Whether by luck, looks or talent, Craig Smith had been catapulted from Hoot Night to Prime Time. The Good Time Singers made their debut appearance on The Andy Williams Show on September 24th, 1963, joining Andy to sing “Bury Me Beneath the Willow Tree.” Immediately after the first show, though, the group underwent a lineup shakeup. Two of the men and one woman departed, and Drake and the producers scrambled to find three replacements in time for the next show.
The timing couldn’t have been better for Craig’s high school buddy Doug Brookins, who’d just been replaced in the New Christy Minstrels by future Byrds member Gene Clark. Brookins got wind of the auditions from Mike Post and headed down to NBC’s old studios at Sunset and Vine to try out. “There were like five hundred people there,” he remembers, “everybody auditioning for three spots in the Good Time Singers.” Brookins played two songs for them, and later that afternoon got a call from Drake telling him he had the job and to report to rehearsals in Burbank on the following Monday.
Marilyn Miller, an attractive blonde with a three-octave range, was also hired, as was banjo player Bob Flesher. “I was sitting at a drafting desk on a Monday where I worked as a draftsman at Canon Electric,” remembers Flesher. “When I got off work and went home I got a call from Tom Drake stating he was with the Good Time Singers who had replaced the New Christy Minstrels on The Andy Williams Show. He said their banjo player had quit after one show and wanted to know if I would be interested in auditioning the next morning at NBC Studios in Burbank at 8 a.m. For some reason I said yes. I lived in Orange County and it was over an hour drive. Well, I auditioned for them and they said yes. At 10:00, less than 24 hours after I was sitting at a drafting desk, I was sitting next to Andy Williams practicing a banjo song called ‘Thumb Pick Pete,’ which I had never heard in my life and didn’t particularly lend itself to a five-string banjo. At the taping of the show on Sunday night the director told me, ‘Don’t make any mistakes because this tape costs $1,500 a minute if we have to do it over.’ That calmed my nerves!”
Although ostensibly a “folk group,” on TV the Good Time Singers were part of an all-purpose variety show cast, participating in skits and song and dance numbers with Andy and assorted guests, which in their first season alone included Art Carney, Don Knotts, Dick Van Dyke, Bob Newhart and Joey Bishop. “I learned that the group had four purposes,” explains Flesher. “First, to perform a solo each week. Second, to be the background singers for the stars. Third, to be the extras in the skits, and fourth, when they wanted quiet on the set the director would yell at us, not the stars, and they would get the message.”
Smith’s outgoing personality and natural charisma translated well to television, and the Williams’ show producers began favoring him with a little more camera time. “I remember him as a very handsome young man with a lot of energy and a million-dollar smile,” says Flesher. “When you saw a picture of the whole group you would always be drawn to his face. Craig was certainly the dominant character of the group in many of the sketches we did.”
On the December 10th episode the Good Time Singers performed “Mountain Greenery” with Williams. Craig bounds onto the set ahead of the rest of the cast to begin the piece, and has some dialogue with Andy later in the song. It’s white-bread family entertainment in its purest and most anodyne form, airing to a nation still stunned by the assassination of their president just two-and-a-half weeks earlier.
The group was in their second week of a four-week engagement at the Troubadour on Friday, November 22nd when Kennedy was shot. The club went dark that night, but reopened on the Saturday, as did most of the venues around town. “I went to see Tom there on the 23rd and it was crammed full and everybody in the club was manic as hell,” remembers Sally Drake. “It was just crazed, and that was just expressing grief really.”
Performing on a television variety show was quite arduous work. Rehearsals and costume fittings ran through most of the week, becoming more intense as the day of the taping approached. “Ninety-five percent of what we sang was behind the lead singer, either Andy or the guest,” explains Michael Storm. “They would rehearse and we would rehearse with them, and we’d rehearse until we’d got it.”
The show was filmed live with a studio audience, but a full dress rehearsal was also taped as a backup, in case anything went wrong with the live feed. “On the day of the show there was a full dress run-through with tape,” explains Jackson. “Then we’d break for dinner, and then come back and shoot the show. They would run the previously recorded dress rehearsal in sync with the show, pretty much, including commercial time. We wouldn’t see any commercials, obviously, but they would put those in either at NBC or in New York or whatever, but we would be down for however long the commercials would take, and then ‘5-4-3-2-1’ and we’d be up again. I think it was a seven-second delay. So if something messed up on the live show, they had seven seconds to pull in something from the dress rehearsal and fix it—which I only saw happen once. I was told that was pretty darn modern stuff in 1963. Not many people could do that. It took that big studio at NBC to pull that off.”
