Indispensable Feature Story: Eddie Kramer
In the midst of his work with Hendrix, Kramer and his team captured the music at Woodstock, where his early live mobile recording experience was to pay off but not exactly prepare him for what was to come. He got the call just the week before the festival was to take place. When he arrived, he thought, “this is going to be fun.”
He had to juggle 8 tracks of audio: one to sync to the cameras for the soundtrack, another for the audience track, which left six for the bands. “It was very tough. Communication between the stage and the back of the truck was very primitive. It broke town in terms of the headphone feed for me. It was just a nightmare. The bands would go on until two in the morning, and then we’d start again early the next day. We got pretty much no sleep and the only thing keeping us going were these huge vitamin B injections in the bum, and they didn’t half hurt.” 1
Back in the safety of proper studios, Kramer recorded Johnny Winter, The Nice, Family, and John Mayall. And he began his years-long association with Led Zeppelin. Engineering "Heartbreaker", "Ramble On", "Bring It On Home" for Led Zeppelin II was just the beginning.
While he didn’t man the boards for the entire record, he was responsible for the mix. In fact, the middle section of “Whole Lotta Love” (“where everything was going bananas”) was “a combination of Jimmy and myself just flying around on a small console, twiddling every knob known to man.” 2
Their next project together was Houses of the Holy in 1972, followed by some work on Physical Graffiti in 1972 (the double album was composed of tracks from a myriad of recording sessions with different engineers at a variety of studios over a few years), and tracks from the Coda compilation (and the group’s last studio release). His final record with the band wasn’t issued until 2003. How the West Was Won was a 3 CD set culled from performances at the L.A. Forum (25 June 1972) and Long Beach Arena (27 June 1972).
Though he continued to wear his engineering hat through 2014, working with Humble Pie, Peter Frampton, Curtis Mayfield and many others, Kramer moved to the Producer’s chair in 1970. Engineering and producing Carly Simon’s eponymous debut album helped to earn the singer a Grammy nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance in 1972.
In 1975, he began another long term relationship, this time with Kiss, producing their breakthrough, Kiss Alive!, followed by Love Gun, Rock and Roll All Over, Kiss Alive II and III, and three Ace Frehley solo albums. He continued to work with a variety of rock artists (Spooky Tooth, NRBQ, Foghat, Whitesnake, Anthrax, and many others). He also produced Buddy Guy and John McLaughlin.
Eddie Kramer has had a long and storied career. While he certainly had the technical chops to work with the world’s premier artists, what mattered to him most was something far less tangible. “Feel. Feel, feel, feel. Give me feel over technique any day. It’s the way the artist expresses him or herself,” he told Reverb. 3 Fortunately for us, his instincts and his talents have captured incredible artists and performances that will inspire and enrapture music lovers for many years to come.
"Record Producer Eddie Kramer ReCalls Woodstock 1969 on Sirius XM"