(Interview by Martin Porter and Greta Fagin).
It’s not every day that we come across someone who was at Record Plant at the beginning. That’s why, when we read an article about educator and audio engineer Sandy Stone, who started working at the Record Plant in New York in 1968, we jumped at the opportunity to talk to her ourselves.
Stone was the New York studio’s first maintenance engineer, having been hired after being asked to fix a piece of equipment on the spot by studio co-founder Gary Kellgren. In a matter of days, not only was she keeping the gear running during intense, round-the-clock sessions with artists like Jimi Hendrix, but she was doing sessions herself. She even built the mixing console for Studio B, finishing it right before it opened.
After leaving Record Plant, moving to California and transitioning as a woman in the early 1970s, Stone became the recording engineer at Olivia Records, a women-run label at the heart of the feminist music movement. Following her time in the music industry, she went on to a career in academia. She is Professor Emerita at the University of Texas at Austin, and is known for her work in media theory and gender studies. In 2024, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame as the first trans woman to receive the honor. She is the star of a feature documentary film in-production, GIRL ISLAND: THE SANDY STONE STORY.
This interview focused on Stone’s time at Record Plant, where she provides an inside look at the behind-the-scenes that shaped her career and resulted in some of the era’s most famous recordings.
Record Plant Diaries (RPD):
Do you remember when you started working at Record Plant?
Sandy Stone (SS):
It was either summer or fall of 1968. There was no Studio B; there was just Studio A, and there were Gary (Kellgren) and Jack Adams and Fern in the front office, and various other people hanging around it. And Chris (Stone) and Ancky, whom I only knew as Ancky Johnson – I never knew her as Anky Revson.
RPD:
Tell me how you ended up working there. What was your background?
SS:
I had just had my life come apart in Annapolis, Maryland. Whatever you think that means, it meant, and when I got to New York, I felt as if I were dead. I had no past and probably no future, and I had to do something, so I figured I might as well do something I knew. I opened the Yellow Pages at random, put my finger on “Record Plant”, and went over to the garage. The door said “Abaddon Limited” over the Record Plant bubble logo. The studio manager Fern let me in and said, “What do you want?” I replied, “I’m the greatest recording engineer in the world,” And Fern said, “Hang on”, and she got Gary. Gary came out and asked me the same thing, I said the same thing. Gary looked at me as if I were a putrefied fish and asked, “Can you fix anything?” I said, “Sure, I can fix anything.” Gary took me back in, and there was the Scully 12 track, which was not running. Gary said, “Can you fix that?” And I said, ”Of course, I fix them all the time. Do you have the manual?” Gary had the manual and I speed read it, went over to the machine, and this is hard to explain, but I did something … like putting my hands on the machine and saying, metaphorically: “In the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, heal!” And the machine started to run. And Gary said, “You’re hired.”
RPD:
Had you been in studios before?
SS:
I’d been a tech head since I was about 12 years old, and when I was a teen I built my own home recording studio. It was not very good, but it worked. I built my own tape recorder because I couldn’t afford to buy one. It used a vacuum cleaner motor for the capstan, fan motors for the reels, a tangle of electronics and all kinds of weird stuff. I had a lot of hands-on experience with my own funky gear, but nothing with a real piece of professional equipment. But they all operate on the same logical principles.
RPD:
What was your impression of Record Plant when you walked in the door, and when you started working there?
SS:
The room was like my dream of what a recording studio should be, so I felt at home right away, and in fact, feeling right at home in capital letters because I wound up living in the basement, sleeping on a bunch of Jimi (Hendrix)’s capes. Gary was sleek, pleasant, but also a little jivey. He and (engineer) Jack Adams would chat all the time in the control room about Jack’s conquests of various kinds, whoever he had had over the night before. Jack was always talking about how his door swung both ways…if you didn’t like it, you could leave. When I first walked in, Jack was complaining that a jilted lover had sunk his houseboat.
RPD:
The relationship between Gary and Jack was a pretty interesting one at that time. I mean, they hung out a lot together, and they partied a lot together.
SS:
They hung out a lot together, and they partied a lot together, and they would share their exploits… You could think of me as a farm boy fresh out of Annapolis, and hearing their stories was fascinating.
