By the beginning of 1967, Smith and Ducey were starting to put together a permanent backing group. They were already rehearsing with a drummer and a lead guitar player when Don Glut came to audition as a bass player in response to a notice on the Musicians’ Union bulletin board.
“Chris and Craig made a tremendous impression on me,” Glut remembers, “because they were doing all original material and it was all… really… GOOD! One of the things that impressed me about the Beatles when they first came out was the unusual chord progressions they did that I’d never heard before, not the two or three typical progressions usually heard in rock music. And Chris and Craig were doing the same kind of thing. I mean, they didn’t sound like the Beatles, but they were doing all these unusual chord progressions and rhythms, and the lyrics were all different. I said to myself, ‘These guys are really gonna make it.’ They sang well together. Craig had a very mellow voice. Chris has a more of a nasal kind of sound and a rougher edge to it that Craig didn’t have. Together they blended perfectly. So I said, ‘I really wanna be a part of this, because I think these guys are really gonna go.’”
Don Glut (pronounced “Gloot”) was born in Pecos, Texas and raised in Chicago before moving out to L.A. in 1964 to study filmmaking at the University of Southern California. Today he’s a successful writer, director, filmmaker, voiceover actor and amateur paleontologist.
“The moviemaking started when I was nine years old,” he explains. “I didn’t really want to make movies at that point, but we had a 16mm camera in the family and a projector and a screen. I loved monster movies, dinosaur movies, and Frankenstein movies. At first I really didn’t want to make these films, I wanted to show them on our projector any time I wanted, and in those days you couldn’t buy movies. The only movies that were available were things like cartoons, Hopalong Cassidy westerns and newsreels. The horror and the science fiction stuff you couldn’t get, so I decided to make them myself so I could show them on my home screen. The first was a dinosaur movie I made in 1953 called Diplodocus At Large. The special effects consisted of a homemade ‘Ollie the Dragon’ hand puppet, which I manipulated to attack a little model railway town. Then I kept making movies as I became a teenager.”
Along with horror and science fiction movies, Don’s other passion was rock & roll. “Music has always been a part of my life and a part of my family,” he says. “I played in the school band in grammar school and high school and I learned the guitar through one of my uncles. He showed me a few chords so I could play new songs and I just picked up the rest on my own. I’ve always been able to do that, and so I’ve actually played in bands ever since I was a really young teenager.
“The other side of the block where I lived in Chicago was where all the hoodlum gangs hung out. There was the nice side where I lived, and next to it was the ‘other side of the tracks.’ One of the guys there who I went to grammar school with, who was in this gang, played the drums, and we started playing together. That’s how I got in with the kids on the other side of the block. To this day they’re some of the best friends I ever had.
“So anyway, because I could play the guitar and because he could play the drums, they sort of brought me into their gang. At that time, in the late ’50s, I had been making all these Frankenstein, Dracula and Wolf Man movies in my backyard and the alley and the basement. We were basically kids playing the parts of adults with makeup and fake sideburns and Frankenstein masks and everything. Well, around this time Hollywood started making teenager monster movies: I Was a Teenage Werewolf, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein… And I said, ‘Hey, we can make movies and we can actually be the right age of the characters we’re playing.’ So I started getting these guys I was hangin’ out with to be my characters. We all had the leather motorcycle jackets and all that, and we started making this whole series of teenage monster films, and they were all my actors. So these things—the music and the movies—were all kind of related.”
In 1964, Glut left Chicago and began attending film school at USC. “That was the year that an awful lot of creative people came out of USC,” he recalls, “and a lot of them stuck together and helped each other out.” George Lucas was one of Don’s friends and classmates (years later Don would write the novelized version of The Empire Strikes Back), John Milius (director of Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn) was another buddy, as were Hollywood film composer Basil Poledouris, and Randal Kleiser (director of Grease and The Blue Lagoon). Kleiser also played one of the leads in Don’s Captain America vs. The Mutant, filmed in L.A. that year.
While at school, Glut’s musical activities continued unabated. “I had more opportunities out here,” he explains, “because the people that I met musically were not just guys playing in the garage or in the basement, these were people who were serious about it and had connections.”
He teamed up with another guitar player and USC student, Kim McKellar, to form the Hustlers, playing largely but not exclusively Beatles, Rolling Stones, and other British Invasion material. By 1965 that band had mutated into the Wicks, who played some parties and club gigs and parties around L.A., attracting the attention of a producer. “We had an opportunity for a recording deal,” says Don, “which eventually kind of fizzled out, but it looked real hot at the time.”
