Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision

-When you hit a guitar... [ Jimi Hendrix's "Night Bird Flying" plays ] ...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.

-You know, 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.

It was something that was personal.

-Oh, he loved it.

He loved the idea.

He was really looking forward to it.

It would 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.

I mean, people walk into the studio and hair stands up on the back of their head.

[ "Lover Man" plays ] - Here he comes, baby Here comes your lover man Here he comes Here comes your lover man I better get out of here Get out of here as fast as I can [ Cheers and applause ] -One of my great loves with Jimi in any situation is you could be in the armpit of who, you know, North Carolina or whatever, wherever, you could 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'd go and play.

I mean, it's what happened after the gigs that, uh, made up for a lot of, you know, 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.

- You see, I lost my sweet baby And I'm just in a daze and I don't know No, no, no I don't know what to do The sky is crying Look at the tears Fall like rain Ahh -I didn't know who in the hell Jimi Hendrix was.

So anyway, I was in one of these wild things and the place was packed and they were screaming, and all of a sudden somebody was hollering, "That's Jimi, that's Jimi."

And he was like, crawling up on the floor with this wah-wah pedal and this guitar with his big hat.

And I said, "So, what the hell?

Who is Jimi?"

[ Chuckles ] 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.

And so that was really what was important to him is his music.

- Broken glass was all in my head Screaming, jangling, talking in my bed Said broken glass was in my head -I was the general manager of a nightclub 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 and he came in with the Experience and wanted to jam.

I said, "Sure, fine, let's do it."

- I used to live in a room full of mirrors -It was hard to get him off stage.

He was magnetic.

He was fantastic.

We really got to know one another.

When 5: 00 in the morning, 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.

And afterwards he said, "Why'd you do that?"

I said, "I had to, Jimi.

Sorry.

That's management for you."

And it was the beginning of a long relationship.

-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 on line, waiting to get some ice cream, and answered an ad in the paper out of boredom.

I just picked up the paper, and the paper had a want ad that asked...

I said, "Well, that sounds like fun."

And I found myself 30 minutes later in an apartment on the Upper West Side with some gay guys, I actually had never met a gay person in my life, wanting to do this club.

They had a little model in a shoebox that was going to take place with somebody's trust fund money and a loft in Soho.

I never heard of the word "Soho."

And I said, "Well, that's interesting."

And three months later, I'd essentially redesigned 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's called -- It was called Cerebrum.

It was very well known.

-This super electric, turned on, far out fantasy land called Cerebrum, where anyone can play.

-Lived for about nine months in a lot of 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 sort of was a cross between a club and theater.

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 that became the site of Electric Lady Studios.

-Jimi loved the jam, and it was a beautiful club, and he said to me, "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 to own a nightclub down in Greenwich Village.

They saw a prospective club called... that was the Village Barn originally in the village.

They bought it up when it went bankrupt for $50,000 in bankruptcy sale.

It was called The Generation at that time, not the Village Barn, because Barry Imhoff, the owner, was bringing rock music like we were at the scene and had Sly and the Family Stone appearing regularly and lots of R&B groups.

But 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 a lack of a liquor license to generate the sales required to substantiate the overhead, Jimi bought it at 50,000 and thought he could have a better go at it.

He asked me if I'd come in to the corporation partnership and build a club for him.

-And they buy the club and it sits there for six months of doing nothing with it.

And finally they said, "Well, let's design this nightclub."

-And 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 lights to change.

He actually wanted a lot of the things he saw in Cerebrum.

-The idea was, hey, you know, Jimi wants to be able to record with an eight-track machine, a little thing stuck in one corner.

"Kramer, do you want to come down and check it out?"

I remember very clearly going down to 52 West 8th Street.

Opened this funky door, walked down the stairs into this very dark club, and it was basically demolished.

I mean, 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?"

And 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 $200,000 a year.

Why don't we build him the best studio in the world?

