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Jimi Hendrix, Lenny Kravitz and Their Mutual Friend

NEW YORK — In early May, Lenny Kravitz, the singer, songwriter and guitarist, made a special appearance in New York between the Mexican and European legs of his world tour.

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VINCENT M. MALLOZZI
, New York Times

NEW YORK — In early May, Lenny Kravitz, the singer, songwriter and guitarist, made a special appearance in New York between the Mexican and European legs of his world tour.

Kravitz had gone to 450 Broome St. to visit Michael Goldstein, a 79-year-old retired New York entrepreneur by way of Cleveland who had made his mark in the music world some 50 years before.

The man Kravitz referred to as “a mentor and a father figure” worked as a music publicist with bands like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Sly & the Family Stone during their heydays — and his.

Goldstein greeted Kravitz with one of his riffs on the music industry.

“Once again, Michael began giving me all kinds of advice,” Kravitz said. “He started again with ‘You should do this, and you must do that and you should not do this.'”

During the visit in May, Kravitz, who became a superstar in the 1990s, decided to make a recording in Goldstein’s home because his mentor and father figure was battling pancreatic cancer.

“He offered some great advice about concert tickets and so many other things,” Kravitz said. “He was always looking out for me.”

On May 19, Goldstein died, surrounded by his wife and three daughters at his Broome Street address, where he had lived since 1972.

Two weeks before his death, Goldstein discussed his legacy with the kind of energy that helped make some of his old clients famous.

“I served as a press agent for 10 acts at Woodstock,” he said. “Whenever or wherever there was a concert or a music festival, I was brought in to promote it.” He had done well enough as a music promoter, he said, to start his own newspaper, The SoHo Weekly News, which for a while was a sharp competitor with The Village Voice. (The Weekly News was published from 1973 to 1982; The Voice ended its print publication last summer.)

“We had a really nice paper, we had a dance page which was supported by local dance ads, we had an arts page that was covered by advertising from art galleries,” Goldstein said.

“But what we needed to knock out The Village Voice was a great classified, and we simply didn’t have one,” he added. “That’s what really hurt us in the end.”

Goldstein moved on. He tried starting another newspaper, The Wall Street Final, which quickly folded. But starting in the 1980s, he found great success in selling a variety of items he had invested in and sold for profit on the Home Shopping Network, including 8,000 automobile covers he bought for $3 apiece from racing driver Mario Andretti that he sold for $8 apiece.

Goldstein said he sold everything from “T-shirts to automobiles.”

“I was a salesman,” he said, “that’s what I did.”

In 1988, Kravitz, who was then working on his first album, “Let Love Rule,” moved into 450 Broome St., one floor below Goldstein’s ninth-floor apartment, with his wife, a young television actress named Lisa Bonet, who was pregnant with their daughter, Zoe.

“Once I met Michael and found out who he was, I became very attracted to his history, especially the part where he worked with so many musicians,” Kravitz said.

Kravitz soon learned that his new neighbor was both a business rep and a good friend of Jimi Hendrix. Kravitz grew up idolizing Hendrix, whose onstage persona later served as inspiration for Kravitz.

“Of all the bizarre coincidences,” Kravitz said. “I move in to a random building in New York and run into a guy who not only worked with Jimi but was a friend of his, just unbelievable.”

Soon Goldstein and Kravitz became “much more than neighbors,” Kravitz said. “In Michael’s eyes, I sort of became another Jimi,” he added. “He always told me I performed like Jimi, even reminded him physically of Jimi, and he went on to share with me the blueprint for success that he and Jimi had created together.”

Thirty years later, Goldstein was still imparting that wisdom to Kravitz, despite the fact that he was gravely ill.

“That’s why I had gone to visit Michael, I knew he didn’t have much time left and I wanted to say goodbye,” Kravitz, his voice cracking, said in a telephone interview from Paris, where he now lives. “Even though he was going through this traumatic event, he’s still giving me this great advice, the kind of advice I would never get again, so I thought, ‘Hey, why not record it, and I turned on my voice memo and did just that.”

When Goldstein died, his family quickly reached out to Kravitz.

“We called Lenny, he was very upset,” said Jocelyn Goldstein, one of Goldstein’s daughters. “Lenny has been like a brother to us all of these years, and now he feels as if he’s lost a father.

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