The Making Of Dolly Dagger By Jimi Hendrix

If you read this blog much you probably know by now that I'm a sucker for "making of" videos and stories. It doesn't matter who the artist is, you can always learn something from their creative experience because each one is so unique.

Here's the making of Jimi Hendrix's Dolly Dagger from the Rainbow Bridge album. The song was never a big hit, but a "making of" really doesn't have to be. I have a little bit of a connection to Rainbow Bridge in that I was the producer and surround mixer for the DVD release, and my good friend Eddy Schreyer's (a great mastering engineer and owner of Oasis Mastering) father was the cinematographer on the film.

The video features a very young Eddie Kramer (engineer for most of Jimi's records) working on an API console and an Ampeg MM-1100 tape recorder (gear that I cut my teeth on as well), which probably dates this to about the early 70's. Eddie has also been a friend for a long time and is featured in a couple of my books. You can read an excerpt of an interview with him from The Recording Engineer's Handbook.

The video is interesting in that Eddie talks about how complicated the song is, and it really is for the time. Today, most engineer's would revel in it's simplicity, but it's still pretty interesting to see and hear how it was put together.