Hands of the clock going ’round
Making syncopated sound
Always tick in endless drone
Steady moving monotone
Although the duo of Chris & Craig had now expanded into a self-contained quartet, with four distinct “personality types,” the Penny Arkade was not a democracy by any means. The band was a vehicle for Smith’s and Ducey’s songs with Glut and Donaho, as Marvel and Dunny, in supporting roles. The first press reports on the act—in Tiger Beat in the summer and fall of ’67—featured pictures of only Chris and Craig. “I didn’t get it from Chris at all,” says Don, “but Craig always made it seem that he was somehow ‘above’ the rest of us. It was like there was me, Bobby and Chris over to one side, and then Craig by himself.”
As Bruce Barbour sees it, Craig dominated the band by sheer force of personality. “Penny Arkade was a great band, but Craig just transcended the band and everything just by the brilliance of his personality. He was just one of those guys who walked in the room and every girl in the place just gravitated to him. He was such a physically good-looking guy, and he’d crack that smile with those beautiful white teeth and right away you were smiling too, and you wanted to know this guy. He was intelligent and funny and talented—he was just one of those great guys that within minutes you’d go, ‘God, what a cool guy!’”
Rehearsals with the new lineup began immediately, and continued several days a week as they familiarized themselves with a growing repertoire of exclusively original material. “Mike just said, ‘Go rehearse!’” recalls Bobby. “So we went and rehearsed, and we rehearsed, and we rehearsed a lot.”
Craig Smith, Don Glut and Bobby Donaho at TTG Studios, October 1967. (Photo courtesy Chris Ducey)
The first rehearsals were at a Hollywood Hills house Craig was now sharing with John London and a couple of other roommates. The Lewis & Clarke Expedition also practiced there. “It was one of those houses suspended by the poles,” Don Glut recalls. “I remember once a knock at the door, the door opens and we’re rehearsing and it’s Dan Duryea, the actor who did all those old film noir movies, wearing shorts and holding a little dog. ‘Can you guys turn down? You guys are making too much noise!’”
“We used to take turns practicing up there,” Craig later told Tiger Beat magazine (the quote was mistakenly attributed to Chris). “But all the neighbors started complaining—and then they started sending up the police. So we stopped playing there completely.”
Their rehearsals were then relocated to Mike Nesmith’s place on Sunset Plaza Drive, a few blocks up from the Whisky. “Mike, in order to better monitor our progress, invited us to move our rehearsals to the Nesmith home, playing in a room adjacent to the house’s sunken living room,” remembers Don. “A few months later, after Mike and his wife Phyllis and young son Christian moved into a considerably larger house in the Hollywood Hills, we moved too. There we were awarded our own rehearsal room, a nearly soundproofed haven where we could turn up our amplifiers and get as loud as we needed or wanted to be.”
Don Glut and his mother with the Nesmiths, 1968. (Photo courtesy Don Glut)
Bruce Barbour—who had moved out from San Antonio to live with his sister Phyllis and brother-in-law Mike—was around for many of the Penny Arkade rehearsals. “I would go down whenever they were rehearsing and just listen to them,” he remembers. “They were fantastic. It’s beyond me why they didn’t get huge. I was so much younger than them—I think I was 17—and I just idolized the guys, I really did, but Craig especially. I smoked a ton of grass back then, everyone did, and Craig would smile and he’d look at you and say [he puts on a funny voice] ‘You’re pretty stoned, aren’t ya?’ You’d get the giggles and say, ‘Yes, I guess I am.’ ‘OK, well, we’re gonna play a song for Bruce because he’s stoned.’ But it flattered the hell out of me just ’cause he took notice of me. He was that kind of personality. He just took over the room when he walked in.”
Craig and Bruce had a little comedy rapport going between them. Bruce was doing stand-in and stunt work on the Monkees show so Craig would always greet him with, “Hey Bruce! How’s show business treatin’ ya?” And Bruce would always have a witty rejoinder prepared: “Well… it’s not all limousines and autographs!” was one he remembers had Craig rolling on the floor. “Well… it’s not all blondes and blowjobs!” was another. “We kept that up for months,” he remembers. “Craig just had a way of making you feel special by paying attention to you that way.”
