When you hit a guitar...
...it starts at this point
and just amplifies out,
and it just envelops with
this beautiful, fat, gorgeous sound.
It's a unique-sounding room.
I have to be honest with you, I don't
really know that much about studios,
but we spent the next year of our lives
designing and building this studio.
This was totally creative chaos.
The challenges were
a lot of challenges.
When Electric Lady was completed,
that was our studio.
Oh, it was something,
it was personal.
Oh, he loved it, he loved the idea.
He was really looking forward to it.
It was to be his living room,
his bedroom, his house.
He knew he had something special.
And you go,
"Number one, boy, was that unique.
Number two, boy, was that valuable."
And hopefully you can say
we handled it well.
We created a vibe in there for Jimi
that is so apparent.
And his spirit still is there.
People walk into the studio and hair
stands up on the back of their head.
One of my great loves with Jimi
in any situation,
is you could be in the armpit
of North Carolina, or wherever,
you can have a lousy gig,
you go back to the hotel or motel,
and Jimi would say,
"Hey, so and so is playing up the road."
And we go and play.
It's what happened after the gigs
that made up for a lot of the trials
and tribulations of the road.
He just took his guitar with him
everywhere.
One night we went to see
Albert King at the Village Gate.
And he brought his guitar
and got up on stage with Albert King
at the end of the show,
which was always a surprise
to everybody.
I didn't know who in the hell
Jimi Hendrix was.
Anyway,
I was at one of these wild things,
the place was packed
and they were screaming.
And all of a sudden someone was
hollering, "There's Jimi, there's Jimi!"
He was crawling up on the floor
with this wah-wah pedal and his guitar,
With his big hat.
And I said, "So, what the hell,
who is Jimi?"
And that's the time we met.
He would always take his guitar with him
and go listen to music
and then get up
and be on stage and jam.
So, that was really
what was important to him, his music.
I was the general manager
of a night club called The Scene.
It was a hotbed of music in those days.
It was half disco and half live music.
I met Jimi one night when he came in
with The Experience and wanted to jam.
I said, "Sure, fine, let's do it."
It was hard to get him off stage.
He was magnetic, he was fantastic.
We really got to know one another
when 05:00 am he was still jamming
and I was now an hour over
the allowed time in New York City
to operate a liquor establishment.
So I had to cut the power.
Afterwards he said,
"Why'd you do that?"
I said, " | had to, Jimi, sorry,
that's management for you."
It was the beginning
of a long relationship.
I'm a young architectural student
having just graduated from Princeton,
I'm 22 years o/o', 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 on line
waiting to get some ice cream
and answered an ad in the paper out
of boredom, just picked up the paper.
And the paper had a want ad that asked,
"Wanted: Carpenters to work for free
on an experimental nightclub."
I said, "Well, that sounds like fun."
And I found myself 3O minutes later
in an apartment on the Upper West Side
with some g*y guys,
actually I'd never met a g*y person
in my life, wanting to do this club.
They had a little model in a shoe box
that was gonna take place
with somebody's trust fund money
in a loft in SoHo.
I'd never heard of the word 'SoHo'.
And I said, "Well, that's interesting."
And three months later,
I'd essentially re-designed the club,
led the carpentry crew,
worked at nights, kept my day job,
kept my band job, and the club opens.
Now it's November of 1968
and this club does open.
It was called Cerebrum,
it was very well known.
It's a super-electric, turned-on,
far-out fantasy land called Cerebrum,
where anyone can play.
Lived for about nine months,
in a I01' 0f books.
Marshall McLuhan read it,
everybody loved it.
It was one of the 'in' things
to come to.
It was kind of a sensorium
that you entered, changed your clothes,
and was a cross between a club
and theatre.
And you lived in these little
floating pods,
and smoke came up,
and projections were on.
It was way ahead 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.
Jimi loved to jam
and it was a beautiful club.
And he said to Mike,
"Why don't we just buy this?
So I can have a place where I can jam
and maybe we'll put a little tiny studio
in the back?"
He basically turned to his manager
and said,
"Find the person who did this club
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
to design a club for Jimi Hendrix.
Jimi was hanging out in the club
and his personal manager, Mike Jeffery,
would come through on occasions.
I became friendly with them both.
Jimi's idea was to extend his holding
and go into a joint venture with Mike
doing a nightclub
down in Greenwich Village.
They saw a prospective club called the
Village Barn originally, in the village.
They bought it up when it went bankrupt
for $50,000 in a bankruptcy sale.
It was called the Generation
at that time, not the Village Barn,
because Barry lmhoff, the owner,
was bringing in rock music
like we were at the Scene
and had Sly & the Family Stone appearing
regularly and lots of R&B groups.
But he couldn't get his liquor license.
Jimi jammed down there frequently
and got to love the club.
But when it couldn't make money
and went broke,
because of the lack of a liquor license
to generate the sales
required to substantiate the overhead.
Jimi bought it at 50,000 and thought
that he could have a better go at it.
He asked me if I'd come
into the corporation partnership
and build a club for him.
They buy the club
and it sits there for six months,
they're doing nothing with it.
Finally they say,
"Well, let's design this nightclub."
Of course I accept the job.
And now I'm moonlighting
to design this club, which I did.
Jimi's directions were to make it very
soft, he wanted the lights to change.
He actually wanted a lot of the things
he saw in Cerebrum.
The idea was, "Hey, Jimi wants to be
able to record with an 8-track machine,
a little thing, stuck in one corner.
Kramer, do you wanna come down
and check it out?"
I remember very clearly
going down to 52 West 8th Street.
I opened this funky door,
walked down the stairs
into this very dark club.
It was basically demolished.
There was holes in the floor
and parts of walls had been ripped out.
And there was a little office where
Jim Marron had made his home
with, I guess, industrial-type 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 '5 spending a bloody fortune
in stud/o time, $ 750 f0 $200, 000 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.
I got a call from Jim Marron that said,
"The club is being scrapped.
It's now gonna become a studio."
And he was pulling his hair out
because he knew nothing about
recording studios, or how to build them.
So I watched this incredible commission
disappear right before my eyes.
Jim blamed it on Eddie Kramer,
so my first meeting with Eddie
was not a very good one.
Eddie was like, "Oh my gosh,
you just cost me a very exciting job."
But the next day,
or a few days later,
we met, "Jim, Eddie Kramer."
"How are you doing?"
And, "We'd like you to stay on
and do the studio."
I said, "I have to be honest with you,
I don't really know that much
about studios."
They basically said,
"You're gonna work with Eddie."
I agreed at the time to leave my job
and work for free as an intern
with another acoustician, Bob Hanson,
whose specialty was radio stations
but knew a lot about isolation.
Based on that,
Eddie Kramer, and a few other people,
we spent the next year of our lives
designing and building this studio.
The recording studio
was very important to Jimi.
He would book a studio
for hours and hours.
He probably spent most of his money
in recording studios.
He would have a different musician
come and see him and play with him
and they would jam in the studios.
Jimi was spending a lot of time
at the Record Plant.
They would let the clock run
and bill him for everything.
It was a lot of money.
He would book it
from 09:00 pm until 07:00 am.
He would spend
hours and hours in the studio.
He would play, he would edit, he would
produce, he would do everything.
Jimi and Eddie
had a very nice connection.
Eddie was like his engineer of choice.
Eddie was his man, really,
they had a very good connection.
There were really two forces at play
to complete the story, one was Eddie.
Eddie, I know this now for a fact,
had no interest in the club.
The club was, what does Eddie
wanna have anything to do with a club?
And here he is watching Jimi
spending a lot of money
with a small control room
in the back 0f a club,
but this is not really meeting
Eddie's dreams and goals.
He would like to have
his signature studio.
Now he was nibbling away in Jimi's ear,
which he had,
to convert this incredible space,
with the high ceilings and no columns,
into a world-class studio.
But there was another force at play too,
and that's Jim Marron.
Jim had club experience,
he had operated a club called The Scene,
another club where Jimi used to go
but a bit uptown.
When I explained the facts
of life in New York City
and that Jimi was neither
Italian or white,
and that he would have
a great difficulty
operating an establishment
of that nature on 8th Street,
they asked for my recommendation
on what they should do
because they had already bought
the existing premise
at a bankruptcy sale for $50,000.
So, I proposed that we could build
a recording studio
that was like a nightclub,
that it would be a place
he could entertain his friends
and open for private parties.
They hired me on as president
of the corporation,
to put the studio together
and make it a reality.
Jim knew that this would not make
a lot of money.
Clubs are a nightmare.
They look like they make
a lot of money but they really don't.
So he "s also nibbling away saying,
'L4re you real/y sure you Wanna do this?
Anyway, the two of them, they must have
been successful in bending the tale,
because the club
literally became a studio
and the story unfolded
and we never looked back.
No one ever looked back ever since.
My friend and I went out
and we found an apartment for Jimi,
a lovely apartment on 12th Street.
It was a very happy time for him.
His apartment was
a very comfortable place.
We'd sit up there
and eat strawberry upside-down cake,
watch TV, and then practice.
Jimi was a very humble guy.
He wasn't wild about spending
and having this and having that,
and a lot of material things.
He wasn't worried about that.
He could walk four blocks,
he was on 12th Street,
he would walk carrying his guitar, with
his hat and his bag over his shoulders,
walking down the Village
straight to the studio.
People would say, "Hi, Jimi."
He would nod.
They would acknowledge him
but they would never bug him.
Yeah, pass me that bottle again.
Unlike most studios of that era,
the concept was to make
the control room big,
make it an artist's room.
The idea that the artist
was on that side of the glass,
was a relatively new idea.
Most control rooms were small,
they were for engineers.
Artists are on the other side
of the glass.
They come in, they go out,
have a nice day.
This was completely different.
The room was big, big, spacious,
a lot of glass.
That was Eddie's idea.
The shape of the studio was with
the sloping ceiling going up to a point
and the beauty of that room.
John designed the control room,
it was on two levels.
In front of the control room desk,
it dropped down about four or five feet
and there was a bench
that was covered in cushions
so that the friends of Jimi or the
friends of the artist could sit in front
not disturb what we're doing,
out of our sight line.
And to my right
was a beautiful booth with glass,
so that I could just turn my head,
I could see the singer on my right.
If I looked straight ahead
I could see the whole band.
It was cocoon-like, that's what it was.
It felt like when you walked in there,
"Ah!"
I'm enveloped
by the warmth of this room.
Well, let's do it straight right now,
you can overdub all that.
We'll call this one "Drifting", OK?
- The tape's running, Jimi.
- OK.
Two, three, four...
Jimi's idea was to leave the acoustics
and the technology to,
"You guys, you figure it out.
I just want things to be soft and curvy.
I want things to be white,
and then I Want the light
to be able to change it.
Jimi wanted some way
to control the atmosphere,
some way to control the aura
of the room, the vibe of the room.
and I could see Why.
So they came up with this idea
of putting white carpeting on the walls,
and then up, recessed up
in a valance was colored lights.
Jimi adored that,
this was something that...
We would play games about that.
He would say to me, "Hey, man,
I want some of that purple on the wall,
and green over there."
And we would just dial in the various
colors and we'd start laughing about it,
and then, "No, make it darker, darker."
"OK, fine, I got it, I got it."
It was fun.
We could make an atmosphere
that he felt comfortable in
and that he was able to direct and say,
"This is what I want."
No one had ever seen anything like it.
When other artists would come
to the studio they'd say,
"OK, blue,
let's put on some blue today."
Well, see, Jimi had that
way before anybody else.
And that's just a spark of creativity.
Jimi had some interesting ideas
that none of us would have come up with.
- That's the entire front?
- Yeah.
It was my job to create the staff,
put them all together,
get the finest engineers you can find.
I was the drummer
for The Am boy Dukes.
That's how we all met Eddie
for the first time, he was our engineer.
I get a call to do an album with a band
called Ted Nugent & The Am boy Dukes.
This drummer comes to me
after the session and says,
"Hey, I got this tape,
I'd like you to have a listen to it
and tell me what you think of it
technically."
So at one point I play him the tape
of "Hey Jude", this little doo-wop song.
And Eddie was kind of impressed.
He said, "You did this
down in the basement?"
I said, "Yeah,
two little Sony tape recorders."
And Eddie went, "Hmm."
So Eddie says, "Hey, Dave, this weekend,
how about you stay in town with me?
You can stay at my place,
I wanna show you something."
That's all he said,
and I went, "OK."
The next day we went down
to 8th Street in Greenwich Village
and kick open this little cement door
and we walk down the stairs.
He goes, "This is gonna be
Jimi Hendrix's recording studio.
We're gonna call it Electric Lady,
this is gonna be Studio A."
It's dirt and concrete
and Eddie's all beaming,
he's all, "This will be Studio A
and this will be Control A
and down the hall will be Studio B."
And I'm going, "Oh, OK."
Eddie says to me,
"Dave, I think you'd make a better
recording engineer than a drummer.
How would you like to come and
work for me at Electric Lady Studios?"
I just loved being in the studio.
And the more I saw Eddie work,
the more I respected what he was doing.
He had a whole new slant
to how to get things done.
He'd give you a scream
every once in a while
if he didn't think you were doing
as best as you could do.
That's another thing I learned
from Eddie.
Then, of course I learned there's times
when not to scream at the artist.
I learned that too.
And after a while,
Eddie let me run the tape machine.
Then Eddie would take me out in
the studio and show me some mic set-ups.
I was eating it all up.
And Eddie let me be his second engineer.
Then I hired Kim King,
he was my next choice.
Kim was great, we had some of the best
up-and-coming assistant engineers.
In 1966, when he was Jimi James
& the Blue Flames at the Cafe Wha?,
- we jammed together on a daily basis
- Whoa!
Because it was free hamburgers
at the Night Owl to any musicians.
- And we were all broke.
- Free hamburgers at the Night Owl.
At the Night Owl, he had this set
of changes that he was working on
and we'd just jam on it every afternoon.
Then he disappeared, went to England,
and the next thing we knew,
"Hey Joe", Lothar was the house band
at The Scene.
Jimi kept a guitar at the Scene.
If Jimi was there and wanted to play,
that guitar would appear.
I jammed with him
a couple of times there.
We talked for a minute or two
and he said,
"Oh, right, you're that slide player
from the Night Owl."
So there was that connection
and he said, "Right,
you're the guitar player, I know you."
Jimi and I are at Juggy Sound
in New York on 54th Street,
and we're mixing the "Band of Gypsys".
