Over the 54 years since it opened, Electric Lady Studios in New York has hosted recording sessions for a who’s who of music acts. Its earliest clients included Led Zeppelin, Carly Simon and Stevie Wonder — none of whom are in the documentary about the facility that’s now hitting theaters. That absence is noticeable at first but ultimately not a problem; one of the strengths of John McDermott’s film is that it breaks the rock-doc mold by not relying on a starry roster of talking heads.
Focused on the conception and creation of the studio — the first such commercial enterprise owned by a recording artist — explores the stop-start year spent designing and building it, with Hendrix and his creative partners navigating cash-flow interruptions and the intrusions of subterranean tributaries. The doc might have been a degree or two tighter, but compared with Dave Grohl’s rambling , a higher-profile portrait of a recording studio, it more than makes up for its lower glamour quotient with a compelling story, better told. Embracing the people who constructed and ran Electric Lady in an atmosphere of “creative chaos,” as studio manager Linda Sharlin affectionately puts it, McDermott’s straightforward oral history offers an unfamiliar slant on the biography of a legendary performer, and contains tantalizing asides.
Also, refreshingly, this is a look at Hendrix that isn’t filtered through the mythic prism of his untimely death. As the second part of its title might su.