A biography of Jimi Hendrix's Electric Lady Studios, its ownership and other black memories.
Jimi Hendrix had initially wanted to turn the two cavernous bottom floors of 52 West Eighth Street into a club, like it had been when he first visited the space. For almost forty years it had been the Village Barn, a novelty western-themed bar, and then, for a brief time in 1968, a nightclub called the Generation Club (you can watch videos of Hendrix sitting on the side of the stage there while Janis Joplin sings). It was Eddie Kramer, Hendrix’s mix engineer, who suggested he found a studio—a place where Hendrix could have some financial and artistic autonomy—rather than a club, which Kramer insisted was a waste of money. Despite being the highest paid musician in the world, by the time Hendrix played Woodstock, in 1969, he was swamped with money problems. He was always the sort of performer who preferred to push boundaries and do the unexpected, and he was spending well into the six figures to record. He complained that crowds wanted to hear only his hits, so the studio was to be a place where Hendrix could have some freedom—something that despite his outwardly freewheeling look, riotous onstage antics, and easy come, easy go attitude, he had very little of. As Les Paul, the guitarist and inventor, recalled in the New York Times, “Musicians know that I’m a night person, so when someone’s got a technical question—how do you hold the guitar pick for this, how do you finger that chord?—they call. Back when Jimi Hendrix opened Electric Lady Studios, he was on the phone all the time; we talked about how to mike a guitar amplifier and where he should place the mike in the studio.” (...)
Tucked into the whirl of Greenwich Village, Electric Lady could have become a priceless real-estate curio. Instead it has continued to be a place where great American music is born. Unlike many historical sites in Manhattan, Electric Lady Studios has a strict but logical door policy: no tours, no strangers. For the most part, the only people admitted are those who have come to make music—the artists and their retinues.
Maybe that’s why it’s difficult not to feel sentimental, blessed even, when one gets a chance to go inside. There is something about Electric Lady that feels sacrosanct. From the moment the discreet, glass-paned door buzzes and lets you through, disbelief sets in and does not fade as you walk down the bordello-red staircase. These are the steps where a very shy Jimi Hendrix, only weeks away from his death, told a very young Patti Smith his never-to-be realized plans for a universal love orchestra, an orchestra where, as Smith wrote in her memoir, “musicians from all over the world in Woodstock… would sit in a field in a circle and play and play. It didn’t matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through their discordance until they found a common language. Eventually they would record this abstract universal language of music in his studio.”
When I first went to Electric Lady, ten years ago, Richard had booked the oval-shaped Studio A for Baraka to record in, and among the things I remember now is the way, late in the night, the red lights made the room gleam—as if the three-story building were a collection of bedouin tents set into the bow of a very fine, Jules Verne–built boat. There are no straight walls on the first floor of Electric Lady. Most of the studio’s rooms are lit by antique lamps and overhead mood lights that change color and make light shows against the white walls. Now a leather Eames recliner sits in the lobby and, next to it, a wooden record cabinet containing records from the studio’s most recent clients: Kanye West, Lana Del Rey, Daft Punk. There are Moroccan and Persian carpets and objets d’art throughout the building, such as a working 8-track with Ray Charles and Dolly Parton tapes that the current studio manager, Lee Foster, found and painted scarlet. There is a tiny hole in the door of an upstairs bathroom that Keith Richards cut for his microphone cord, so he could record his guitar solos in private. In a hallway there is a framed picture of the old Village Barn that Patti Smith gifted to the studio. In Studio B, the control board is caped in soft aubergine velvet. Another bathroom, painted a deep mauve, is papered with Barbra Streisand records and Polaroids of U2 hamming it up. And all along the walls of the first floor there are hundred-foot-long murals, painted in teal, pink, and purple, of astromen and -women trapped inside cosmic embryos: images, the artist Lance Jost recently told me, that are intended to paint the viewer into a spacecraft that is “hurtling through time and space.” As Erykah Badu put it, having pulled over her tour bus so that we could talk, “The artwork puts you automatically in Jimi Hendrix’s world… You don’t know what time it is, you don’t know what year it is, you’re just in a warp, in a wormhole or a vortex. There were many times that I would sleep there for days and didn’t see the outside world. I would take a sponge bath in the bathroom.But I didn’t mind that, because the mural in the bathroom makes me feel like I’m going into another part of myself. And just to see those people painted on those walls—those people are living still! And breathing through those walls. They are characters who are frozen in one position for the rest of time, who have millions of stories, depending on who lays their eyes on them. And those stories touch all our senses, and they have contributed to many of our songs, I’m sure.”
