Lenny Kravitz

There is a riff you recognise in two seconds: a few dirty guitar notes, a drum hit and a voice coming in screaming. It is the first track on Are You Gonna Go My Way, and for more than thirty years it has been used as proof of the one-man-band myth, the musician who shuts himself in a studio and plays it all himself. The album's credits say otherwise. That electric guitar is played by Craig Ross. Lenny Kravitz, on that song, plays the drums.

The partner is called Craig Ross

The casting of Are You Gonna Go My Way, released on the ninth of March 1993, is awkward for the legend and it is printed on the record: Kravitz appears on electric guitar only on tracks three, seven, nine and eleven, and Craig David Ross on one, two, three and from six to eleven. Track one is the song that gives the album its title. And it is not only a matter of who plays it: the song is co-written by the two of them. The Academy certified that without meaning to in 1994, when it nominated the song for the Grammy for Best Rock Song credited to Lenny Kravitz and Craig Ross. The riff that gets cited as proof that he does it all alone belongs, in the writing and in the hands, to his guitarist.

Ross, born on the tenth of March 1964 —two and a half months before Kravitz—, arrived by chance: they met in a Los Angeles pool hall, introduced by Kathy Valentine, the bassist of The Go-Go's. He joined the Mama Said tour in 1991 and has not left since: he plays on every subsequent album, signs co-writing credits and takes care of mandolin, keyboards, percussion and programming as well. The finishing touch is in the song's video, where the drums are not played by Kravitz either: they are played by Cindy Blackman, whom he had hired after hearing her over the telephone and who spent eighteen years as his live drummer before marrying Carlos Santana on the nineteenth of December 2010.

The other riff was written by Slash

The second riff everybody associates with Kravitz is the one from "Always on the Run", a single from the eighteenth of March 1991. That one is not his either. Slash wrote it for Guns N' Roses and set it aside because Steven Adler could not manage to play it. Slash and Kravitz had been classmates at Beverly Hills High School, the same school Nicolas Cage and Maria McKee passed through. Slash flew from London to New York on the Concorde when his European tour ended and the song was written and recorded in a single day: according to Kravitz himself, he put down the drums, Slash the guitar, and afterwards Kravitz recorded his own guitar, the bass and the vocals and called in the horns. Both of them sign it and it reached number eight on the American alternative chart.

None of this turns the myth into a lie: it corrects its focus. Kravitz does play almost everything on Let Love Rule (the sixth of September 1989), on 5 (the twelfth of May 1998) and on Blue Electric Light (the twenty-fourth of May 2024), and he has produced his own work from day one; what is not true is that he does it alone. There is a stable core: Ross on guitar, Henry Hirsch on keyboards, bass and engineering on the early albums, Karl Denson on saxophone since the debut. What also fails to hold up is the other half of the postcard, the one about analogue tape as the house rule. From 5 onwards he recorded in Pro Tools, and engineer Terry Manning said so without hedging: they recorded the whole album in Pro Tools and never went to tape. The album of the first two Grammys is, technically, his digital record.

Four Grammys, and one with somebody else's song

He won the Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance four years in a row. On the twenty-fourth of February 1999, at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, for "Fly Away"; on the twenty-third of February 2000, the twenty-first of February 2001 and the twenty-seventh of February 2002, all three at the Staples Center, for "American Woman", "Again" and "Dig In". Four awards out of nine nominations in all.

The second of those four is the one that throws you, because the song is not his. "American Woman" was written by Randy Bachman, Burton Cummings, Jim Kale and Garry Peterson, of the Canadian band The Guess Who, and it had been number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks from the ninth of May 1970. Kravitz's version came out as a single on the tenth of May 1999, reached number forty-nine on the Hot 100, lived off the soundtrack of Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and took the guitar solo off the original. The explanation he himself gave is that he could not get the tone. Which is to say: one of the four male rock Grammys he won singing a song he had not written and from which he had removed the guitar part.

The record is worth stating in full, because it tends to get overstated. Nobody won that particular award more times, or more times in a row: behind Kravitz come Bruce Springsteen with three and Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Don Henley and Robert Palmer with two. But it is not the Grammys' record for streaks: Aretha Franklin won Best Female R&B Vocal Performance eight years running, from 1968 to 1975, and nobody has matched that in any category. What Kravitz's mark does have is something rarer: it is unbreakable. The category was handed out for the last time in 2004, the following year it was folded into a generic one, and in 2012 the redesign of the awards dissolved it altogether. The award he won four times no longer exists, so nobody can reach him.