A place where Jimi could call it his home."

-I think he saw it as a home for him, but he was extremely 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, and a lot of the technology that was being used at the time was fairly new -- The consoles 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, this 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.

It's not like you can -- 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 sort of 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, that were working as carpenters and masons and plasterers.

And when Friday came, they were living week-to-week.

So they had to get paid, and I'd have to go over to Max's Kansas City and ask Mickey Ruskin, who ran it, to float the check of 4 or $5,000 would cover the payroll, and Jimi would have to go do a concert that Saturday to cover the check.

He'd fly back into town Sunday night with a suitcase full of hundred dollar bills and say, "Okay, cover the check."

-His background was clubs, so he knew all about cash and money and how to get things done.

And I remember on two different occasions seeing -- literally seeing bags of money.

-Once when he went out to the LA Forum and brought back $100,000.

He could work for about four weeks without a cash flow problem.

But it was hard.

-What originally was going to be maybe a 5 or $600,000 project, ended up costing $1 million in 1970.

It was a lot of money in those days.

-Studio A was going to be Jimi's studio, and that had to get completed first.

Jimi would call up, like, 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."

-We came up with a scheme to borrow against Jimi's royalties from Warner Brothers.

-He borrows against the future earnings of Jimi's royalties.

And we're off to the races.

-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.

[ Piano plays ] -We had just gotten a Yamaha grand piano in the studio, and 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 going to put tape on the machine, push the red button, the red lights were going to come on, and Eddie was going to 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.

-And I think Eddie at some point had talked to Jimi, and Jimi, "Well, is it ready?

Can I come now?"

And Eddie said something like, "The piano played back.

It's ready."

[ Laughs ] -So in the beginning, Jimi and I were auditioning the tapes that were in the tape library in the hallway.

Jimi's taped closet.

We would bring it in, listen to it, catalog it, figure it out, and Jimi would figure, "Okay, this tape, not that one.

We need to work on this song."

Then we would pick through them and sort of start to assemble the record, which was going to be a double album.

This was Jimi's focus, was this record that he had in his head.

He wanted to pursue that, and I think the interruptions were, "Oh, I got to go out on the road.

Oh, I got to 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 like 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.

And 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, okay, 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.

[ "Freedom" plays ] 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.

And, I mean, 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, because I used it on "Crosstown Traffic," that augmented ninth chord.

I mean, Jimi's attacking that piano, and, you know, I would be fooling around in the studio sometime.

You know, I used to get in there and jam around and stuff, and play chords and he'd say, "Hey, man, I love those chords.

Can you play?

You play on the track," I said, "No, no, no, no, no, no, I'll show you the chords, you play it."

"Oh, okay."

[ Laughs ] -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 and 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 to drumming because you can hear the R&B influence coming out a lot more.

He's probably figured out, "Oh, okay, well, Buddy Miles did that, but I'm going to 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.

- I got my leg hanging off your girlfriend's bed You got my money, baby So I brought my lead -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?

-Da da da da.

-I know.

We're doing that bit we just did again.

-We're not doing anything again.

We're just doing that, da da da da da da.

-The point of the studio was, here's your creative space where we can come in and we can just kind of jam it out for a while and see what -- 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, you know, 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.

- Freedom Free to live To get to you -For a man like Jimi Hendrix, who was a creative artist, he had to have a place like Electric Lady Studio.

So it became his and our laboratory.

[ "Hear My Train a Comin'" plays ] There was a sense of achievement with the Electric Lady Studios.

He was very proud of it.

He gave some ideas for the decors in there and some people would sit and listen, "Okay, we'll try this, we'll try that."

And it worked out great.

And he was always proud of it, always bragged about it.

-He let me know, "Now before you come in here, it's not complete.

It's not finished.

They're still working on it."

And that was it.

He apologized somewhat, you know, because it was still in progress.

That day when I was there, they had something petitioned off where there was work going on.

