In most hip recording studios realworld time doesn’t exist — but in Electric Lady it’s denied. Past a closed circuit TV eye and down a flight of stairs from Greenwich Village’s seedy 8th Street is another world. The hallway is curved and long, dim lights accent the floor to ceiling murals of golden-haired children piloting spaceships thru Hendrix-skies. Inside the studios, lights glow" in colors and strengths of your choosing, acoustic sound panels flow into walls — and in the control booths there are more floor pillows than chairs. Sure, there are a few digital display clocks counting silent minutes, but you have to look to find them. Tape machines and mixing boards wait to be fulfilled — and no matter what the weather outside, it’s always the same time here — do it time.

Poet/singer Patti Smith and her band (known as “the boys” for now) lived here most of the month of September, recording and mixing Horses, her first album for Arista. They ran on rock and roll time — some sessions starting at 5 AM and going till 11 at night, next day it might be noon to 6 AM. The hours shifted, sleep was sporadic, days became nights, nights became dazed, everybody was caught in the common obsession of getting it down. It don’t take many times of working all night and leaving, wasted in the dawn, only to find the streets full of sunshine and people going to offices before all that’s real is the mania of the sound you’re making.