Certain other people, like David Price, preferred Chris Ducey’s company. “Chris and I, we got to be friends,” says Price. “Chris and his wife and my wife at the time used to play pinochle together, guys against the girls. But Craig was intense. Chris was very focused professionally, but he was a more laid-back personality and more of a fun sort of a guy. Craig I always felt was a lot more serious about what he was doing, and he was pretty intense. Any of the times I spent with the two of them in the room—me, them and whoever else, maybe we were at a party or something like that—I just ended up spending not that much time with Craig, just because my personality and Chris’ were more of a match, I think. But I liked Craig. We got along fine.”
Bruce Barbour, November 1967. (Photo: Henry Diltz)
After Chris Ducey got married, he and Craig didn’t socialize as much anymore outside of the band. When he wasn’t rehearsing, Chris would stay home with his family, while Craig would hit the Strip with Jason Laskay or Don Glut. “We had two married guys in the band,” explains Don. “One was Bobby Donaho and one was Chris. Craig and I would go out to parties looking for girls and things, and go hanging out at Gazzarri’s and places, while Chris went home to his wife and Bobby went home to his wife.”
Glut also found time to make another movie during 1967: Atom-Man vs. Martian Invaders with himself in the titular super hero role and a girlfriend, Melody Raber, and Bobby Donaho as interplanetary invaders.
With The Monkees TV show and recording career by now in overdrive, Nesmith had an extremely busy schedule, but with the Penny Arkade ensconced at his home sometimes six days a week, he found time to look in on them and offer his encouragement and suggestions. “Mike was excited by just about everything we did,” remembers Don. “I mean, he really liked us and he really saw us as a way of, I think, showing the world that he was not just ‘Old Wool Hat’ from The Monkees show. He was very self-conscious about that, because when he came out here from Texas he was a serious musician, a serious songwriter, a serious singer, and then suddenly he got lumped in with all the Monkees nonsense.”
As Nesmith sees it, his role was more as a facilitator than anything, and the group was basically left to their own devices. “I don’t remember a lot of interaction,” he says, “because I was quite busy. I had a rehearsal room at my house on Mulholland so that was a place that they could rehearse. Really I just had a facility, and I wasn’t around too much for helping them—it was very internal to the band.”
Soon after their association began, one of Craig’s songs, “Salesman,” caught Mike’s attention, and he decided to record it with the Monkees. “It’s about a dope salesman,” Craig later explained to Mike Love. “Craig was a prolific writer,” says Mike. “He’s a good writer and ‘Salesman’ I thought was a good pop song. It had a sensibility that—I mean, it didn’t come across this way in the Monkees—but it reminded me of Doug Sahm’s ‘She’s About a Mover.’ That was what intrigued me about it. But by the time it went through the filter,” he laughs, “it didn’t quite come out the way Doug sounded, but that’s what drew me to it.”
The Monkees, with Nesmith on lead vocals, recorded “Salesman” on June 14th, 1967 at RCA Victor Studio A in Hollywood (“Daydream Believer” and “Words” were tracked at the same session). “Salesman” became the lead-off track on the Monkees’ chart-topping fourth album, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, which was released in November 1967—another big payday for Craig, who was now starting to make a name for himself as a songwriter. Another of his songs, “Rapid Transit,” had been recorded by the Robbs, who had replaced Paul Revere & the Raiders as the house band on the Dick Clark-produced ABC-TV show Where the Action Is. The Robbs’ “Rapid Transit” single was released by Mercury in April, and reached the substrata of the sales charts at #123.
Even more impressive musically was a 1967 single by Heather MacRae featuring two of Craig’s compositions, “Hands of the Clock” and “Lazy Sunny Day.” Sheila MacRae was recording an album for ABC Records at the time, called How Sweet She Is, which also featured Heather’s guest vocals on a couple of tracks. Producer Bob Thiele liked Heather’s voice so much that he suggested she make a record of her own, something more contemporary. “They wanted material for me,” she remembers, “and so I said, ‘My friend has two great songs.’” Thiele was Gabor Szabo’s producer at the time, so he and Craig may already have been acquainted. Either way, he and the label people liked both the songs enough to green-light a recording session. Not only that, Craig would also share a producer’s credit with Thiele. This was a big deal. Thiele produced some of the giants of jazz, including John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington and Count Basie, so a co-production credit was an impressive piece of plumage for Craig’s cap, and an indication of the ease with which he was moving among the music industry’s elite talents at the time.
