[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. On WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Some artists say they can feel Jimi Hendrix's spirit when they record at Electric Lady. Electric Lady Studios sits at 52 West 8th Street, right off Washington Square Park, one of the first studios to be ever opened by an artist. It was Jimi's recording home when it opened in 1970, shortly before his untimely death.

A new documentary tells a story of Electric Lady's construction, unique design, and shows how Hendrix wanted a space where he could be his most creative self away from the pressures of the music industry. We also learn a lot about the songs he recorded in this space. Like Dolly Dagger.

[MUSIC - Jimi Hendrix: Dolly Dagger]

The documentary is called Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision. It's opening at the Quad Cinema on August 9th, while the film's archiving theaters, the Hendrix State, prepares to release a new box set of his music archives in September. With me now is director and Hendrix's estate archivist, John McDermott. He's in the studio. Nice to meet you, John.

John McDermott: Nice to meet you. Thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: Also Electric Lady architect John Storyk is joining us via Zoom. Hi, John.

John Storyk: How are you? Thanks for having me. Thanks.

Alison Stewart: Sure thing. Listeners, are you a musician who's worked in Electric Lady Studios before? What's impressed you about the space? Did you feel Hendrix's spirit? Call or text us. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. We also want to ask you, audience, Electric Lady is famously right off Washington Square Park, and it's been used by so many musicians over the years. Have you ever been walking by the studio when you've seen an artist coming or going? We want to know your story. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC, or you can reach out via social media @allofitwnyc.

John, to start out, John M, how would you describe where Hendrick was artistically in the months leading up to the purchase of 52 West 8th Street?

John McDermott: At that time in his career, he was the highest-grossing touring act in the world. He had two albums in the Top 10. He was enormously popular. For him, creating those works, particularly his most recent record at the time was Electric Ladyland, he had spent a lot of money at the record plant and other studios, so this was ultimately part of the thinking that having your own space would allow you to be able to create and have some semblance of continuity, as opposed to running around to various places to finish things you started somewhere else.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] When you think about 52 West 8th Street, how did you find the location?

John McDermott: As John Storyk can tell you, I think he really enjoyed jamming at the Generation Club, which was a nightclub without a liquor license that featured acts like Sly and the Family Stone and others playing. Jimi liked to go there to watch the music and then to sit in with other artists. He was certainly well familiar with that. As a result of it, he and his manager bought the lease, thinking they'd create a nightclub. That's what led them, of course, to John Storyk.

Alison Stewart: Mr. Storyk, let's bring you into the conversation. You're in your 20s, you're just out of college, and Jimi and his team reach out to you about designing the club, based on your work, designing a club called Cerebrum in Soho. First of all, what would people experience in Cerebrum, and why was Jimi so into the design?

John Storyk: The story's a little bit bigger than that. It turns out I'd actually been at the Generation Club even two years before because I was in a blues band down the road at college. This is where you would go to see Buddy Guy or Junior Wells, or even a kind of an odd left-handed guitar player from Seattle one night. I knew this club, I'm out of school, In a story that is a little bit too long to get into in this brief interview, I ended up designing and even partially building an experimental nightclub called Cerebrum, which opened in Soho. In an era when the word Soho was still new to most cab drivers

It was an experiential club. You kind of went into the club, and you even changed into these gowns and immersive audio at the time. Again, before there was that word. Scenes changed over two or three hours. It was sort of a cross between a club and theater, and it was very hip. Life changed on a dime. If you were any kind of artist in New York or visiting Orlando permanently, you would go there. Jimi went there. As John pointed out, at the time, Jimi's idea and Michael Jeffery's idea, his manager, was to take over the lease and run the club. Literally, one day I got a call from the management company, "Would you design a club for Jimi Hendrix?" I was 22. I was, "Okay, that seems like a--"

Alison Stewart: "Sure. Why not?

John Storyk: Why not? There I am a few days later meeting Jimi and Michael. Of course, I'm a Hendrix fan like everybody else. I designed the club. I have one drawing, April 1969, for a club. Then one night at eleven o'clock in the evening, I got a call from, then, an unknown record producer, actually from [unintelligible 00:06:21] Jim Marin, who had been hired to run the club because he was a club owner. Again, this is supposed to be a club that they're changing from club to studio. Basically, Eddie talked Jimi out of it, reminding him of his extraordinary recording bills and so the clubs were scrapped. My first commission was abandoned. I wanted to strangle Eddie Kramer, who, by the way, became a lifetime friend and my daughter's godfather. I talk to Eddie every week.

