Most people these days know the broad strokes of Jimi Hendrix’s early life story. Born in Seattle in 1942 to parents Al and Lucille Hendrix, he began playing guitar at age 15. He enlisted in the Army in 1961, and spent a year in the 101st Airborne. (There’s a classic photo of Hendrix in uniform playing a cheap Danelectro electric guitar, eager to keep his chops up, even in the service.) After his discharge, he played backup guitar with several well-known black performers such as Ike and Tina Turner, Little Richard, and the Isley Brothers in the American south on what was called “the Chitlin Circuit.”
Eventually, in 1966 he developed an act he called Jimmy James and the Blue Flames in Greenwich Village, when Chas Chandler, bass player for the Animals, spotted him, was properly astonished at what he was witnessing and volunteered to manage him, and send him to London. Once there, thanks to Hendrix’s blazing guitar playing, earthy bluesy singing voice, and incredible stage presence and showmanship, well-deserved superstardom quickly followed.
“He Was Huge, and He Was Broke”
But, despite Hendrix’s ultra-flashy image, not necessarily great wealth. An interview recently made the rounds with Pete Townshend who said, “Look at the legendary Jimi Hendrix, I saw him in LA in the last two weeks of his life. He was happy, he was really nice to me, and he hadn't been always in the past. I said, 'How you doing?' and he said, 'Pete, I'm broke.' He was huge, and he was broke.”
If true, a big reason why was that Hendrix plowed much of the revenue from his touring and record sales to booking massive amounts of studio time. Townshend wrote songs for The Who in his home studio, where he could toil away for endless hours without incurring large fees, once had recouped the initial cost of the tape recorders, mikes, and other equipment. In sharp contrast, Hendrix thought nothing of hiring a first-class professional recording studio in London or New York for hours at a time at night, and jam endlessly with his band and guest musicians in search of a new song.
My Generation
Hendrix also loved to jam in nightclubs after a concert. Early in the new documentary Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision, (which is currently playing in select theaters before the inevitable streaming and home releases), Mitch Mitchell, Hendrix’s drummer (1946-2008) explains in archive footage that while Hendrix could have a good or a bad concert to a paying audience, for the guitarist, “it’s what happens after the gigs that made up for a lot of the trials and tribulations of the road.”
One of the New York nightclubs where Hendrix loved to jam was the Generation, which Hendrix bought in 1968, originally with the goal of owning his own club, maybe with some space in the back to do some casual recording and songwriting.
As the new documentary explains, Eddie Kramer, Hendrix’s favorite recording engineer, convinced him to build his own recording studio in the space, which became the now legendary Electric Lady Studios, a name inspired by Hendrix’s 1968 double album, Electric Ladyland. As architect/acoustician John Storyk explains to his unseen interviewer, by the late 1960s, “I'm a young architectural student having just graduated from Princeton, I'm 22 years old, and made a decision not to go to graduate school, but to move to Manhattan and start working. Pretty quickly, a strange event happened one night. I was literally standing online waiting to get some ice cream and…out of boredom, just picked up the paper, and the paper had a want ad that wanted carpenters to work for free on an experimental nightclub.”
Storyk eventually helped design the nightclub, eventually dubbed the Cerebrum, which became an underground hit in New York:
It was way out of its time. Everybody would go to this club when they came to New York, including one night, Jimi Hendrix.
Now the story gets a little more interesting. Jimi Hendrix at the time was also apparently going every night to a blues club in the village in the basement of 52 West 8th Street. It was called The Generation. It became the site of Electric Lady Studios.
“You Just Cost Me a Very Exciting Job!”
Eddie Kramer picks up the story, explaining how Hendrix loved the club so much, he convinced his manager to buy it, telling him, “I can have a place where I can jam, and maybe we’ll put a little tiny studio in the back.”
Storyk says that Hendrix “basically turned to his manager and said ‘Find the person who did [the Cerebrum], in downtown Manhattan, and let’s see if we can get that person to do my club. And one night, I got a call from Michael Jeffery,” Hendrix’s then-manager.
Storyk designed the club for Hendrix in early 1969, using design elements inspired by Cerebrum.