For over two years Craig and the other Good Time Singers worked alongside some of the biggest names in show business. Interacting with celebrities would become second nature to Craig, and his ease and confidence around famous people would serve him well in the years ahead.
One of the first stars he worked with on the show was none other than Peggy Lee, who was Williams’ guest on November 12th. Brookins remembers an excited Smith gamboling over to Lee and asking if she remembered his mother. “She said, ‘Oh yes! She was a wonderful singer!’” he recalls. Craig’s parents must have been proud to see their son performing on television with Lee not once but twice. She was back on the show the following season, in February 1965, and there was some palpable electricity on the set between her and Craig as she played the character of an old-time saloon madam with Smith eyeing her up and down perhaps a little more appreciatively than the script notes called for.
Singing cowboy Roy Rogers was also on the show several times with his wife Dale Evans. Craig may have already known Roy and Dale from the neighborhood. “Craig loved Roy Rogers!” remembers Storm. “We all did. We all had been raised on his movies. Roy would sit with us, and he one day expounded for an hour on how to make coffee,” he laughs. “He told us about ‘the cowboy way’ to make coffee. And his wife, we called her Chicken Little, she was just this little pudgy thing: ‘Oh Roy, don’t you bother those young people!’ ‘Oh, it’s all right! You take the coffee; you put an egg in the bottom of the pot...’ He was just wonderful. He couldn’t wait to see us every morning. A great guy. As I recall, Craig was smitten by him—but we all were.”
The Good Time Singers making their debut on The Andy Williams Show on September 4, 1963. Craig in foreground.
“Roy Rogers was a great guy!” agrees Doug Brookins. “I didn’t care for his wife—I called her Baby Huey—but loved Roy Rogers, because he just wanted to come out and play. Off the set we’d be having lunch and he’d come out, play Frisbee or throw a baseball back and forth. He was great.”
David Jackson remembers another side to the old cowboy. “Roy Rogers came on to every female dancer on the show—a number of times, kind of shamelessly, and kind of obviously—which Dale must have lived with for a portion of her life, I’m guessing. No one mentioned anything, but all the dancers told me, ‘Oh, that’s the fourth time he’s come on to me.’ That was interesting.”
“Don Knotts was the guest that week along with Roy and Dale,” remembers Flesher. “There was a skit in which Andy, Roy and Dale made a campfire. Shortly after, Don Knotts shows up in his Barney Fife sheriff’s outfit. He is instantly in control and wants to see their fire permit. They give him the fire permit and he moves over just in front of me to inspect it. I don’t know what prompted me to do it, but I looked over his shoulder to see what it said. He immediately perceived a joke here and quickly turned and stared at me with a very serious face. It scared the hell out of me and I looked shocked. I just knew my short career was over. I was going to be fired there on the spot. But the director liked it and told me to continue to do that. Whew! Close call! As a result the director started giving me more parts like Craig had.”
Because of his thick glasses and diminutive stature, the writers and director also favored Dave Jackson with some comedy bits with Williams and his guests. “I ended up kind of being the comic foil,” relates Jackson. “I remember one of the first shows being with Milton Berle as the guest star. On the run-through in costume—we were Mounties—he came over and planted his open right hand on my mouth and then kissed his hand so it looked like a big stage kiss. The producers thought that was quite funny and the look on my face apparently was nice so they said, ‘Let’s keep that in for the show,’ which was filmed after dinner that same day. Berle didn’t like it that I got a laugh—I was told later—so on the show, he planted the kiss and then snapped the little elastic thing that came down under my chin to hold the hat on. He snapped that, and it stung like a son of a gun! And so my face went red. I still got a laugh, and so did he, but he’d showed me who was top there. That’s one of the strongest recollections I have of the whole three years on the show.”
“David was funny,” remembers Brookins. “He was a comedian, he had a funny look. He didn’t even have to say anything. You just looked at him and you laughed.
“And Craig had the look,” he continues. “He was truly a good-looking fellow. Star quality, leading-man looks, at the time—and he knew it. They gave him a couple of showcases on the Williams show where he had a few lines to say. He did a good job. But for the rest of us—I mean, what were the Good Time Singers after all? We had a name for a while—but only because of The Andy Williams Show. All we were was just wallpaper. The group was wallpaper. We were filling up the screen for Mr. Williams. And because we were able to sing we were allowed to do the background music. They got a vocal choir for next to nothing on the show. All those vocal tracks on the Williams show were done by the Goodtimers—and it was tough because there were only two or three of us who could read music: Dave Jackson, myself and Marilyn Miller—and later Johnny Horton, when he came in. But the rest of them couldn’t read a note and they had to be rehearsed, above and beyond the long sitting hours waiting to work on the show. Craig couldn’t read music, but he was able to write, so you never know, limitations are only created by the mind. Set him free and he was able to create without any restriction.”
