Life and How to Live It with Dr. Rocco

A conversation with John Storyk, legendary acoustic designer

I've been wanting to share this conversation for a long time. John Storyk is a Princeton-trained architect, a lifelong blues musician, and the man who — at just 22 years old — designed Electric Lady Studios for Jimi Hendrix. But more than any single achievement, what I find fascinating about John is the through-line of his entire life: serendipity, a tuned antenna, and the willingness to say yes before he knew how.

John grew up on Long Island, the son of an international commodities trader who believed deeply in world travel. A teenage summer in Mexico — walking into the Mayan ruins at Tulum, falling in love for the first time, discovering Greenwich Village through a girl whose father was a New York Times editor — set the whole thing in motion. By the time he graduated from Princeton in 1968, he was as serious about playing saxophone and blues piano as he was about architecture. He moved to Greenwich Village with his college sweetheart, played in a band, and assumed life would sort itself out.

Then came the ice cream shop. One hot August evening, he picked up a local paper while waiting in line and spotted an odd want ad: carpenters needed, no pay, experimental nightclub. A dime in a rotary phone later, he was redesigning the entire concept. That club — Cerebrum — landed on the cover of Life Magazine and ran for nine months before the mafia shut it down. But word had gotten around. Jimi Hendrix's manager tracked John down with a simple offer: come design a club for Jimi on 8th Street. Midway through, producer Eddie Kramer convinced everyone to build a recording studio instead. John had never been inside a studio in his life. So he created his own internship from scratch, doing all the drafting for a seasoned acoustician for free, in exchange for learning everything he could. A year and a half later, Electric Lady Studios opened. It is still there. Still booked solid. One of the finest rooms in the world.

We go deep into what followed: Stevie Wonder moving into Electric Lady almost the day after Jimi died, a lifelong friendship with Eddie Kramer, and a roster of commissions that reads like a who's who — Whitney Houston, Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger, U2, J. Cole, and many more. We talk about the moment John heard Leon Russell playing Beethoven in his pajamas at 6am and quietly decided he would never be that good — and quit the band. We talk about meeting his wife Beth at a Thanksgiving party in Saugerties, and how she helped him turn a haphazard one-man operation into WSDG, now a 60-person global acoustic consulting firm with offices across four continents, built almost entirely through a student intern pipeline.

And we talk about where John is right now — navigating succession, stepping away from the CEO role, trusting the team he spent decades building, and the unexpected peace that's slowly come with letting go.

In this episode

• Growing up with a globalist father and a summer in Mexico that changed everything
• Cerebrum: the strangest nightclub in 1960s New York, and why the mafia closed it
• Designing Electric Lady Studios at 22, having never set foot in a recording studio
• Stevie Wonder, Leon Russell, Eddie Kramer, and a career's worth of stories
• Building WSDG into a global firm through an intern pipeline he never planned
• Succession, ego, and the slow art of letting go
  
  "The background noise of life is always there. There's always opportunities every single second. You need to keep your antenna up."
  — John Storyk
  
  John's billboard
  "Follow your dreams. Follow your heart. Believe in your intuition. And believe in serendipity."
  
  — John Storyk

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