Now, we all know
that Buddy Miles loved to jam.
Buddy liked f0 improvise
and he liked f0 scat sing.
I just remember this one track we're
mixing and Buddy is going on and on.
And I'm looking at Jimi
out of the corner of my eye.
He's sitting next to me and he's wearing
his hat and Jimi's head's going down,
finally, he's on the desk
and he's like this.
And the hat's over his head,
and I can just hear him mumbling,
"Oh, I wish Buddy
would shut the f*ck up."
So we had to do a lot of edits.
And Kim King,
who was the assistant engineer,
I gave him a task of cutting
a lot of Buddy Miles' stuff out.
My instructions were to pull it together
so it was guitar
and to eliminate the excess drums.
It was 20-some odd minutes
and we had to get it.
That was more than you can fit on a side
in an LP at that point.
It was an audition.
And he did a damn fine job.
I said, "Kim, would you be interested,
by any chance,
in coming down to see this new place
that we're building for Jimi
and becoming an assistant engineer?"
And I think he jumped at the chance.
In terms of people that Eddie hired that
he could train up, he went to musicians.
It was just smart on his part.
They picked two people who were
already good, accomplished musicians.
As a result they were easy to train.
He gave them a little bit of training
and they both set sail.
I gravitated towards musicians,
being a musician originally myself.
And I liked the way they thought.
It was music first
and then learn the engineering.
So much cooler if you have musicians
who are engineers.
They get it right away.
"Hey, can you take it back
just two bars?"
They know what two bars is as opposed
to ten seconds or whatever it is.
Ah, just go back a bit.
- Just do it, 'cause that was good.
- Where, where?
I needed a great assistant engineer who
could come in and help me with patching.
I'm recording, this is now edit 12.
Zeppelin were in town to do an amazing
show at the Fillmore East in 1969.
After the show I got asked by Page,
"Hey, we've got a bunch of tapes
that we've been hauling around with us.
Would you like to help us with that?"
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.
I said, "Hey, Shimon,
I got some problems here.
I need this reverb, I need delay,
I need this, I need that."
Within minutes he had patched me up,
and I thought, "This guy's smart,
I like this guy."
"Hey, Shimon, we're building this 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."
Jimi Hendrix was a very
interesting person when I met him.
He was working
in a different studio with Eddie.
When he came, he was very gentleman
and he'd always say "Hi."
And so 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.
My wife said, "Take a chance."
And I did.
The challenges were a lot of challenges.
I was a military guy and I said,
"There's nothing that I can't do."
There 's a great' story about console in 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 he asked one of the carpenters
to put two doors in the back.
The guy took a circular saw
and cut two doors out.
He cut thousands of wires.
He thought he was gonna be more gentle
doing that.
Shimon, apparently
didn't say anything.
He just got his solder and his tools
and crawled into B and stayed there
for a couple of days fixing that.
I'd probably do something like this,
shaka-oo, shaka-oo, shaka-oo,
shaka-boom-ki-doom-doo.
Jimi, for me, I saw the quiet,
shy, extremely polite Jimi,
always very pleasant, very low key,
but knew exactly what he wanted.
He'd come down but he'd often
come down at odd hours.
One day he came in during construction.
All the doors were installed,
these are pricey acoustic doors.
We had windows in them
because we wanted people
not k*ll themselves
when they open the doors.
They were rectangular windows and
he said, "Couldn't we make those round?
Couldn 't we just change
the windows to round?"
We were looking at each other and said,
"Well, yeah, anything can happen."
And eight acoustic doors
disappeared into New York
and they were replaced
with doors that had round windows.
This is how Jimi worked.
The reception was downstairs.
The first thing when John Storyk
made that curve of the wall
outside as you come in,
he made me a window.
I put a camera in there
with a wide angle.
You can see anybody there.
Everybody that came
had to be announced.
There were hundreds of people
that when they found out
that this is Jimi Hendrix's studio
they really wanted to go down.
When they recognized staff people,
they'd buzz them in.
If they didn't recognize you, you'd say,
"Well, who are you here to see?"
And it was,
"Oh, I'm here to see Jimi."
"Well, what's your name?"
He goes, "John Doe."
So, "Hang on."
"No, John Doe ain't gettin' in."
Every once in a while,
the receptionist would call,
"You gotta come and hear this."
Someone would be auditioning.
Someone would be outside going,
" | know you're listening and watching,"
and would be singing and playing guitar
out there in the street.
Electric Lady Studios was private,
that was the one thing
we wanted to make sure.
And this was great,
Jimi felt really safe.
The original club design had
this curved wall that curved onto itself
and ended up going into
this spiral shape in the ceiling.
Most of those ideas
were continued in the studio.
Even though some of those curves
were not the ideal acoustic shapes,
we made them work.
To this day the ceiling
is completely unchanged.
It's like this flat propeller shape.
We used then a home-made version
of air-entrained plaster,
in other words we made plaster a little
bit more absorptive than normal plaster.
Now you can buy this product, then we
had to make it in a home-made fashion.
We knew that we would need
extraordinary isolation
between the main room
and the second studio in the back.
To this day those walls are unchanged,
sand-filled, 12-inch solid masonry walls
that had to sit on footings.
And of course that leads us
to the river under the studio story,
which of course was discovered
when we were digging the footings
for these heavy walls.
We just dug too deep one day
and boom, it exploded.
Underneath the floor of the Studio A
was a tributary of the Minetta River.
What we didn't know was that,
after the main wall separating Studio A
and Studio B was built,
some of the clay pipes had cracked.
The flooding was a very disturbing thing
beoa use Studio A was full of Water.
I walked over and put my foot on it
and I heard squish.
I thought, "We've got problems."
We had to start
almost from the beginning
with a lot of things
because everything was with water.
The whole bloody floor
had to be taken up,
we had to dig down,
repair all the pipes.
So those are the things that happened
to knock us back on our feet.
But, hey, you repair and you go on.
I think he saw it es a home for him
but he was extreme/y frustrated
about the amount of time it took
to build that home.
He wanted to get in the studio
and play
but things like that
don't get built overnight.
A lot of the technology that was
being used at the time was fairly new,
the consoles and that
were being built.
It was a frustration on his part
but I don't think things could have
moved much faster.
This is a complicated studio.
If you were to build that studio today,
the studio would take
six to eight months to build, today.
With seasoned construction veterans,
40 years of studio design knowledge,
go back to 1969, 1970, there is no
studio construction industry.
There are really no books,
there's very few guidelines.
So actually, in the scheme of things,
given the fact that it stopped
and started a few times,
it didn't really happen that slowly.
The construction of Electric Lady
was a nightmare.
We were always running out of money.
Poor Jimi had to go back out
on the road, make some money, come back,
then we could pay the crew, 'cause
we would lay them off for a month,
and that was not the right thing to do
when you're building a studio
of this nature.
I remember once we were really down
and out and I couldn't make a payroll.
I had artists working for me
that were doing trade work,
working as carpenters and masons
and plasterers, and when Friday came,
they were living week to week
so they had to get paid.
I'd have to go over to Max's Kansas City
and ask Mickey Ruskin, who ran it,
to float the cheque of $4,000 or $5,000
to cover the payroll.
And Jimi would have to go do a concert
that Saturday to cover the cheque.