Now comes one of those crazy moments where they said, "Well, you could just stay on and design the recording studio." I said, "Guys, I've never even been in a recording studio." "That's okay. Try to figure it out and learn as much as you can." I went back to Columbia, took an acoustics class. This was in an era when there were very few studios. You have to realize there were very few, if any, artist-owned studios. There were no studios below 34th Street, that just simply didn't exist. Certainly no studios in the village, and certainly no commercial studios of this size. We were all on new ground.

Alison Stewart: New territory. Yes.

John Storyk: It was very exciting. I, of course, thought that this is exactly what's supposed to happen to a 22-year-old having just graduated from school, arriving in New York.

Alison Stewart: Of course, like everybody says. You're making a point, and John, I want to get you in on this, the idea that Jimi Hendrix was spending so much money at other studios, what kind of advantage would he have by having his own studio?

John McDermott: Well, continuity would be the most important thing, and then, of course, the upgrade in quality. I think that that's one thing starting with John and then, of course, all the great technical people that worked together with [unintelligible 00:08:10] Jim Marin and Eddie Kramer, Shimon Ron, all these wonderful folks. This was a purpose-built operation for an artist. There was always the understanding that there would be Studio A, which would, in theory, be Jimi's, and Studio B, which would be for other artists to rent.

The thinking was, if we do this right and make this for Jimi, he'll be even greater than he is today. There really was kind of a team effort by all the people involved to serve him, not only in a friendly way, but I think they all really wanted this to succeed for him. They were all young people really dedicated to doing something like this, which nobody else out there was doing.

John Storyk: If you look at studios in the late 50s and 60s and look at how most recording was done, not Jimi's, but most recording, artists arrived, songs were recorded very quickly. Artists did not go into the control room as you know. Songwriters wrote songs, artists sang the songs, engineers were engineers, and. There was this giant line between the two of them. Electric Lady had a huge control room. Jimi worked in both rooms. At a technical level, at an architectural level, it was all quite different than how most studios historically were set up going back to the late 50s and early 60s. I had the advantage of simply not being ever part of that world. Of course, now everybody has a studio, everybody has a home studio, but not in 1969, I can assure you.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. Marcus is calling in from West Chester. Hi, Marcus. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Marcus: Hi, nice to be with you guys.

Alison Stewart: Tell us your story.

Marcus: Well, first of all, I'm really looking forward to the film. It's such a cool-sounding project. I can't wait to see it. My story is very serendipitously ended up in a recording session late on, I feel like it was a Monday night with the artist Usher. He had shown up at a birthday event that I was playing at with a guitarist-singer from Haiti named Monvelyno, who was based in Brooklyn. He and I worked together a lot. Usher came to the party, ended up singing with us, and then invited us to an impromptu recording session that was basically all night. That was my first time going in after having walked by the studio countless times in the village and fantasizing about what it must be like to be in Jimi Hendrix's old digs.

I went in there. I'm a percussion player. I play a lot of Afro-Caribbean hand percussion, mostly jazz and other kinds of music, so it wasn't lost on me that I was bringing my voodoo drums into the Voodoo Child studios. I guess the thing that really most struck me when I went in was having played in a lot of other studios that had been beautiful in very different ways, the vibe in there was just very different. Everything from the colors on the walls to the fact that you kind of feel like you're in a big curved wall living room or something. It had a very sort of hangout, relaxed vibe to it. Also, I couldn't help but think about all the amazing music that's been made there since, thinking about people like Questlove, Carmen, Usher, Erykah Badu, and all the other people that have holed up there creating amazing music.

Alison Stewart: Marcus, thanks for the call. John Storyk, let me ask you about this. The vibe of the place when you were. I know you have to go through all of your architectural details, but there's a vibe that you had to get, and there's a vibe that Jimi wanted. What was it?

John Storyk: Remember, he had fallen in love with Cerebrum. Cerebrum was basically white, with color. Think of it as a screen. It was basically a screen. Think of a 55-year-old version of the Sphere in Las Vegas. That is what he fell in love with, and that's what he-- I can remember like it was yesterday. "What do you want this to look like?" He said, "I want to be able to change the colors at any time." Basically, we gave him a curved palette. This was the club design of which a lot of it carried over to the studio, with a complete light-changing ability on almost every surface. It's easy to do now, you can get all that stuff at Home Depot. Again, 55 years ago, not so easy. You needed theater technology, which then, technically, was a little bit difficult. We needed special kinds of dimmers, et cetera.