He said, "You're going to 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 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 lightings and here's -- here's -- here's the round windows, and here..." [ Chuckles ] -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.

It was something that we all wanted to do was to have this equipment on hand, and so that if 2:00 in the morning we felt like, you know, playing, and it was just a question of hitting a button and hopefully everything went down onto the tape.

-Now the address of Electric Lady Studios is 52 West 8th Street.

I was at 49 West 8th Street.

I love the fact that it was right across the street from the studio.

About midnight, the phone rings.

Well, I'm just going to bed, and it's Eddie.

And Eddie says, "Come on over here."

I said, "Eddie, I've been working all day.

And I got a -- I got a -- I got a..." -"Palmer, get your...down here."

-He says, "Well, Jimi's here with Steve Winwood, and they need a drummer."

-"Hendrix needs -- We need some drums."

-And he goes, "If you want to come to work tomorrow, you better come over here tonight."

-"Okay, man.

I'll be there in a minute."

-[ Chuckles ] "Yes, sir."

-And he would come tear...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 -- 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 that the studio would build, not only for the sound -- once people used it -- but because again, it was Jimi's studio.

- Angel came down from heaven yesterday She stayed with me just long enough to rescue me -So this is a track that originally was cut as a demo in England in '67.

And 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 the song came up again, a great idea to recut it.

-Jimi saw in Eddie that Eddie cared about Jimi's music.

Eddie wasn't afraid every once in a while to give a little.

"That's really good.

But you know what?

That thing you did before, try that."

Eddie would kind of -- And Jimi would go right along with it, because Jimi understood that Eddie was paying attention and that Eddie was a creative person and that Eddie cared about Jimi.

And I'm in the back, but I'm watching you at the board, and I'm watching Jimi out in the studio and said, "It's going to be like this from now on."

-It is.

What's going on here, you can hear Billy playing.

Of course Mitch is setting off cannons there, and then you've got this lovely doo-doo-doo-doo-doo.

-Well, apparently Jimi loved Billy's playing, too.

Especially-- -Very much so.

And I think he relied on Billy because Billy was such a solid character and could rely on him to play in time, locked up with him.

-Well, not just a solid character, but his musicianship was solid.

-Exactly.

-And I think Jimi felt good about being able to rely on that.

-It was our workshop.

It was our -- our passion.

Not only our -- what we -- our hobby, but it was our living, too.

It was great just hanging out and being who we were.

Musicians, you know?

It was a naturally free, creative exercise because Jimi was a leader.

You see, we weren't in a group where we say, Oh, we don't like that."

[ Mumbles ] Jimi was the leader and we respected him.

We respected him, we loved him.

And we were a part of this, uh, of the Jimi Hendrix Experience 'cause it was his experience, and we enjoyed that.

And we were very supportive.

- Forever I will be by your side -Jimi would come in to listen to a playback.

He would sit in the chair and Eddie would slide over and let Jimi come and sit at the console, too, and he would encourage Jimi to, "All right, move the faders around a little bit.

You want to hear more, uh, more echo on the guitar or you want more bass?"

And Jimi got into that, and he liked that because now he's really controlling his music.

And 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 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, I'm sorry.

Do you think that's going to work, though?

-That's sounding out of sight.

-Uh-oh.

-Uh-oh.

[ Guitar riffs ] Don't get carried away, Hendrix.

-[ Laughs ] -Jim's main concern was to make sure that 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 help each other, whatever it is.

-Financially it was -- especially in the beginning -- it was really, really difficult.

I mean, kind of held our breath sometimes from week to week, you know, until we could get, you know, 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, and simultaneously they were doing string and horn session.

And it was -- That was weird.

That was strange 'cause the producer would stop and go, "Okay, um, okay, let's back up.

Let's take it from bar 32 at masturbation," you know?

[ Chuckles ] And it was just kind of a surreal kind of 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 7 p.m. till three, four or 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 really -- it was tough in the beginning.

