It's impossible to say everything there is to say about rock music in 400-something pages, but--his book's subtitle to the contrary--Lenny Kaye just about says it all in Lightning Striking: Ten Transformative Moments in Rock and Roll.
Kaye is well positioned to tell rock's story: best known for his guitar work with Patti Smith, he has been an album reviewer, a musical talent scout and a record producer. Of an age to recall the dawn of rock, Kaye winds his personal reminiscences through the book's 11 chapters, each named for at least one place and time, from "Cleveland, 1952" through "Seattle, 1991." (Readers who have to ask why the "Ten Transformative Moments" of the book's subtitle correspond with not 10 but 11 chapters don't know their rock mockumentaries.) Each chapter amounts to an extended portrait of a scene and how it got that way. This means that before readers can, say, meet the Beatles in "Liverpool, 1962," they're introduced to singer Lonnie Donegan, manager Larry Parnes and producer Joe Meek.
Kaye is an unabashed music geek but doesn't write like one: he sustains a beat poetry-evoking style that usually works well (the early Ramones were "all downstrokes and lyrics one step removed from the asylum"). Kaye not only knows all the rock; he knows all the words, and if the ones that exist don't suffice, he invents them (Jimi Hendrix "pyrotechnics" his guitar). Lightning Striking is a love-letter-like historic record that can turn rock know-it-alls into rock know-even-mores. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer