Kramer began the second decade of his career working alongside architect John Storyk to oversee creation of Jimi Hendrix's state-of-the-art studio, Electric Lady Studios, built and equipped for a then-astonishing $1 million. He served as Director of Engineering there from 1970 to 1974, producing Carly Simon's debut solo album, Carly Simon, as well as albums for Sha Na Na and Peter Frampton, and also engineering albums for Lena Horne, Dionne Warwick, and David Bowie, David Live and Young Americans. (The latter featured rhythm guitar from John Lennon on its Number One hit, "Fame".)
Kramer produced Buddy Guy, classical guitarist John Williams, award-winning country group the Kentucky Headhunters, hard rock and metal bands such as Whitesnake, Icon, Pretty Maids, Fastway, Alcatrazz featuring Steve Vai and Graham Bonnet, and Anthrax. He produced Among the Living for Anthrax in 1987, which yielded a Top 10 single in the UK, "I Am the Law".
In 1993 Kramer produced and engineered Stone Free: A Tribute to Jimi Hendrix, featuring tracks by Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, The Cure, Buddy Guy, classical violinist Nigel Kennedy, Living Colour, jazz guitarist Pat Metheny, hip hop artists P.M. Dawn, Spin Doctors, and others. The album raised $750,000 for music and dance scholarships (Berklee College of Music, the Juilliard School, and Dance Theatre of Harlem), administered by the United Negro College Fund.
In 1994 Kramer released a two-part video series, "Adventures in Modern Recording", utilizing interviews with Les Paul, the seminal guitarist as well as pioneer of both electric guitar development and modern recording techniques such as multi-tracking and looping. In the same year Kramer produced the Spin Doctors' single for Woodstock '94, as well as Buddy Guy's Slippin' In the 1995 Grammy winner for Best Blues Album and winner of the W.C. Handy Award for Album of the Year in 1996. Buddy Guy and the Saturday Nite Live Band with G.E. Smith, also produced by Kramer, was a 1996 Grammy nominee.
In 2004, Kramer had several Hendrix-related projects, including helping DigiTech design and create an effects pedal which emulates characteristically Hendrixian guitar sounds. He also remastered Hendrix albums for Classic Vinyl, and remixed Woodstock, a posthumous live release, in 5.1 surround sound.Concerning his remastering work, Kramer told Guitar Player magazine, "I was able to really enhance and improve upon the actual sound, so if the original sound was good I was able to make it even better. I gave it a more full-bodied sound. I was able to improve some of the dynamics. Of course this is made possible by new technologies and equipment." Kramer specifically credited modern monitors, which provide abundant high-end detail, making it clear where various instruments are within the stereo image.[4]
In 2005 Kramer reunited with architect John Storyk to design Anacapa Studios in Malibu, California. In the same year, Kramer remastered the Woodstock video footage of Jimi Hendrix for DVD release, revealing a fuller perspective of the guitarist's performance.
Again working with Digitech, Kramer helped design and create a Brian May guitar effects pedal in 2006. Also that year, galleries in Santa Monica, California, Hollywood, and Rotterdam exhibited Kramer's photographs of rock stars performing, recording, and in candid moments.
Waves Audio, a producer of software for audio engineers, released the Eddie Kramer Collection in 2009, a set of five plug ins for replicating Kramer's studio touch in recording guitar, drums, vocals, bass, and special effects.
Kramer was chosen to be a presenter at the 2011 Grammy Technical Awards. Also in 2011 he recorded preeminent pedal steel blues/gospel guitarist Robert Randolph and the Family Band on the album Lickety Split, and Carlos Santana, a guest star on two of the album's tracks, as well as completing further mixes of Hendrix recordings in 5.1 Surround Sound. 2011 also saw the release of three more Kramer plug-ins for Wave, Kramer Master Tape, the Kramer HLS Channel, and the Kramer Pie Compressor.
Rolling Stone ranks Hendrix as the greatest guitarist of all time. Kramer specifically cites his strong individuality, powerful message, and expansion of the sonic vocabulary of electric guitar, including its potentials for controlled feedback and distortion. In the words of master musician Les Paul, for whom the Gibson Les Paul is named, "Man, he was all over that thing! He had that thing wide open."[7]
Born in Seattle, Washington, Hendrix began playing guitar at age 15. In 1961, he enlisted in the US Army, but was discharged the following year. Soon afterward, he moved to Clarksville then Nashville, Tennessee, and began playing gigs on the chitlin' circuit, earning a place in the Isley Brothers' backing band and later with Little Richard, with whom he continued to work through mid-1965. He then played with Curtis Knight and the Squires before moving to England in late 1966 after bassist Chas Chandler of the Animals became his manager. Within months, Hendrix had earned three UK top ten hits with the Jimi Hendrix Experience: "Hey Joe", "Purple Haze", and "The Wind Cries Mary". He achieved fame in the US after his performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and in 1968 his third and final studio album, Electric Ladyland, reached number one in the US. The double LP was Hendrix's most commercially successful release and his first and only number one album. The world's highest-paid performer,[2] he headlined the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 before his accidental death in London from barbiturate-related asphyxia in September 1970.
Hendrix was inspired by American rock and roll and electric blues. He favored overdriven amplifiers with high volume and gain, and was instrumental in popularizing the previously undesirable sounds caused by guitar amplifier feedback. He was also one of the first guitarists to make extensive use of tone-altering effects units in mainstream rock, such as fuzz distortion, Octavia, wah-wah, and Uni-Vibe. He was the first musician to use stereophonic phasing effects in recordings. Holly George-Warren of Rolling Stone commented: "Hendrix pioneered the use of the instrument as an electronic sound source. Players before him had experimented with feedback and distortion, but Hendrix turned those effects and others into a controlled, fluid vocabulary every bit as personal as the blues with which he began."[3]
Hendrix was the recipient of several music awards during his lifetime and posthumously. In 1967, readers of Melody Maker voted him the Pop Musician of the Year and in 1968, Billboard named him the Artist of the Year and Rolling Stone declared him the Performer of the Year. Disc and Music Echo honored him with the World Top Musician of 1969 and in 1970, Guitar Player named him the Rock Guitarist of the Year. The Jimi Hendrix Experience was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992 and the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005. Rolling Stone ranked the band's three studio albums, Are You Experienced (1967), Axis: Bold as Love (1967), and Electric Ladyland (1968), among the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time", and they ranked Hendrix as the greatest guitarist and the sixth-greatest artist of all time. Hendrix was named the greatest guitarist of all time by Rolling Stone in 2023.[4]
At Horace Mann Elementary School in Seattle during the mid-1950s, Hendrix's habit of carrying a broom with him to emulate a guitar gained the attention of the school's social worker. After more than a year of his clinging to a broom like a security blanket, she wrote a letter requesting school funding intended for underprivileged children, insisting that leaving him without a guitar might result in psychological damage.[32] Her efforts failed, and Al refused to buy him a guitar.[32][nb 5]
In mid-1958, at age 15, Hendrix acquired his first acoustic guitar, for $5[41] (equivalent to $51 in 2022). He played for hours daily, watching others and learning from more experienced guitarists, and listening to blues artists such as Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, and Robert Johnson.[42] The first tune Hendrix learned to play was the television theme "Peter Gunn".[43] Around that time, Hendrix jammed with boyhood friend Sammy Drain and his keyboard-playing brother.[44] In 1959, attending a concert by Hank Ballard & the Midnighters in Seattle, Hendrix met the group's guitarist Billy Davis.[45] Davis showed him some guitar licks and got him a short gig with the Midnighters.[46] The two remained friends until Hendrix's death in 1970.[47]
Soon after he acquired the acoustic guitar, Hendrix formed his first band, the Velvetones. Without an electric guitar, he could barely be heard over the sound of the group. After about three months, he realized that he needed an electric guitar.[48] In mid-1959, his father relented and bought him a white Supro Ozark.[48] Hendrix's first gig was with an unnamed band in the Jaffe Room of Seattle's Temple De Hirsch, but they fired him between sets for showing off.[49] He joined the Rocking Kings, which played professionally at venues such as the Birdland club. When his guitar was stolen after he left it backstage overnight, Al bought him a red Silvertone Danelectro.[50]
Before Hendrix was 19 years old, law authorities had twice caught him riding in stolen cars. Given a choice between prison or joining the Army, he chose the latter and enlisted on May 31, 1961.[51] After completing eight weeks of basic training at Fort Ord, California, he was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division and stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.[52] He arrived on November 8, and soon afterward he wrote to his father: "There's nothing but physical training and harassment here for two weeks, then when you go to jump school ... you get hell. They work you to death, fussing and fighting."[53] In his next letter home, Hendrix, who had left his guitar in Seattle at the home of his girlfriend Betty Jean Morgan, asked his father to send it to him as soon as possible, stating: "I really need it now."[53] His father obliged and sent the red Silvertone Danelectro on which Hendrix had hand-painted the words "Betty Jean" to Fort Campbell.[54] His apparent obsession with the instrument contributed to his neglect of his duties, which led to taunting and physical abuse from his peers, who at least once hid the guitar from him until he had begged for its return.[55] In November 1961, fellow serviceman Billy Cox walked past an army club and heard Hendrix playing.[56] Impressed by Hendrix's technique, which Cox described as a combination of "John Lee Hooker and Beethoven", Cox borrowed a bass guitar and the two jammed.[57] Within weeks, they began performing at base clubs on the weekends with other musicians in a loosely organized band, the Casuals.[58]
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