-We had a sort of understanding that Jimi only worked weekends.

He didn't -- 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 you didn't get a chance to play other than, you know, 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 studio and an entertainer on stage.

So, you know, he needed to get on stage sometimes.

-We did work a lot in the studio during the week.

- I wanna take you home -And on the weekends we were out touring and having fun and we couldn't wait 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, and he said, "Well, why?

I mean, this is my studio."

"But Jimi, we're trying to make money.

We're trying to, you know, keep the place going."

But if he had his way, it would have been, "Just leave my (no audio) in here.

I just want to leave it so that nobody touches it.

And I can just record whenever I want to."

-And there'd be times when Jimi just said, "I need a break.

I'm not coming in these two days."

Well, then there's a 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 7:00 at night and we weren't finished a session that we were doing, and he would stand in the corner in the doorway and would stand there like this and just go -- and watch what was going on.

And 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 want to come to Electric Lady and record, and it was a badge of honor.

It was, "I recorded 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.

-Different vibe entirely in the studio.

You know, Carly and I sort of 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.

- Dolly Dagger Her love's so heavy, gonna make you stagger Dolly Dagger She drinks the blood from a jagged edge -This is a track that we all really got into.

It's called "Dolly Dagger."

-Oh, absolutely.

-[ Laughs ] This track was created on the floor of Studio A.

It's a point where Jimi has total creative control.

- Dolly Dagger She's so heavy, gonna make you stagger Dolly Dagger She drinks the blood from a - Ooh, ooh, ooh -Yeah, that's definitely the, um, The Ghetto Fighters helping out Jimi on the backgrounds.

- Been riding broomsticks since she was fifteen Blowin' out all the other witches on the scene She got a bull whip just as long as your life Her tongue can even scratch the soul out the devil's wife Well, I seen her in action at the Player's Choice Turning all the love men into donut boys I tell you what.

Hey, Kim.

Karma kids, they're dead on the run -A little address to our friend here.

-So if Jimi said, "I want to do something tonight," and if he asked for me, he'd get me and -- and -- And Palmer -- Dave Palmer was a drummer, so he was more involved in tracking.

And I was a guitar player.

And so I was more involved in the guitar overdubs.

-Because your punch-ins were really fast on that, and it would allow me the flexibility to be in control of the board and have you just go punch, 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 the punches.

-And if I missed one, I was fired.

-Yes.

And you got fired... -Multiple times.

[ Laughs ] -Everybody got fired every day.

But that's okay.

-The guitar solo on this -- On the solos, is we take all of the gobos out, and 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, and this-- -This studio actually was split into two sections.

It was diagonal, on the diagonal one, this side of the diagonal was carbon and the other side was wood.

And we could open up all the gobos and screens, which separated the two because we wanted to keep the sound contained.

But then for the solo, we would open up all the screens and let his Marshall just rip and put mics 20, 30 feet away, as Kim was saying.

And that's what you're hearing is that lovely room sound in there.

- Dolly Dagger She drinks the blood from a jagged edge -As it 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 like you had to deliver.

-There was a lot of money spent.

-Yeah.

-It was over -- It was $1 million.

And "Hey, guys, uh, how much more time do we have before we have a finished album?"

-We were certainly under pressure to get something deliverable.

Uh, at least that sounded finished.

And 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, okay, just check this out, see what we've got, you know, and then leave us alone so we can do the rest.

-We can go back to work.

-Yeah.

- Dolly Dagger Her love's so heavy, gonna make you stagger Dolly Dagger She ain't satisfied 'til she gets what she's after -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, and I think there was a bond there.

He knew -- 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 going to have a press party for the opening of Electric Lady Studios and The New York Times and 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'll invite some local artists.

You know, Jimi's very shy.

He doesn't want to, you know, have too many people around there.

-Now, we had a hard time getting him to play.

He was one, notoriously shy.

