Eddie Kramer, the engineer still remixing the rock history he recorded

Every few years someone hands Eddie Kramer a box of tapes he has already heard. This autumn it is KISS, and the tapes are the multitracks he recorded in a theatre in the round in Nanuet, New York, which he has now remixed for a 50th-anniversary box set. Before that it was Jimi Hendrix, again and again. The question that follows Kramer around is the one his best-known records were built to hide: how much of the sound people call live, raw or untouched was made afterwards, by a man at a console deciding what the music should have been.

He comes from Cape Town, where he was born in April 1942 to Sonny and Minna Kramer, art- and music-loving parents who opposed apartheid and left South Africa for London in the early 1960s for political reasons. He had started classical piano at four and went on to study it at the South African College of Music, before jazz and rock pulled him away, to his father’s displeasure. He followed his parents to London at 19 and began recording jazz groups in a home studio with primitive equipment, while fitting hi-fi systems into antique furniture to pay his way.

Studio work came at Advision in 1962 and at Pye a year later, where he assisted on sessions by the Kinks, the Searchers and Petula Clark. By 1967 he was at Olympic Studios, which caught the Beatles when their usual room at EMI was unavailable: he engineered “Baby, You’re a Rich Man” and “All You Need Is Love” there, worked on Traffic’s Mr. Fantasy and began the partnership that would define him. On Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love and Electric Ladyland, Hendrix gave him instructions in colours. “Make it sound green” meant, in practice, more reverb.

Kramer moved to New York in 1968, mainly to keep working with Hendrix, and the following summer he and his crew recorded the sound of the Woodstock festival. He also engineered Led Zeppelin II, whose production was credited to Jimmy Page. The two mixed it in a two-day marathon, and Kramer later described the “Whole Lotta Love” breakdown as the pair “just flying around on a small console twiddling every knob known to man.” He went on to engineer Houses of the Holy, along with sessions that later surfaced on Physical Graffiti, and worked on the live album The Song Remains the Same.

The project that should have crowned the Hendrix years became their hinge. Kramer helped persuade Hendrix to turn the Generation, a defunct Greenwich Village nightclub, into a recording studio, and designed Electric Lady Studios with the architect John Storyk around the guitarist’s tastes, down to round windows and coloured lighting. Hendrix recorded there for about ten weeks. Their last mix session took place on August 24, 1970, the opening party two days later, and about three weeks after that he was dead. Kramer stayed on as director of engineering until 1974, producing Carly Simon’s debut album, Carly Simon, along the way.

In 1973 a struggling New York band cut a five-song demo with him at Electric Lady and soon had a deal with Casablanca Records. Two years later Kiss asked Kramer to produce a double live album. Alive! became their commercial breakthrough and gave them their first hit single, “Rock and Roll All Nite”. He went on to produce Rock and Roll Over, Love Gun, Alive II and, much later, Alive III, and co-produced Ace Frehley’s 1978 solo album, Ace Frehley, with its hit “New York Groove”. On Love Gun, he says, it was his own hands on the piano of “Christine Sixteen”, with Gene Simmons standing over him telling him to “play like a Neanderthal.”

That breakthrough is also the clearest case against the myth attached to his name. The Alive! concert tapes were rough, with wrong chords and missed microphones, and the band spent weeks at Electric Lady re-recording guitars and vocals; reportedly only Peter Criss’s drums survived untouched, and Kramer spliced together crowd noise from several shows. Kiss denied it for years. Kramer never seemed troubled: “Who cares if it was overdubbed? The energy still comes through.” When Anthrax hired him for Among the Living in 1987, precisely because Alive! had sounded so live to them as teenagers, they rejected his first mix, heavy with effects and reverb, and made him strip it back to something drier. He later called the mixing “contentious.” The engineer celebrated for capturing performances has always been, just as much, a builder of believable ones, and the line between restoring a recording and rewriting it is one he has crossed in both directions.

The same tension runs through his longest job. From the 1970s to the 1990s, Hendrix’s unreleased recordings were steered by the producer Alan Douglas, whose compilations wiped parts played by Mitch Mitchell, Billy Cox and Buddy Miles and replaced them with session musicians. After Hendrix’s family won back the rights in 1995, Kramer became co-producer of the estate’s releases. For First Rays of the New Rising Sun in 1997 he returned to the original masters and sequenced the songs from Hendrix’s own notes; Robert Christgau called the result Kramer’s reimagination of the planned double album, a fair description of what any posthumous record is. Valleys of Neptune, People, Hell and Angels and the 2024 box Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision have extended that work.

Outside the vaults he produced Buddy Guy’s Slippin’ In, which won the Grammy for best contemporary blues album, co-wrote Hendrix: Setting the Record Straight with John McDermott, and in 2014 won a Primetime Emmy for the music mixing of the American Masters documentary Jimi Hendrix: Hear My Train a Comin’. His photographs from inside those sessions have been exhibited from Manhattan’s Morrison Hotel Gallery to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the audio company Waves has sold plug-ins built to imitate his console habits.

At 84 he is still at the desk. His new stereo mix of Rock and Roll Over, made from the original analog multitrack tapes, anchors the album’s super deluxe edition from UMe, alongside his new mixes of the band’s first concerts in Japan at the Nippon Budokan. The first taste, his 2026 mix of “Mr. Speed” paired with an unreleased “Hard Luck Woman” outtake, arrived on October 16, a year to the day after Frehley’s death. The label pitches the new mix as a more modern rock sound, which is exactly the question fans will put to it: whether a producer revisiting his own record improves it or sands off the blunt, room-sized crunch they loved. In May he sat down with Rick Beato for a long conversation about recording the bands that made his name.

The box arrives on November 6, five days before Rock and Roll Over turns 50. Once again Kramer will be the person deciding what a 1976 performance sounds like, as he was in 1976.

Tags: singers, Led Zeppelin, record producers, KISS, Eddie Kramer, Rock and Roll Over

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