He'd fly back into town Sunday night
with a suitcase full of $100 bills
and say, "OK, cover the cheque."
His background was clubs
so he knew all about cash and money
and how to get things done.
I remember on two different occasions
literally seeing bags of money.
Once when he went out to the LA Forum
and brought back $100,000,
we could work for about four weeks
without a cash-flow problem.
But it was hard.
What originally was gonna be
maybe a $500,000 or $600,000 project
ended up costing a million dollars
in 1970 dollars,
that was a lot of money in those days.
Studio A was gonna be Jimi's studio
and that had to get completed first.
Jimi would call up every two days
or every day,
"Well, can I come over, is it ready?"
And Eddie would go,
"Well, I'll let you know, not quite."
But the anticipation was,
"We're getting close, I can smell it."
Oh, he loved it, he loved the idea.
He was really looking forward to it.
It was to be his living room,
his bedroom, his house.
When it came time for ordering the gear,
I knew exactly what I wanted.
I certainly wanted to expand
the technical horizon
by going 24 tracks of Dolby.
Then it came time for the console.
In 1968 when I was working
at the Record Plant,
I became very familiar with a console
made in New York City.
It was called Data mix.
Data mix to us represented the cutting
edge of recording technology.
The actual slide faders were lit up,
which was quite novel in those days.
I figure a', 0K lknow this board,
it's got a pretty decent sound,
Jimi's familiar with it,
let's go with this guy.
Boy, did we have trouble with that,
'cause the guy who designed the console
was, shall we say, a little 'fugazi'.
The board was still at Data mix.
Eddie Kramer and Jim Marron went almost
every week to look at the console.
And they saw a lot of lights
and they got very excited.
Studio A console looking fantastic,
a great, massive console with
all the modules, it looked beautiful.
What we didn't know,
behind that with a big cloth over it
was the Studio B console.
When I went over there,
I looked underneath the console,
there was nothing there.
He would be taking the modules out
of the B console
and dropping them into the A console
and then hiding it away from us.
So when he finally got shut down
for not paying taxes,
we got word from the Sheriff's Office
this place was gonna be raided.
So eight o'clock on a Friday morning,
we went in and stripped the place bare.
We took every piece of gear.
And Shimon had the job
of re-building Studio B's console.
I learned about Electric Lady
from Eddie Kramer.
It was a chance meeting.
I worked at Gotham Recording
and he was on his way to Gotham Audio
and we actually met in the elevator.
The elevator doors opened and this
very beautiful lady got on the elevator.
Dark hair, very good looking and nodded.
She got off at another floor.
He stopped me and he said,
"I'm looking for you."
I'm like, "Why?"
He said, "Well, I'm building a studio
with Jimi Hendrix."
And I was like,
"Yeah right, another nut job, no."
We talked and he wanted to set up
an interview for me to see Jim Marron
about being studio manager.
That's how it all started.
I thought, "It would be really cool
if you have another lady
running Electric Lady.
Why not Electric Lady
have a great lady studio manager?"
Linda was great, she was the
Electric Lady, she did all the bookings.
Yeah, she kept everybody happy,
and it was a thankless job.
The building was still going on,
so it wasn't even nearly completed.
In the beginning
this was totally creative chaos.
They split the second floor in half.
Half of the floor
was Electric Lady offices,
the other half was Michael Jeffery's,
Jimi Hendrix's offices.
Michael Jeffery is being Jimi's manager,
he had Bob Levin as his assistant.
Upstairs in their offices, it's now...
we have an administrative wing upstairs
and then the engineering
and the creative stuff downstairs.
I think Michael did see it as a way
to not only grow
his own management business
and so that he would
establish himself even more,
but also for Jimi to have a home.
It would attract people
because it was Jimi's studio.
It really did make a difference.
Building Electric Lady
was a real challenge.
To bring those forces together
was a very difficult task.
Michael and Jimi
had their own difficulties with it.
Jim Marron was really taking care
of business during that time
and did it, as I recall,
with a very light touch.
There's a lot of franticness going on
between them both
because remember Michael was also
looking at "Rainbow Bridge"
in those days
and it drained him.
The studio, again,
was a great difficulty to finance
for Michael as well as Jimi.
They both wanted to experiment
and go out in other directions,
and at the same time they wanted their
cake in New York and be able to eat it.
It was frantic
trying to raise the capital
while they were experimenting
in these various directions.
Jim Marron was the balance
between the top floor,
with all of the craziness going on
with Michael Jeffery
and the bands that he was doing,
and the downstairs, which was
all technical and music and all of that.
He definitely kept Michael Jeffery
out of our hair.
Michael is a strange guy,
and not too many people like him.
I loved him because he wanted
to do things, do this, do that, do this.
There was always a distance
between myself and Michael Jeffery.
We just never really hit it off.
I always felt he was very cold,
very calculating.
He was a very astute business person
and very smart.
On the other hand, he could be ruthless
and sometimes very ugly.
Michael used to ask me,
"Do we really need them,
Jim Marron and Eddie Kramer?"
He was telling me.
And I said,
"Michael, what are you saying?"
He was always not trusting,
that's what he was.
Looking back on it now,
it's almost funny.
It was just almost
like cartoon-like at times.
Michael doing his thing,
you know, management.
It was Jim trying to juggle
personalities.
Shimon in the back
trying to get the equipment done.
It was very hard because,
don't forget, I came into the studio
and all of a sudden we had a pause
because of the money.
All of the employees were gone
and I was the only one in there.
Late in '69,
we just hit a wall financially
and the place just shut down.
There was nothing going on
and Jeffery just had to figure out
what his next move was.
When we finally got tapped out
of the finances
and we had to shut down
the building operation in '69.
Things were looking pretty grim.
I was trying to figure out
a way to complete this project
'cause I wasn't gonna be deterred
by just a thing like money.
We came up with a scheme
to borrow against Jimi's royalties
from Warner Bros.
He borrows against the future earnings
of Jimi's royalties
and we're off to the races.
All right, well, if Kim can go upstairs
to the second floor, in the box,
there's a mic cable in a separate box,
and bring me an 86 and an 87.
We had just gotten
a Yamaha grand piano in the studio.
Eddie, unbeknownst to me,
Eddie plays piano.
It was one evening, and I was there,
and I think this was the first time
that we were gonna put tape
on the machine, push the red button,
the red lights were gonna come on,
and Eddie was gonna play something
on the piano.
We were thrilled
when we first opened up the mics
and listened to the piano
for the first time,
the first recording session
for Electric Lady.
I think Eddie at some point
had talked to Jimi.
And Jim, "Well, is it ready?
Can I come now?"
Eddie said something like,
"The piano played back, it's ready."
So...
In the beginning,
Jimi and I were auditioning the tapes
that were in the tape library
in the hallway, Jimi's tape closet.
We would bring it in, listen to it,
catalogue it, figure it out,
and Jimi would figure,
"OK, this tape, not that one.
We need to work on this song."
Then we would pick through them
and start to assemble the record,
which was gonna be a double album.
This was Jimi's focus,
was this record that he had in his head.
He wanted to pursue that.
I think the interruptions were,
"Oh, I gotta go out on the road.
I gotta go to this gig or that gig."
In order to keep funding
what was happening at Electric Lady.
