Jimi’s Last Ride
On the evening of August 26th, 1970, Jimi Hendrix walked through the street-level door at 52 West 8th Street in New York’s Greenwich Village into paradise. Electric Lady Studios was the guitarist’s own state-of-the-art recording facility, and he had personally supervised many of its psychedelic details, like the mural of an elfin woman at the console of a spaceship. Tonight was the official opening party. Guests including guitarist Johnny Winter, Yoko Ono and Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood enjoyed Japanese food in Studio A, where Hendrix usually had stacks of amplifiers.
Hendrix, however, avoided the crush. One of rock’s most flamboyant showmen but a reserved, intensely shy man offstage, he was remote and despondent, spending much of the night sitting in a barber chair in a quiet corner of the reception area.
It would be his last night at Electric Lady. Hendrix died in London three weeks later. He was 27.
The studio that was supposed to be Hendrix’s sanctuary was also a source of stress and frustration. He was scrambling for money despite hit-record sales to fund the construction at Electric Lady; changing band lineups; and battling his manager. But even at a low ebb, he was looking, as he put it in one song at the time, “Straight Ahead.”
The Seattle-born guitarist had already revolutionized the blues roots, amplified fury and orchestral future of the electric guitar on three worldwide-hit albums – 1967’s Are You Experienced, 1968’s Axis: Bold as Love and the ’68 double album Electric Ladyland – made with the Jimi Hendrix Experience: the British rhythm section of drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Noel Redding. There had also been constant touring and growing tensions, especially with Redding over money and the latter’s own ambitions as a singer and songwriter. Even before Hendrix broke up the Experience in mid-’69, he was pushing his music beyond electric blues and acid rock, recording with jazz and soul players such as drummer Buddy Miles, bassist Dave Holland and future Mahavishnu Orchestra guitarist John McLaughlin.
“My initial success was a step in the right direction,” Hendrix said in a June 1969 interview, as Electric Lady’s construction was getting under way, “but it was only a step, just a change. Now I plan to get into other things. A couple of years ago, all I wanted was to be heard. ‘Let me in’ was the thing. Now I’m trying to figure out the wisest way to be heard.”
Located under a movie theater in a space that was most recently Generation, a rock club, with a striking brick facade that stuck out over the pavement like a pregnant woman’s belly, Electric Lady was conceived by Hendrix, with his manager, Michael Jeffrey, and his stalwart recording engineer, Eddie Kramer, in early 1969. Design and construction took more than a year. The final cost was about $1 million.
It was a historic enterprise. Electric Lady was the first major commercial studio in New York created specially for and owned by a Sixties rock star. In comparison, the Beatles and Bob Dylan mostly recorded in facilities owned by their record labels, according to strict corporate rules. For years, at Abbey Road in London, the Beatles worked with studio engineers who were required to dress in white lab coats.
For Hendrix, Electric Lady was also a refuge from the whirlwind. He was exhausted by his celebrity – “I don’t want to be a clown anymore, I don’t want to be a rock & roll star,” he complained to Rolling Stone in 1969 – and frustrated with the pressure from Jeffrey to stay on the road making the fast, big money. Hendrix spent much of 1968 as well as the spring of ’69 touring North America.
At Electric Lady, Hendrix – who had been touring nonstop since the mid-Sixties, when he was a sideman for R&B stars like Little Richard and the Isley Brothers – finally had a place of his own, where he could live with his music without interference. “That was the dream,” says veteran studio architect John Storyk, who was only 22 when Hendrix commissioned him to design Electric Lady. “As an artist, this became your home.”
Hendrix held his first formal recording session in Studio A on June 15th, 1970, two months before the opening party. The site was in disarray; a second studio was still being built at the end of the hall. But Hendrix got right to work with his current trio: Mitchell and bassist Billy Cox, a trusted old friend from Hendrix’s early-Sixties spell in the Army. They played a new instrumental, “All God’s Children.” Then Hendrix cut guitar overdubs for the turbulent rocker “Ezy Ryder” and jammed with a studio guest, Traffic‘s Steve Winwood, on one of Hendrix’s favorite recent originals, “Valleys of Neptune.” That number, in a different incarnation, is now the centerpiece of an album of previously unreleased Hendrix studio recordings, also called Valleys of Neptune.
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