I said, "Jimi, I'm breaking my balls building this place.

You got to come to the party.

I mean, you know, I 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."

So I knew a lieutenant in the Village Police Department.

He said, "No problem.

You know, two motorcycles?

Yeah.

You know, I'll arrange it."

And that's why he came to the party.

-And 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 mean, I was totally into the Japanese food.

-So the drum booth in Studio A became the bar.

-It was like a home, you know, that we were throwing a little party in.

It just happened to be a recording studio.

-You know how you drink sake out of these little, uh, little sippy cups?

No, no, they had cases and cases of, like, 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, and Jimi was sitting next to her talking to her, and she writes about it in her book.

There was the most wonderful conversation that she had with him because he was very personable.

-You could put a tape on a 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, oh, music."

So pretty much towards 1: 00 in the morning, and I think Jim Marron and Eddie both came up to me and they said, uh, "Dave, here's a set of keys.

We want you to lock up because we're going home."

So I locked up.

- Angel came down from heaven yesterday -I came to work the next day or Monday, "Here's your keys back."

And Jim Marron said, "Well, here's your keys."

And he gave me a set of keys.

And that was the moment right then that I knew that 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 are you doing, England?

Glad to see you.

We'll do a thing called "Freedom."

You got my pride Hanging out of my bed You're messin' with my head, baby I had to buy my lead -Jimi was in Europe.

He was working, "Cry of Love" was midway.

Even though much of it had been completed.

It still wasn't, you know, it wasn't ready for prime time.

So there was work remaining to be done.

Everybody was waiting for him to return and get back to work on it.

-I 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 yeah, there was a great excitement.

Most people were talking about, you know, when Jimi's coming back and resumes working, you know, it was great anticipation for that certainly from Eddie, you know, and I guess everybody else, you know, involved.

-Thank you for being so patient.

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 that other good... [ Cheers and applause ] -Jimi, you just come from the Isle of Wight Festival.

You enjoying that?

-Well, you know, I enjoy playing anywhere.

It was dark, you know, I was playing at nighttime.

I couldn't see anybody.

You know, but I could see the people that was lined with bonfires, you know, it was like a little bit, you know... [ Indistinct ] -How do you feel about playing before, say, 400,000 people?

-What does that mean to me?

You know, you're not getting through to all of them.

[ Indistinct ] -We were on a train going to Fehmarn and found out that there was no hotel for us.

And then when we got to the hotel, there was no one to check us in because apparently the hotel had not been paid.

And so their way of dealing with it was just to pull all the staff.

So there was a hotel and there were rooms, but there was no -- you didn't check in, you just went and found a room and hope there was nobody in it.

-As soon as we got there and got out of the transportation, it was -- we heard it, "Go home."

"Americans go home."

[ Crowd booing ] -I don't give a...if you boo, as long as you boo in key.

You mother-- -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, and we hit the stage after that first number.

It got quiet.

I mean, the people really appreciated.

They realized why we were there and what Jimi was all about.

A true artist.

[ Cheers and applause ] -And then when we got there, the word was that the promoter had been machine-gunned.

He'd brought in some -- some German Hell's Angels to do security a la Altamont.

And pretty much the same thing happened that happened at 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 through them, 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 and it was Jimi.

He was in London.

This was after we had mixed these tracks, he went to London, he did his gigs and he said, "Hey, man, can you bring -- can you bring the tapes over?

Can you send them over?

Can we start working over here?"

And I said, "Jimi, we just built $1 million studio.

And you're happy with it here."

And he said, "Yeah, you're right.

Okay.

Don't worry about it.

I'll see you next week."

And that was the last time I ever spoke to him.

-He talked about what he was doing in the studio, which was something for him.

And...

I go back to a thing that he had me do just before he died.

The day before, He said, "I want to get back in the studio and finish something."

He said, "Book us back to America as soon as we can."

You know, he was interested what he was doing in the studio, and he wanted to finish, he felt he was on a roll.

