Lenny Kravitz on Getting His 'Butt Kicked' in 'Guitar Hero' and Palling Around With Hillary Clinton

Lenny Kravitz isn’t shy about admitting that the Guitar Hero video game has humbled him over the years.

“My relationship with it is playing my godkids and nieces and nephews back when it came out and always getting my ass kicked by little kids,” Kravitz, who appears with actor James Franco in a series of new live-action trailers for the new Guitar Hero Live, which hits shelves on Oct. 20, tells Billboard. “As a guitar player, when you first play it, it doesn’t make any sense. The way you have to think in [the game] is not natural to me. So it’s pretty funny, getting pummeled by these little kids and they know you’re a real guitar player. Your song’s on there, and you get your butt kicked.”

Lenny Kravtiz shows James Franco how to play Guitar Hero in trailer for the video game. (photo: Mathieu Bitton)

Kravitz took a few good-natured lumps from Franco, too, who ad-libbed some barbs during the filming about the #Penisgate episode during Kravitz’s Aug. 3 show in Stockholm, when his pants split during the opening song and he had to stop the show to change. Kravitz says he’s laughing about it now – as he did when the wardrobe malfunction happened. “What else are you gonna do, y'know?” he says. “If this happened 20 years ago, it would’ve been a completely different thing. But the fact that everyone’s got cell phones now with cameras and videos and we have Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and everything, it got maximum effect.”

Even Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was asked about it during a recent interview with Girls’ creator Lena Dunham. “She’s a friend,” Kravitz says of Clinton. “I’ve known her for many years and have done many things with her and with Bill, playing at national conventions and playing at the White House and going to dinners. We’ve had a relationship for years. I thought it was so funny when I caught wind of (Clinton being asked about it), and it was all in good fun.”

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Guitar Hero Live aims to be good fun, too. The first new edition of the game in five years, its new features include interaction with fellow band members’ avatars and the crowd. GHTV, meanwhile, allows players to jam along with a variety of music videos, including Kravitz’s “Are You Gonna Go My Way,” and the menu of songs will continually be updated. “The new game is more involved and has more detail,” Kravitz says. “If you start messing up your singer might turn around and say something to you, or someone else in the band will tell you to get it together. And the audience is out there now and they’re reacting as well.”

The Guitar Hero Live promotions may be the last we see of Kravitz for a short while. After wrapping the tour to promote his 2014 album Strut, he plans to lay low – though he will be releasing a tour documentary Just Let Go on DVD on Oct. 23. He’ll also continue working on his next album, which Kravitz previously described to Billboard as “very funky and very raw. Very psychedelic.”

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The rocker is also busy with active projects for his Kravitz Design firm, including his recently launched CB2 X Kravitz Design line of furniture and accessories for Crate & Barrel’s sister line, as well as a photo book and exhibitions. “Like a true West Indian I have a lot of jobs but I love having different mediums I can use to express myself and go from one to the next,” Kravitz says. “I don’t think about it in a brand way; I just look at it as creativity in general. After doing an album and then going into a tour for, like, two years of your life, I can now take a few months more on design, and after that I might do a film. And one inspires the other.”