Brookins saw quite a lot of Smith during the show’s first season as the two of them would often drive out to Burbank together for rehearsals and filming. “When I joined the Goodtimers I was living with my parents in Sepulveda in the Valley, and Dad would drive me to Craig’s home, because I didn’t have a car. Craig had a 1955 or ’56 Porsche. Craig thought he was Jimmy Dean for a while. He had high plans for himself. He had an old classic Porsche. I think it was light gray. Cool car! Craig liked fast cars and motorcycles. His parents—all I can say is that they were great parents. I never knew Craig’s parents on a very personal basis, but they seemed like very nice folks. They loved Craig, they supported Craig. They thought Craig hung the moon. A doting parent is all one needs in this life, and Craig had that, and he had so many other things. Craig was pretty—not in a feminine sense; it’s like Paul Newman is pretty in a rustic way, while Robert Redford is pretty in a handsome way. Craig had leading-man good looks that he got from his mother. She was very sweet, very small, petite.”
In conversations with Craig’s mother, Brookins learned that she had serious misgivings about Craig’s decision to go into show business. She would have preferred that her son go to college. “Craig was smart and he had so many universities interested in him,” explains Brookins. “He gave all of that up to join the Good Time Singers. He had received scholastic scholarships. I got scholarships to West Point and Berkeley, and the Naval Academy, for athletics. But Craig had scholarships from all over the place, scholastic scholarships, so he was a very smart student. I remember his mother talking about it. She said, ‘I don’t understand why he wants to do this singing thing.’ Even though she had done it—but she was speaking from experience. She knew! She was trying to protect her fledgling. But... my daddy did the same, and we don’t listen when we’re young. We just don’t, we just have our ambitions and we try to follow them the best we can.”
More than anybody else in the group perhaps, Craig seemed to have that single-minded, focused commitment to make it in the business. “He had that necessary ego with which to really make it in a very competitive business,” reflects Brookins. “He had all the tools with which to make it, and he had the most necessary tool, which was insatiable ambition. He had it in spades. Sadly, he didn’t move in the circles that would allow him to see the magnificent possibilities that his life could have been.”
Aside from their appearances on The Andy Williams Show, the Good Time Singers also appeared on the ABC-TV folk music show, Hootenanny, on November 2nd, 1963, alongside the Brothers Four, Hoyt Axton and Anita Carter, shot on the campus of UCLA. They were also filmed at the Ice House in Pasadena for an unreleased TV pilot called The Big Hoot. “There was Santa Ana winds that day,” remembers Bob Flesher. “The outside temperature was about 120 degree or so and the Ice House’s air conditioning was on the blink. That made the temperature inside the place with all the lights on about 140 degrees. They put the makeup on us and by the time we were into the song it was all dripping off our faces onto our shirts.”
Craig also began getting other job offers. Gordon and Sheila MacRae had a three-week engagement at the ritzy Cocoanut Grove in Hollywood starting December 27th, 1963, and hired Smith and Storm to join their act alongside daughters Meredith and Heather. “Craig was always at my house,” recounts Heather, “and we were always singing and stuff. My mother loved Craig. She knew he was very talented and he was writing songs and he was very musical and so she asked him to be in the show. She wanted two guys and two girls, and me and my sister were the two girls.”
“They dressed us up in harlequin tights!” laughs Storm. “Well, that’s all you need. So Craig and I did this show, and Heather and Meredith too. We oohed and aahed behind Sheila and Gordon, and got paid a lot of money.”
Along with all the ooh and aahing, Craig, Michael, Meredith and Heather also had several of their own feature spots in the act singing folk and pop songs, including “If I Had A Hammer,” “500 Miles,” and, according to Heather’s recollection, the Murmaids’ “Popsicles and Icicles.” Their performances won them positive shout-outs in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, which wrote, “on the definite plus side was [the] addition to the act of a fresh, young quartet, featuring daughters Heather (17) and Meredith (19) MacRae, balanced by two guitar-strumming folksingers, Craig Smith and Michael Storm. The quartet’s very pro singing on ‘If I Had A Hammer’ made it hard to believe it was their first try as a group.”