I think building that studio, he thought
would give him an incredible freedom
to be able to create as much music as
he wanted to create, which was enormous.
He just had music all the time.
And to have that energy,
which was the business energy,
it was not the creative energy,
that was not always harmonious.
I think the business part of it
was the root cause.
He just wanted to play his music.
Then there were too many contracts,
there was too many deals to be made,
and he was the golden goose.
I think there was always
this constant feeling of,
"OK, well,
we have this amount of material,
and it's owed,
and there is a pressure to deliver."
There was a ton of work to be done.
What an incredible track,
it's "Freedom".
We've got all the cool sounds.
Check this out,
for instance, on the drums and bass.
That's Jimi on piano.
The guy's such an amazing musician,
and he's using these...
I used to show him a couple of chords,
and that's like a modification
of one of the chords I used to show him.
I used it on "Crosstown Traffic",
that augmented 9th chord.
Jimi's attacking that piano.
I would be fooling around
in the studio sometime,
you know how I used to get in there and
jam around and stuff and play chords.
He'd say, "Hey, man, I love
those chords, you play on the track."
I'd say, "No, no, no,
I'll show you the chords, you play it."
"Oh, OK."
Well, plus the fact that this was
a Yamaha grand piano.
A nine-foot concert grand,
one of the best.
It was amazing for rock 'n roll
because it cuts through the track.
All the time.
Now, what's really cool about this is,
if you isolate what Mitch is doing.
He's evolved his style
and there 's a definite change
in his approach f0 drumming.
'Cause you can hear the R&B influence
coming out a lot more,
he's probably figured out,
"OK, well, Buddy Miles did that,
but I'm gonna do this."
See, what he's doing
with the bass drum right there
is something that these days
a keyboard player
- would play on a drum machine.
- Right.
But a live drummer
necessarily doesn't have the stability
to play what Mitch is playing
right there.
When the studio first was running
and Jimi would come in,
a lot of that time was spent
writing as we go.
Jimi would have some ideas
for some songs
but he didn't really have them
officially set up.
Where's this from?
The last...
Ta-da-ta-ta-ta...
/ know, but' we 're doing that biz',
We just' did I! again.
We're not doing anything again,
we're just only doing that
ta-da-ta-ta...
The plan of the studio was, here's
a creative space where we can come in
and we can just jam it out for a while
and see how it goes
as opposed to just hearing it
in your head as you're writing it.
He could get the guys together
and actually create,
and then, two minutes into the thing,
he'd say,
"Oh, stop, wait a minute, no, that's not
working, let's try this."
But he did have what he wanted
in his head,
it's just that now
he had the opportunity
to actually hear it live, real time.
For a man like Jimi Hendrix,
that was a creative artist',
he had to have a place
like Electric Lady Studio.
So it became his and our laboratory.
Before we knew it,
we were creating songs
and building songs
and really moving along.
After a short period of time
we had a lot of stuff.
The use of unison.
You can hear how Jimi
has shown Billy,
"OK, this is the part
I want you to play."
Then Billy has
added his own stuff to it.
There's an extra couple of
notes at the end of the phrase
I'm sure Billy put in on his own.
- On his own, yeah.
- And it works.
Eddie every once in a while
would just get on the talk back and say,
"Look, guys, this is meandering."
Do you wanna pick it up
and do an edit, Jimi?
And he'd say to Jimi,
"Jimi, you got another angle on this.
That other angle
that you were playing before.
Man, you should try that,
go back to that."
- Let's just try it one more time, OK?
- One more time?
We had it on tape,
so we could roll the tape back and play.
Jimi, he'd have so many ideas going on
and he'd go,
"Oh yeah, that one, that lick."
It was interesting that your ideas were
also being recorded for later look-back.
And that was kinda cool.
How did you feel when they actually...
- Proud as hell.
- ...when you said, "That's the take?"
Just being in the studio,
getting excited, watching him play
and watching him smile,
I'm thinking to myself, "Damn,
it doesn't get much better than this!"
- This is what it's all about.
- It is what it was all about.
Ghetto fighters.
Now, Jimi is actually in the studio
singing in there as a blend,
as a part of that and
there's that lock again.
But the sound of Jimi's voice with them
is a perfect fit.
That's a song for today, isn't there?
There were times when Jimi
would be doing guitar overdubs
against a track that was already cut.
Jimi asked Eddie one time, he says,
"Can I come and sit in the control room?
Can I get a long guitar cord
and come and sit in the control room
to hear what it actually sounds like
coming out of the speakers as I play?"
I don't know
that a lot of people did that.
What we did later on was we installed
a special jack in the control room.
And it was just known as "Jimi's jack".
That was unique, that was kind of cool.
Eddie was never afraid of
anything new and neither was Jimi.
Solo.
So that solo is a nice ripping one.
Jimi was so excited.
There's a live vocal performance,
and from the performance
on the floor he's going, "Yeah!"
Because he knows
the track is going great.
He commands the whole track.
Rhythm, lyrics, vocal performance,
"What's the band doing?"
It's all locked.
I recall the day before, Jimi had played
another solo that knocked us all out
and we thought, "That's it."
So we all went home, Jimi came back
the next day and said, "Eddie...
"Put that up."
Put that up one more time,
I got an idea for another solo."
You encouraged him to do that,
but I think also you were saying,
"We're gonna hold the solo
from yesterday, we're not losing..."
- Just in case.
- "We're not losing that one."
And it turned out
this solo that we're hearing now...
- Is the better one, because he knew.
- ...is the better one.
- And it was the next day.
- Absolutely.
Inevitably, there' | | be this thing,
"You know, I think I can do that,
I know I can do it better,
I know I can do it better."
We'd have to find
a track and maybe ditch one.
And, "Which one do I lose?"
- That was you and J/m/ doing this.
- Doing that, yeah.
And, trust me, I was in the room
sitting in the back observing.
You're getting me embarrassed now, so...
- Finally.
- Finally.
There was a sense of achievement
with Electric Lady Studios.
He was very proud of it.
He gave some ideas
for the decors in there,
and some people said,
"OK, we'll try this, we'll try that."
It worked out great.
He was always proud of it,
always bragged about it.
He'd let me know,
"Now, before you come in here,
it's not complete, it's not finished,
they're still working on it."
That was it, he apologized somewhat,
because it was still in progress.
That day when I was there,
they had some partitioned off
where there was work going on.
He said, "You're gonna like it."
And I did.
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 them go in.
He'd just stand there,
give it a minute to soak in,
and then he'd start pointing out,
"Well, here's the lightings,
and here's the round windows."
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.
That laid the path
for a different sort of recording,
to try things out, and to jam,
to jusz' make accidents happen,
and with the tape rolling
and try and develop those.
It was something
that we all wanted to do
was to have this equipment on hand,
so that if at 2 o'clock in the morning
we felt like playing,
it was just a question
of hitting a button
and hopefully
everything went down onto the tape.
The address of Electric Lady Studios
was 52 West 8th Street.
I was at 49 West 8th Street.
I loved the fact that it was
right across the street from the studio.
At midnight, the phone rings
and I'm just going to bed.
It's Eddie, and Eddie says,
"Come on over here."
I said, "Eddie, I've been working
all day and I gotta, I gotta..."
"Palmer, get your a*s down here!"
He says, "Jimi's here with
Steve Winwood and they need a drummer."
