The Soulquarians at Electric Lady: An Oral History

From 1996 to 2002, Questlove, D’Angelo, Common, Erykah Badu, James Poyser, J. Dilla, Bilal, Q-Tip, Mos Def, and Talib Kweli turned Electric Lady Studios into a hub of musical innovation. Drawing inspiration from their surroundings, the crew worked on a clutch of unforgettable albums. Electric Lady hadn’t seen such activity for a while. Epoch-defining music from Stevie Wonder, David Bowie and more had been recorded there. But the studio was in a bit of a slump when Russell Elevado, Questlove and D’Angelo took up residence there. In this oral history, Questlove and Russell Elevado are joined by Bilal and James Poyser to tell the story of this hugely creative period.

Russell Elevado

D’Angelo and I were brainstorming about the album [that would become Voodoo], listening to records. I found that Music of My Mind and Talking Book were in his collection. I pulled them out and showed him that Stevie did these records at Electric Lady. This was when he was really starting to get into Jimi Hendrix. I told him that we should go to Electric Lady Studios to record it. He had no idea that Electric Lady was still operational. As soon as we stepped into Studio A, which was pretty much unchanged except for the flooring and one wall, we immediately felt positive vibes. I can say with conviction that we brought that place back to life. They weren’t busy. If you look at their history, you’ll see a big spike starting in 1996. We were literally blowing dust off of the Fender Rhodes that was in there. I was wiping dust off of the microphones.

Questlove

The Roots’ New York home base was always Battery Studios. We chose Battery Studios because that’s where Q-Tip, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, and Phife recorded all of their A Tribe Called Quest records. I remember D’Angelo had a session that he had to do for a movie soundtrack, and we recorded at Battery. I was ecstatic about the song, but he said, “It doesn’t have the vibe I’m looking for. Don’t worry because next week we’re going to go to the house that Jimi built.” I was like, “Huh?” He said, “Yeah, man. We’re going to go to Electric Lady.” At first, I was like there were so many classic records made at Battery Studios. Why would you want to go to Electric Lady Studios? As it turned out, D’Angelo already had one foot into the future. He just knew that place was so blessed. He said, “Yo, man. It has the blessings of the spirits. We have to go there. It’s only right.”

I didn’t really know about the history of Electric Lady Studios. But when I got there, the design of the place was so damn mystical. First of all, the original design was circular. It looked like a globe. It was so beautiful, and what was strange about it was our first day at Electric Lady was really the last week of that old infrastructure, because the family that had purchased Electric Lady Studios decided to knock down that beautiful, spherical brick front display that Jimi Hendrix had made for the studio. They just wanted to make it a regular building storefront, which I guess, in their minds, they thought if this venture were to fail, they could sell the building and cash in and really get a good retail store value from it.

Bilal

I didn’t realize it was Electric Lady Studios because I’d walked by it so many times. My college was right up the street from the studio. We were standing in front of the building all that time and didn’t know what it was. [laughs]

Questlove

I remember on the first day of recording it was three o’clock in the morning; D’Angelo, Russell Elevado, and I were saying to each other, “We can’t let these new people ruin Jimi’s vision.” We spent the whole day admiring the paintings and collages on the wall. We were marveling at them. To go into that building was like going inside of a spaceship. We decided that we were going to get up at nine in the morning and stand in front of the building, so they couldn’t knock down the wall. We were going to stand in front of the actual wrecking ball and prevent them from knocking it down. [laughs]

This conversation we had was at four o’clock in the morning. I set my clock for eight o’clock in the morning. So when I woke up, I called D’Angelo to make sure we were still going to do it. I was staying at the Paramount Hotel. So, I called him up, and he answered the phone half asleep. I asked him, “Are we still doing this?” He responded, “Doing what?” I replied, “Are we still standing in front of the wrecking ball?” He said, “Nah, man. I’m going back to sleep.” [laughs]

Russell Elevado

We started our first sessions there at the end of 1996. We were there early. At the beginning of 1997, we pretty much booked Studio A for the entire year. There was no mixing. It was just straight jamming and recording for a whole year. There was tons of recording happening. We went through 200 reels of tape that year. I think we came to Electric Lady at the right time. They had their regular clients that had been coming there for years, but there wasn’t any hustle and bustle going on until after we started working there. Everybody started visiting us at the studio. People were starting to hear what we were working on. We had major stars coming in like Mariah Carey, Lauryn Hill, Q-Tip, Eric Clapton, Chris Rock, Rick Rubin, and not to mention all the amazing people and musicians who were involved in making Voodoo.