Although I only went to one or two sessions with him, I've spoken many times with Eddie, of course. Jimi would all the time change the colors constantly. He would stop and say, "I want it to be blue now. I want it to be purple now." The caller that just called in kind of hit it on the nose, he really wanted it to be much more like a living room. Even the current people who operate it now, I've spoken to Lee many times about this, you walk down there now, and it feels like a living room. It doesn't have windows to the daylight, it's in the basement, as we all know. That was his vibe. That was his request. Jimi didn't read drawings very well, but he knew what he liked, he knew what he loved, and he expressed it very quietly in those kinds of words.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the new documentary Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision. We're talking with John Storyk who's the Electric Lady architect, as well as John McDermott, the director of the film. One thing I saw in the film that surprised me, I guess, was how much financial trouble they had in building this. How difficult was it to get the money for it? I guess you just can't go to the bank and say, "Give me a million dollars to make a record studio."

John McDermott: Not in those days. No, no. The irony of the situation was that Jimi, financially, given that he was making at that time in 1969, anywhere from $80,000 to $100,000 for playing venues like Madison Square Garden, the LA Forum, and so on and so forth. It just seemed like that gravy train would continue to roll forever. That was the thinking when the studio started, was that, "Okay, we'll be able to manage this as we go." Unfortunately, there were not only problems with Jimi's band, his bassist Noel Redding left at the end of June '69, but then you also had a number of unforeseen problems in the construction, which made things more expensive.

They had water, a tributary of the Minetta Brook once they broke through. All that stuff flooding the studio, all those kinds of problems exacerbated the construction process, and that put a lot of pressure. As John says in the film, [unintelligible 00:15:24] Jim Marin said when he came back from the LA Forum in 1969, he literally brought $100,000 in two shopping bags to say, "Okay, pay the carpenters and the electricians. Keep it going." In terms of forensic accounting, I think things were a little bit fast and loose back in those days,

Alison Stewart: John, yes, please tell the story.

John Storyk: Heading to that. Now there's a pretty sophisticated and well-organized industry of studio construction. Again, 55 years ago, that simply didn't exist. There was no studio building industry. To budget a project like that was essentially impossible. Nobody really knew what this would end up costing. Then again, some unforeseen. The water. Hitting the Minetta River tributary was clearly unexpected.

[laughter]

John McDermott: Slight hiccup, as they say.

John Storyk: To this day, everybody thinks that there's a river under the studio, which is why it sounds the way it sounds. That's okay. I mean, I'm okay with that myth. There is definitely water under the studio, it's flooded several times. 24/7 pumps continue all the time, 24/7 keeping the water level at check. I'm not quite sure if that's the reason the studio sounds like it sounds, but if people believe it, I guess that's okay. The water is really there, and it really did cause a problem. It was a huge setback.

Alison Stewart: John, what is one thing you would point to in the design that you think, "Yes, I got that right. That's cool"?

John Storyk: This is an easy question I'm asked many, many, many times. The reason why the room works technically, not emotionally-- Emotionally, I will let almost everybody else discuss that, and maybe Jimi is in the walls, I guess he is. The reason why the room works technically is the ceiling, this is what we got right. It was mostly an accident, although a little bit of thinking without really completely understanding what we did, we essentially made a low-frequency membrane absorber in this curved, propeller-shaped ceiling by using lightweight plaster on mesh.

It wasn't until 25 years later that I could even measure it because I didn't have enough knowledge and didn't even really have enough equipment to go measure why it works. Basically, the low-frequency reaction time in that room is perfect for rock and roll recording. That's technically, I believe, why that studio sounds the way it sounds. Electric Lady basically jump-started a career for me thousands of studios later but took a long time before I was able to measure it and really understand what we somewhat accidentally, and who knows? Maybe not accidentally, did. I thank Jimi regularly, let's put it that way.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the new documentary Electric Lady Studios, a Jimi Hendrix vision. Thank you to John Storyk, who's the Electric Lady architect. We're also talking to John McDermott after the break, and we want your conversations as well. Are you a musician who's worked at Electric Lady Studios before? What impressed you about the space? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All Of It.

[music]

You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is John McDermott. He's a director of Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision. It's a new film about the studios. It's going to be opening at the Quad on August 9th. We got a great text, John. Here's one.