The highlights of the Wicks’ short career included flying out to Florida to play a Christmas show in Miami Beach. On another occasion they auditioned for a spot on a Lucille Ball television special. “Lucille Ball had a television special she was doing and we got up and auditioned. We did ‘All My Loving’ and ‘The Last Time.’ We almost got it, except there was this other band that the same producer was promoting—this real clean-cut, uninteresting instrumental group who did a lot of shtick. They would get on their backs and play the guitars and all this kind of stuff that we thought was kind of lame, but Lucy was impressed by that more than she was impressed by us. And they all had the nice suits and they all looked alike and everything, and so they got the gig, and we didn’t.”
During this period Don continued to make movies including the aforementioned Captain America vs. The Mutant, Superman vs. The Gorilla Gang, Wrath of the Sun Demon and Rocketman Flies Again. Several of these were screened in underground theatres, and were publicized in popular monster magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland, Castle of Frankenstein and Monsters and Heroes. Under the pseudonym Mick Rogers, he also penned a nonfiction exploitation paperback, Freakout on Sunset Strip, about Southern California’s “Mod Generation.” “Fags, Freaks and the Famous turn the street into a hippie hell,” shouted the book’s cover.
Although Don was a gifted filmmaker he generally graded poorly (C’s and D’s) because of the subject matter of his films. “I was actually called in by the Dean once, and he said, ‘We had a meeting about you the other night and we’re thinking of basically booting you out of the cinema department because’—quote—‘you like to read comic books’– unquote. And at that point I just decided, OK, I wanna get out of this school. I’m not gonna play the game their way. My enthusiasm for films plummeted dramatically at that point. And then the Chris & Craig thing happened very shortly after that and I just sort of segued from one to the other. For years I didn’t want to have anything to do with movies, I just wanted to play music, so that’s what I did.”
Chris & Craig’s rehearsals were held at a small theatre in Hollywood, which rented out space for bands to practice during the daytime. Along with Smith, Ducey and Glut, there was an unknown drummer and a lead guitarist called Mort Marker. Twenty-nine years old at the time, Marker was already a veteran musician. Back in his native Delaware in 1958 he’d cut a couple of hot rockabilly singles with singer Jimmy Stayton. When Stayton left for the Army, Marker formed his own band, Morty Marker & the Impalas, and recorded a single for the Houston-based Back Beat label. He moved to Los Angeles in 1964 to find work as a session player. Like Glut, he connected with Chris & Craig after seeing a card on the notice board at the Musicians’ Union Local 47. The job didn’t pay anything, but after meeting Chris & Craig and hearing their songs he decided he’d stick around.
“I was really impressed with those guys,” says Marker. “They were fun, and they had some good material, I thought. There was a big difference in their personalities, but when they were working together they had that magic.
“It was always Craig that was the most outgoing,” he continues. “Craig I liked immediately as soon as I met him. He just welcomed you in, and that’s what I noticed. I could talk to Craig easier than I could talk to Chris. It seemed like I could walk up to Craig and talk to him about anything and his ears would open up. He was very good at that. He seemed like the kind of guy that cared, you know? It’s a personality thing.”
Mort was married and had two young children at the time. Since his wife was also working during the day, and they couldn’t afford a babysitter, he asked Craig if it would be all right to bring his kids along to rehearsals. Craig naturally said yes, so Marker’s children would often come along to watch their father work.
Marker played a big Gibson L5 hollow-body guitar, and his playing sometimes had a jazzy touch, which Chris & Craig liked for some of their material. There were no charts for the songs, but Marker had learned to play by ear and so was able to figure out the sometimes unconventional chord progressions and time signatures their songs demanded. “It always seemed like they knew where they wanted to go with it and they just got together and did it,” recalls Marker. “I remember Craig playing rhythm, and he had a very nice rhythm touch. I had a good ear and if somebody had a chord progression that they wanted to do, I could hear that and I knew where to go with it. I think they were impressed with what I was doing melodically and even branching out and improvising—because sometimes they would tell me, ‘Go ahead and improvise.’ I was playing everything I could think of. But they liked it, and they liked the sound of my big guitar. They were more or less looking for somebody to provide a filler for what they were doing.”
Mort Marker (left) with Jimmy Stayton & His Rocka-Bye Band, ca. 1958.
The big hollow-body also allowed Marker to experiment with some Gabor Szabo-inspired feedback, which they also loved—though at that time Mort had no idea that they even knew who Gabor was. “I was using a lot of Gabor-type sounds,” he says, “because I did a lot of his songs in my club gigs—because you could dance to it but there was a jazz tinge to it too. Maybe that’s what they were hearing. They liked some feedback, and I was just getting into that because at that time all the rock players were getting into that. I think Gabor did some of the best feedback I’d ever heard because it was controlled, and I think that’s what they were looking for. I didn’t realize then that they were friends with Gabor or even knew him.”
