“One of the things about the Penny Arkade was that it was really the quintessential L.A. sound,” Mike Nesmith told me when I interviewed him in 2003. “During that time I was in the television show so I was out all the time among the music makers in Los Angeles. When I heard them play live I thought this is such a quintessence of Los Angeles music. I’ve never heard it either before or since; it was a strange mixture of country and rock & roll and blues and everything, filtered through this sort of L.A. urban sophistication that was the sound of L.A. during that time.”
Nesmith doesn’t remember how he first connected with Chris & Craig. Maybe it was through Micky Dolenz, who’d gone to school with Craig. Dolenz himself pleads ’60s amnesia. Then again, Nesmith may have run into Craig at the Monkees auditions, or at one of the Troubadour’s Monday night hoots. Chris Ducey remembers him coming to see Chris & Craig play at a small folk club in Goleta in Santa Barbara County. “We had already bombed with ‘Isha’ and were over our singles deal with Capitol by that time,” says Chris. “After our set we talked with Mike and the process of working with him began.”
“I remember seeing them play live and that was the thing that was pivotal,” confirms Nesmith. “That was when I became interested in producing them. When I had first gone to Los Angeles I had gotten a job at the Troubadour on Monday nights as an MC for an open mic show, which at the time was called a Hootenanny. Through there came all the people who played. So I started getting a sense of what the L.A. sound was, what people were doing and where the music was coming from. When I heard the songs of [Chris & Craig], I was very much taken with the fact that it was out of this L.A. mix. When I heard them play as a band, it was just that: This really does distill what L.A. sounds like at this time and it needs to get on record.”
Mike Nesmith at his home in the Hollywood Hills where the Penny Arkade rehearsed during 1967-68. (Photo courtesy Don Glut)
At first Nesmith teamed Smith and Ducey with a new rhythm section, bass player John London and drummer Johnny Raines. London and Raines were probably only intended as placeholders, as both were already involved with another group, the Lewis & Clarke Expedition. Nevertheless, photographer Henry Diltz stopped by Nesmith’s house on May 10th, 1967 and shot photos of Smith and Ducey both as a duo and with London and Raines.
John London (born John Kuehne) was part of the loose circle of Lone Star transplants, most of them musicians, sometimes referred to as Nesmith’s ‘Texas Mafia,’ a group of friends that also included Michael Martin Murphey, Owen Castleman, David Price and Bruce Barbour, the brother of Mike’s wife Phyllis. “Seems like everyone in San Antonio ended up out here because of the Monkees show,” says Barbour. Barbour worked as a stuntman and a stand-in on the show, and went on to become a hugely successful Hollywood stuntman, appearing in countless films and TV shows.
London had played bass in a folk duo with Nesmith back in San Antonio. After relocating to Los Angeles in July 1964 he, Nesmith, Murphey and Castleman had played together in the Survivors, a group put together by Randy Sparks in the wake of his success with the New Christy Minstrels. When Nesmith was cast in The Monkees, he got London a job working as his stand-in for the show’s first season.
David Price, who worked as a stand-in for Davy Jones, was attending San Antonio College when he first met Nesmith in 1963. “I was involved in the folk music scene in San Antonio,” he remembers, “and Mike Nesmith came along and he kind of became the organizing influence on the folk scene, because he started getting gigs for us and putting together these shows, like playing at shopping mall openings, and we did a few sort of concert things too. And so I got to know Mike, and introduced him to his future wife Phyllis, actually, who I’d known since she was about 16.”
Price then moved to Austin, where he formed a rock band called the Chelsea, which included lead singer George Kinney (later of cult psychedelic group the Golden Dawn), and two musicians who would later figure into the Penny Arkade family tree, lead guitarist John Andrews and bass player Bob Arthur. The Chelsea disbanded in 1966 when Price got a call from Nesmith. “Mike knew that I wanted to get out of Texas, so when he got the Monkees job he called me up and said, ‘Do you wanna come out and I’ll get you a job on the show?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’ So I packed up my ’58 Ford two-door sedan with all my stuff and my bass player, Bob Arthur, and his illegal alien girlfriend, and we drove to L.A. The car made it as far as the curb in front of Mike’s house on Sunset Plaza and died. Which was beautiful. I got out of the car and went inside, and that was it. My life changed dramatically after that.”
Short-lived lineup of the Chris & Craig band, May 10, 1967. Left to right: John London, Craig Smith, Johnny Raines, Chris Ducey. (Photo: Henry Diltz)
The Nesmiths’ Hollywood home was the hangout spot while they waited around to start filming the TV show. “When I came out here they had done the pilot and sold the pilot,” recounts Price. “They were getting ready to go into production, so the four guys were sort of on hold for the moment. They were getting a stipend, a little bit of money each week, and they were waiting for the show to start filming. Davy was staying at Mike’s at the time and he and I hit it off right away. He was a very nice guy. We’d sit out on the hood of my no longer functioning car and wait for the Greenblatt’s Delicatessen guy to bring up ribs to go. When the show started shooting, each of the four guys had a friend who signed on as their stand-in. Mike had John London, Peter had David Pearl, and Micky had Rick Klein. Well, Davy picked me. The interesting thing about that is I’m five ten and Davy’s not five ten!” he laughs. “So what I had to do a lot was crouch. But it gave me great thighs. I’ve got thighs that still serve me well!”
