POWER STATION

Founded by Jimi Hendrix mere months before his death, Electric Lady Studios was a mind-expanding creative mothership where his guitar playing reached new heights. As a new documentary explores this lost chapter, longstanding Hendrix engineer Eddie Kramer and filmmaker John McDermott tell us about Jimi's final brainwave

- Henry Yates

Take a walk down New York’s 8th Street in modern times and you’ll find barely a sniff of the 60s counterculture that once pulsed in this neighbourhood. There is just one last holdout against the gentrification of Greenwich Village. Blink and you’ll miss the mirrored gunmetal door. Yet beyond it lies the city’s most fabled recording studio, conceived by Jimi Hendrix in the late 60s, operational by summer 1970, and the scene of the guitarist’s final creative burst before his death that September.

By now, everybody knows about Hendrix’s 1966 touchdown in London and the shifting of rock’s tectonic plates, about this Seattle-born sonic terrorist’s onstage humbling of Clapton, and the breakout Bag O’ Nails show that forced Britain’s guitar class to give up or get serious. By contrast, one chapter that has never been trawled to death is the birth of Electric Lady Studios. And that’s a curious oversight because the story of this recording facility has everything, from quixotic ambition and ruinous debt, to last-gasp redemption and some of Jimi’s most beautiful music.

Now, at last, the guitarist’s spiritual home is getting its due with director John McDermott’s fantastic new documentary, Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision. “It’s the history of how we put the damn place together, which was kind of a miracle when you think about it,” says Hendrix’s famed engineer Eddie Kramer, as he joins our Zoom call. “It was basically a bunch of hippies who thought they knew what they were doing. And I guess we did…”

The story goes that Electric Lady was originally going to be a nightclub? m