However, after visiting space after it was gutted before building Hendrix’s proposed new nightclub, Kramer had other ideas:
I remember very clearly going down to 52 West 8th Street. Opened this funky door, walk down the stairs Into this very dark club and it was basically demolished.
I mean there were holes in the floor and parts of walls had been ripped out and there was a little office where Jim Marron [the future president of Electric Lady Studios] had made his home, with I guess industrial type of lights above him. I started talking to him.
I said this is the space that Jimi wants to have a nightclub?! He said “yeah. Yeah, and he wants to put a studio somewhere over there.” And I'm thinking to myself that's crazy! He's spending a bloody fortune in studio time, 150 to 200 thousand dollars a year. Why don't we build him the best studio in the world, a place where Jimi could call it his home? And then we had to convince John Storyk. Poor John.
Storyk was not happy about this change of plans, and initially despised Kramer for planting the seed in Hendrix’s brain, saying, “I watched this incredible commission disappear right before my eyes, and blamed it on Eddie Kramer. So my first meeting with Eddie was not a very good one…‘You just cost me a very exciting job!’ But the next day, or a few days later, we met, Jim [and] Eddie Kramer [saying], ‘How are you doing and we'd like you to stay on and do the studio?’ I said, you know, I have to be honest with you, I don't really know that much about studios and they basically said, you know, you're gonna work with Eddie.”
By May of 1969, with Kramer’s input, Storyk then drew up plans to build Hendrix’s recording studio. For its time, the finished studio really was state-of-the-art, boasting of excellent acoustically treated soundproofed rooms, adjustable multicolored psychedelic mood lighting, and perhaps most importantly, one of the first 24-track recording machines, at a time when the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and the Rolling Stones were still releasing best-selling albums recorded on machines with only eight tracks. (In a 2013 interview with Mix magazine, Kramer said, “When we finally finished the console, we had probably the first fully operational 24-track console.”) The world-class gear and room designs of Electric Lady made for quite a contrast with the comparatively shambolic studio the Beatles commissioned a few months earlier for the basement of their Apple Records building on Savile Row in London, as featured in Peter Jackson’s recent Get Back documentary.
Musicians for Musicians
Kramer chose the staff for the studio. Significantly, as he explains in the documentary, he went out of his way to hire musicians to be his assistant engineers. “I gravitated towards musicians, being a musician originally myself. And I liked the way they thought, you know, it was music first and then learn the engineering,” Kramer says. “So much cooler if you have musicians who are engineers, they get it right away. [If you say,] ‘Hey, can you take it back just two bars?’ They know what two bars is, as opposed to ten seconds.” In contrast, many recording engineers, and even producers, are not really musicians, as much as they love sculpting the sounds created while recording music.
One of his best hires was Shimon Ron, who would become the chief technical engineer at Electric Lady. Kramer says:
Zeppelin were in town to do an amazing show at the Fillmore East in 1969. After the show, I got asked by Page, ‘Hey, you know, we've got a bunch of tapes that we've been hauling around with us [which would become Led Zeppelin II]. Would you like to help us with that?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely, [I’d] love to.’ And I picked A&R Studios.
So, in walks this guy, and he's built like a tank. He's an ex-Israeli paratrooper. And he is their chief engineer. And I said, hey, Shimon, I've got some problems here. I need this reverb. I need delay…And within minutes, he had patched me up. And I said, hmm, this guy's smart. I like this guy! Hey, Shimon, you know, we're building a studio for Jimi Hendrix downtown. Would you be interested in coming on as chief engineer? And I think he looked at me like, you must be crazy, you know?
Ron picks up the story:
Jimi Hendrix was a very, very interesting person when I met him. He was working in a different studio with Eddie. And when he came, he was very, very gentleman. And he always say “hi,” and so on and so forth. He was very shy, coming from A&R, a beautiful studio that we built over there. And here I'm going into a dump. Sorry to say it. It was really bad. So, it was a little bit strange for me to start from the beginning. And my wife said, “Take a chance!” And I did. [There] were a lot of challenges. I was a military guy, and I said, there's nothing that I can't do.
Including, engineer Dave Palmer says, a massive rewiring project:
There's a great story about console [in Studio B] when it was put in. You could get to the electronics with a door in the front, but the back you couldn't get at. So, [Kramer] asked one of the carpenters to put two doors in the back, and the guy took a circular saw and cut two doors out -- cut thousands of wires. I thought he was going to be more gentle doing that. So Shimon apparently didn't say anything. He just got his solder and his tools and crawled into B and stayed there for a couple days fixing that.