Roxie Roker showed a photograph

The mother is not "an African-American actress", and summing her up that way means losing the best paragraph in this story. Roxie Albertha Roker was born in Miami on the twenty-eighth of August 1929, the daughter of a Bahamian father, graduated in drama from Howard University in 1952, trained at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon and was a member of the Negro Ensemble Company. Before entertainment television she was a reporter and presenter at WNEW-TV in New York. And before she was a popular face she was an award-winning actress: she won the Obie in 1973 and was nominated for the Tony in 1974 for her role as Mattie Williams in The River Niger.

The role that made her known in every household was Helen Willis in The Jeffersons, the CBS series that was on the air from 1975 to 1985. Helen Willis was, alongside Franklin Cover's Tom Willis, half of one of the first interracial marriages with a regular role in American prime time, and Norman Lear doubted the audience would accept it. Roker settled the doubt without arguing it: she showed the producers a photograph of her white husband, Sy Kravitz, a news producer at NBC, and she got the part. Lenny Kravitz, born in New York on the twenty-sixth of May 1964, was literally the son of that marriage. His mother was playing on television what at home was the Monday routine.

From his father's side came the name. He is called Leonard Albert after his uncle Leonard M. Kravitz, Sy's brother, killed in combat in Korea on the seventh of March 1951, aged twenty, after staying at his machine-gun position to cover his unit's withdrawal; he was decorated with the Distinguished Service Cross and, after the congressional review of Jewish and Hispanic veterans who had been denied the highest honour, his medal was raised to the Medal of Honor: his niece Laurie Wegner received it from Barack Obama on the eighteenth of March 2014, sixty-three years later. With that crossing on his back —a Bahamian-American mother, a Jewish father, a California boys' choir and the Metropolitan Opera children's chorus in childhood at her insistence—, the labels told him his music was neither black enough nor white enough. He recorded on his own under the pseudonym Romeo Blue until five major record companies fought over him and he signed with Virgin in January 1989.

The mother's story ends with a record on the table. Circus came out on the twelfth of September 1995, entered at number ten on the Billboard 200 —his first top ten in the United States— and carried as a single "Rock and Roll Is Dead", from the twenty-eighth of August. Kravitz described the recording as a tedious process and admitted that his mother's illness was weighing on him. Roxie Roker died of breast cancer in Los Angeles on the second of December 1995, aged sixty-six, less than three months after the record came out.

The song that was going to be somebody else's

His best historic placing in the United States is none of the guitar anthems, and he was not planning to sing it either. "It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over", a single from the third of June 1991 and from Mama Said, reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and is still his ceiling at home, with number ten on the R&B chart, five on the adult contemporary chart and eleven in Britain. He wrote it while his marriage to the actress Lisa Bonet was breaking up, having married her in Las Vegas on the sixteenth of November 1987 and divorced her in 1993, and at first he did not want to record it: he wanted to give it away to Smokey Robinson. The horns are The Phenix Horns, the Earth, Wind & Fire section. The title is the phrase that made Yogi Berra, the Yankees catcher, famous, though there are reasonable doubts that he ever said it at all.

And the only outright Hot 100 number one that carries his name was sung by somebody else. Kravitz co-wrote and produced "Justify My Love", Madonna's ninth number one, at the summit in the weeks of the fifth and the twelfth of January 1991. There too the authorship ended up being divided, and by way of the courts: Ingrid Chavez, who had originally written the text as a love letter addressed to Kravitz, had accepted twelve and a half per cent of the publishing rights with no writer's credit, sued him in the federal court in Minneapolis on the thirtieth of July 1991 and on the twenty-ninth of January 1992 they reached a settlement that gave her a co-writer credit and a share of the royalties. The song's current credits read Lenny Kravitz and Ingrid Chavez, with additional lyrics by Madonna.

What to remember

Kravitz is a genuine multi-instrumentalist and he has produced his own albums since 1989, but the story of the man alone in the studio falls apart precisely on the two songs it is demonstrated with. "Are You Gonna Go My Way" he co-wrote with Craig Ross and the guitar is Ross's; "Always on the Run" he co-wrote with Slash, who had been keeping it for another band. What there is here is not an impostor: it is a partner. Craig Ross has been in the job for thirty-five years, and the best of the work comes out of that partnership and not out of a closed room.