"Hendrix needs...
We need some drums."
And he goes, " | f you wanna come
to work tomorrow,
you'd better come over here tonight."
"OK, man, I'll be there in a minute."
"Yes, sir!"
He would come
tail-as sing across the street.
He rued the day that
he lived across the street.
That's not the thing
to do when you're an engineer.
That was either the goodwill
or the curse
of living across the street
from Electric Lady Studios.
I was just so entrenched
in trying to make it work
that I didn't really have any doubts,
because the reputation the studio
would build, not only for the sound
once people used it, but because again,
it was Jimi's studio.
So, this is a track that originally
was cut as a demo in England in '67.
It was nice, it was great.
A lot of the ideas
were established at that point.
But when we got to Electric Lady in 1970
and the idea of this song came up again,
a great idea to re-cut it.
Jimi saw in Eddie
that Eddie cared about Jimi's music.
Eddie ween '2' afraid
e very once in a while to give a lift/e,
"That's really good but, you know what,
that thing you did before, try that."
Eddie would suggest,
and Jimi would go right along with it
because Jimi understood
that Eddie was paying attention,
that Eddie was a creative person,
and that Eddie cared about Jimi.
I'm in the back but
I'm watching you at the board,
and I'm watching Jimi out in the studio.
He said, " | t's gonna
be like this from now on."
It is.
What's going on here,
you can hear Billy playing.
Of course Mitch is setting off canons
there and then you've got this lovely...
Doo-doo-doo-do
Apparently Jimi loved
Billy's playing too, specially...
Very much so.
I think he relied on Billy because
Billy was such a solid character,
and he could rely on him to play
in time, locked up with him.
Well, not just a solid character
but his musicianship was solid.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think Jimi felt good
about being able to rely on that.
It was our workshop, it was our passion.
Not only our hobby,
but it was our living too.
It was great just hanging out
and being who we were, musicians.
It was a naturally free, creative
exercise, because Jimi was the leader.
You see, we weren't in a group where
you say, "We don't like that leader..."
Jimi was the leader
and we respected him.
We respected him, we loved him,
and we were a part of
the Jimi Hendrix Experience,
'cause it was his experience.
We enjoyed that,
and we were very supportive.
Jimi would come in
to listen to a playback.
He would sit in the chair,
Eddie would slide over
and let Jimi come
and sit at the console too.
He would encourage Jimi to, "A | | right,
move the faders around a little bit.
You wanna hear more echo on the guitar,
or you Want more bass ?
Jimi got into that and he liked that,
because now he's really controlling
his music.
Eddie let him do that because Eddie knew
that Jimi knew what he wanted to hear.
I thought that was really nice.
You saw that happening live
and you'd go,
"There's two guys that trust each other
and there's two guys
that understand each other
and care about each other,
creatively and musically."
- Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
- What's up?
- You think that's gonna work, though?
- That's sounding out of sight.
- Uh-oh.
- Uh-oh.
Don't get carried away, Hendrix.
In terms of how big the operation
was and the number of people involved,
I was shocked when I came to work there
about how few people were on the scene,
doing the job
of a major recording studio.
In 1970, when the studio was hitting
its baby steps,
starting to walk, standing up,
the staff was relatively small.
There was Eddie, Kim King,
it was me, who was the baby of them all,
but I was rapidly working my way up
to being full second engineer.
The staffing at Electric Lady
became a big issue
because we were running
ourselves ragged, 18, 20-hour days.
"Guys, we need staff,
let's go, let me audition them."
But we need a couple more people
to assist Eddie,
who basically was running the boat.
No matter what was going on,
Eddie was sitting in the big chair.
In the next wave of engineers
that we hired,
there was one in particular
who I really took to,
was a guy named John Jansen.
I lived in SoHo,
which was near the Village.
I got to be friendly
with a receptionist there,
and I was there a lot
before I was hired.
Apparently I came in
one time and she said,
"Eddie just fired somebody,
he'll give you an interview."
S0 I got the interview
and he gave me the job.
That's how I started working there.
My feeling was it was Jimi's place and
for rent, there was a business as well.
Jim's main concern was to make sure we
had enough bookings to make the payroll.
Yeah, I remember we did an early session
with Led Zeppelin
and we mixed a couple of tracks.
They loved the place
and they kept coming back.
It was definitely
that we were like a family
trying to do something for a star.
We helped each other, whatever it is.
Financially, especially in
the beginning, it was really difficult.
We held our breath sometimes
from week to week,
until we could get better flow,
cash flow.
We did a very strange session once,
actually, it was "The Joy of Sex".
There was a narrator
reading excerpts from the book.
Simultaneously they were
doing a string and horn session.
That was weird, that was strange,
'cause the producer would stop and go,
"OK, let's back up, let's take it
from bar 32 at masturbation."
It was kind of a surreal session.
I don't know how many that sold.
It was a double-edged sword
because on one hand, it was
Jimi's studio but it had to make money.
The original idea was that Studio B
would be for outside, other clients,
but Studio A was mainly Jimi's room.
But, what happened was the studio
started to get really popular.
Once that was happening,
I was working 16, 17, 18 hours a day,
'cause I'd be working with Jimi
from 07:00 pm till three, four, five
in the morning.
Sometimes I'd get four hours sleep
and come back in and
work the rest of the day.
So it was tough in the beginning.
We had a sort of understanding
that Jimi only worked weekends.
He didn't work during the week.
I think the weekend thing
was good for him.
It was good to be in the studio,
yes, but not seven days a week,
because he didn't get
a chance to play other than in a studio.
Jimi just wasn't a great guitar player,
Jimi was one of those rare occasions
when he was a great guitar player in
the studio and an entertainer on stage.
So, he needed to get on stage sometimes.
We did work a lot in the studio
during the week.
On the weekends
we were out touring and having fun.
We cou/dn '1' waif to get back.
I think Electric Lady meant
something very special to us.
I think Jimi was really frustrated
with the fact that he had to have
his gear taken down then put up again.
He said, "Well, why?
This is my studio."
"But, Jimi, we're trying to make money,
we're trying to keep the place going."
But if he had his way, it would
have been, "Just leave my sh*t in here.
I just wanna leave it
so that nobody touches it
and I can just
record whenever I want to."
There'd be times when Jimi just said,
"I need a break,
I'm not coming in these two days."
Well, then the studio is sitting there.
So we opened up Studio A for some select
clients to come in and do some recording
when Jimi was out of town
or doing something else.
However, I remember Jimi
coming into the studio at 07:00 pm
and we weren't finished
a session that we were doing.
He would stand in the corner
in the doorway,
and he would stand there like this
and just go...
and watch what was going on.
I'll always remember this.
If there was a lady in the control room
who was walking around
and didn't have a chair,
Jimi would find
a chair and bring it over for her.
I thought that was
so cool that he would do that.
Other clients, they would
wanna come to Electric Lady and record.
It was a badge of honor, it was,
" | recorded at Jimi Hendrix's studio."
One of the first artists working
there with Eddie was Carly Simon.
Eddie and I worked on her first album,
"That's The Way I've Always Heard
It Should Be."
Jimi had to go to Hawaii,
he had shows there
and he had some work
to do with Michael Jeffery
and go to Maui and maybe make a movie.
So all of a sudden,
we had a window of a couple of weeks,
and we could book in a new client.
