Waylon Jennings (1937–2002)

that lit the coming punk movement.

Outside of his curatorial brilliance on Nuggets and the inspiration it provided to artists like Iggy and The Stooges, Lenny Kaye played an even more elemental role in the development of punk as the guitarist on Patti Smith’s revolutionary first album Horses. His legacy, with Patti and through his work as record producer, continues.

In the mid-’90s, while conducting research for the autobiography of Waylon Jennings he would co-write with the country legend, Kaye met Waylon’s wife, the musician Jessi Colter. All these years later, Kaye has produced Jessi Colter’s just-released album The Psalms. Its origins go back to their first meeting.

... I think my role is fairly constant with the people I work with. I just did Waylon Jennings' autobiography. To me that was a lot like literary production. I would find myself relating to him in the same way when we would be riding in a car, as I would to a musical artist sitting in the studio. Listening to what he has to say, trying to find little things about him that he may not even recognize are there. Trying to see what can be made of them, in terms of placing a portrait up on the wall of this artist. I like to think that, if writing is somewhat driven by the rational part of your mind, and music comes from a kind of intuitive spot, then producing blends the two together. You're listening to stuff and thinking about it, but you're also reacting to it in a very musical way.

...Now Waylon had already been through two writers, and he didn't get along with them. He didn't really want to see me, but Tony told me to go down there anyway. So I walked in and we really hit it off. I'm a musician, and told him that I wanted to relate to him musically. I knew that there was a lot of good tabloid stuff happening, but in the end, you are why you get up on that stage. He also like the fact that I wasn't a Nashville guy, I was an outsider. We got along great. I went on his bus the next week, to kind of get the introduction thing together. He took me to Wichita, Kansas, on the bus, and we went up to Milwaukee and by the end of it we were really close buddies. It's a pretty intimate relationship with somebody, when they tell you their life story. We got along really deeply. He's open, and he's a wonderful, wonderful human being. He has tons of integrity and it was a great story to tell. I was proud to be able to tell it. It took a long time. Writing a book is a lot of discipline. When you start thinking, "I have to write over 50,000 words," you don't realize just how many words that is! You know, you're sitting there, day after day, but it came out great. I think it's his voice. He's reflecting himself off me, so I'm hearing certain elements of him, and I think he'd like that...