Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision

“The last four months of his life there, when we just had the room just about finished and he came in, it was like a rocket ship,” fabled producer and recording engineer Eddie Kramer tells Apple Music. “The speed at which he was working was incredible.” Before it was a New York City landmark (and a reliable place for paparazzi to stake out glimpses of Taylor Swift coming in to record or attend weddings), Electric Lady Studios on Eighth Street in Manhattan was Jimi Hendrix’s dream. At the height of his fame, the guitarist envisioned a home base in his adopted city that could also be a club, then pivoted to making it a studio—designed by and for him and suited to his insatiable need to create at all hours. “The goal,” Kramer says, “was to make this wonderful place for him where he could relax and not feel pressured about the time that was being spent there, and knowing that we got his back.” The tragedy was that Hendrix only had a few months to enjoy the fruits of his work: The studio became operational in late April 1970 and he died on September 18, 1970. But the time he did spend there was productive, yielding material that wound up on the posthumously released 1971 albums *The Cry of Love* and *Rainbow Bridge*. The 39-track box set *Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision*, released in October 2024, gives a unique perspective on that short but critical time. Kramer, who was at Hendrix’s side for all these recordings, considers this to be a document not only of Hendrix’s boundless energy, but the special place that captured it. “We\'d get those phone calls: ‘Hey, man, those doors, can you give me some round holes in the door? I\'d like more round windows, man,\'” Kramer recalls. “We came up with this idea that all the carpet around the perimeter of the room was white, and that spaceship ceiling was filled with multiple lights. Jimi would say to me, ‘Hey, man, give me some purple. Make some green. Yeah, maybe some red,’ and we would just play with the colors. This affected your brain and your ability to create and get in the mood. I don\'t know any studio that had a theater lighting system; it just never had been done before.” Kramer was among the few trusted confidants tasked with building the studio while Hendrix was busy touring the world and funneling the proceeds into the project. “’69 was a crazy year, not only for Jimi, but for me and a lot of people,” he recalls. “He was going from studio to studio because he wanted to jam. In the few months leading up to the opening, he\'d call me up, ‘Hey, man, is it ready? Can I come in yet?’ ‘No, Jimi, we\'re this close.’” The first thing Hendrix and Kramer did once the studio was finally up and running was dig into the tapes Hendrix had in storage. “We spent the first couple of weeks going through every one of those tapes and compiling and putting aside what we were going to work on,” Kramer says. “Most of that is the 39 songs that you hear. Some of them are duplicates, of course, but the idea here was to show his music that was going to be *The Cry of Love*, which was supposed to be a double album, to show the growth of that material. You hear the looseness and you hear the tightness, you hear the music shifting left and right and finally making it up to that penultimate take where it\'s like, ‘Oh, my god, that\'s so cool,’ and you can\'t help but being swept up in this enormous hurricane of creativity.” After Hendrix’s untimely passing at just 27, Kramer and the rest of the people at Electric Lady decided that he would have wanted the studio to continue, and it quickly became a destination for artists. But this collection—not the last of what’s in the vaults, to hear Kramer tell it—can only hint at the bigger and broader directions Hendrix was heading in. “Jimi wanted to put horns on,” he says. “He wanted strings, he wanted bigger orchestras, more percussion, et cetera. So he was thinking of music on a larger scale. Unfortunately, he didn\'t get to do that, but those tracks, I think, can show the joy that was in the room at the time.”