RPD:
Let’s talk about some basic maintenance, though. The Scully was quirky but fixable with your magic. What about the Datamix console?
SS:
The Datamix was also pliable, and I kept it and the other equipment in the studio going . Usually at some wee hour in the morning, I would come in and fix everything, and then I’d go back to sleep in the basement. I’d then get up in the morning before anybody else had come in and go up and wash in their bathroom and put my clothes on. And then I would spend the rest of the day hanging out in the corner of the control room. Chris said I always wore a cape and a long beard.
RPD:
And was it all Jimi at that point?
SS:
Jimi was working in the evening. He was alternating between (engineers) Gary, Tony Bongiovi, who we called Bonji, and Jack (Adams). At that time Tony was a big presence, although he loathed the place. He never got tired of talking about the studio he was building, which must have rankled Gary. Eddie Kramer was there, too, and he was not a very happy person. When I met him, he was insecure, or he allowed himself to be insecure around me. We would talk about personal things, and he would talk about his plans for Electric Lady Studios, but he always gave me the impression that he felt that somebody was about to push him out, and he wasn’t happy about it.
RPD:
One of the big questions about the sounds on Jimi’s album “Electric Ladyland,” were they Gary or Eddie? What’s your take on that?
SS:
It was a combination. I don’t think I have any mixes on that album, it’s pretty much a combination of them.
I did do some unusual effects with Jimi, but I think they’re only on some of the alternate takes. Jimi wanted a slapback sound that was shorter than was possible with a conventional tape machine. In other words, he could hear digital effects in his head that wouldn’t become possible until Rick Factor released the first Eventide unit some time later. So I tried faking it by winding layers of tape around the capstan to increase its diameter. The more I wound, the better the slapback got. Jimi loved it and kept egging me on to make the delay shorter and shorter until the capstan was about three inches in diameter, at which point the whole thing became unstable and the takeup reel couldn’t keep up with how fast the tape was spewing out of the heads. I must have gotten the delay time down to a few milliseconds, though.
Jimi was notorious for wanting to play with the faders during a live take, which could ruin the recording. After we tangled hands at the board a few times, I came up with a scheme. I built a fence, made of popsicle sticks and colored tape, down the middle of the console. Then I patched all the monitor faders over to the right side where Jimi sat, and all the faders that actually controlled the recording levels to the left side where I sat. Then Jimi could mess with the faders to his heart’s content while I made sure the levels to the machines were right. Occasionally Jimi would become overenthusiastic and reach over to my side, and I’d slap his hand. Then we’d grin at each other.
I remember a few nights after I started working with Jimi I was in the control room in the hot seat, and this huge party was going on, and everybody’s yelling and babbling to each other. Jimi was out in the studio and (Jimi’s girlfriend) Devon (Wilson) was sitting in the producer’s seat. The entourage was unruly and very loud, laughing and joking and laying out lines on any horizontal surface and not paying any attention to the music. In the meantime we’re trying to work. I got frustrated because I couldn’t hear what Jimi was doing, and finally I yelled “Okay that’s enough, everybody SHUT UP!” Instantly the room was silent. Devon gave me a sour look and said caustically, “Do you like your job?” I was in no mood to humor her, so I simply said “No”. She looked startled and pulled back. I don’t think anyone had ever said no to Devon, and she didn’t know what to do. After that, she left me alone.
Before anything else could happen, Jimi waved at me from the studio, and so I shut off the faders and went into the studio and closed the door. I said, “Jimi, do you want me to throw them all out?” And Jimi made a helpless gesture and said, “They’re my friends, man.” And I said, “Jimi, they’re not your friends. They’re just sucking on you. Tomorrow they’ll be sucking on the next guy. We need to do the work.” And Jimi said, “You’re the first person who’s come in here who said anything honest to me.” And I don’t remember exactly how he shifted gears, but he said, “I don’t trust any of these guys.” And then he made me an offer to come work with him, and of course I felt very honored. And I said, “Okay, I’ll think about it”.