The end result of all of that trial and error and a massive amount of labor was a brilliant studio design. Dave Palmer says, “When Jimi would show the place to other musicians, there was pride, you could see, he'd bring in Steve Winwood or whoever, and he'd just open up the door and let him go in and he'd just stand there. Give it a minute to soak in and then he'd start pointing out, well, here's the lighting and here's the round windows and here and there.”
In the documentary, Winwood, now 76 and with enormous gray muttonchop sideburns that make him look like he may be moonlighting as a Civil War general, adds:
There was a time when it was only big corporations that had recording studios and then suddenly there came a time when either musicians would buy into the recording studio, or they'd actually buy the equipment themselves and have it set up in a space of their own. And that laid the path for a different sort of recording to try things out and to jam and to just make accidents happen and with the tape rolling and try and develop those.
As is the style of the classic album documentaries of the last 30 years, there are several scenes of Kramer playing the individual tracks of multitrack audio recorded by Hendrix at Electric Lady, where Hendrix would bring in Winwood and other legendary musicians to contribute parts.
Carly Simon, Lena Horne, Stevie Wonder – and The Joy of Sex
However, even while Hendrix was still alive, those running Electric Lady Studios were eager to point out that it wasn’t just Hendrix’s personal recording space, but a well-designed and well-equipped Greenwich Village recording studio, a highly desirable option for any professional musician looking to record. Or arranger, given that the facility’s largest room could accommodate a 50-person string session.
As the documentary depicts, two early performer who recorded there were Carly Simon and Lena Horne, each of whose warm, melodic vocals contrasted sharply with Hendrix’s driving, guitar-driven sound.
Also mentioned in the documentary by engineer John Janson was one of the studio’s strangest clients — the producers of the audio version of the bestselling 1972 book, The Joy of Sex by British author Alex Comfort.
We did a very strange session once, actually. It was The Joy of Sex. There was a narrator reading excerpts from the book, and simultaneously they were doing the string and horn session, and that was weird. That was strange, because the producer would stop and go, OK, OK, let's back up. Let's take it from bar 32 at “Masturbation.” It was just kind of a surreal kind of session. I don't know how many that sold!
Beyond this anecdote about the ultimate in quirky recording sessions, I wish there had been more time devoted to the studio’s long existence after Hendrix’s death, but instead this is largely tackled by a discussion of Stevie Wonder’s early fondness for the studio, and some Adobe After Effects animation of numerous album covers of music recorded there over the decades zooming past the viewer. Sadly, Wonder wasn’t interviewed on camera, but Robert Margouleff, his engineer and synthesizer guru, explains Wonder’s love of Electric Lady Studios in the early to mid-1970s, where his landmark albums Innervisions, Talking Book and Music of My Mind were recorded.
If you haven’t figured out by now by my review, Electric Lady Studios is a documentary primarily aimed at both Hendrix obsessives, and those fascinated by the music recording process. Both camps (and admittedly, there’s plenty of crossover) will be well served by its careful attention to detail, towards both the last months of Hendrix’s tragically short life, and the studio he commissioned, which is still very much an ongoing concern.
Which isn’t true of many classic recording studios, who have fallen by the wayside, in large part because of how the computer and sinking recording budgets have combined to radically change the recording process for all but the orchestral film soundtrack world, and the few remaining superstars who can still afford the few big studios left. Near the end of the documentary is a quote from Hendrix that foreshadows the future:
I have done great things with this place. It has the best equipment in the world. We can record anything we like here. There is one thing I hate about studios usually, and that is the impersonality of them. They are cold and blank and within a few minutes, I lose all drive and inspiration.
Electric Lady is different. It has been built with great atmosphere, lighting and seating, and every comfort that makes people think they are recording at home.”
Decades before that vision of “recording at home” could become a reality — and that reality is definitely a mixed blessing for musicians for a multitude of reasons — Hendrix’s studio pointed the way. If only the man himself had been around longer to experiment with the incredible sonic playground he had envisioned just a few years before his untimely death.
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