Interview by Dan Fox

Photos by Chris George

It was a bittersweet day in 2004 when Chris George and Daniel Majorie powered down their Milton St. home studio in old Gretna for the last time. For years, the aptly-titled Living Room had earned a reputation for being the place for up and coming bands of all genres to record. Some of our most beloved performers, from Blair Gimma, Big Blue Marble and Community to Hawg Jaw and Outlaw Order cut some of their first recordings at the Living Room. It wasn’t just the rock bottom costs, which were always per project (never hourly) that kept it booked solid through the year, but the whole experience of tracking in an intimate environment (the control room doubled as George’s bedroom) with people who brought a fiery, passionate and personal approach to engineering. Majorie’s engineering skills, which he had honed at school and in Nashville, coupled with George’s creative abilities that ranged from mic placement and drum tuning to barbecue and photography made for an unforgettable experience for musicians otherwise feeling the stress of a recording session. Their success eventually exhausted the possibilities of that little house and it became increasingly evident that a new venue would be needed, one that would not only broaden the possibilities but suggest a full-time occupation instead of recording only after a day’s work in an outside world hardly sympathetic to the hours music keeps. For over two years now, the buzz has been growing over the work that Majorie and George have put into the church/machine shop sitting directly under the Crescent City Connection, which was little more than a shell and a prayer when they wrangled it away from the city’s coffers. The Living Room Studio, version two is about ready to open its doors again and the wait will have been well worth it. From the colorful paint choices to the crisp echo of the live room, it’s clear that the past couple of years have been a labor of love for Majorie and George. ANTIGRAVITY caught up with the duo as they worked in the control room, one of the last spaces of the studio to be completed, and talked about reviving old gear, keeping bands happy and, of course, the good ole’ days of four-track cassette recording.

ANTIGRAVITY: The old place had a certain feel that was really relaxed, to say the least. Do you think you were able to transport that vibe over here?

Chris George: I feel like we did. It’s a bigger room than before but it still feels like a house. I didn’t want it to look like a studio. I feel like it’s a fresh, new version, three times bigger than the old place.

AG: What’s a dream clientele list you have? Who do you see in that room?

CG: I would like to branch out, do stuff we weren’t able to do before. I feel like New Orleans music in the ’60s was really bumpin’ and the recordings that Cosimo [Matassa, of J&M Studio] did for a lot of people really represented how they actually sounded. That stuff sounds killer. There wasn’t a whole lot of technology back then, but it sounded awesome. It was a bunch of guys playing in a room, moving them around a couple of mics until it sounded awesome. There’s stuff like James Singleton projects, 3 Now 4, all that kind of stuff. Sometimes I don’t even know if these people have a name. You’ll just go to Le Bon Temps and there’s somebody playing drums, somebody playing organ, somebody playing guitar, somebody playing sax, and I’m dying to be able to tell these people: “Please come record, I really need to have you playing in this room.”

AG: Part of that feeling comes from the joie de vivre atmosphere that New Orleans is so good at fostering. That has always been a critical part to the Living Room experience, also.

CG: I don’t want bands to even think about the equipment. Daniel and I both want the gear to be transparent, where you come in, record an album and leave and you don’t even realize that we put mics up. And I’m sure I’ll cook like I used to. Recording is a lot like hanging out. If Daniel’s working on vocals, I could be barbecuing with the rest of the band outside and they’re not bored out of their minds listening to the guy sing the same thing over and over.

AG: There is a lot of cool gear in here, though. What are some of the pieces you’re particularly excited about?

CG: I don’t know, all of it. [Laughs]

Daniel Majorie: Anything that’s not a computer we’re excited about. Because if you don’t stare at the screen the whole time, you actually listen. It’s amazing what can happen.

AG: What’s something that has a good story, at least?

DM: This MCI, two-inch 16-track probably has the best story. We bought it on eBay for four hundred dollars. It was a wreck. Somebody had painted it black with a paint brush.

CG: A squirrel made a nest in it.

DM: A bunch of wires were chewed up, the circuit board was green with fungus on it. Most people would’ve junked it.

CG: We bid on it because it was close; if it was in L.A. we would never have bid on it. We liked it because it was shitty and it was in Shreveport. We drove there on Good Friday, picked it up, drove back, and by 8pm we had it completely disassembled. Daniel had all the electronics spread out across the living room floor; I had the chassis apart and outside. I stripped it down to the bare metal and painted it with a 1977 AMC car color to match the era of the machine, and Daniel worked on the electronics. Literally, every nut and bolt came off of the thing.

AG: So did you do all that for economic reasons, the challenge, or a combination of the two?

CG: It was economics, challenge and an opportunity to make a one-off machine that nobody else has. And bringing something back from the dead is awesome. It was a big learning experience, too. Daniel had to go through all the electronics.

DM: It’s got all new chip sockets, all new capacitors, new heads; it’s all to spec. It probably works just as good as it did new.

CG: Or better. It was a lot of work but we probably don’t even have two grand in the whole thing, including buying it, and it’s better than something we would’ve paid three grand for.

AG: It’s impressive that you two have done all this work. How did you get through it while staying positive and focused?

CG: I think I had to have Daniel for a partner, because if I’d had one of my other friends I would rather go drink beer. Because there are a lot of times I’d come here after work and would rather go drink, but if Daniel’s working I’d feel guilty. If it weren’t for Daniel I wouldn’t have done as much.

AG: There’s a certain poetry to the fact that Fatter Than Albert will be the first band to track in the new space. It was their forebears, the Supaflies and their subsequent bands that you really cut your teeth on, recording-wise.

CG: Daniel did stuff for them on four-track; he recorded all of their demo tapes.

DM: I had this cassette four-track thing with a couple of mics. We did a little bit in my parents’ garage and they had a practice space by the old A&P on Manhattan.      
AG: The first thing I remember you recording was the Lymph Vessel album. Tell me about that time, way back when.

CG: That was the first thing Daniel and I did together. I had a four track and somebody from the Supaflies had a Peavey 12-channel live mixer, and then I borrowed a compressor, some monitors and a DAT player from my cousin, Tim. We mic’d the whole drum set with some random mics. I was all jazzed about this recording, so I went to Radio Shack and bought two forty-dollar condensers because I read that you need condensers for drum overheads. Daniel and I stayed up until two in the morning tuning and mic’ing the drums. We got it sounding killer before the band even came over. So we recorded all of the drum mics through the Peavey and ran it out of the left channel into the four-track—one channel. We needed drums, bass, vocals and guitars, that’s four tracks. So all of the guitars went into the mixer and came out the right side into the four-track. And then we did bass and vocals.

DM: I sent the drums through a junky guitar delay so it kind of has a stereo effect. And then everything went through some old realistic equalizer, not made for recording at all. Surprisingly it came out decent.

CG: They actually got that recording pressed and other bands that they would play shows with heard that recording. In the meantime, Tim heard it and he was like, “Your ears are way better than mine,” so he gave me all of his gear. It was basically an entire home studio. It snowballed from there.

AG: Do you ever want to go back to that and make one of those four-track recordings?

CG: Yeah, but I never can again. There’s no more trial and error; that’s what was fun about it. The learning process is what’s fun. And then it becomes a business.