She was so happy to work
with someone of Eddie's caliber.
In fact, they wrote together too.
A different vibe entirely in the studio.
Carly and I put our heads together
on that one
to find session musicians in New York,
figure out who are the right folks
to make this sound that she is hearing.
And we started cutting.
I think we got pretty much
the whole album tracked in about a week.
This is a track that we all really
got into and it's called "Dolly Dagger".
Absolutely.
This track was
created on the floor of Studio A.
It's a point where Jimi
has total creative control.
Yeah, that's definitely
the Ghetto Fighters
helping out Jimi on the backgrounds.
...Donut boys
- I'II tell you what, hey, Kim...
-Yeah.
A little address to our friend here.
If Jimi said,
" | wanna do something tonight,"
and if he asked for me, he'd get me.
Dave Palmer was the drummer,
so he was more involved in tracking.
Right.
I was the guitar player and I was
more involved in the guitar overdubs.
'Cause your punches are really fast.
It would allow me the flexibility
to be in control of the board
and have you just go
punch, punch, punch, for Jimi,
because he liked the fact that
you were pretty fast with the punches.
And I liked the fact that
he was fast with the punches.
If I missed one, I was fired.
- Yes, and you got fired.
- Multiple times.
Everybody got fired every day,
but that's OK.
The guitar solo on this, on the solos,
we'd take all of the gobos out,
Jimi's Marshall would be over there
near the drums
and we'd put a room mic up 50 feet away
because we had that space in Studio A.
- Exactly.
- And this huge liveness...
The studio actually
was split into two sections.
It was on the diagonal.
This side of the diagonal was carpet
and the other side was wood.
We could open up all the gobos,
the screens that separated the two,
because we wanted
to keep the sound contained.
But for the solo, we' d open up all the
screens and let his Marshall just rip,
and put mics 20-30 feet away,
as Kim was saying.
That's what you're hearing
is that lovely room sound in there.
Yes, there was a lot of competition
between what we were trying to do
in the control room
and what was going on
in the management department.
After months of building the studio,
you had to deliver.
- It was a lot of money spent.
- Yeah.
I think it was a million dollars.
"Hey guys, how much more time do we have
before we have a finished album?"
We were certainly under pressure
to get something deliverable,
at least that sounded finished.
I believe this was the first
completed track that we did.
I remember we did a mix on it
in time for the opening party
and a couple of other tunes
that we just kept playing
over and over at the party.
It's like, "Well, OK,
just check this out, see what we've got,
and then leave us alone
so we can do the rest."
- We can go back to work.
- Yeah.
When we mixed the four songs
before he went to England
for "The Cry Of Love"
that was the time when I think
we had the most fun,
and I saw that smile on his face.
I think there was a bond there.
He knew exactly
what we were trying to get for him.
This was a magical place
and he was proud to be there.
In August, when both studios,
A and B were finally wired,
we were gonna have a press party for
the opening of Electric Lady Studios.
The New York Times, Billboard
and everybody was invited to come.
The party was planned to be a splash,
it was good PR.
It was saying, "Yes, here we are,
we are a firmly established studio.
Come.
Come and record."
I think the idea of the party was
"Jimi's going away to England.
Let's have a nice big party,
we're gonna invite some local artists."
Jimi's very shy, he doesn't wanna have
too many people around there.
We had a hard time getting him
to the party, he was notoriously shy.
I said, "Jimi, I'm breaking my ba*ls
building this place,
you gotta come to the party.
Can't have an opening party for Jimi
Hendrix's studio without Jimi Hendrix.
What do you want to get there?"
He said, "Well, if you get me
a police escort to the airport."
I knew a lieutenant
in the Village Police Department.
He said, "No problem,
two motorcycles, yeah, I'll arrange it."
That's why he came to the party.
I think it was Eddie who suggested
that the catering be Japanese food.
I seem to remember a whole ton
of Japanese food
appearing at the bottom end
of the studio.
I liked it, I thought it was cool,
I was totally into the Japanese food.
The drum booth in Studio A
became the bar.
It was like a home,
that we were throwing a little party,
and it just happened
to be a recording studio.
You know how you drink sake
out of these little sippy cups?
No, no, they had cases and cases
of magnum-sized sake
and we were drinking them
out of these red plastic party cups.
Patti Smith was sitting on the stairs
coming down to the studio.
Jimi was sitting next to her
talking to her,
as she writes about it in her book.
There was the most wonderful
conversation that she had with him,
'cause he was very personable.
You could put a tape on the two-track
and play music in Studio B,
so when people would walk down the hall
and they'd come to Studio B,
they'd go, "Oh, yeah, music."
Pretty much towards 01:00 am,
I think Jim Marron and Eddie
both came up to me and they said,
"De ve, here is a set' 0f keys, We Wen!
you I0 lock up bause We 're going home-
So I locked up.
I came to work the next day,
or a Monday, "Here's your keys back."
And Jim Marron said,
"Well, here's your keys,"
and he gave me a set of keys.
That was the moment right then that
I knew I had become part of the family.
Not just the guy
that lived across the street,
but actually part of the family.
It was after the studio party
and he was going to London
the next day,
and we were supposed to go with him
but I just couldn't leave.
He invited us
and my Green Card had expired
and I just couldn't get out
of the country.
Hello, how're you doing, England?
Glad to see you.
We'll do a thing called "Freedom".
Jimi was in Europe, he was working,
"Cw Of Love" was midway.
Even though much of it
had been completed,
it still wasn't ready for prime time.
So there was work remaining to be done
and everybody's waiting for him
to return and get back to work on it.
It was in the middle of all
these recordings, all these great songs,
and everybody's really excited about it.
While Jimi was away,
Dave Palmer was starting to do sessions
on his own, so was Kim King.
So, there was a great excitement.
Most people were talking about when
Jimi is coming back and resumes working.
There was great anticipation for that,
certainly from Eddie,
and, I guess, everybody else involved.
Thank you for being so patient and maybe
one of these days we'll join again.
I really hope so.
All right, thank you very much.
And peace and happiness
and all the good sh*t.
Jimi, you've just come from
the Isle of Wight
which is another
of these large festivals.
Did you enjoy that?
Well, I enjoy playing anywhere.
But it was dark, we were playing at
night time, we couldn't see everybody.
If I could see the people,
if there was lines of bonfires,
that's the only way I could tell
there was a hill back there.
How do you feel about playing for,
say, 400,000 people?
That's what I mean, it's too big.
You're not getting through
to all of them,
and the idea to play to them,
to try to turn them on or something.
We were all in a train going to Fehmarn
and found out that
there was no hotel for us.
Then when we got to the hotel,
there was no one to check us in,
because, apparently,
the hotel had not been paid.
So their way of dealing with it
was just to pull all the staff.
So there was a hotel
and there were rooms
but you didn't check in.
You just went and found a room
and hoped there was nobody in it.
As soon as we got there
and got out of the transportation,
we heard,
"Go home, Americans, go home."
I don't give a f*ck if you boo,
so long as you boo in key.
Do you love them?
There was a lot of controversy at that
time and a lot of things were happening.
But to show the true artist in Jimi,
they were still saying, "Go home,"
we hit the stage,
after that first number, it got quiet.
The people really appreciated it.
They realized why we were there and
what Jimi was all about, a true artist.
