Eddie Kramer Quotations

Look at the mikes. There are three mikes on the drums, all Shure 58s, not what you'd call high-end condenser microphones,

I think 'caretaking' is a very apt description, ... I feel like we've nurtured them along. It must be 10 years ago that the Hendrix family got the rights back and in so doing we have been literally caretaking all the wonderful music that Jimi left us.

Jimi's music is so universal. And kids who are getting into rock 'n' roll guitar, who's the go-to guy? It's Jimi. That's the first place you start and everything else comes from that.

I think the box set represents the four top creative years of his life. It shows that growth pattern and shows behind-the-scenes little things that he was doing in creating those records and (is a) sort of wonderful window into the mind of the man who to me was the greatest guitar player of all time.

Life was but a joke and a dream, quite frankly. We were having a good time, and we were working very hard and the sessions were very light-hearted.

You can hear Jimi experimenting with his vocal. He's rustling the paper and going 'Oh...oh...oh I don't know where I am.' ... The first time he ever sang it, and he's laughing and carrying on.

When I first did Woodstock many, many years ago, my initial impression when I went to California to look at the rushes . . . was I was appalled. I knew the performance was OK, but the visual of the crowd walking away in the mud and the way they cut it together was kind of depressing,

We won't let anything out unless we've spent an awful lot of time and spent days and weeks and months on how to make this sound good, ... We've got enough material in the vaults for another 10 or 12 years with an album each year.

We always joked and kidded around, every day and every moment,

The take (of 'Hey Joe') that we're listening to on the box set has an earlier version of the backup singers singing a little out of key and not quite what they wanted,

There's gonna be one nice piece of product coming out every year for about the next 15 years. There's enough good stuff there, trust me.

There was a guy onstage filming the whole bloody thing. Who's this guy? Where did he come from? We tracked him down. He was a student. His parents had given him some money to buy an open reel video recorder, ... It shows some wonderful moments that were not captured by the other cameras.

This was an experiment - expanding the band and trying to make the music communicate in a different sort of way. Maybe that part of it didn't happen. But his performance is so stunning when you watch what he is actually doing. When we cut the film together in the present form, in the correct order, better angles, and you really focus on Jimi, ... you see what he is doing. He's conducting the orchestra. He's playing lead and rhythm at the same time. He's smoking a cigarette. He's doing five things at once. It's incredible.

It was such a fluid motion, from the brain to the heart to the hands to the feet with the pedals, that the nanosecond that he thought it, it came out with no interruption and his and he played from the heart.

This is what we do. We try to make the best out of what we had, ... It wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. Because of the leakage you had to be very careful of where you placed certain things. The bass was recorded in such a primitive mode that finding the right tone of the bass and making it fat . . . that was tricky.