Elliott Smith still sings to his studio’s keepers

With the white candles, reverent words and hushed tones, it could almost have been a religious service. And in a sense it was: The two musicians and one sound engineer gathered in a tight warren of rooms in the San Fernando Valley were, among other things, paying homage to a departed saint, battered troubadour Elliott Smith.

The trio has spent the last 18 months or so fixing up New Monkey Studio, which Smith owned for the last three years before his 2003 death from stab wounds to the chest and where he recorded some of the songs on the posthumous album “From a Basement on the Hill” as well as others unreleased.

“Elliott’s away for a while,” says drummer and music manager Robert Cappadona while leading a visitor through the studio he owns with guitarist Joel Graves of the band Earlimart. “We’re just minding the store.”

The neighborhood is decidedly mundane, conveying neither the indie-rock-cool Smith embodied nor the morbid chill that has clung to him since his death. (The L.A. County coroner has never closed the book on whether it was suicide or homicide, saying there was not enough evidence to rule either way.) Wide, charmless Van Nuys Boulevard is lined with countless new car lots; a vacuum cleaner repair store sits a few doors down.

And the studio itself is modest. With its Persian rug on hardwood floors, small refrigerator and TV it could be a neater-than-usual dorm room. On entering, only an original mid-’60s poster for the Who’s “I’m a Boy” single suggests that there’s something unusual here.

But inside are artifacts that would excite any serious music fan -- especially an enthusiast of the British Invasion rock that served as the foundation for Smith’s music, even when his work was at its most fragile and haunting. “It’s an amazing collection of gear,” Graves says, “that we didn’t want to see disassembled and sold off on EBay.”

The studio’s key piece is a console made in the early ‘70s at London’s Trident Studios. According to Mike Terry, the Grammy-nominated engineer who has helped Graves and Cappadona refurbish the studio, only 13 were made, and they were used making records by Rush, Queen and AC/DC.

“It leads to a really big, round rock sound,” says Graves. “We were told the selling point for Elliott was that some of [George Harrison’s] ‘All Things Must Pass’ may’ve been recorded on this console.”

But most of the pieces come from the more hand-crafted tradition of 1950s and ‘60s analog equipment, like the studio’s classic ‘50s tube microphones, or the 1959 limiter (a device that helps prevent distorted recordings), both the sort of equipment favored by the Beatles.

Graves describes these pieces as producing analog sound with “a natural warmth to it -- what people love about vinyl records.”

And Terry, who was nominated for a 1999 Grammy for his work with the Foo Fighters, points out that the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds,” revered for its studio wizardry, was recorded in a studio as small as New Monkey.

Still, while they describe the refurbishment as a labor of love, it’s also been, as Graves puts it, “a battle” to get some of this old machinery working properly.

Graves, Cappadona and Terry are hoping to attract others with an ear for that sound. Members of Rilo Kiley, Bright Eyes and Modest Mouse have recorded in various configurations, and Earlimart has begun work on its next album at New Monkey.

So far the studio, which has recently allowed outsiders in to record, is filled only a few weeks a month.

“I’d like to see it working every day, with people in and out of here,” says Cappadona. “To allow bands that might not be able to touch this kind of equipment come in here and make records.” He’s referring in part to the studio’s relatively low rates: $500 for a 12-hour day.

Smith’s fans -- who tend to have an intense and personal connection to his music and persona -- seem to have warmed to the project. The studio’s opening, for instance, has been announced approvingly on Smith’s website, www.sweetadeline.net.

Charlie Ramirez, who runs the site, says he has heard only good words from other fans, some of whom hope to record in the studio.

“Elliott created that studio not only for himself but to help his friends and other musicians to have a place to record with pretty much no boundaries,” he says. “I think Joel, Robert and their friends really understood what kind of environment Elliott was going for.”

The trio suspects that the New Monkey name, which doubles as their website domain name (www.newmonkeystudio.com), came from Smith’s sense that the studio where he spent many a day and night tinkering in his final years had become the new “monkey on his back.”

For an artist whose tangles with drugs and alcohol were legendary, it’s a reminder of the dark magic the place still embodies.