Sheila and Heather MacRae, 1967.
AFM recording contracts show that the songs were recorded at United Recorders in Hollywood. Sidney Feller, who was also working on Sheila’s album, was the band arranger for the first session on June 7th, 1967, which included Glen Campbell on guitar, Larry Knechtel on bass, and Jim Gordon on drums. Then Craig himself directed a “sweetening” session on the afternoon of June 14th, hiring Jim Gordon to overdub percussion, along with studio engineer Eddie Brackett. He also brought Don Glut and Bobby Donaho in to help out, and collect union scale wages—65 bucks each. “Craig was really good in the studio,” remembers Heather. “He was just so versatile; he was a real renaissance person—he could do anything really!”
“Hands of the Clock” is an extraordinary piece of psychedelic pop. The unerringly pretty melody line is a perfect fit for Heather’s sweet, unaffected voice, while the compelling lyrics about the unstoppable march of time lead the song into more shadowy territory. It plunges midway through into two boldly experimental instrumental sections with eerie sound effects and disembodied voices, and ends with a clamor of ticking clocks. Craig made clever use of the studio’s brick-lined echo chambers to magnify the ominous, otherworldly atmosphere he wanted to create. Bobby was instructed to pluck the strings of the studio’s grand piano for a ghostly music box effect, Don played chimes to mark the tolling of time, and all of them sang backup harmonies. “I banged those chimes like Quasimodo played the bells!” jokes Glut. The overall effect was quite stunning, but the single went largely unnoticed as it was given only a very limited release by ABC in August.
That summer, Craig’s connections to the MacRae family landed Chris & Craig a two-week gig at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, where they appeared in the Versailles Room as part of Sheila MacRae’s stage show. Their part of the act was as a vocal group together with Heather and her brother Gar. “My mom would get offers for things where she wanted to be hip and cool,” laughs Heather, “so that’s why she wanted us to sing with her. She called us Heather and Her Feathers and we sang backup for ‘If You’re Going to San Francisco’ and ‘The Happening,’ which was by the Supremes. My mom liked to change clothes, and she also did impersonations, so we also sang this special material that introduced her doing her imitations.”
“Sheila was gonna open for Marty Allen and Steve Rossi—the comedians Allen & Rossi—on the big stage at the Riviera Hotel,” explains Chris Ducey. “In ’67 Vegas was like the sleepiest place in the world. So Craig somehow, for us to make money, talks them into creating this little schticky show where Sheila has four people singing and doing this little dance step behind her, right? And it’s us, meaning Chris, Craig, Heather and Gar. And we’re in like blue sweaters and white pants, singing. But they did let us do one Chris & Craig song in the middle of the set. I think we came out with guitars and did one song and that was their token to us, and then we were on behind them for the rest of the show. It was two sets a night, 7:00 and 11:00, seven nights a week for two weeks.”
“They were Heather and the Happeners,” laughs Bobby Donaho. “They were wearing powder-blue sweaters and did a little dance behind her when she sang. I was so glad that I didn’t have to do that.”
Bobby and Don tagged along to Vegas so that Penny Arkade rehearsals could continue during Chris and Craig’s engagement with Sheila. “We just set up in one of the big rehearsal rooms at the Riviera and rehearsed just like we were at home,” remembers Bobby. “Except it was a lot hotter. I remember Don and I walking across the Strip. There was a little coffee shop between the Riviera and the rooms, and we were broke and just burning up. We could just barely make it to the coffee shop for the air conditioning. I had one nickel, and a Coke was a dime. So I gave it to Don and he put it in a slot machine and we got four nickels and bought two Cokes!”
