The majority of people today are familiar with Jimi Hendrix’s beginning life story’s broad strokes. He began playing guitar at age 15 after being born in Seattle in 1942 to his relatives Al and Lucille Hendrix. He enlisted in the Army in 1961, and spent a year in the 101st Airborne. Hendrix is seen in a traditional photo playing a low Danelectro electric guitar while wearing a uniform and trying to keep his chops sharp despite the service. In the South of the country, he joined some well-known black musicians who performed as backup piano, including Little Richard, Ike and Tina Turner, Little Richard, and the Isley Brothers, on” the Chitlin Circuit.”
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Finally, in 1966 he developed an action he called Jimmy James and the Blue Flames in Greenwich Village, when Chas Chandler, guitar player for the Wildlife spotted him, was appropriately astonished at what he was witnessing volunteered to maintain him, and take him to London. When there, thanks to Hendrix’s blazing guitar playing, aromatic bluesy singing tone, and extraordinary stage presence and artistry, well-deserved fame immediately followed.
” He Was Huge, and He Was Broke”
But, despite Hendrix’s ultra-flashy picture, not necessarily great success. Pete Townshend just gave the statement,” Look at the famous Jimi Hendrix, I saw him in LA in the final two months of his career,” in an exam that just surfaced. He was happy, he was really nice to me, and he had n’t been always in the past. I said,’ How you doing?’ and he said,’ Pete, I’m burst.’ He was great, and he was broke”.
If Hendrix is accurate, a significant part of the income came from booking a lot of studio time for his travelling and recording. When had recovered the original value of the audio cameras, mikes, and other gear, Troyeshend had spent hours working on his songs for The Who in his house studio, where he could work for an unlimited amount of money without paying a lot of money. In stark comparison, Hendrix never considered it possible to spend hours a day jamming with his group and guest players in search of a new music in a top-notch, professional recording studio in London or New York.
My Technology
Hendrix even enjoyed impromptu jam sessions in clubs following performances. 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” . ,
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Hendrix purchased the Generation in 1968, one of the New York nightclubs where he would frequently jelly. The Generation was initially intended to be his own team, with some room for back-up vocals and music.
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As the new video explains, Eddie Kramer, Hendrix’s preferred tracking expert, convinced him to develop his own capturing studio in the room, which became the now famous Electric Lady Studios, a title 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. Very quickly, a strange occurrence happened one day. I actually waited online for ice cream while I picked up the paper, which had a demand ad for free carpenters to operate in an experimental nightclub.
Storyk ultimately helped design the bar, later dubbed the Cerebellum, which became an underwater hit in New York:
It was means out of its day. Nobody would go to this team when they came to New York, including one day, Jimi Hendrix.
Then the account gets a little more exciting. At the time, Jimi Hendrix was reportedly attending a blue team in the village’s room, located at 52 West 8th Street. It was called The Generation. The location of Electric Lady Studios was changed.
You” Really Save Me a Quite Exciting Job,” I thought!
Eddie Kramer expands on the incident, explaining how Hendrix had so much fandom for the band that he persuaded his boss to purchase it. He suggested that Hendrix should have a jam room and that we might even consider putting a small studio in the back.
Storyk says that Hendrix “basically turned to his boss and said’ Find the person who did]the Cerebrum], in city Manhattan, and let’s see if we can get that person to complete my team. And one day, I got a visit from Michael Jeffery“, Hendrix’s then-manager.
In earlier 1969, Storyk used design elements from Brain to create the team for Hendrix.  ,
But, after visiting room after it was gutted before building Hendrix’s proposed new bar, Kramer had another suggestions:
I remember quite clearly going down to 52 West 8th Street. This really dark club was generally destroyed when I opened this quirky door and walked down the stairs.
I mean, there were holes in the floor and exposed walls, and there was a small business where Jim Marron, the incoming president of Electric Lady Studios, had built his house, with probably industrial-style lights above him. I sat down with him and spoke.