And, you know, he said, "Book me out as soon as you can."

He died the next day.

Next night.

Um, you know, I -- So I can't think anything else than he was enjoying what he was -- that what he was writing at the time.

And I know that he mentioned to me that he felt he was writing again.

[ "Slow Blues" plays ] -I got a phone call from Jerry Sickles about 7:00 in the morning saying, "Don't talk to the press.

Go someplace and get lost.

Jimi's dead, and we'll sort this all out later.

But don't talk to the press."

-But a phone call came in and just general disbelief and people kind of, you know, person to person, it wasn't a group meeting.

It just -- It was like playing telephone.

-And when the office called, they said, "Are you standing or sitting?"

I said "I'm standing."

They said, "Sit down."

And then they said, "Well, Jimi passed this morning.

I said -- so I slammed the phone down.

I thought it was a joke.

Then they called back again and they said, "No, Billy, it's real.

-I went downstairs to open up the mail and in there was my green card and I was so happy I got my green card.

Yay!

You know?

Went down to the Electric Lady, walked downstairs and I'm looking around there, "What's going on?"

People crying and stuff.

And they said, "What?

You haven't you haven't heard?"

I said, "No, no, what's going on?"

Said, "Jimi died."

Oh!

That hit me like a ton of bricks.

-[ Sighs ] Talking about Jimi's passing is really difficult.

It was...horrifying.

I mean, it was horrifying.

Nobody -- I think everybody was very shell shocked.

-The look at the future sort of wasn't the primary thought.

The primary thought was almost chaos.

The rug had been yanked out so, so firmly that there was a really kind of a chaotic emotional response to it.

-With the passing of Mr. Hendrix, there was a big concern about what's going to happen to Electric Lady Studios.

-In terms of Michael's presence and involvement in the studio itself, immediately after Jimi died.

No, he wasn't he wasn't trying to, uh, 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 didn't - He wasn't there being kinder, gentler, you know, trying to ease people's minds.

But he also wasn't there protecting the closets, which, you know, looking back on it, how come they just didn't, you know, sit the gopher by the closet, you know, 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, so it was a good feeling that people would come in.

There was respect.

It's like you're stepping into control, you're stepping into the Studio A... "Hey, this is where Jimi worked.

This is Jimi's room."

And people would -- you could -- on some people, you could see they -- 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.

And there was a lot of pressure from Michael and Warner Bros. and everybody else.

You got to 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.

So I think he was banking on the fact that we could keep it rolling, you know, without falling flat on our face.

-In terms of continuity or stability during that time with people wondering like, you know, 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, so there was an ongoing sense of everybody, you know, 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, um, you know, we could continue on.

And we were still 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 equality, I, you know, 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 Elektra.

She had a big success with that first album.

And it, you know, it always helped.

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 of Al Brown who booked a lot of the string sessions here.

He loved it.

The string players loved it because Studio A could accommodate 50 people.

I mean, they would come in and set up and the sound was just -- I remember Al was so happy he couldn't record and in fact, he brought Lena Horne here.

It was wonderful to have someone of her caliber here.

And that's how we started.

You know, it was trying to get the word out and -- and I think Elektra and Atlantic were thrilled with the studio because they heard what we knew they would hear.

You couldn't go wrong.

I mean, you're going to 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, and 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," and 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 of how he wanted things to work, and 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.

I mean, 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.

And what he would do is he'd go in and he would sing them the line, you know, and then they would just play it because, and of course, having Stevie Wonder here was another A-plus for the studio.

The buzz was out, you know, 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.

I mean, 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 and 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, no, not that beat, this beat."

[ Laughs ] [ "Straight Ahead" plays ] - Hello my friend So happy to see you again I was so alone All by myself I just couldn't make it Have you heard, baby?

What the wind's blowin' 'round Have you heard, baby?

A whole lot a people's coming right on down Communication...