This may be the age of alienation and rage in rock, but Lenny Kravitz is riding high as the peace and love candidate.
His dreadlocks and nose-ring are pure '90s, but his trademark bell-bottoms and boots are more redolent of "Good Times" than "Beavis and Butt-head."
While lots of pop musicians have affected the retro '60s-'70s look as a joke, Kravitz is dead serious about it.
"People say, 'Oh, he's stuck in the past' and this and that," he snaps backstage before a recent Pauley Pavilion concert. "I mean, if you have an antique chair in your house, people don't say that's retro furniture.
"I started thinking the other day, 'Why do I like the clothes I like?' The reason I dress the way I dress is simply because I like the lines. It's not me trying to relive something."
Fans have responded to Kravitz's '60s-driven music and look by making million-sellers of his three Virgin Records albums (including this year's "Are You Gonna Go My Way?") and turning his concerts into instant sellouts.
But detractors say his sound is as dated as his clothes, dismissing his message and music as shamelessly derivative for the obvious references to Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, Curtis Mayfield and John Lennon.
In the "Rolling Stone Album Guide," critic Mark Coleman praises Kravitz's "sheer conviction and articulate rhythms," but concludes that "this nouveau hippie's reliance on bell-bottom platitudes and recycled hooks gets old pretty fast."
Kravitz, 28, nods when the criticisms are raised.
"What's funny is I've read about 60 different comparisons," he says. "I have my influences like any artist does, but I think it definitely comes out like me.
"If you really listen to my records, there's elements of folk, elements of gospel . . . lots of R&B, lots of soul, jazz, classical with my arrangements, reggae. I'm really covering a lot of ground. But because of the clothes and things it all gets clumped up, and it's like 'Lenny's just '60s-'70s.' But I'm really doing a whole thing.
"I don't (care) about it," he says a bit testily. "Look what they said about Jimi, look what they said about Zeppelin. They dogged Bob Marley, they dogged John Lennon, they dogged everybody. Who cares?"
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Kravitz seems uncomfortable defending his art or gloating over his success. He prefers to ignore it, the way he was taught by his mother, actress Roxie Roker, best known as the upstairs neighbor Helen Willis on the TV show "The Jeffersons" from 1975 to 1985.
"My mother raised me pretty well," he says. "She is a celebrity but never acted like one. She taught me really great values. She wasn't a 'Hollywood mother,' so I knew about all that false stuff."
Kravitz says that by the time he became a celebrity himself, he was immune to its trappings. He was born in Brooklyn, and his earliest memories--thanks to his mother and his father, Sy Kravitz, a television news producer who moonlighted promoting jazz shows--include "hanging out" with Miles Davis and sitting on Duke Ellington's lap while the great jazzman played piano.
When Kravitz was 12, his mother landed the "Jeffersons" role and they moved to Los Angeles (his father stayed in New York and his parents later divorced), where he attended Beverly Hills High School, palling around with Slash, the future guitarist of Guns N' Roses.
Music was a solitary passion for Kravitz, who was never in a band before he made the album that landed him a deal with Virgin Records after an intense bidding war.
Jeff Ayeroff, the co-chairman of Virgin Records at the time, recalls: "I thought it was funny, this kid doing '60s stuff with a certain sort of naivete, and that's the thing people sometimes miss. People say it's derivative, but it's sort of like if you listen to Cream doing 'Crossroads' and compare it to the original."
But Ayeroff was struck by more than just Kravitz's music:
"He definitely has a star feel to him. He's a nice guy, but there's something about him. I've seen it in others, but the fact is it's a strain of gold that runs through people who are successful. His naivete was an issue, but he was a kid and they grow out of it. I still think he's growing out of it."
Even before the first album was released in 1989, however, Kravitz was a name on the celebrity circuit via his marriage to actress Lisa Bonet of "The Cosby Show" (they're now divorced).
"That was weird," he said. "It was hard. I'd just married somebody I loved at the time and \o7 foooom\f7 ! Man! Everyone was looking at me."
In many of the reviews of the album, in fact, there was as much talk about his marriage to Bonet as about the music. By the time of the second album, 1991's "Mama Said," Kravitz began to establish his own identity.
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