The next day Gary was furious. At first he tried hiding it. He met me in the front office, put his arm around me and said in an avuncular way “Kid, I can go out on the street and hire a dozen engineers, but people who really understand maintenance are rare. I want you to stop doing sessions and stick to maintenance.” I said “Gary, engineering is what I’m for. I don’t want to give it up.” Gary upped the pressure. He said “Look, I’m going to build a whole chain of Record Plants across the country. Chicago, Nashville, Hollywood, San Francisco. I want you to help build them. I’ll make it worth your while.” This was a code phrase Gary got from Jack when Jack was offering someone obscene amounts of money to do something weird for him. I said “Thanks, that’s very generous, but I really want to engineer. How about fifty per cent engineering and fifty per cent maintenance?” Then the gloves came off. Gary got very severe and said “Maintenance or nothing.” He walked away. Fern had been watching the whole thing from behind her desk and gave me a sympathetic look.
RPD:
Is that when you left Record Plant?
SS:
Yeah. After Gary walked away I went back into the studios and finished up whatever I’d been doing. I went out in the late afternoon and walked around the streets for a long time. Later that night, after all the sessions had ended and everyone had gone home, I came back. I got a sheet of letterhead out of Fern’s desk, put it in her typewriter, and typed “To whom it may concern: I resign.” I put it in an envelope, added my keys, put the envelope in Fern’s top drawer, and left. I never went back.
RPD:
Did you ever regret it?
SS:
No. It was the right call. That world eats people alive. It almost ate me, too. But I had a different future in mind.
RPD
We wrote a lot about the opening of Studio A, right, but we didn’t write about a party for B. That’s very interesting.
SS:
I can give you a little background on the party for B, but it’s all from my perspective.
Long before B was opened, Gary had started booking sessions for it, and to celebrate its completion Gary, Chris, and Ancky planned a huge blowout of a party. Between the three of them I think they managed to invite every musician, artist, dealer, and rich weirdo anywhere near Manhattan. They scheduled nothing for A that day, so both studios were available for the party. Of course it was a Record Plant party, so we planned on having blacklights not only over the boards as usual, but all over the whole place.
A few hours before party time Gary, Chris, and Anky came in to check out the setup. Gary immediately said “We need more blacklights!” I said “We can get more, but Infernal Light (the place we rented them from) is downtown, and I don’t have a car.” Anky said “That’s no problem, take my car. It’s right out front.” So I went out the 44th street door and around to 8th avenue, and sure enough, there was Anky’s car — a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow with a driver in full livery standing at attention. “Uh”, I said, “Okay, whatever.” I got in and reached for the door handle and he said “Oh no, allow me,” and he shut the door.
We pull up in front of Infernal Light and he gets out, walks around the car, and opens my door. The Infernal Light people are coming out to gawk at the car. The liveried driver is standing at full attention. I stagger out. I’m wearing my blue denim work shirt, torn blue jeans and clunky black engineer’s boots, my hair is wild and I look like I haven’t slept in three days — which is true, I’d just finished a marathon session putting the final touches on B’s board and my hair still stinks of soldering flux. They’re just staring. I say “I need some blacklights.” They snap back to reality and say “How many do you need?” I say “All you’ve got.” Everyone runs back inside and in a minute or so they’re loading blacklights into the Rolls’s trunk until it’s full. Then whoosh, we’re back at 44th Street.
As we put the last ones in place people began to show up. Within a few minutes the place was jammed. It seemed as though everyone in town really had come — musicians, curators, artists, people from Andy Warhol’s Factory. Wine and drugs flowed like rivers, which is why I don’t remember much about the actual party, beyond sitting on the floor in the hallway with Edgar Winter, backs against the wall because neither of us could sit up unassisted at that point, discussing — of all things — philosophy. The only other thing I remember from that night was meeting a handsome, jovial man in an immaculate three-piece suit. He had a large brown leather attache case. As we were chatting he reached up to scratch his head, his suit jacket pulled back a little, and I saw the handle of a chrome-plated revolver. I said something like “How comes it that you are heeled?” He threw me a dazzling smile and opened the attache case. It was full to the brim with cocaine. “Here, have some,” he said, proffering a baggie the size of a lime. “No, take two, they’re small.”