"I was waiting for a friend a couple of doors down from an Electric Lady one summer night and a man in a wheelchair was dropped off by an amulet and rolled in. Then all of a sudden, a car drives up and out walks Joni Mitchell to walk into the same building. People recognized her, but no one else recognized it. That was Charlie Mingus being pushed into the studio earlier. I had no idea what they were doing, how they were connected, or what was going on, but the album they created after was just amazing. I felt like I had experienced a moment in history."

Someone else texted in, "Saw Erykah Badu at the beginning of her major world Baduism takeover coming out or going into the recording. I was gagged." That one is Tim from Hamilton Heights. We talked about this, that people have an emotional response to Electric Lady.

John McDermott: Well, they do. I think in some ways it's very much like Jimi Hendrix himself in that even today, there's still a lot of mystery about the place. It's not open to the public. It's underground. There's something that's unique and special about it. For a lot of young people who come onto the Jimi Hendrix legacy, you're fascinated to find out things about him because he wasn't the kind of artist who was a self-promoter. He was really all about creating music. He was an amazing performer on stage but he was a quiet person, shy person, plus the studio, that air of mystery still is an attraction today to people like, "What's going on down there?"

Alison Stewart: [laughs] I wondered if Jimi Hendrix ever had mixed feelings about other artists using the studio.

John McDermott: I think knowing and talking, particularly to Eddie Kramer, I think the difficult thing was he just loved to be in there. They would start normally at 7:00 PM at night and work till whenever. It was a commercial studio and I think particularly early on, after all the cost overruns that they had, Jimi put up $500,000 of his own record royalties to finish the construction of the studio. It was always that conversation with him, like, "Jimi, we've got to make some money. We've got to do this to be able to pull it off." I think in a perfect world, he would have been happy with Studio B being for other artists, Studio A always just being set up for him. He had Eddie Kramer there as his engineer who could just at any time, he knew, like, " got my guy, I got my band, I got everything that I want." I think that would have been really fuel for the next chapter of that incredible career that he had.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Charles, who's calling from the Upper West Side. Hi, Charles. Thanks for calling All Of It. What's your experience with Electric Lady?

Charles: Thank you very much. I want to say, Alison, you're a rock star commentator. You're fantastic.

Alison Stewart: Thank you.

Charles: I wanted to say that I was so lucky to meet Hendrix because my friends were a rock band called Cat Mother and The All Night Newsboys. What a commentary name, right? Hendrix produced their first album on Electric Ladyland. That night I was singing opposite Hendrix. He was in a corner. He kind of nodded out, but I guess he was glad that he was producing this band because they were a great band. They have a song called Good Old Rock 'n Roll. When you were in that studio back then, when I was there, you felt like you were at a dining room table because the band would be on one side of you and you'd be on the other side looking at them. That's kind of like the way I remember it.

When you'd walk in from 8th Street facing south, he was just on the corner on the right in the far south side, and I was sort of in the middle. It was a great band. They had a loft on Baker Street. If you can play their song, Good Old Rock 'n Roll, Cat Mother and The All Night Newsboys, they were just an incredible band. I was just lucky to be their African American friend at front and center. Basically, did their first album. I'm pretty sure your guest knows who they are.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling in. Let's talk to Thomas, who's calling in from Brooklyn. Hi, Thomas. Thanks for calling, All Of It.

Thomas: Hey. Thanks for having me on.

Alison Stewart: Tell us about your experience with Electric Lady.

Thomas: It's kind of peripheral. When I came to New York in the late '80s from Sweden, I was a musician wannabe, and songwriter, and producer. I met somebody named ĒBN, who was in a band called ĒBN-ŌZN. There were one-hit wonders in the '80s. He told me that he used to be an engineer for Jimi at the studios. Then later on, John ended up designing our studio in Seoul for us. I don't know if you remember me, John, probably not, but--

Alison Stewart: It's very nice. Thank you so much for calling. Listening to all these people, you can hear the influence of having Jimi Hendrix around, right?

John McDermott: Oh, yes.

Alison Stewart: Like, "I'm sitting in the corner, this person helped me develop this studio because he worked there." It was interesting to hear the way that Jimi affects musicians.

John McDermott: I agree. There's a force behind him and the art that he created, everything about him, I think. In a lot of ways, you can't think of a Fender Stratocaster without thinking of Jimi Hendrix. You can't think of Electric Lady Studios without thinking of Jimi Hendrix. What he did when he did things was just in this amazing, outside, really creative, free way.

