Electric Lady Studios

Jimi Hendrix spent the last two years of his life frustrated by studio time. He was paying commercial rates to record, working on someone else's schedule, feeling the clock running even in the middle of a take. By 1968 he had a solution: build his own. He and his manager Michael Jeffery secured the lease on a building at 52 West 8th Street in Greenwich Village that had housed a nightclub called the Village Barn, hired acoustic designer Eddie Wallis and engineer Eddie Kramer, and began a construction project that ran catastrophically over budget — eventually costing close to one million dollars, an enormous sum for a recording studio in 1969 — and took far longer than planned. The result was Electric Lady Studios: two recording rooms cut into the bedrock below a Greenwich Village street, designed around Hendrix's specific needs, with no clock on the wall and no one to tell him when to stop.

The studio officially opened on August 26, 1970, with a party attended by Mick Jagger, Steve Winwood, Eddie Kramer, and most of the people who mattered in rock music at that moment. Hendrix was the host. Three weeks and two days later, on September 18, he was dead in London — having recorded only a handful of sessions in the studio he had spent two years and all his money building. He never really got to use it.

The irony of Electric Lady's history is that it became, in the decades after his death, one of the most productive and legendary studios in New York. Led Zeppelin recorded here. David Bowie made several albums here. The Rolling Stones, the Clash, John Lennon, Kiss, AC/DC, Bob Dylan, Daft Punk, Lorde, Taylor Swift — the list of sessions at Electric Lady covers the full arc of popular music from 1970 to the present. The studio is still operating at the same address, still below street level on West 8th Street, still carrying Hendrix's name on the door of a room he barely had time to enter.