Questlove

Every day was a new adventure. For instance, Pino would say, “OK. I’m here for two weeks. Let’s make use of it.” The same thing when Charlie Hunter came on board. He had three weeks to spare, then he would go on the road. I had the same thing, but I didn’t want to miss any of the magic. Sometimes I would go home and then D would call me and say, “Yo. You have to listen to what Charlie and I did last night.” He would play me something, and I would be seething with jealousy because I wasn’t there for the magic. I knew instantly that whatever album we were making was going to be a historical moment. I knew it instantly. I didn’t want to miss anything, even if it meant that I had to set up shop in the same studio, and that’s what I ended up doing.

Bilal

I had a sleeping bag there because I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to live there.

Questlove

When D did his vocals, he liked to be alone and secluded. A majority of Voodoo was done on two-inch tape. With Pro Tools, he could spend nine hours on vocals. On two-inch tape, the songs would go on for like four days with all these intricate bobs and weaves of vocal parts. So on days where he devoted himself to vocals, I’d run back to Philly to record with The Roots. After a while, that got tiring. Suddenly, we started using Studio B at Electric Lady. D’Angelo’s day would start at six o’clock in the evening. He would call a session for two o’clock, but we knew that meant either six or seven in the evening. Having set up shop in Studio A, I decided to take advantage of the situation because by this point, everybody was starting to get a whiff of the aroma that was coming out of 52 W. 8th St.

I’ll say that activity at Electric Lady went full throttle in early 1998. By early 1998, a typical day in Electric Lady and this is from the D’Angelo point of view, at six in the evening, D’Angelo would arrive at the studio, and usually he was coming from the gym. If you remember, he was severely cut and in shape. It was first time I heard about the nine carb diet. If you walked into the break room, there were twenty pieces of turkey bacon and a bunch of lettuce. That was D’Angelo’s snack. I would set up shop there. There was a TV and a VCR inside of the break room. Before YouTube, I was YouTube. I was the one going to Europe and Asia, and I would come back with the largest Kipling bags stuffed with 40 to 50 VHS tapes of every Prince concert, Soul Train episode, every Michael Jackson concert, Al Green, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye concert.

Russell Elevado

There was a lot of studying. One thing that D discovered during this time was that Prince wouldn’t be Prince without the influence of Jimi Hendrix. Then he started realizing that everyone was influenced by Hendrix – from George Clinton to Stevie Wonder. He was at the core of all the music he was fond of. By this time, Erykah and Common were listening to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. It felt like they were opening up to the psychedelic rock side of music while being inside of Jimi’s home. Everyone was also trying to hone in on the funk/soul sound of Marvin Gaye. They were really going to school on it. I remember going to record stores with Quest and D, and they would buy $2,000 worth of records. They couldn’t wait to get back into the studio to play those records. Once they started listening to these records, there would be impromptu jam sessions.

Questlove

The majority of the time we would sit and watch Prince, and that is how the process would start. We would sit in front of the TV from seven o’clock in the evening to nine o’clock. We would watch performances over and over again. We’d get amped! The performances would come through loud on the speakers. It was like a concert experience. He would be like, “Yeah! That’s what I want to do!” The whole point of Voodoo was to build the Voodoo show. The only way to build the show was to make an album that could complement it. The one thing we always noticed with Prince was he would make the album version the way the album version was, but he would take it to another level when he performed it in concert.

Around 9:30 to 9:45, we would go into the A room. D would go to his set up, and I would go to mine. I had this little pod. Think of a miniature greenhouse that you could buy at Home Depot. Back in the day, you could buy it from Sears. So this was where my drums were located. It was like a spaceship inside of a spaceship.

Bilal

The room was so big that you could build your own fucking contraption in there. It was a dream job for the engineers that were working there, so we had the best engineers, and they were all experimental cats who knew their craft. Ahmir built his own kind of cage with all these giant boards. He put a bunch of sheets over them and inside of that room is where he had his drums. It was crazy. You could hardly see Ahmir. It was so dark. All you could hear were drums.