And then when we got there,
the word was that the promoter
had been machine-gunned.
He'd brought in some German Hell's
Angels to do security la Altamont,
and pretty much the same thing happened
that happened at the Altamont.
But they machine-gunned him
and we got out of there.
We spent the first few days
back in London
unpacking the trucks and coiling cable,
because we literally backed the trucks
up to the stage and threw sh*t in,
just handfuls of cable,
because we were scared for our lives.
It was after Fehmarn,
when we went back to London
to try and sort things out.
That was the last we saw him.
The only thing that I do remember
is the last conversation.
He called up, in fact,
the phone was ringing on the console,
there was a red phone on the console.
It was Jimi, he was in London.
This is after we'd mixed these tracks,
he went to London, he did his gigs.
He said, "Hey, man,
can you bring the tapes over?
Can you send them over?
Can we start working over here?"
And I said, "Jimi, we just built
a million-dollar studio
and you're happy with it here."
He said, "Yeah, you're right, OK.
Don't worry about it,
I'll see you next week."
That was the last time
I ever spoke to him.
He talked about what he was doing in
the studio, which is something for him
and I go back to a thing that he had me
do just before he died, the day before.
He said, " | wanna get back in the
studio and finish some of that stuff.
So book us back to America
as soon as we can."
He was interested
in what he was doing in the studio
and he wanted to finish what he...
He felt he was on a roll.
And he said,
"Book me out as quick as you can."
He died the next day.
So I can't think anything else
than he was enjoying
what he was writing at the time.
And I know that he mentioned to me
that he felt he was writing again.
I got a phone call from Gerry Stickells
about 07:00 am saying,
"Don't talk to the press,
go some place and get lost.
Jimi's dead."
We'll sort this all out later
but don't talk to the press."
But a phone call came in.
Just general disbelief.
And person to person,
it wasn't a group meeting.
It was like playing telephone.
When the office called they said,
"Are you standing or sitting?"
I said, "I'm standing."
He says, "Sit down."
Then they said,
"Well, Jimi passed this morning."
I slammed the phone down,
I thought it was a joke.
Then they called back again
and they said, "No, but it's real."
I went downstairs to open up the mail
and in there was my Green Card.
I was so happy, " | got my Green Card!"
Went down to Electric Lady,
walked downstairs.
I'm looking about,
"Hey, what's going on?"
There was people crying and stuff,
then they said, "What?
You haven't heard?"
- "No, what's going on?"
- He said, "Jimi died."
Oh, it hit me like a ton of bricks.
Talking about Jimi's passing
is really difficult.
It was horrifying, it was horrifying.
I think everybody
was very shell-shocked.
The look at the future
wasn't the primary thought.
The primary thought was almost chaos.
The rug had been yanked out so firmly
that there was a really
chaotic emotional response to it.
With the passing of Mr. Hendrix,
there was a big concern about,
"Well, what's gonna happen
to Electric Lady Studios?"
In terms of Michael's presence
and involvement in the studio itself
immediately after Jimi died,
he wasn't trying
to bring people together,
hold their hands, keep them psychically
and emotionally intact.
He really wasn't.
I think he was in shock himself
probably, looking back.
But he wasn't there
being kind or gentler,
trying to ease people's minds.
But he also wasn't there
protecting the closets,
looking back on it, how come
he didn't sit the gopher by the closet,
with a club on his lap and stop people
from going into the closet?
Somebody really should have done that.
We were in the middle of doing
the "Cry Of Love" album.
$0 i2' was a good feeling
when people would come in.
There was respect.
It's like you were stepping
into Studio A,
"Hey, this is where Jimi worked,
this is Jimi's room."
And on some people you could see
they stopped and they took a minute.
After Jimi died, it was very tough
for me to get back in the studio
and look at all the tapes
and all of that.
There was a lot of pressure from Michael
and Warner Bros. and everybody else,
"You've gotta get another album out.
You have to finish this,
you have to do that."
Michael's attitude after Jimi,
I think he was looking at,
"Where can I go from here?"
He obviously had no one in his roster
the caliber of Jimi.
But you could tell he needed the studio
to continue and to make money.
I think he was banking on the fact
that we could keep it rolling,
without falling flat on our face.
In terms of continuity
or stability during that time
with people wondering, "What's next?"
Even financially, just in terms of jobs,
Kramer played an enormous role in that
and put such a focus on ongoing,
high-quality recording of people.
There are various albums going on.
There was an ongoing sense of everybody,
"Let's just get her done, go to work,"
and Kramer led that charge.
After Jimi's passing, I think the studio
took on another life of its own.
We were well-established
but we still had to make a payroll,
we still had to make sure
that we could continue on.
People still were coming,
they were calling for bookings.
So there was still a life after.
The reality was it was still
Jimi's studio, and with the quality,
I felt fairly confident
that we could sustain ourselves.
The beginning of our more commercial
success, like having Carly Simon here.
Carly was sent here by Electra.
She had a big success
with that first album
and it always helped
to get a credit on an album,
whether it was one song
or the entire album,
"Mixed at", "Recorded at",
"Produced by",
anything that would link people here.
There was a gentleman
by the name 0f Al Brown
who booked a l0!
of the string sessions here.
He loved it,
the string players loved it,
because Studio A
could accommodate 50 people.
They would come in and set up,
and the sound was just...
I remember AI was so happy
he could record.
And in fact he brought Lena Home here.
It was wonderful to have
someone of her caliber here.
That's how we started,
it was trying to get the word out.
I think Electra and Atlantic
were thrilled with the studio
because they heard what we do.
They would hear you couldn't go wrong.
I mean, you're gonna have a sound
that was spectacular.
Stevie Wonder came to the studio through
two guys with this electronic music.
And Stevie loved it.
Stevie loved it so much
because they came in with something new.
Bob Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil, they
were doing things that nobody else did.
Stevie was able to walk
into that space with us
and we had a ready-made set of shoes.
We did some walking in that studio,
for sure.
We did a lot of "Innervisions" there,
and we cooked up the album cover
for "Innervisions".
Danny Blumenau
actually designed the cover with me.
We made a lot of music in that place.
When Stevie Wonder recorded here,
he had a definite idea
0f how he Wanted things to work.
He did not want us to store his tapes
in the lockers that we had.
So he brought a trunk, and he had
his own lock for it, and that was fine.
He was gracious to the staff.
And when he recorded "Superstition".
I remember him being in the studio
wanting to make some changes,
I think with the horns.
What he would do is he'd go in
and he would sing them the line,
and then they would just play it.
And of course having Stevie Wonder here
was another A+ for the studio.
The buzz was out, the word was out.
People heard, they loved it
and they wanted to be here.
He was proud when somebody came in.
Yeah, he was, because it's his studio,
it's his idea.
Jimi's presence was there,
you could feel his hand on that place.
The place was seen
by the people working there
and obviously
by the rest of the industry,
as a leader in the industry.
The feeling daily there
was "We're at ground zero."
When Jimi was here, I think he felt
very safe and very protected
and knew that he could be
as creative as he wanted
and he got the support that he needed.
The sound of Studio A, just...
I can hear the drum sound in my head.
I think his ghost is still there.
When you turn the lights down low,
it's scary in there
because Jimi's walking around saying,
"Hey, not that beat, this beat."
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Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision (2024)
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