On a late night in New York City more than three decades ago, all that stood between Lenny Kravitz and superstardom was a lack of stationery.
“In 1992 I lived in a loft on Broome and Mercer,” he recalls. “A bunch of musicians lived there, so it was kind of a mess, and never had a proper pad and paper. So I’m listening to this track we’d cut that morning, that I’d brought home on a cassette, and I had no idea what I was gonna sing over it.
“It’s late,” he continues, “and I’m probably stoned at the time as well, when all of a sudden I hear the song – I can hear the melody, I hear the words. But I cannot find a piece of paper to save my life! So I’m running around the kitchen, with the boom-box playing on the counter, and I see a paper bag that someone’s brought Chinese food home in. I ripped open the bag, flattened it, and found an old pen to scribble down the words. And the words all just came out in one go. I still have that paper bag somewhere.”
So there it was: Are You Gonna Go My Way. Alongside the scribbled lyrics that came on like a messianic manifesto (‘I have come to save the day/And I won’t leave until I’m done…’) was God’s own guitar riff, which had rolled off the fingers of sideman Craig Ross at New Jersey’s Waterfront Studios earlier that day.
“We were jamming when all of a sudden, this thing just happened,” Kravitz explains. “We didn’t know what it was gonna be for, but it felt really good. We whipped it out in one take, as we normally did, and I was left with this cassette. It was just a great riff.”
With the rock scene in thrall to grunge, and singer/multi-instrumentalist Kravitz still looking like a bigger star than he was, he didn’t expect the mainstream to go his way.
“I’d had two albums, and a big hit with It Ain’t Over ’Til It’s Over, but even when I was making Mama Said I was still taking the train to the studio,” he admits. “The funny thing about Are You Gonna Go My Way is that when we did it I had absolutely no idea it would be a hit. Sometimes you record something and you have a feeling. With that one we didn’t. Compared to what was on the radio at that time, the sound, the recording, the rawness… it was quite quirky, y’know?”
For all that, Kravitz’s vocal hardly lacks ambition.
“I’m singing lines like ‘I was born long ago’ and ‘I am the chosen, I’m the one’, but obviously it’s not about me,” he clarifies. “It’s about Christ, and it’s coming from that Jesus Christ Superstar kind of place. I’m singing in role, y’know, as if it was a musical, and the question means: are you gonna go the way of love? Let’s think about what Christ really said. His methods were all about love. So the question is, are you gonna continue to live in this way, full of hate, or are you gonna live in the way of love? Are you gonna go my way?”
Elsewhere, lines that called on planet Earth’s inhabitants to ‘hug and rub-a-dub’ seemed like sentiments beamed from the Summer of Love, hopelessly adrift in the hard-nosed decade of grunge and Britrock.
“When I came out with Let Love Rule [’89],” counters Kravitz, “I was always called idealistic. Y’know: ‘This guy is always singing about love, peace, spirituality and equality.’ But they are pretty great ideals.”
In terms of sentiment, Are You Gonna Go My Way is undoubtedly Kravitz’s baby. Back in 2009, however, this writer interviewed the aforementioned Craig Ross, and was surprised to learn that the sideman not only co-wrote and played all the whip-cracking guitar parts on the track, but also finds it frustrating that the stinging solo is widely assumed to be Kravitz (a myth perhaps perpetuated by the singer’s habit of talking up his multi-instrumentalist skills to interviewers).
“I’m proud of what I’ve done,” Ross said in that interview, “and I know I’ve done it. But it does get frustrating that I’m not as ‘known’ as other people.”
“Honestly, I believe that Craig is a genius and doesn’t get the credit he deserves,” Kravitz agrees. “It all depends on how I cut a song. If I play all the instruments on a song, I’ll start with the drums and I’ll build it up. But the way we were feeling Are You Gonna Go My Way is that I wanted the guitars and drums tracked at the same time, so I played drums, Craig played guitar and Tony Breit played bass. So it was one of the tracks where I had musicians. And it was beautiful: you get that rub, and you get the microphone leakage. It created that sound.”
In 1993 it was everywhere. A chart-topper in the US, Are You Gonna Go My Way hit No.4 in the UK, boosted by a dreadlock-shaking video that ensured the star would never take public transport again.
“People were already starting to recognise me, and it was getting hectic,” he recalls. “Then Are You Gonna Go My Way came out and changed everything. After that it was never the same. I had to adjust my life.
“But it was a great moment. That song has definitely become a classic. I hear it played all over the world. I hear it in nightclubs, even when they’re playing dance music; sometimes they mix it in and it seems to cross so many genres. The video, by Mark Romanek, helped a lot. It kinda showed you could dance to it, and it actually had a swing.”
But that was the 90s. Does the public have the stomach for such dippy idealism in the age of terrorism and economic meltdown? Kravitz insists these factors only make his message louder and clearer.
“Is the sentiment of Are You Gonna Go My Way still relevant today?” he muses. “The world we live in right now is so challenging, and it’s really sad where we’ve gone as human beings – how we treat each other and the world. So I think it’s even more relevant now. I’d never drop it from the set. It wouldn’t feel complete. That song live is just so beautiful, and it’s one that I’ll always play.”
Lenny Kravitz plays shows in New Zealand and Australia in November.