Eventually we turned off the blacklights and everyone went home. I went down to the basement, got my dupe master of Fritz Reiner and the Boston Symphony Orchestra playing “Also Sprach Zarathustra”, put it on one of B’s 2-track machines, and turned up the volume. There was no furniture in B yet, so I sat on the floor where the engineer’s chair would be, and cried. I thought the place was deserted, but Tony Bongiovi came in very quietly and sat down next to me. He said “Sandy, you’re crying.” I nodded. Bonji was not a person noted for his empathy, but after a minute he said gently “Why are you crying?” I didn’t know how to explain that I was crying for everything that was lost.
RPD:
And you’d been living at the studio the whole time?
SS:
Yeah. I’d sleep on gear cases or under a desk. There was no clock. Time was sessions. Fix. Sleep. Repeat. But I began to realize I was being used. Celebrated when convenient, ignored when it mattered.
RPD:
And after that, you wrote an article for Zygote magazine (see sidebar) that described a night in session with Jimi?
Sandy Stone:
I didn’t want it to be autobiographical, so I changed the names and altered some of the action. I wrote it under the pen name Doc Storch, which later became my studio name. I wrote Gary in as the engineer instead of me. But it was about my experience. I was actually the engineer.
RPD:
I always thought that article was about Gary.
SS:
It wasn’t. It was me. I couldn’t say it directly back then. I needed space from it all—emotionally and physically.
RPD:
Did you stay in touch with Jimi?
SS:
Not really. We had one last conversation not long before I left New York. He said, “Everyone’s pulling at me, and I don’t know who’s real anymore.” That stuck with me.
RPD:
That sounds heartbreaking.
SS:
It was. He didn’t trust anyone by then. He said he wanted to make music that mattered but couldn’t find silence long enough to think.
RPD:
Do you think he would’ve made a different kind of record if the environment had been different?
SS:
Yes. Absolutely. If he’d been around people who cared about the music more than the scene, I think he would’ve pushed boundaries more deeply. He had it in him. But he was drowning in distraction. The real Jimi wasn’t the guy on stage. He was the guy sitting at the board at 4 a.m., chasing a sound no one else could hear yet.
RPD:
Did he ever tell you what he was chasing?
SS:
He called it “something honest.” He hated fakeness. Hated people who talked about art and then phoned it in.
RPD:
What would’ve had to happen for you to stay at Record Plant?
SS:
Someone would’ve needed to say, “We see you. We value what you bring.” Instead, it was all ego, all the time. I wasn’t going to survive in that atmosphere. Not and keep my soul.
RPD:
You ended up working for Wally Heider in San Francisco; was that kind of a reset?
SS:
Exactly. I worked with people who knew how to listen. Who showed up prepared. That gave me just enough faith to keep going.
RPD:
How long did you stay there?
SS:
Not long. A few years. Then I left the industry. Started doing smaller audio projects. Teaching. Writing. I didn’t want to burn out again.
RPD:
Do you miss it?
SS:
Sometimes. When I hear a perfect mix, I miss the feel of the board under my hands. But I don’t miss the chaos. Or the loneliness of being the only one who cared when something or someone broke.
RPD:
It sounds like you carried a lot of weight.
SS:
I did. But I wasn’t the only one. There were techs and assistants and engineers everywhere holding it all together. They never got credit. But without them, none of those albums would exist… Sometimes we were the only ones sober enough to remember how things worked.
RPD:
That’s part of why we wanted your story.
SS:
Then I’m glad I told it. Because the myth is big, but the truth is better.
The following is an excerpt of an article by Sandy Stone from Zygote Magazine. Stone (not Gary Kellgren) was actually the engineer in this session that took place on April 7, 1969, in Record Plant Studio A, providing a rare inside view of Jimi Hendrix at work in the studio:
Jimi Hendrix dry humps his guitar to an earsplitting climax. In the confusion of overgrown Marshall guitar amps and mike booms, Hendrix’s figure is almost lost. In the control room this evening are the usual cadre of hangers on, groupies, sycophants and musicians.
Using a 16 track studio for jamming, as Jimi does, works out to be horrendously expensive; after midnight it’s $160 an hour with tape at $120 a roll. When Jimi went into a studio, he could easily leave $2500 behind.
