He started telling me how this was a huge hit. And I don’t know what a huge hit is — I know what I like, I know what’s a hit to me, but what becomes a hit in public? …” After his visitor threatened to never speak with him again if he didn’t put “Fly Away” on his album, Kravitz got in touch with his label, Virgin. “I said, ‘Listen, I got this track.’ They’re like, ‘The album’s in the factory, but send it.’ So, I send it. I get a call back, ‘I think we can accommodate.’ And there it is.” The song would rise to No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 and go on to win him the first of four consecutive Grammys for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance.
“Fly Away” aside, Kravitz insists that he doesn’t leave many gems behind in the vault. “Not thousands, like Prince did,” he says. There is, though, the small matter of an album that Kravitz has talked about over the years, a collection of what he’s called “raw, greasy” funk featuring contributions from such giants as New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint, Parliament-Funkadelic founder George Clinton, James Brown saxophonist Fred Wesley and others. It is, he says, at least a double album. “And it’s done — it’s incoming,” he says, although he also admits, “I’ve been saying this for 20 years! It’s in the old barrels, man. Just fermenting. The vintage is doing its thing. Like that old commercial,” he interpolates an old wine ad, “We will serve no funk before its time.”
Starting in the 2000s, Kravitz began to broaden his horizons, taking parts in movies (“Precious,” “The Butler,” “The Hunger Games”) and television (a recurring role in the music-industry drama “Star”). He also started Kravitz Design, which has given him a chance to apply his aesthetics to hotels, residences, and brands like Leica, Rolex, and Dom Perignon, which named him its creative director in 2018. Mark Seliger — who’s directed videos for Kravitz and worked with him on creative projects — remembers being struck by Kravitz’s unique eye when he went to Eleuthera to shoot the album cover for “5.” “We had probably been shooting for two or three days, all over the Bahamas. And then one day we were in the back of a Rolls Royce, and I shot a couple of rolls as we were driving. The car popped me up into the ceiling and my camera shutter went off. When I sent the contact sheets to Lenny he picked that shot where he’s half in the frame because the camera got bumped. He’s a photographer himself — a very good one — and really attuned to the photographic process. But he’s also one of the few artists who’s that responsive to the unexpected.”
In a way, both his Hollywood Walk of Fame star and “Electric Blue Light” are full-circle moments for Kravitz — returns to the days of his youth in Los Angeles. “Electric Blue Light” was recorded while Kravitz waited out the pandemic in the Bahamas. “Time stopped, I just went to the studio, and all this stuff started coming out,” he says. “It felt very immediate, really fresh, sensual, and spiritual. And it reminded me of the music I was making in high school.” In fact, two of the songs, “Heaven” and “Bundle of Joy,” date back to cassette tapes from his high school days and were written with his partner from his time as Romeo Blue, Tony LeMans. Kravitz painstakingly transcribed the songs from the original recordings. “Fucked up, nasty cassettes that sounded like shit,” he says. “I spent a couple of weeks on each of those, getting some of the parts I played back in high school and programming the synthesizers.” LeMans released one album on Prince’s Paisley Park label in 1989 but died in an accident on the Pacific Coast Highway before he could finish his second. “Prince coerced him to change his sound. This is the sound we were doing in high school,” says Kravitz. “It was a real honor to honor Tony and to bring that to light.”
As for the Walk of Fame, “I used to walk those streets, man,” Kravitz says. “I used to hang out at Hollywood Boulevard when I was a teenager — Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, a club across the street, and a music store a few blocks down. When I moved to L.A., it was one place that gave me the vibe of walking through Times Square when it still had its quality of old, let’s say.” Kravitz’s star will be in front of the Capitol Records building. “It’s all the things I love,” he concludes. “Music, architecture, the street — I get it all.”
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