Questlove

I’d go in there, and D’Angelo would go into his room, then we would redo that entire Prince concert that we just watched for two hours in a row. Mid jam, we would catch a good eight bars of a magic moment, and say to each other, “Yeah. This is good. How do we cut this energy in half to make it palpable for the record? So, if we do it in concert, we can do it as hype as we’re doing it right now.” We would spend about an hour bringing it down to normal speed like 80 BPM instead of 120 BPM. We were writing songs on the spot. I can say that management was definitely afraid because it was very raw and non-commercial. You had to know what was hitting in 1998. It was the height of the shiny suit movement. The typical R&B was Carl Thomas and Mary J. Blige.

Eddie Kramer would come in with these Hendrix tapes, and we were like, “Yo! This is the type of shit we’re on!” I think management was afraid because this is how it was for the first seven months. We were watching videos and pretending we were in the band, just he and I. An hour into it, we would sample ourselves. We would go back and listen to what we did. He’d say, “What was that thing you just did?” We’d go back and listen to it and try to figure out what we did to turn it in to what would become Voodoo. This is why it took five years. This would go on from 7 PM and we would start to lose steam around 5 AM. I had two options: I could go back to the hotel and come back at 10 AM, or I could sleep in the break room to wait for Common to come in.

Russell Elevado

Questlove was the one who started bringing people there. He told everyone what was happening. He was the original Twitter before Twitter. [laughs] He brought Common and Erykah into the studio. He had a vision for Common’s album, Like Water for Chocolate. The same applied for Erykah and James [Poyser]. He wanted them to catch the vibes he was getting at Electric Lady. It was this super organic, soulful, psychedelic vibe that he was getting. Electric Lady brought out a certain type of psychedelic vibe in D’Angelo and everybody else, including me.

Questlove

First up to bat was Common. Common was like, “I’m just trying to get some scraps off of the table. Even I know the scraps off of the table are better than anything that anybody is doing out here. What other people are doing out here sounds regular, but the shit y’all are doing feels futuristic and urgent, and I want a piece of it.”

Bilal

I remember meeting Prince at the studio one day. He played on Common’s album, Electric Circus. When I met Prince, he was a Jehovah’s Witness, and I didn’t know he was a Jehovah’s Witness. Back then, I used to cuss a lot. Ahmir was behind me yelling, “NO! NO! STOP!” [laughs] He didn’t like to hear cursing, but he was cool about it. Ahmir thought he was going to kick me out of the session. After a while, I realized what was going on, and I stopped cursing. When I was growing up, my mother was a Christian and my father was a Muslim. I don’t know what happened, but out of nowhere, Prince and I were having a religious discussion. It was a bit surreal.

Questlove

The Common sessions were fun because J. Dilla would take the lead.

Bilal

J. Dilla had his own setup in the console room where we were. He was playing the bassline on the Moog jamming with Ahmir when he was playing on drums. The way he would organize and move, he was making the Moog talk. I didn’t know he was that type of an ill musician. It sounded like Pino Palladino or somebody like that playing the bass, but Dilla was just freaking the Moog.

Questlove

One day out of boredom, we were having a beat making challenge. Of course, I knew I was going to lose because J. Dilla was God. [laughs] He let me choose his records, and he still killed me. The best example was when he said, “You can pick any record for me.” I gave him Rick James’s Street Songs because I had limited hip hop vision. I thought you couldn’t really find anything on a commercial funk record from 1981. I told him to use “Give It to Me Baby.”

I thought the song was too fast for him to use. There was no drum breaks in it. It was too commercial sounding. The beat was going to sound like something MC Hammer or Vanilla Ice would’ve used. He took the intro and chopped up the bass so precise and slowed it down. Common instantly said, “I’m making this the second song on my record.” I was like, “What?!” Dilla made the beat and it ended up being “Dooinit” from Like Water for Chocolate.

That is when I learned that I had all the records in the world, but I hadn’t listened to them. That’s what Dilla did; he listened to the music. Most beat makers will skim through it. They’ll buy records, and they don’t have the patience to sit there and marinate on songs for a half-hour. Some of his best samples come in on the last 40 seconds of a song. There was this Laura Nyro song that he once used. It was a nine-minute song. After listening to it for five minutes, I said, “There ain’t anything on this shit.” I skipped it. He listened to it five times in a row, and then the last 30 seconds before the fade, a second of magic happened. He knew how to turn that one carrot into a full-fledged meal.

