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."

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Source: LA Times