It’s easy to use words like vibe and surreal to describe Electric Lady, but it is almost impossible to understand the brave new world Hendrix was trying to forge with his studio if one doesn’t know that, in 1968, the idea of a studio owned by an artist—and one that had been built to allow artists to sit in the control room—was almost unheard of. Studios operated for the most part under the ironfisted grip of record companies. Engineers of that era were largely technicians, so much so that they often wore lab coats and cut their mixes in sterile, scientific environments. “There was a real boundary line between one side of the glass and the other, so Jimi’s idea was that it would be a safe haven for artists,” the Electric Lady’s architect, John Storyk, told me last summer. (...)
What is most incredible, to me, about Hendrix’s ascent and decline is how rapid and culturally defining it was for someone who lived for such a brief time. Not too long before Hendrix went vanguard and donned a British brigadier’s jacket, stopped conking his hair and curled it into a wispy Afro, thereby reinventing (but never quite losing) his painfully shy, poor-boy past to become a peacock of a performer, a god of rock, he was just a nameless, guitar-playing journeyman on the touring circuit once offensively known as “the Chitlin Circuit.” Hendrix would travel the Deep South, playing behind his childhood heroes. He also played for acts that were embarrassing and gimmicky, as a YouTube clip of him backing the duo Buddy and Stacey shows. Working behind them, Hendrix appeared for the first time on television on a Nashville-based R&B program called Night Train. Like so many other black musicians, he was a skilled laborer in his craft, but his ability to be flamboyant and vanguard mattered little while he was touring the circuit, and ultimately it served only to get him fired from Little Richard’s band.
Still, the circuit was where he learned the showmanship that Rolling Stone later would mock as being that of a “psychedelic superspade.” And, as songs like “Bold as Love” suggest, it is impossible to believe that he didn’t also learn the most technical, uneducable tricks of the trade from these acts. Before Hendrix claimed the title, Ike Turner was a reigning master of the vibrato, and Hendrix’s playing and showmanship have traces of Turner, a violent man whose fists have all but erased what he could do with his fingers when they strummed a guitar. Hendrix’s performed wildness was borrowed from Little Richard and Chuck Berry, his quickness from Bo Diddley, and (from the man he might have admired most of all) his smoothness from Curtis Mayfield. These were the people on the circuit who would lay the foundation for much of what Hendrix would later aspire to do—and would also serve as a template for what not to do when he became the frontman of his own group.
by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, The Believer | Read more:
Image: via:
Jimi Hendrix had initially wanted to turn the two cavernous bottom floors of 52 West Eighth Street into a club, like it had been when he first visited the space. For almost forty years it had been the Village Barn, a novelty western-themed bar, and then, for a brief time in 1968, a nightclub called the Generation Club (you can watch videos of Hendrix sitting on the side of the stage there while Janis Joplin sings). It was Eddie Kramer, Hendrix’s mix engineer, who suggested he found a studio—a place where Hendrix could have some financial and artistic autonomy—rather than a club, which Kramer insisted was a waste of money. Despite being the highest paid musician in the world, by the time Hendrix played Woodstock, in 1969, he was swamped with money problems. He was always the sort of performer who preferred to push boundaries and do the unexpected, and he was spending well into the six figures to record. He complained that crowds wanted to hear only his hits, so the studio was to be a place where Hendrix could have some freedom—something that despite his outwardly freewheeling look, riotous onstage antics, and easy come, easy go attitude, he had very little of. As Les Paul, the guitarist and inventor, recalled in the New York Times, “Musicians know that I’m a night person, so when someone’s got a technical question—how do you hold the guitar pick for this, how do you finger that chord?—they call. Back when Jimi Hendrix opened Electric Lady Studios, he was on the phone all the time; we talked about how to mike a guitar amplifier and where he should place the mike in the studio.” (...)Tucked into the whirl of Greenwich Village, Electric Lady could have become a priceless real-estate curio. Instead it has continued to be a place where great American music is born. Unlike many historical sites in Manhattan, Electric Lady Studios has a strict but logical door policy: no tours, no strangers. For the most part, the only people admitted are those who have come to make music—the artists and their retinues.
Maybe that’s why it’s difficult not to feel sentimental, blessed even, when one gets a chance to go inside. There is something about Electric Lady that feels sacrosanct. From the moment the discreet, glass-paned door buzzes and lets you through, disbelief sets in and does not fade as you walk down the bordello-red staircase. These are the steps where a very shy Jimi Hendrix, only weeks away from his death, told a very young Patti Smith his never-to-be realized plans for a universal love orchestra, an orchestra where, as Smith wrote in her memoir, “musicians from all over the world in Woodstock… would sit in a field in a circle and play and play. It didn’t matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through their discordance until they found a common language. Eventually they would record this abstract universal language of music in his studio.”