It wasn’t until after he left the group that Marker discovered that Chris & Craig were familiar with Gabor and his work. “Being a jazz fan, I went down one night to see Gabor Szabo at Shelly’s Manne Hole on North Cahuenga in Hollywood, and they were there. They were glad to see me and I was glad to see them, and I was surprised to see them because I didn’t picture them being into that kind of music. Apparently they knew Gabor pretty well because they had a conversation with him for quite a while. That was the last time I saw the guys.”
Back in the practice room, though, Smith and Ducey were on a creative roll, cranking out new songs on an almost daily basis. “We were always trying out new tunes,” says Mort. “Seems like almost every day I went in they had some new tunes that they wanted to try.”
They were honing not only a set of exclusively original material, but an entire act that incorporated comedy material between songs. “They were trying to get something not just with the songs, but they wanted to do show-type stuff,” says Mort, “not just stand there and sing and play their guitars. They had comedy things they were doing. They had one-liners that were hilarious! It seemed like they enjoyed doing that, and sometimes they’d just throw it in out of the blue—and it worked! I thought they had a lot of talent. When Craig and Chris were singing together, they were very electrifying. I felt very strongly that those guys were gonna make it.”
If they were going to make it, though, they were up against some serious competition. Hollywood was teeming with rock & roll talent at the time. The Buffalo Springfield were practicing right next door, and used to stop by to hang out. “We’d take breaks and they’d come over and chit-chat,” remembers Mort. “I remember chatting with Neil Young,” says Ducey, “and the drummer, Dewey Martin—he was the most friendly.” “We all hung out together,” adds Glut. “I remember my amplifier blew up one day and their bass player [Bruce Palmer] was trying to fix it for me.”
Members of the Springfield were friendly with the Monkees, which could be why Mike Nesmith stopped by one day to check out Chris & Craig. Nesmith was so impressed with their songs that he wanted to get involved. “Mike Nesmith came by and he talked with Craig and Chris,” remembers Marker. “I think he was trying to get them a deal. At the time I was with them, that was just starting to happen. I remember him coming by almost every day, it seemed like.”
Asher Dann remembers making a call to Nesmith’s agent Jerry Perenchio to seal the deal: “The Monkees were owned by Perenchio at that time and so I called Jerry and said, ‘Let’s just go in the studio, that’s what Mike wants to do, and we’ll see what comes out. See if they get any interest.’”
Not long afterwards, Dann and Bonafede dropped out. For one thing, they had bigger fish to fry, namely the Doors, whom they’d taken over management of in March 1967. Don Glut remembers the transition from Sal and Ash to Nesmith. “One day while we were rehearsing Mike Nesmith came in,” he recalls. “This is when The Monkees was already a hit show. He didn’t say much; he talked to Chris and Craig and he listened to us. He sat in the audience section and then he left. Then, shortly after that, either Chris or Craig told me, ‘It looks like it’s over but we’re trying to get another manager.’ He didn’t say it was Mike yet, I don’t think, at that point. And so we all went our separate ways. Then one day, a couple of months later, I got a phone call from I think it was Chris, and he says, ‘Mike Nesmith is gonna produce us. We’re no longer gonna be Chris & Craig, we’re gonna be an actual band. We’re gonna be called the Penny Arcade.” (The word “Arcade” was originally spelled with a c, later amended to a k for trademark purposes.)
In the interim, though, Mort Marker had dropped out of the project. “I wanted to stay with them,” he remembers. “I was thinking that here’s something that might take a while to materialize, but it might be a good idea if I could stay with them. But I was married and had two kids, and was trying to make ends meet. I was doing some studio work at the time, but not enough to be able to pay all my bills. So I needed to move on. I really hated to tell those guys I wasn’t going to be able to do it anymore. They seemed to have a lot of irons in the fire, but nothing came through at that time.”
Marker went on to make a living as a working musician, playing on sessions by Gary Puckett & the Union Gap, John Davidson and even Elvis Presley. He’s still making music today at age 78. He never forgot Chris & Craig, and remained convinced for many years that they were going to make it big. “I used to often think of those guys,” he says. “I thought I probably messed up by leaving them, but I had to do it because I had a family to take care of. I often talked to my wife about it, and people I knew in the business. I used to bring up their names after I left. I always wondered what happened to them because I never seemed to hear anything. But then the next thing I heard was years later when you called me. As soon as you did that, it came back to me immediately: these are the guys I’ve been thinking about all these years!”