Content area
Full Text
A World of Sound
During the last year of his life, Jimi Hendrix opened a world of sound. Electric Lady, it was called, a state of the art 32-track recording studio where the guitarist could pursue all the sounds running through his head. And they were plentiful, those sounds, maybe too much for one guitarist to handle:
Most of the time I can't get it on the guitar, you know? Most of the time I'm just laying around day-dreaming and hearing all this music. And you can't, if you go to the guitar and try to play it, it spoils the whole thing, you know?-I just can't play guitar that well, to get all this music together. (Burks 41)
Over the course of his brief career, recording studios assumed a special significance for Hendrix as the sites where he could enact his wildest fantasies of sound, and where he could work to exert the greatest amount of control over the sounds he produced with his guitar. By the accounts of his ex-bandmates, his attention to detail in the studio verged on obsessive. He would labor for hours over a single sonic effect, manipulating the various technologies at his disposal past their limits, exploring every sonic parameter until he found the sound that was just right for the song, or the song that was just right for the sound.1
Electric Lady was Hendrix's effort to move his control over sound one step further, to actually own the means of musical (re)production. It was also his attempt to create a "total environment" in which physical design and visual appearance fused into the overarching purpose of making music. According to musician and Hendrix biographer Curtis Knight, Electric Lady was "designed to give an atmosphere of being in space," and featured "every electronic innovation that could be conceived" (155). Another biographer, David Henderson, provided a more detailed portrait of the setting:
The carpeted stairway led to an underground reception area that was shaped like a flying saucer. A low, round cubicled mini-office was encircled by a soft, low couch. Passageways led to the first studio and, curving around a bend, to the second. Curving passageways disappear in muted lights, spacey spectrum colors gave the effect of endlessness. A...