The Greenwich Village studio that crafted Patti Smith’s ‘Horses’ and ‘Young Americans’ by David Bowie
The greatest gift Jimi Hendrix left behind in this world was not just his music, but the Greenwich Village physical reminder to other artists that he always had their backs.
That present was bestowed in the form of the Electric Lady Studios in New York, which the guitarist virtuoso opened on August 26th, 1970, before he returned to London and subsequently died three weeks later. He was like a magician in the truest sense – never revealing how his tricks were pulled off, and simply leaving the lasting wonderment behind.
The fact that Electric Lady was the first artist-owned studio was enough of a revolution in itself, and although Hendrix never got to see the legacy he left behind, it’s hard to shake the feeling that so many iconic albums have been created there with the help of just a hint of his Midas touch.
From friends of Hendrix’s like Patti Smith, who assembled her crew in 1975 to record her timeless debut Horses there, to bona fide icons like David Bowie and John Lennon descending on the studio to definitively put their heads together in the creation of the latter’s Young Americans, every artist who walks in the door subsequently carries a symbol of ‘making it’.
Of course, anyone can sit and reel off the massive lists of world-changing albums that have been recorded at Electric Lady. It certainly has a seismic effect. Yet what seems even more majestic about the place is that it feels like a drop in the ocean compared to wider New York, with all its throngs of neighbourhoods and constant hustle and bustle.
Much has been said previously about the artistic scene in New York in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, of which Hendrix, Smith, and their many compatriots were very much the leaders of the cause. Yet it was also true, by the same token, that even such a concentrated area of stardom never seemed to turn many heads.
There was something Hendrix undeniably quite liked about that – the fact that he was like the Queen Bee of this artistic hive, and yet the rest of the world could just continue to keep walking on by. It was almost as if they were the secret beholders to the key that changed the planet, and as smug as they could be about it, they were absolutely right.
This is not to say that Smith, Bowie, or any other artist who came to Electric Lady, for that matter, knew they were instantly on to a winner just because of the studio space they found themselves in. For Smith, it was the start of her journey. For Bowie, it was his last-ditched attempt at breaking America. In some ways, the stakes were never higher.
Yet behind it all was the whisper of a small electric riff, growing louder and ever louder the closer each artist came to striking gold. Every album created at Electric Lady has just a shimmer of Hendrix’s gold dust laced into its DNA, not because it forced itself to be there, but because that was the prime reason for the gift the guitarist left for his fellow musical icons.