He's arguably the most creatively free artist, certainly in American popular culture, you're talking about a guy who truly knew the depths of failure as a sideman for R&B acts to be willing to go to England to try to advance his music and then to come back to his homeland and have great success. I can't help but think that a lot of what was in his head was almost like, "This could end, and I'm going to take advantage of every opportunity that I can to create." That's also fueling this energy to, "Yes, let's get in the studio." It's all about being able to make music. Given how he was denied that, while he was struggling, it just had to be exhilarating for him. I think that enthusiasm, that excitement, it couldn't help but inspire other people to be like, "Wow, that's really great. What's going on over there? I want to check that out."

Alison Stewart: Hendrix's engineer Eddie Kramer, he put together a group of assistant engineers. One guy lived across the street. Felt bad for him. It was a great story. What was key to being an engineer if you worked at Electric Lady?

John McDermott: I think Eddie made a very smart move, being a musician himself, to hire two musicians who were musicians first with an interest in recording. [unintelligible 00:26:17] Kim King was a guitar player who actually worked as an assistant engineer to Eddie on the Band of Gypsys album. Dave Palmer was the drummer in Ted Nugent and The Amboy Dukes. He impressed Eddie with some home recordings that he had been doing. Those were the two guys that came on board and they worked hard.

It's interesting, in some ways for these guys, it was very much a mission. They were musicians, so they understood this process. They understood being told what you could and couldn't do. "Hey, fellas, four songs, three hours. Time to go. Next band's here." All that stuff. To them, I think Jimi Hendrix was like, he's changing this. I'm a part of this. It had to be exciting to feel that energy to say, "I'm going be a part of this cutting edge," because they understood recording technology, even simple things like Eddie having Jimi, which is now a common thing for an artist to sit in the control room, to be able to do a guitar overdub and to hear it right away as opposed to saying, "Okay, you go out there. When I say it's good you come in here and listen to it."

There, it's a much more active and involved process that really made, I think, even the assistant engineers really feel part of it. Like, "Hey, we're capturing greatness here, and I'm helping." That passion, I think, fueled them, having other people who then came in and joined the staff and the staff grew. That foundation of, like, "Hey, we're all about helping Jimi and breaking new ground that," I think that was a driving force for that studio, particularly in the early days.

Alison Stewart: Somebody did make a joke in the film, like, "Everybody got fired once a day."

John McDermott: Oh, Kramer was tough because he was under tremendous pressure. Eddie was brought over when Jimi relocated to America, he was brought over from Olympic Studios, where he had worked with Jimi to the record plant, became a staff engineer there. For him, he was the one who had said, "Hey, no, you should do a recording studio. You're crazy. Don't do a nightclub." That pressure of like, "Hey, is this going to work? What did I get us all into?" That absolutely was hanging over his head.

They were so excited to be able to work with him because they knew he would take full advantage of that hard work. It wouldn't be squandered. They were such a small team that you really felt like, "Hey, Jimi understood what we really tried to do for him here." It wasn't like, "Oh, that guy with the blue shirt. Oh, that guy." No, no. He knew Dave, and he knew Kim and Shimon Ron and all those guys that worked super hard. When he walked in, he could just plug his guitar in and hit it.

Alison Stewart: All right, let's click. Glenn. Glenn, I got a few minutes for you. Let's hear your story.

Glenn: Sure. I'm a location scout in the film business, and probably about 10 or 15 years ago, I went down there to scout the studios for a shoot. What really blew me away were those psychedelic, trippy murals on all the walls. I felt like I had stepped back in time to, like, 1968. I think Ric Ocasek was recording in one of the studios when I was there. I just felt very privileged to be in there and just see such a magical space.

Alison Stewart: Thank you for calling in. Before we run out of time, do you want to tell me about the box set that's coming in September?

John McDermott: What we tried to do with the film, was tell the story of how it got there. Then, sadly, the box set really gives you a sense of what he did in those three and a half months. It's showing you where it was going next, and that's the tragedy. The music that is on the box set I think people will really enjoy because it's how songs like Dolly Dagger and others came to fruition in that building.

Alison Stewart: The name of the documentary is Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision. I've been speaking with its director, John McDermott. Thanks for coming in.

John McDermott: Thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: Let's go out on Hendrix.

[MUSIC - Jimi Hendrix: Straight Ahead]

 

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