The Good Time Singers, 1963. Craig Smith top row, second from right.
“We had a lot of fun and we were adorable,” laughs Heather. “Craig was always funny. He was famous for making his ‘lizard face.’ He would hold his eyes open and he would make them real wide and then he would do a lizard tongue. That was one of his signature things. He was always so funny and charming, and we all had a good time together with my sister and I and Craig and Michael. But it was a very, very emotional time because my father was heavily, heavily drinking in those days. One time he fell off the stage and he never came back to the show. My mom just finished the show. It was really awful, but my mom just continued on, and I guess we were continuing on with her.”
“Gordon was a good guy, but alcoholic,” confirms Storm. “Sheila was a pistol, a wonderful, strong lady who put up with a lot.”
Storm remembers another incident with an inebriated Gordon MacRae. “We were up in San Francisco at an ice rink. Ice Capades was being performed and we were singing something there, and Gordon MacRae was singing too, but he was in a sleigh. They towed him around the rink in the sleigh, you could tell he was shit-faced, and as he came by Craig and me, he shouted, ‘MER-RY CHRIST-MAS!’” MacRae’s cartoonishly slurred delivery cracked them up big-time, and Craig and Michael would impersonate this moment to each other endlessly for days afterwards.
The Good Time Singers recorded their first album at Capitol Records studios in late 1963. Staff producer Curly (a.k.a. Kermit) Walter was in charge of the sessions. “In those days there was kind of a line of A&R producer guys,” explains Jackson, “so whoever walked in the door, whoever was next in line to be producer got that act, and Curly was up for this thing, and you could see that he was kind of like, ‘Oh God! Who are these kids?’—because we really weren’t very good, in all honesty. Craig was exuberant and a great pleasure and a pretty good singer, as I recall, but was kind of a flailer on his instrument. None of us was terribly precise, so we got to work with Hal Blaine on drums; Glen Campbell was the rhythm guitarist on the thing, and Tommy Tedesco—the Wrecking Crew band, pretty much. So it went very quickly because of that. They would do the tracks and we’d kind of sing along on vocals, and then they’d leave and we’d take some more time doing the vocals—which again were not very good.”
The self-titled album is a fairly generic and pedestrian folk record. Along with traditional fare like “Rock Island Line” and “Banks of the Ohio,” it includes a couple of Drake-Storm compositions, and songs by Rod McKuen, Harry Belafonte, and Phil Ochs. Craig, apparently, did not submit any of his own compositions for consideration—if indeed he had any at this early date—and as a supporting player in a ten-person group, he wasn’t able to make a discernible personal imprint on the record either musically or vocally.
The album was released by Capitol in January 1964, at the same time as a record by a group that was about to blow the entire music industry wide open. The Good Time Singers was Capitol T 2041; Capitol T 2047 was Meet the Beatles. The death knell of the hootenanny had been sounded with a clash of electric guitars.
In the case of the Good Time Singers, the impact was immediate and devastating. All of Capitol’s resources were being channeled into the Beatles, and their pressing plants were working overtime to keep up with demand. The Good Time Singers were, quite literally, lost in the shuffle. “Half of Tom’s actual physical records ended up in Beatles LP jackets,” remembers Sally Drake, “or the Beatles record ended up in Good Time Singers jackets. It was just a mess. Capitol were doing absolutely nothing for any other act at that label except the Beatles. I told Tom that was karma biting him in the ass!” she chuckles. “I was glad! I did not wish them well in that situation.”
For young musicians like Craig Smith, the Beatles opened up a vast new musical horizon that extended far beyond the staid and limiting confines of folk music. Inspired by the Beatles’ ebullient harmonies and keenly inventive songwriting, many folk musicians began gravitating toward rock, in the process creating a new and potent musical hybrid, folk-rock. First and foremost of these new folk-rock groups was the Byrds, formed in mid-1964 as the Jet Set by Gene Clark of the New Christy Minstrels, David Crosby of Les Baxter’s Balladeers, and Jim McGuinn, who’d played as a sideman with the Limeliters and the Chad Mitchell Trio.
Craig Smith would take a little longer to make the transition from folk to folk-rock, but the seeds of change had been planted. In the meantime he remained safely ensconced in the mainstream entertainment world, singing and grinning through numerous Andy Williams Show appearances right up through the end of 1965, and touring the country playing concert halls, folk clubs, night clubs, and state and county fairs.