James Poyser

There was a certain period of time where we would be working in all three rooms simultaneously. All three rooms were popping.

Bilal

D’Angelo was jamming with Mos Def. Mos Def was playing the bass. Most cats don’t know that Mos is ill on the bass.

James Poyser

I would go into the studio to work with one person, and while I was there, I’d meet another person and start working together with them.

Questlove

People would ask me, “If y’all aren’t using it, can I have that?” A great example of that was the song “Chicken Grease” on D’Angelo’s Voodoo album. It was actually made for Common. The song “Geto Heaven” on Common’s record was made for Voodoo. This was the song that Lauryn Hill and D’Angelo were supposed to do a duet to. When it was made clear that Lauryn Hill wasn’t going to be available to sing on D’Angelo’s record, Common asked him, “Can I please have that track?”

But what Common didn’t know was that D’Angelo said to me, “Yo, man. I can’t let him have that funk track y’all did. Common doesn’t know what to do with that song. That’s the funk I need. You know good and well that’s the funk I need. Common doesn’t know what to do with that funk.” So I had to broker a peace deal. I said, “If you give him that song, he can take “Chicken Grease,” and you can have “Geto Heaven.”

James Poyser

I remember working on the Mama’s Gun album with Erykah, and we were trying to finish the album because we were on a deadline crunch. We had all three rooms and a room uptown at Sony Studios. We would be mixing in one room, finishing vocals in another room, and doing keyboards and overdubs in another room. It just felt like home being there. That’s the best way to describe it.

Questlove

Some of my more historical and comedic drumming falls on Mama’s Gun. There was a point in 2000 where you could hear me for a good 20 second stretch, where she was scatting at the end of a song, literally snoring. You could hear the drumstick fall on the floor. The drumstick falling on the floor woke me up. You could tell I was alarmed when I woke up. I was playing a drum set with just one drum stick. It was at the end of the song and it faded out. I didn’t think anything of it.

For the five weeks I worked on the record, I was the sickest I’ve ever been. I remember having a throw up bucket next to my drum set. I was really, really sick during that whole period. It was still fun, though. All the sessions were fun.

Russell Elevado

I wish we could pull out all of those jams, man, and make a whole album out of them. It would be really incredible. Over the years, I don’t know where everybody’s tapes went. You have to remember that everything was done on tape, so a lot of these tapes you can’t even find anymore.

Questlove

Electric Lady was chosen for its vintage equipment. I needed to learn how to play drums lightly. A lot of that process was through trial and error. There was a real learning curve. D’Angelo’s song “Playa Playa” was a great example. My first take on “Playa Playa” I was putting my ass into that kick pedal. I was damn near standing up trying to put a hole through it. Russell said, “You don’t need to do that. The lighter you play; the better it sounds.”

We used the most vintage equipment. The same Fender Rhodes and clavinet that Stevie Wonder used on Talking Book, including “Superstition,” were still at that studio. D’Angelo set up included the clavinet, Fender Rhodes, a vintage grand piano; the hip hop side of him will never leave that damn ASR 10 for nothing. [laughs] To this day, he still sticks by that ASR 10 floppy disk and all. For me, I used a vintage Ludwig kit from 1968. Pino Palladino used these old precision bass axes from the 1950s. Russell Elevado would always use these old Royer microphones.

Russell Elevado

The original Electric Lady only had the main room, which was Studio A. The original board in Studio A was a very special console. It was a Focus Right board. The sound of it was really incredible and unique. Our projects were the last ones to use that original console. I was sad to see it go. It was one of a kind.

Bilal

A lot of people discovered ways to record in the console instead of going in the giant room. People used to record in the console back in the day like Sly Stone and Marvin Gaye. Marvin used to sing behind the board with the microphone. They would find the “dead zone” in the room and set the mic up and there wouldn’t be any feedback. You could sing in there with the speakers and stuff on. It’s almost like you’re singing live because you can feel the music, instead of the music coming through the headphones. I know D’Angelo, Erykah, and all of them were real good with that shit.

