Let Love Rule - Lenny Kravitz Page 0,23

all their own. I could love both the most technically accomplished musicians—Weather Report, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever—and still love KISS. One thing had nothing to do with the other.

Every Saturday, I was at the Guitar Center on Sunset playing every guitar in sight, plucking every bass, fingering every keyboard, pounding every drum set. Sometimes my mom would come along and patiently wait for me in the front of the store.

I was obsessed with sound, though I had no idea how to mix the sounds spinning inside my head. I’d hear a Stevie Wonder groove, a Hendrix lick, a Zeppelin riff, a Steely Dan Pretzel Logic story. How to put ’em together? Just keep listening. Listen to Bob Marley. Listen to the Eagles. Listen to Phoebe Snow. Listen to the Commodores. Listen to everything.

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A lot of my friends came from hippie households. Hanging out in those beach bungalows did even more to connect me to an earlier era. Their folks openly did what we kids did in secret: smoke tons of reefer. Sex was still years away for me, but there were make-out parties with blond beach girls. Most of my friends’ parents were in their thirties, as opposed to my mom, who was forty-six, and my dad, fifty-one. I listened to the grown-up hippies tell stories about hearing the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore West or the Doors singing “L.A. Woman” at the Whisky a Go Go. Their period posters of Canned Heat, Jefferson Airplane, and Cream made it seem like the summer of peace and love was still alive and well.

As opposed to our place, where Dad ruled with an iron fist, my friends’ pads were loose and free. And lack of structure was just what I wanted. There, we could smoke weed, eat junk food, and watch cable TV for hours. Z Channel was the new thing. We could even sneak peeks of soft-core porn. Anything goes.

We could also blast the stereo as loud as we wanted. For my friends’ folks, high on Acapulco Gold, the louder, the better. Seventies rock, funk, and four-on-the-floor disco. The Rolling Stones, Parliament-Funkadelic, the Bee Gees—I didn’t discriminate. Cameo, Average White Band, Aerosmith, Donna Summer, Chic. All great.

Back home alone in my room, I kept honing my drumming chops. I followed Buddy Rich, who carried his seventeen-member band on his back. Buddy was a crazy technician. I studied all styles—rock drummer Keith Moon, funk drummer Clyde Stubblefield, bop drummers Max Roach and Elvin Jones.

I also heard the comics that provided the laugh track of my teen years. My friend Shannon turned me on to Richard Pryor. I put Pryor in the same category as Jimi Hendrix: the best of the best. Pryor was hysterical, but the hysteria was deep. He exposed everything. He said everything. He opened up his insides and offered them to the world. No one’s ever been more vulnerable or more downright honest. That Nigger’s Crazy was my jam. But so were all of Pryor’s records. Me and my boys could do all his routines. His characters—Mudbone, the preachers, the pimps, the hos, the winos—were living, breathing people. I carried my dad’s portable cassette player to school so we could listen to Pryor in the back of the library. He was taboo, and that made us like him even more.

The ultimate stoner kings were Cheech and Chong. Mom and Dad never did learn that I was a pothead. So to discover these pothead comics, especially those who made the get-high ritual ridiculously funny, was like finding long-lost friends. Shannon, Derek, and I knew their routines by heart. Humor helped get us through school.

School was excruciating; if my teachers had made the material more engaging or applied it to life, I would have been interested. But it was all about memorizing facts, dates, and formulas. I came home with bad grades, and my parents were furious. They insisted that I focus. I didn’t want to. Or, I should say, I was focused on other things. I just wanted to get high, play my guitar, and rock out.

Aunt Joan understood me, though. She was my godmother, but she became a friend. In fact, she started having more in common with me than she did with my mom. We would sit in her room and listen to Bowie while she modeled her new outfits for me. I thought she was cool. I didn’t have to hide anything from her. She was my ally.

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The second season of The