I said Jimi wants a nightclub in this location, but I did n’t. He said “yeah. Yeah, and he wants to put a workshop there over that”. And I’m thinking to myself that’s ridiculous! He’s spending a terrible riches in theater time, 150 to 200 thousand dollars a month. Why do n’t we create Jimi’s dream studio, which would be his place of residence? Finally John Storyk had to be persuaded. Poor John.
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Storyk first despised Kramer for planting the seed in Hendrix’s head, saying,” I watched this extraordinary percentage disappear right before my sight, and blamed it on Eddie Kramer,” but he later expressed regret for this change of plans. So I had a bad first conversation with Eddie because,” You only cost me a very interesting work!” But the next day, or a few days after, we met, Jim]and ] Eddie Kramer]saying],’ How are you doing and we’d like you to sit on and do the workshop?’ I said, you know, I have to be honest with you, I do n’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 type, Storyk then drew up plans to build Hendrix’s saving studio. For its moment, the done studio really was state-of-the-art, boasting of exceptional musically treated soundproofed rooms, changeable colored kaleidoscopic 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 also 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 Beatles commissioned a few months earlier for the basement of their Apple Records building on Savile Row in London, as depicted in Peter Jackson’s most recent Get Back documentary, with quite a contrast to Electric Lady’s world-class equipment and interior design.
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.
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Shimon Ron would become Electric Lady’s chief technical engineer, making him one of his best hires. Kramer says:
In 1969, Zeppelin performed a fantastic show at the Fillmore East. 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 joining as the chief engineer? And I think he looked at me like, you must be crazy, you know?
Ron picks up the story:
When I first met Jimi Hendrix, he was a very, very interesting person. With Eddie, he was also at a different studio. 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 that. 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 ca n’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 could n’t get at. The carpenter then used a circular saw to cut two doors out of the back, cutting thousands of wires, [Kramer ] asked to put two doors in the back. I anticipated that he would act more subduedly. So Shimon apparently did n’t say anything. He just dug into B and spent a few days fixing that with his solder and tools.
A brilliant studio design was the result of all that trial and error and a lot of work. 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”.
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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:
When big corporations started operating recording studios, musicians would either buy into them or they would actually purchase the equipment and have it set up in their own space. And that opened the door to a different type of recording to experiment, jam, and just make mistakes happen while keeping the tape rolling and trying to develop those ideas.
There are several scenes where Kramer plays the individual tracks of Hendrix’s multitrack audio, which include Winwood and other legendary musicians who would bring in parts, in the manner of the classic album documentaries of the last 30 years.
Carly Simon, Lena Horne, Stevie Wonder – and The Joy of Sex
Even so, Electric Lady Studios ‘ owners were eager to point out that it was n’t just Hendrix’s personal recording space, which was 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.
One of the studio’s most odd clients, the producers of the audio version of British author Alex Comfort’s bestseller The Joy of Sex , was also mentioned in the documentary by engineer John Janson.
We did a very strange session once, actually. The Joy of Sex was involved. The narrator was reading excerpts from the book, and it was strange that they were also performing the string and horn session. 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 merely a strange kind of session. I do n’t know how many that sold!
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I wish there had been more time devoted to the studio’s long existence after Hendrix’s death, but this is largely addressed 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 years, zooming past the viewer. Sadly, Wonder was n’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 have n’t already figured out by now, read my review of Electric Lady Studios, a documentary that’s primarily geared toward Hendrix fans and those who are fascinated by the process of recording music. 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.
This is not the case with many traditional recording studios, which have fallen largely because of how the recording process for all but the orchestral soundtrack industry and the few remaining superstars who can still afford the few big studios that are still around. Hendrix’s quote that foreshadows the future appears near the end of the documentary:
With this place, I have accomplished great things. The world’s best equipment is present. Anything can be recorded here, of course. I detest studios generally for their impersonality, which is one of their things. 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.”
Hendrix’s studio paved the way decades before that “dream” of recording at home” could become a reality” for musicians for a variety of reasons. If the man had lived longer, he could have discovered the incredible sonic playground he had only recently imagined.
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