Eddie Kramer: Hendrix, Woodstock and Beyond

By Michael Louis Albo

Legacy Records has released The Woodstock Experience, albums by Woodstock headliners Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Santana, Sly and the Family Stone and Johnny Winter. Each two-CD set features the individual artist's complete Woodstock festival performance plus their 1969 studio albums.

South African-born Eddie Kramer, of course, was the man who engineered the live performances and he recently took some time to lay down some background and talk about the music festival and some other experiences of a well-spent life in rock & roll.

Your background was, initially, in classical music and jazz. Was it a difficult transition crossing over to rock and pop music?
I came to the UK in 1960, and I had that classical musical background and got into the recording industry at a very young age. I gravitated towards rock & roll. I loved listening to Elvis and all the great R&B music that I heard in South Africa growing up on the short-wave radio. It was a very natural thing. Once I started becoming an engineer, I was very fortunate to be in England at the beginning of when the Beatles started and the Stones ... so it was just a natural fit.

How did you come to start working with the Jimi Hendrix Experience?
I was at a studio called Olympic Sound in London in about 1967. It was one of the greatest independent studios in London at the time. I was given the task of engineering Hendrix because I had a diverse background in avant-garde jazz, classical and other things.Hendrix did a lot of weird stuff, so they thought it would be a prefect fit. We hit it off immediately and never really looked back. I was very fortunate to be in the right place at the right time.

You also worked with Led Zeppelin. That must have been an experience.
They were definitely a challenge. But in a good way. Jimmy Page knew exactly what he wanted to do. In 1969, I did Led Zeppelin II. The history of my involvement was partially with Jimmy Page as a session musician. He was a musician on a session I did in 1963. He came in to do a guitar overdub for the Kinks. The time I met him after that was in 1967 when he was doing a guitar overdub for Donovan on "Hurdy-Gurdy Man." So I did know who he was, and I knew John Paul Jones as well, who was also a session musician from that period. In fact, Jonesy was the one who had asked me to listen to this new album they had just done - the first one - and I went over to his house and I was floored by what I heard. It was amazing.

Does working with a strong personality like Page or Hendrix make your job easier or more difficult?
It's easier. It might be slightly contentious at times, but it makes things easier to have someone who has a clear direction. It's easier to grasp hold of what they're looking for and try to give it to them, which is my task. If I wouldn't interpret what the artist wanted, then I wouldn't be doing my job.

Did you have any idea going in what Woodstock would turn into?
We had no idea going in how big it was going to be. It took everyone by surprise. But what are you going to do? When a half a million people descend on your back door, you can't give up. You have to move forward.

Recording the festival must have been difficult, a glorified field recording.
It was more like a battlefield recording than a field recording. In fact, that's what I'm going to say from now on: battlefield recording. It was very difficult. It wasn't very stable. We'd run one machine until it almost finished its reel and then start the second one. We ran tape all the time. In fact, we were running tape when they weren't running film. It was always a challenge.

There were some musically diverse acts that you recorded. Did that present any special challenges?
Technically, it's not that hard to adapt because you're just adjusting gain. The main thing was to figure out who was going to be on stage next and where the bloody mics were and what channels they were coming into. That was the big challenge. There are five albums with the Sony edition. And they all presented their own individual challenges in terms of sonic quality. It depends, of course, on the complexity of the band, how many mics were working at the time. And with those bands, its the dynamics that controlled everything. Janis Joplin had such a wide dynamic range. She had that fantastic, guttural scream and then she'd use that almost whisper, so you had to be on your toes. I think we got it all.

How do you think the current generation will respond to a 40-year-old musical package?
I'm hoping the current generation will pick up on this. If you look around you, and see the impact of what the '60s had on America, and here it is 40 years later, if you go into any store like Macy's you'll see the effect of those peace signs and flower power from our era on things like contemporary women's clothing. It's unbelievable. So there's this resurgence with younger audiences of interest in what happened 40 years ago. I hope that they'll appreciate the dynamics where music goes softer and louder. MP3s, as much as they are a great form of communication, sound like crap. Unfortunately, at this point, we are raising a generation of kids who do not know the value and the beauty of well-recorded music. I hope that with reissues like this, kids will be attracted to it and want to emulate it.