I liked to do a lot of things with my voice and background vocals in the style of Parliament and Funkadelic. I would manipulate the tape machine with my voice. I used to slow the tape machine down and then speed it up accordingly, if I wanted my voice to be really high or if I wanted my voice to be very low. I’m into creating a lot of white noise, so I had mics set up all over the building just to record. The place made you very curious to see if you could come up with a sound in your head and find it in the room. One of the engineers, Steve Mandel was a genius, too. If you had a sound in your head, he would spend all day trying to find it. I think that was the spirit of Jimi, because that was his whole thing being in that studio. He was trying to find these new sounds that he was hearing in his head. I think that energy was contagious among all of us at that time.

Questlove

I remember that Common was going to audition for this hip hop opera movie called Carmen that Beyoncé was starring in. All day long, he was saying he was going to get the lead role, and she was going to be his leading lady. But he ended up losing out on the role to Mos Def. I remember we were making fun of him that night. I remember James Poyser kept playing a refrain from Destiny Child’s “Bills, Bills, Bills,” and I was playing a refrain from “Umi Says” as a joke. After three or four minutes, it was jokey-jokes, then after seven minutes, Bilal came walking in and started singing. We were like, “This is dope as shit.” When people listen to “Sometimes,” they ask, “Why does the beginning sound like “Bills, Bills, Bills?” Well, that was just the premise of the song. We were fucking around and making fun of Common for losing the role to Mos Def. In the process, we wrote one of Bilal’s most famous songs.

James Poyser

There was this little light brown cat that would roam around and walk through all three studio rooms.

Bilal

Everybody said that the spirit of Jimi was inside of the cat. I remember when the cat was around, and if he was in your room, he really dug your shit. [laughs] They let the cat roam around freely. I liked to keep the doors open while I was recording because of the white noise. The cat used to roam into my sessions.

James Poyser

If there was a song he didn’t like, he would jump up and run out of the room. I’ll never forget this, and I’m not going to say who, but an artist played a particular song, and he was lying on top of the SSL, and when the song came through the speakers, the cat made a noise and jumped off the SSL and ran out of the room. [laughs] You can’t talk about this period at Electric Lady without mentioning “Jimi the cat.”

Questlove

I always knew that James Poyser and I were born in January. It was really J. Dilla that made me pay attention. One day, Dilla said, “Wait a minute. I was born on February 7th.” Then D’Angelo said, “I was born on February 11th.” Then James said, “I was born in January, and I’m an Aquarian, too!” I said, “Well, I was born on January 20th.” Also, the late great guitarist of The Soultronics, Jef Lee Johnson said, “I’m an Aquarian, too.” Then Common and Erykah came in, and Erykah said, “I’m a week late for being an Aquarian. I’m a Pisces, but at least I was born in late February.” She was a week off from being an Aquarian. Common didn’t want to be left out. He said, “I was born in March. I’m like you guys, so I’m sort of like an Aquarian.” [laughs] We realized six or seven of us were Aquarians. We felt like we were a unit.

The Vibe magazine photo was the beginning of the end. Because when that issue came out, motherfuckers were angry. [laughs] The issue started out as a feature about me. The people at Vibe had a clue that I was working on D’Angelo, Erykah, The Roots, Jill Scott, Bilal, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Common, Slum Village, and Nikka Costa’s records. At the height of everything, I was working with 17 different artists. I was really gun shy on any unwelcomed praise. I came from a commune. It wasn’t a one man act. I was very uncomfortable accepting a title or praise. I insisted to Vibe that they could get the story, but they had to make it about the family and not one person.

The thing was we never had a title, but because the journalist was hanging with us the whole time, they were like you guys keep saying Soulquarians all of the time. I explained the difference. I said that the Soulquarians were me, James, D’Angelo, and J. Dilla. The Soultronics was the group we were putting together with D’Angelo. So when we took the photo and then I saw the Vibe cover it said The Soulquarians. I was in Chicago when I saw it, and I said, “Oh shit. This is bad.” The next thing you know, every phone call that came in people were saying, “Yo, man. It looks like I’m working for you. I’m not an Aquarian. I’m my own person.” Literally, that’s when it all fell apart.

At the time we were shooting Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, I knew that it was the last time the “Electric Eight” were going to be together: Mos, Common, Bilal, D’Angelo, Erykah, James Poyser, J. Dilla, and me. I knew that was our funeral. I knew that the next renaissance wasn’t going to be Roots-centric. Seeing Kanye [West] with the marching band from that movie, I knew I wasn’t going to be central to the next movement anymore. He was going to be the leader, and I would have to be fine with it.