Bruce Barbour took over the Nesmith stand-in role when London’s musical activities began to consume more of his time. Costumed in fringe, suede and buckskin, the Lewis & Clarke Expedition was fronted by two other ex-Survivors: Michael Martin Murphey (as Travis Lewis) and Owen Castleman (Boomer Clarke), and also included Ken Bloom on guitar and keyboards, and Johnny Raines on drums. With Nesmith’s help, the group landed a record deal with the Monkees’ label, Colgems, and by the second half of 1967 they were off and running, releasing records, making TV appearances and getting regular coverage in the teen magazines. Nesmith hoped to facilitate similar opportunities for Chris & Craig, whom he next teamed with another Texas transplant, drummer Bobby Donaho.
The Monkees stand-ins, 1966. L to R: Rick Klein, John London, David Pearl, David Price. (Photo: Henry Diltz)
Originally a native of Corpus Christi, Donaho had cut his teeth with the Titans before joining garage-punk monsters the Bad Seeds alongside Mike Taylor (vocals, guitar), Rod Prince (lead guitar) and Henry Edgington (bass). He drummed on all three of their now sought-after singles, including “All Night Long” and “A Taste of the Same.” “We were pretty popular,” remembers Donaho, “but we all just started moving in different directions. Mike [Taylor] and I never really agreed on a whole lot of things. I thought we had agreed to disagree but evidently he took it personally.”
Prince and Donaho reconfigured as the New Seeds with Roy Cox on keyboards and Steve Lohse on bass, but when that didn’t work out they decided to head out to L.A. and try to get something going there. “Roy and I went out there first in his Volkswagen and had the time of our lives,” remembers Donaho, “so we went back and got Rod. We drove Rod out there with us and had a big old house and a couple of fun bands: the Willowdale Handcar, things like that. Then we kind of started drifting off and I started working more with Mike Nesmith.”
Donaho had originally met Nesmith back in Texas. “He and John London did folk singing, and they’d come down and play the Green Frog in Corpus every now and then, so I kind of knew who they were. And then I met him after one of the concerts we did. We were already planning on going to L.A., and we did our last concert and I met him in the hotel room and he ended up asking me to take his GTO to L.A. for him. We ended up spending the night in jail in El Centro because it had manufacturer’s plates, because it was a gift from Pontiac. So we got a grand theft auto charge until the Colgems office could open in the morning. This was with Rod. It was quite a time.”
Prince and Cox returned to Texas in late 1966 where they formed Bubble Puppy, while Donaho stayed back in L.A., where he played for a time with the Lamp of Childhood before being approached by Nesmith for the Penny Arkade project in the early summer of 1967.
To convince Bobby to join, Mike first played him an acetate of a couple of songs recently recorded by Chris and Craig, Ducey’s “Rhyme or Reason” (a.k.a. “No Rhyme or Reason”) and Smith’s “(She Brought Me) Something Beautiful.” Donaho was immediately impressed by the level of their songwriting. “The first time I heard ‘Something Beautiful’ I was just like ‘Yeah! Show me to these guys!’” enthuses Donaho. “That was the first thing I ever heard by them.”
Soon afterwards, Bobby was introduced to Ducey and Smith for the first time at Nesmith’s house. Chris and Craig made an immediate impression on him: “Oh God!” he laughs. “I thought they were the Sunnybrook Farm guys or something. Really nice! I really enjoyed them. Big smiles. Wholesome kind of guys—big white teeth, always smiling and sassy, you know what I mean?”
The cheerful, wholesome image projected by Chris and Craig was a change of tempo for Donaho, who summarily had his shoulder-length hair trimmed by the Monkees’ hairstylist Michael Graber. “First time I ever had to cut my hair to join a band!” Bobby reflects with a chuckle. The rest of the group—including the returning Don Glut—also had their hair styled by Graber and were outfitted in deep blue double-breasted suits.
“Mike was looking not just for good musicians but for personality types,” explains Don, “and I just pushed the right buttons. Back then my hair was—I guess in the sun—a little bit redder-looking than it is now, and I had made the comment, just a non sequitur: ‘You know, not many people name their kids Quasimodo anymore.’ Well, Mike thought this was just hysterical and he went around telling people for days: ‘I met this guy with flaming red hair’—was how he described me—‘who’s loon-crazy!’ That was one of their Texas expressions: ‘loon-crazy.’ Around that time he also decided that we needed nicknames. So Bobby Donaho became ‘Dunny,’ for some reason, and I became ‘Marvel’ because of my interest in the character Captain Marvel and also Marvel Comics. And to this day some people from that period only know me as Marvel.”