Over the 54 years since it opened, Electric Lady Studios in New York has hosted recording sessions for a who’s who of music acts. Its earliest clients included Led Zeppelin, Carly Simon and Stevie Wonder — none of whom are in the documentary about the facility that’s now hitting theaters. That absence is noticeable at first but ultimately not a problem; one of the strengths of John McDermott’s film is that it breaks the rock-doc mold by not relying on a starry roster of talking heads.
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Focused on the conception and creation of the studio — the first such commercial enterprise owned by a recording artist — Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision explores the stop-start year spent designing and building it, with Hendrix and his creative partners navigating cash-flow interruptions and the intrusions of subterranean tributaries. The doc might have been a degree or two tighter, but compared with Dave Grohl’s rambling Sound City , a higher-profile portrait of a recording studio, it more than makes up for its lower glamour quotient with a compelling story, better told.
Embracing the people who constructed and ran Electric Lady in an atmosphere of “creative chaos,” as studio manager Linda Sharlin affectionately puts it, McDermott’s straightforward oral history offers an unfamiliar slant on the biography of a legendary performer, and contains tantalizing asides.
Also, refreshingly, this is a look at Hendrix that isn’t filtered through the mythic prism of his untimely death. As the second part of its title might suggest, the movie bears the stamp of an authorized narrative: Experience Hendrix, the company overseeing the musician’s legacy and headed by his stepsister Janie Hendrix, produced the film, and director McDermott manages Jimi’s music catalog. This is a respectful celebration, yes, but it’s also a gratifyingly low-key one. It assumes a familiarity with and appreciation of the work of one of the most gifted musicians ever to pick up an electric guitar.
Hendrix would be dead from an overdose just a month after the studio’s August 1970 opening party. Today, crucial elements of what he envisioned half a century ago remain unchanged at Electric Lady. More than that, “his spirit is still there,” says Eddie Kramer, the recording engineer who was a key partner in Hendrix’s sonic innovation and his studio venture, and a central figure in the film.
The saga begins with the purchase by Hendrix and his manager, Michael Jeffery, of Generation, a Greenwich Village basement blues club on West 8th Street, previously the country music venue Village Barn. (Next door was the 8th Street Playhouse cinema, which would be shuttered in 1991; occasional glimpses of the marquee, announcing such offerings as Mr. Hulot’s Holiday and the Czech drama The Most Beautiful Age , are a touch of nostalgia that will warm the hearts of art house fans.)
The $50,000 investment would turn into a $1 million DIY project. Hendrix’s initial idea was to create a nightclub inspired by Cerebrum, the SoHo spot that was a kind of public loft party for the beautiful people and their psychedelic adventures. (Not widely remembered these days, Cerebrum closed less than a year after its November 1968 launch.)
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To translate into bricks and mortar his idea for a club with a small recording studio, Hendrix enlisted John Storyk, the recent architecture school grad who worked on Cerebrum. Then Kramer urged Hendrix to make the entire space a studio, a wise financial decision given the many thousands of dollars the artist was spending to rent existing facilities. And so Storyk had to learn a thing or two about the science of music recording. Then came another spin: Jim Marron, the nightclub manager hired to oversee the Electric Lady enterprise, proposed that the studio have the ambience and aesthetics of a club, a place where you could entertain as well as work — an idea that Hendrix welcomed and ran with. He wanted to counter the institutional blankness of commercial studios with something inspiring.
Musicians Buddy Guy and Steve Winwood offer brief reminiscences, the latter pointing out how Electric Lady forged “a path for a different sort of recording,” a place where musicians could experiment and “make accidents happen.” But for the most part the documentary is concerned with the people who worked there. McDermott spends quality time with Kramer and other Electric Lady engineers: Dave Palmer, the drummer Kramer enlisted and mentored; Shimon Ron, a seasoned pro; guitarist and synth player Kim King, another enlistee; and John Jansen, a hanger-on turned studio assistant.
As to the music itself, McDermott certainly had access to it, but he uses performance clips of Hendrix sparingly. He’s more concerned with present-day scenes of Kramer, Palmer and King at the Electric Lady mixing board, recalling the sessions for some of the last tracks Hendrix recorded, “Freedom” and “Dolly Dagger” among them. It’s clear that the engineers are revisiting cherished moments, and, along with their firsthand knowledge of Electric Lady’s acoustics and atmosphere, their love for Hendrix and the singular blues-rock he conjured quietly infuses the proceedings.
Only the gentlest sort of friction arises in the stories told, most of it attributable to outside figures, not Hendrix. When his bandmates weigh in, briefly, it’s with fondness. In an archival clip, drummer Mitch Mitchell, who died in 2008, talks about Hendrix’s eagerness to check out other people’s shows when they were on the road, and how, guitar at the ready, he often joined the performers onstage. Bassist Billy Cox mentions the strawberry upside-down cake they would enjoy while hanging out in Hendrix’s Village apartment.
Most unexpected and lovely are the excerpts from Hendrix’s home movies that McDermott includes, street scenes he shot from the window of that 12th Street apartment. There’s something intimate and ineffable in these fleeting images, an artist’s-eye view of his world, just blocks from the basement space where he and a ragtag group of hardworking people were making a dream come true.
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