RETUNING A RELIC : Built by Seals & Crofts, Then Used as a Dorm, Chameleon Studios Changes Into Itself Again

Strains of electric guitar drift through the halls of a shabby brick building. The sound and rhythm are familiar.

John Fogerty is back there somewhere, locked in a rehearsal room, playing the way he did 20 years ago with Creedence Clearwater Revival. He’s working at new songs in a recording studio that recently reopened after being abandoned, an odd musical relic on the outskirts of Los Angeles.

Chameleon Recording Studios in San Fernando still looks decrepit from outside, on a back street beside a garage and a furniture store. A piece of paper tacked below the door buzzer is the only thing that identifies the place.

But inside there are well-appointed offices and a courtyard and, at the center, an orchestra-sized studio with natural wood decor and 3-foot-thick walls. The mood here is relaxed--a world away from the Hollywood crush of the record industry--and maybe that’s why Fogerty likes it.

Fogerty prefers to keep to himself, the people at Chameleon say. They watch him come and go on warm summer afternoons, but no one pesters him. When he plays, they pause in the hall to listen.

“Hearing that is like a religious experience,” said Larry Michael Gerber, who runs the studio. “A guy like that, he’s a legend, and he’s in my place. Sometimes I have to slap myself in the face.”

Gerber was one of the two men who brought Chameleon back to life in September. For five years before that he had struggled to make a living by recording nightclub singers and bar bands in a studio that took up an extra room in his mobile home. He charged $30 an hour and baby-sat two daughters while working the mixing board.

He still can’t figure out how he ended up at a million-dollar studio.

“It’s astounding,” he said.

Back in the 1970s, Chameleon was known as Dawnbreaker Studio and was a lavish new complex built by the pop duo Seals & Crofts. Somehow, over the course of four or five years, the place fell into financial failure and disrepair. Seals & Crofts eventually sold it back to their manager, who turned the studio into a dormitory for a small religious group.

Rehearsal rooms were made into bedrooms. The main studio was stripped bare, save for a few strands of wire.

Then, last summer, Joe Branam, a local businessman, bought the place to use as a warehouse. When he found out it was a studio, he went looking for someone who knew how to run that sort of business. A friend of a friend introduced him to Gerber.

“It was like an overnight thing,” Gerber said. “I was plucked from this little operation and dropped into a major studio.”

Tom Waits and Mr. Mister have worked at Chameleon since it opened. The Bangles were in for five weeks, rehearsing on the studio’s indoor concert stage. Rock bands pay as much as $1,000 a day to make records there.

And, on summer afternoons, Fogerty’s guitar fills the building with music.

“One day he was playing ‘Proud Mary’ through the wall, and I froze in my steps,” Gerber said. “It was like a historical moment.”

In the recording business such moments are vital to success. You need a superstar in the studio to attract other bands. Chameleon is fighting an uphill battle by trying to make a name for itself way out in San Fernando.

So Fogerty becomes a stamp of approval, a name that Gerber can drop in conversations with record company executives. When Fogerty walks through the halls at Chameleon, a young band that is recording there talks about it later because in some ways it’s a mark of their success.

Little America is making its second album, but these four guys are fairly new to the big-time music scene. They show up at Chameleon looking like brothers, with long hair and similar features and similar dress: sleeveless shirts and jeans and black boots. On this afternoon, the one named Custer is trying to make his drums sound right while the rest of the band watches from the control booth.

“I can’t hear the snare,” Custer says, listening through headphones to a playback of his drumming.

The producer fiddles with some knobs, and Mike Magrisi, the bass player, shakes his head as if it’s no use.

“I think Custer’s losing his hearing.”

Then, the producer wants something slightly different.

“Do you think we could come up with a beat that’s just a little cooler?”

Custer shrugs.

“I thought that was cool . “

Little America has been at Chameleon more than a month, working long days in a dark, loud studio. You spend 14 hours in this place, said guitarist John Hussey, and suddenly music doesn’t seem like such a great job. But Andy Logan recalled that it’s been only a few years since the band was recording in a garage in Santa Barbara.

“That studio was so small,” Logan said, “I wasn’t sure if we were there to record or vote.”

The producer laughed when he heard this.

“We’re all garage bands,” he said. “The better the band, the bigger the garage.”

There are literally hundreds of studios in Los Angeles. The ones clustered around Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood cater to rock ‘n’ roll bands and, in Burbank, places such as Evergreen Studios are set up to record sound tracks for nearby television and film companies.

If nothing else, Chameleon is one of the bigger garages in town. Strange and shadowed hallways run from studios to rehearsal rooms to lounges in this building. An immaculate business office opens onto the courtyard filled with weathered patio furniture. The impressive main studio is flanked by a lounge with a worn-out couch and a broken-down pinball machine.

“This place is relaxed,” Hussey said. “Another place we were at, you come out of the studio, and it was really nice, with a beautiful couch and a glass-enclosed fireplace. Any minute, I expected my mom to come out and say, ‘Don’t sit on the couch! That’s for company!’ ”

Gerber circulates constantly through his studio. Every hour or so he checks on the $39,000 grand piano, pausing to play a note or make sure the cover is on straight. If someone is recording, he pops in and out of the control room. He makes the rounds.

“All these hallways and rooms and stairs,” Gerber said. “I love it.”

In the beginning he never wanted any of this. He was just a struggling singer who bought an inexpensive four-track recorder because he wanted to put some of his songs on tape.

But he got the bug.

Gerber found himself borrowing heavily from a wealthy family friend. He spent $100,000 on equipment and stuffed it all into his 2,000-square-foot trailer. Soon, fledgling musicians were lounging on the front porch, waiting to use the makeshift studio. Even after Gerber soundproofed the walls, vibrations from the music carried through the rest of the house.

“Some of the sessions would go to 2 or 3 in the morning,” his wife, Melissa, recalled. “I was raising two small children. They slept through everything, but I didn’t. Sometimes it was a little unnerving.

“It had to be a joint effort with wanting to make it work. Otherwise I would have left long ago.”

Now the Gerbers have a new car and a house in Lake View Terrace. A few nights a week Melissa drives to the studio after she gets off work at a Sunland stationery store. She has seen Fogerty and some other stars there, but says she doesn’t care much for celebrities. She just likes to sit around and look at the place.

“It’s worth all of what I went through, all the years,” she said.

And some evenings, when Larry is done with work, he walks into the main studio and flicks on $300,000 worth of recorders and monitors and electronic outboard gear. Machines with names like Otari and Nakamichi and Lexicon. Machines with colored lights and digital readouts.

Then he sits at the grand piano.

Late at night, when everyone else is gone, it is Larry Michael Gerber’s music that drifts through the halls at Chameleon.