The session is booked for eight o’clock. In accordance with time honored custom, the set up crew starts to arrive with the equipment at ten or so and by midnight the prefatory honks, squeaks and buzzes are over with. The equipment men with their own desultory jokes check out the drums and Hendrix’s thirteen guitars, most of which are always at a session. They stack spare Marshall amps along the wall and fiddle with adaptors to permit the British equipment to mate with American plugs.
Jimi turns up with a small army of women in tow including (his girlfriend) Devon. In a typical piece of groupie power play, she heads straight for the control room to claim a seat next to the engineer Gary Kellgren. A guy named Mark appears claiming to be Jimi’s dealer and proceeds to lay out the evening’s supply of grass and cocaine.
Jimi and Gary are laughing and joking in the control room. Gary leans forward and flicks the switch on the talk-back mike, so his voice comes over the speakers. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Record Plant Banana Boat, Freak Show and Traveling Blues Band.” Imagining some slight in this comment and eager to show how influential she is, Devon snarls at Gary, “Do you like your job?” ”No,” says Gary and leaves her totally nonplussed.
Jimi signals it’s time to get moving: “Okay, let’s lay it down,” About a third of the way through the song, Jimi calls time out and goes off to the control room to confer with Gary. Everyone reaches for beer and cigarettes while the groupies subtly jostle one another for pole position near Jimi’s chair, ready for the next time he needs to come in for a conference.
Back out in the studio, they start again, only for the music to come to a grinding halt as a woman appears next to Jimi, hanging drunkenly around his neck. It’s Kathy Etchingham, his ex-girlfriend from London. They speak inaudible words near Jimi’s mike; Gary considers turning the mike up so everyone can hear what’s going on but thinks better of it. Devon is staring with an intensity that could melt the control room glass. Kathy is clearly in a bad way – streaked makeup, puffy eyes and torn velvet dress — and clearly Jimi doesn’t want her there. Earlier on she had fallen down the steps of the Scene and hit her head on the swinging doors.
Back in the studio everyone is in the control room listening to takes. Jimi is telling Gary to edit a 16 track tape, a very tricky operation where it would be very easy to ruin the master. “Look man,” says Jimi, “Just cut it right where I say…listen now. Right there. Stop. That’s it. Now run ahead to that next part we did and where the drums go ch-boom, cut it again and put the end of the first part on there. “ Gary looks at Jimi as if he is mad but does it anyway. Only Jimi is not surprised when the playback is smooth with no hint of any ‘cut and paste’ work.
They start off again on another take, but Mitch and Noel are growing restless. Jimi takes a break. On his return he meets them on their way out. “Where are you going? I want to know.” Turns out they go a few blocks away to the Scene. This little ritual keeps repeating, and sometimes Jimi can go over there and drag them back and sometimes he can’t.
“Man, we’ve done that number to death right into the ground,” says Mitch and on the way out he adds, “But Jimi will keep going back and back over it forever and it’ll never get any better than it is now, man, and that’s what’s wrong with this group.” But Jimi didn’t do these endless retakes because of mistakes, but because he was aiming for the sound he heard in his head. Trouble was that nobody else could hear it, so they didn’t know what they were striving for. Jimi couldn’t explain it, he just knew that when it was right he would know it. The result was deadlock and frustration for everybody.
Jimi stayed on, laying down multiple guitar tracks and listening to the takes over and over again, hoping that Mitch and Noel would come back. They didn’t. Jimi gave up around 6 am, gathered up his notes into his fringed shoulder-bag, grabbed his coat and left, leaving the groupies to slink off into the dawn from whence they came. On the way out he passes Kathy, slumped semi-conscious on the office couch in a pool of vomit. Jimi throws her a horrified glance and keeps walking.
Mark the dealer gives his own view on why a woman would follow Jimi halfway round the world, probably in the sure knowledge of rejection: “She follows him because she wants what he has inside, the thing he uses to make music. It’s the same reason all these chicks follow him around. And they know he’ll leave them, he says so and he’s not kidding.” Standing over Kathy, he adds, ”She’d follow him into hell if she thought he’d look after her.”
Perhaps in some respect, Jimi and the groupies are similar. Jimi has this vision of a song which he can’t manifest in the real world of perceived sound. The groupies are living a similar unreality by hoping that Jimi Hendrix will come and sweep them off their feet and declare his faithful and undying love.
Neither can understand why they live in pain so much of the time.
