![]() I ended up leaving that band to do my own thing. I came to his studio on the waterfront with another band I was playing with, and he and I saw things eye to eye. “He was a keyboard player who’d gone to Germany and had a couple of hits, and he then learned how to engineer, and had a very unorthodox technique, really raw. “Henry Hirsch came from New York City,” he explains. It was at a studio in a disused factory in Hoboken, NJ that Kravitz found a kindred spirit. “My music is very mixed, but it has a lot of rock’n’roll in it – and I’ve even had black kids say: ‘How can you play that white music?’ Know your history.” I mean, it belongs to everybody, but we know who invented it, who it came from,” he says, his placidity ruffling just a little. Is it disappointing that he’s still seen as unusual in playing rock as if it’s assumed to be white music? It’s too bad that things are so segregated.” I don’t agree with it, but I understand that people have their formats and their advertisers. “They played It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over. “It’s just the way it is,” he says equitably. Because at the record companies you had your black music division, and your other music division.”ĭoes it bug Kravitz that, as it has been since his debut, black radio in the US still won’t touch him? It was usually this thing of being caught in between. It was rock but it was funky, it was R&B but it was too rock. “Depending on who was listening, I either wasn’t black enough or wasn’t white enough. It was Romeo Blue who unsuccessfully knocked on every major label’s door. I was thinking about a mesh of Ziggy Stardust and Prince.” Someone called me Romeo, because they thought that I was very much a ladies’ man: ‘Oh, check out Romeo!’ And I added the Blue part. It was that time when people were having these very theatrical names. “I wasn’t comfortable being myself yet,” Kravitz explains of his 80s alter ego, “and I thought Lenny Kravitz was the most ridiculous name for anybody trying to make music. After eight years of struggle he ceased to be Lenny Kravitz, answering to ‘Romeo Blue’. The globally famous Bonet and her unknown boyfriend married that year. I worked in a clothing store, I worked in a shoe store, I was a dishwasher in a macrobiotic restaurant.”īy 1987 he was back in NY with girlfriend Lisa Bonet (above, with Kravitz), who starred in The Cosby Show. “I worked in a fish market, cutting and gutting and frying fish. So by the time you’re fifteen, you’re: ‘Well, I’ve been knowing this for ten years now – let’s go!’ The streets of LA and the streets of New York are what taught me.” His privileged life was largely left behind. ![]() “I knew what I wanted to do when I was five. He had already made his gig debut, singing Mahler with a choir at the Hollywood Bowl. Because the parents were all hippies, and it was just a very loose, chilled atmosphere.”īut his relationship with his ex-US Marine dad was less than chilled. I spent a lot of time on the beach, and riding my skateboard up and down the streets, and hanging out at kids’ houses, and jamming. ![]() “I remember one of the first skateboards, before it even had wheels on it, with the hand-drawn Dogtown sign. “I never shared it.” When he wasn’t honing his talent, the skateboard scene filled his time. “After Let Love Rule my mom was like: ‘Oh, that’s what you’ve been doing,’” he says. He built his own world in his bedroom, where he set up a drum kit, guitar, bass and amps. The West Coast in the 70s was perfect for Kravitz. That electric guitar side of it – that heavy, distorted, powerful feeling.” That’s where I learnt about Led Zeppelin and The Who and Queen and Jimi. And then I went to LA, and at that time the whole Dogtown skateboarding scene which I became part of were listening to English rock, and Hendrix and American rock’n’roll as well. “I’d left New York City,” he explains, “where it was all about R&B and soul, gospel and jazz. When his family moved to LA in 1975, Kravitz found the rest of his musical soul. And you’re watching your mother act in plays, and you see people around and they’re doing poetry readings, and there’s Lorainne Hansberry – she inspired Young, Gifted And Black. Duke and Miles Davis, and great writers, like Maya Angelou, and Nina Simone were around our crew. I got to watch these people, be around them, see them performing and personally hanging out with us. Kravitz agrees it’s significant that such stellar musical figures were around him from the start. Giants of the black artistic world were house guests as Kravitz grew up in New York jazz great Duke Ellington played Happy Birthday to five-year-old Lenny. ![]() Father Sy Kravitz was a Jewish-American TV producer and part-time jazz promoter. His Bahamian-American actress mother, Roxie Roker, a star in 70s sitcom The Jeffersons, took her son to shows and gigs. Almost since his birth in 1964 there was something of the golden boy about Kravitz. ![]()
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