When I first went to Electric Lady, ten years ago, Richard had booked the oval-shaped Studio A for Baraka to record in, and among the things I remember now is the way, late in the night, the red lights made the room gleam—as if the three-story building were a collection of bedouin tents set into the bow of a very fine, Jules Verne–built boat. There are no straight walls on the first floor of Electric Lady. Most of the studio’s rooms are lit by antique lamps and overhead mood lights that change color and make light shows against the white walls. Now a leather Eames recliner sits in the lobby and, next to it, a wooden record cabinet containing records from the studio’s most recent clients: Kanye West, Lana Del Rey, Daft Punk. There are Moroccan and Persian carpets and objets d’art throughout the building, such as a working 8-track with Ray Charles and Dolly Parton tapes that the current studio manager, Lee Foster, found and painted scarlet. There is a tiny hole in the door of an upstairs bathroom that Keith Richards cut for his microphone cord, so he could record his guitar solos in private. In a hallway there is a framed picture of the old Village Barn that Patti Smith gifted to the studio. In Studio B, the control board is caped in soft aubergine velvet. Another bathroom, painted a deep mauve, is papered with Barbra Streisand records and Polaroids of U2 hamming it up. And all along the walls of the first floor there are hundred-foot-long murals, painted in teal, pink, and purple, of astromen and -women trapped inside cosmic embryos: images, the artist Lance Jost recently told me, that are intended to paint the viewer into a spacecraft that is “hurtling through time and space.” As Erykah Badu put it, having pulled over her tour bus so that we could talk, “The artwork puts you automatically in Jimi Hendrix’s world… You don’t know what time it is, you don’t know what year it is, you’re just in a warp, in a wormhole or a vortex. There were many times that I would sleep there for days and didn’t see the outside world. I would take a sponge bath in the bathroom.But I didn’t mind that, because the mural in the bathroom makes me feel like I’m going into another part of myself. And just to see those people painted on those walls—those people are living still! And breathing through those walls. They are characters who are frozen in one position for the rest of time, who have millions of stories, depending on who lays their eyes on them. And those stories touch all our senses, and they have contributed to many of our songs, I’m sure.”
It’s easy to use words like vibe and surreal to describe Electric Lady, but it is almost impossible to understand the brave new world Hendrix was trying to forge with his studio if one doesn’t know that, in 1968, the idea of a studio owned by an artist—and one that had been built to allow artists to sit in the control room—was almost unheard of. Studios operated for the most part under the ironfisted grip of record companies. Engineers of that era were largely technicians, so much so that they often wore lab coats and cut their mixes in sterile, scientific environments. “There was a real boundary line between one side of the glass and the other, so Jimi’s idea was that it would be a safe haven for artists,” the Electric Lady’s architect, John Storyk, told me last summer. (...)
What is most incredible, to me, about Hendrix’s ascent and decline is how rapid and culturally defining it was for someone who lived for such a brief time. Not too long before Hendrix went vanguard and donned a British brigadier’s jacket, stopped conking his hair and curled it into a wispy Afro, thereby reinventing (but never quite losing) his painfully shy, poor-boy past to become a peacock of a performer, a god of rock, he was just a nameless, guitar-playing journeyman on the touring circuit once offensively known as “the Chitlin Circuit.” Hendrix would travel the Deep South, playing behind his childhood heroes. He also played for acts that were embarrassing and gimmicky, as a YouTube clip of him backing the duo Buddy and Stacey shows. Working behind them, Hendrix appeared for the first time on television on a Nashville-based R&B program called Night Train. Like so many other black musicians, he was a skilled laborer in his craft, but his ability to be flamboyant and vanguard mattered little while he was touring the circuit, and ultimately it served only to get him fired from Little Richard’s band.
Still, the circuit was where he learned the showmanship that Rolling Stone later would mock as being that of a “psychedelic superspade.” And, as songs like “Bold as Love” suggest, it is impossible to believe that he didn’t also learn the most technical, uneducable tricks of the trade from these acts. Before Hendrix claimed the title, Ike Turner was a reigning master of the vibrato, and Hendrix’s playing and showmanship have traces of Turner, a violent man whose fists have all but erased what he could do with his fingers when they strummed a guitar. Hendrix’s performed wildness was borrowed from Little Richard and Chuck Berry, his quickness from Bo Diddley, and (from the man he might have admired most of all) his smoothness from Curtis Mayfield. These were the people on the circuit who would lay the foundation for much of what Hendrix would later aspire to do—and would also serve as a template for what not to do when he became the frontman of his own group.
by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, The Believer | Read more:
Image: via:
