Lenny Kaye at Rough Trade, Brooklyn

Every April, Record Store Day is a marketing strategy to lure customers back into record stores with the release of special edition purchases. Record Store Day on Black Friday is similar in that the marketing strategy reminds customers to include the gift of music during the holiday spending spree, and similarly launches special edition merchandise. Rough Trade in Brooklyn celebrated Black Friday with a free concert-and-record-signing promotion of a new single by Lenny Kaye and the Fleshtones.

The Fleshtones featured Kaye, guitarist for the Patti Smith Group and the Lenny Kaye Connection, on an album called Brooklyn Sound Solution in 2011. The one song Kaye wrote for that album, "Lost on Xandu," was an instrumental composition. Eight years later, Kaye revisited "Lost on Xandu," wrote science fiction lyrics, and added vocals, turning the track into something new. This re-imagined version of "Lost on Xandu" was released as a limited edition seven-inch 45 r.p.m. single on cloudy orange vinyl for Black Friday 2019. The vocal version of "Lost on Xandu" is on the A-side of the single, and a dub-style rendition of the track titled "Lost on Xandu (Version)" on the B-side features more of Peter Zaremba of the Fleshtones. Neither the vocal version nor dub version of "Lost on Xandu" were previously available in any format.

Although billed, like the album, as the Fleshtones + Lenny Kaye, the half-hour concert was not actually by the Fleshtones. The band consisted of Kaye, Zaremba, bassist Tom Clark and drummer Don Costagna. Hanging with fans prior to the concert, Kaye and Zaremba admitted they were not anticipating a great concert, but that they were hoping that everyone would have fun. Kaye started the live music playing solo and reminisced how record stores used to be the place where music aficionados met, adding that he first met Patti Smith while working in a record store. The other musicians joined Kaye and performed an obscure Fleshtones track, Lenny's first single (recorded under the pseudonym Link Cromwell) and other songs, closing with Kaye's extended version of Them's "Gloria." In the end, the forecast was accurate; the performance was not great but it was fun -- and free. Afterwards, Kaye and Zaremba signed records for the fans.

Setlist:

1. Record Collector (Lenny Kaye solo)
2. Shadow Line (The Fleshtones cover, Peter Zaremba on lead vocal)
3. Crazy Like a Fox
4. Lost on Xandu
5. Gloria (Them cover)