The Grammys work the same way. There are four in a row and they are real, and nobody won that award more times; but one of the four is for a song by The Guess Who from which he removed the solo because he could not get the tone, and the record is untouchable because the category stopped existing. In between there is a Hot 100 number two that was going to be for Smokey Robinson, a British number one that had been discarded as a B-side, a first American top ten released with his mother dying, and a Madonna number one that ended up in a courtroom in Minneapolis. The catalogue carries some forty million albums sold and is still open: Blue Electric Light came out on the twenty-fourth of May 2024 and in 2026 he is out on tour again.

So when that riff starts up and somebody says he plays it all himself, there is the correction: the guitar is played by the man he met in a pool hall, and Kravitz is behind him, on the drums, holding him up.

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Sources

Lenny Kravitz (Leonard Albert Kravitz; New York, 26 May 1964) is an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer. Father: Seymour "Sy" Kravitz (1924-2005), a news producer at NBC. Mother: Roxie Albertha Roker (Miami, 28 August 1929 – Los Angeles, 2 December 1995, breast cancer, 66 years old), a drama graduate of Howard University in 1952, member of the Negro Ensemble Company, reporter and presenter at WNEW-TV, 1973 Obie winner and 1974 Tony nominee for "The River Niger", and the performer of Helen Willis in "The Jeffersons" (CBS, 1975-1985) alongside Franklin Cover; she got the part by showing the producers a photograph of her white husband in the face of Norman Lear's doubts. Some secondary sources give 5 January 1995 as the date of her death: that is incorrect; the AP and The New York Times obituary was published on 6 December 1995. Marriage of the parents: 1962; divorce: 1985. Lenny is named after his uncle Leonard M. Kravitz (8 August 1930 – 7 March 1951), killed in Yangpyeong, South Korea, decorated with the Distinguished Service Cross and raised to the Medal of Honor, presented to his niece Laurie Wegner by President Barack Obama on 18 March 2014. Training: the California Boys Choir and the Metropolitan Opera chorus; Beverly Hills High School, where he overlapped with Slash, Nicolas Cage and Maria McKee. He recorded under the pseudonym "Romeo Blue" before signing with Virgin Records in January 1989, after a bidding war among five labels. Married to Lisa Michele Bonet on 16 November 1987 in Las Vegas; divorce in 1993; daughter: Zoë Isabella Kravitz, 1 December 1988. Studio albums: "Let Love Rule" (6 September 1989, Virgin, no. 61 US, no. 56 UK, RIAA gold), "Mama Said" (2 April 1991, no. 39 US, no. 8 UK, platinum), "Are You Gonna Go My Way" (9 March 1993, no. 12 US, no. 1 UK, 2× platinum), "Circus" (12 September 1995, no. 10 US —his first top 10—, no. 5 UK, gold with 527,000 copies), "5" (12 May 1998, no. 28 US, no. 18 UK, 2× platinum), "Lenny" (30 October 2001, no. 12 US), "Baptism" (17 May 2004, no. 14 US), "It Is Time for a Love Revolution" (5 February 2008, no. 4 US, his best placing), "Black and White America" (30 August 2011, Roadrunner/Atlantic, no. 17 US), "Strut" (19 September 2014, Roxie/Kobalt, no. 19 US), "Raise Vibration" (7 September 2018, Roxie/BMG, no. 43 US) and "Blue Electric Light" (24 May 2024, Roxie Records/BMG, no. 73 UK). "Greatest Hits" (24 October 2000, Virgin): no. 2 on the Billboard 200, 3× platinum RIAA, more than 10 million worldwide; total catalogue estimated at some 40 million albums. "Are You Gonna Go My Way" (single of 8 February 1993) is credited to Lenny Kravitz and Craig Ross; on the album Kravitz plays electric guitar on tracks 3, 7, 9 and 11 and Craig Ross on tracks 1-3 and 6-11, and Kravitz plays the drums on track 1; the song was not eligible for the Billboard Hot 100 because it was issued in the US as a radio-only single, and it was no. 1 on Album Rock Tracks, no. 2 on Modern Rock Tracks, no. 4 in the United Kingdom and no. 1 for six weeks in Australia; 1993 MTV Video Music Award for Best Male Video, with Cindy Blackman on drums in the video. Craig David Ross (b. 10 March 1964) joined on the "Mama Said" tour in 1991 and takes part in every subsequent album; they met in a Los Angeles pool hall through Kathy Valentine, of The Go-Go's. Cindy Blackman was his live drummer for 18 years from 1993 and married Carlos Santana on 19 December 2010. Henry Hirsch: engineering, keyboards and bass on the early albums; Karl Denson: saxophone since the debut. "Always on the Run" (single of 18 March 1991, no. 8 on Alternative Airplay) is signed by Kravitz and Slash, who had written the riff for Guns N' Roses and had held it back because Steven Adler could not play it; it was written and recorded in a single day. "It Ain't Over 'til It's Over" (3 June 1991): no. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 —his best historic placing—, no. 10 R&B, no. 5 Adult Contemporary, no. 11 UK, no. 2 Canada, no. 5 New Zealand, no. 10 Australia, no. 35 on the 1991 year-end Hot 100; horns by The Phenix Horns; the title refers to the phrase associated with Yogi Berra, whose literal attribution is in doubt. "Fly Away" (11 May 1998): no. 1 UK —his only British no. 1—, no. 1 Iceland, no. 12 Hot 100, no. 1 on Mainstream Rock and Modern Rock; it had been discarded as a possible B-side and made it onto "5" at a friend's insistence. "American Woman" was written by Randy Bachman, Burton Cummings, Jim Kale and Garry Peterson, of The Guess Who, and was no. 1 on the Hot 100 for three weeks from 9 May 1970; Kravitz's version (single of 10 May 1999) reached no. 49 on the Hot 100, was issued on the soundtrack of "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me" and removes the original's guitar solo, a decision Kravitz attributed to not getting the tone. "Again" (22 September 2000): no. 4 Hot 100, the only new song on "Greatest Hits". "Dig In" (10 September 2001): no. 31 Hot 100. Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance at four consecutive ceremonies: 41st, 24 February 1999, Shrine Auditorium, for "Fly Away"; 42nd, 23 February 2000, Staples Center, for "American Woman"; 43rd, 21 February 2001, for "Again"; 44th, 27 February 2002, for "Dig In". Total: 4 awards out of 9 nominations, among them Best Rock Song 1994 for "Are You Gonna Go My Way", credited to Kravitz and Craig Ross. He is the artist with the most awards in that category (4), ahead of Bruce Springsteen (3) and of Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Don Henley and Robert Palmer (2); it is not the absolute Grammy record for streaks, which belongs to Aretha Franklin with 8 consecutive years in Best Female R&B Vocal Performance (1968-1975). The category was handed out for the last time in 2004, was merged into Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance in 2005 and was dissolved into Best Rock Performance in the 2012 redesign. "Justify My Love" (6 November 1990), co-written and produced by Kravitz with André Betts, was no. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the weeks of 5 and 12 January 1991, Madonna's ninth no. 1; Ingrid Chavez, the original author of the text, accepted 12.5% of the publishing rights with no writer's credit, sued Kravitz in the federal court in Minneapolis on 30 July 1991 and reached an out-of-court settlement on 29 January 1992 granting her a co-writer credit and a share of the royalties; the current credits read Lenny Kravitz and Ingrid Chavez, with additional lyrics by Madonna. From "5" onwards the recordings were made in Pro Tools, according to engineer Terry Manning. Sean Ono Lennon, aged fifteen, plays piano on "All I Ever Wanted" ("Mama Said"). Nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2024, without induction. Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in March 2024. Memoir: "Let Love Rule", 2020 (Henry Holt). "Blue Electric Light Tour" in 2024-2025 and "Lenny Kravitz LIVE Tour" in 2026. Profile compiled for Rebobinados with fact-checking; interpretations of the meaning of the work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia (Lenny Kravitz, Roxie Roker, Leonard M. Kravitz, Lisa Bonet, Craig Ross, Cindy Blackman, Ingrid Chavez, "Justify My Love", "Are You Gonna Go My Way", "Always on the Run", "It Ain't Over 'til It's Over", "Fly Away", "American Woman", "Circus", "5", "Mama Said", "Blue Electric Light", Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance, Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance, Yogi Berra), Grammy.com, Billboard, Britannica, Encyclopedia.com, Vintage Guitar, Buffalo News, Songfacts and Songkick.