“We had all our instruments,” recalls Don, “but I think we just kinda hung around and picked up girls and the usual thing. I think we might have rehearsed one afternoon day. We used to hang around the pool with Sheila and Heather and the other sister, Meredith, who was on Petticoat Junction. Sheila took us out to see the Supremes at the Copa. That was a great experience. We sat in a booth that, as I recall, was just several yards away from the group!”
“We also went to a club and saw Morgana King and Maynard Ferguson,” remembers Heather. “We saw all these great people that would perform in the lounges that were like geniuses. We always had a lot of fun, me and Craig and my brother.”
Another night they caught Sly & the Family Stone, who were honing their act with a three-month stint at a small club called the Pussycat a Go Go. “It was the most exciting thing we’d ever seen,” says Chris. “Oh my God, were they smokin’!”
Midway through Sly’s set, though, Bobby Donaho, who had yet to turn 21, was hauled out of the club for being underage. “The cops came in and took him away in handcuffs,” recalls Don. “He got arrested; he spent the night in jail.” After a call to the jail from the Monkees’ management in L.A., Bobby was released. “They let me out with apologies,” laughs Bobby, “which I thought was very interesting.”
Bruce Barbour was also hanging out in Vegas at the time, and they rode back to L.A. with him in Micky Dolenz’s car. “It was Bruce, me, and maybe Bobby,” recalls Don. “On the way back we stopped at some restaurant to get hamburgers and they wouldn’t serve us because we had long hair. I’d never really experienced that before. We sat there for like an hour and finally we realized that they weren’t gonna serve us. We made some nasty comments and left.”
In 1967 Craig Smith renewed his acquaintance with the Clinger sisters, whom he’d first met at the Allentown Fair in the summer of 1965. Like Craig, the sisters had continued to push forward in the music business, evolving from a wholesome family vocal group into a self-contained rock band, with Peggy singing lead and playing keyboards, Melody on guitar, Debra on bass, and Patsy on drums. The Clinger family had recently moved from Canoga Park to a house on Moorpark Street in Studio City. Coincidentally Craig’s eldest brother Chuck, then a police officer, lived right across the street, which is likely how Craig reconnected with the girls.
The Clingers’ house was a big hangout spot for the kids from nearby North Hollywood High School, and Craig was soon a frequent visitor to the house too. “Craig would come over and we would walk down to Henry’s taco stand,” remembers Patsy Clinger. “Henry’s taco stand was on one corner of Moorpark and Tujunga, and the other side was the Firehouse, a hamburger joint, and both of them were just inundated at that time. Everybody would go down there, and because we were right there on Moorpark, a half a block up, and we had our music, people would come up to the house—all the kids from North Hollywood High School. We went to a professional school so we didn’t go to a regular high school. But all those kids would come into our house and our back room area where we had our music studio. Later we had to take it upstairs because it got too noisy and the neighbors were complaining so we had to soundproof everything.”
Over the next year or so, Craig frequently dropped by the house to chat with the girls and to sing and play guitars together. “Craig always had a phenomenal smile,” remembers Melody Clinger. “He was happy. He always seemed engaging; he brought everybody in to him. I mean he was just so sweet and so nice. I just loved being around him. Plus he would involve us in his music, and so it would be the fun thing. I remember Craig and I sitting on our stairs and playing guitars, and I remember all of us up in our bedrooms playing guitars and just wailing away. We just loved singing harmony.”
Sometimes Craig would play them a new song he was working on. Patsy remembers one in particular, “Holly,” a romantic ballad with the kind of flowery poetic lyrics that would come to typify much of Craig’s work: “On a velvet wind she comes to me each day / When I’m lonely / Holly enters my mind.”
“He sang it for us first, I think,” remembers Patsy, “and we thought it was just beautiful.”
Craig had written the song for his girlfriend at the time, Holly Mershon, an attractive, willowy blonde singer who was a member of the Doodletown Pipers, a sunshine-drenched easy listening vocal group who appeared frequently in Vegas and Reno, and on television variety shows. The Pipers released a couple of albums on Epic that make the Good Time Singers sound like the Stooges (a 1997 episode of The Simpsons revealed that Homer Simpson was a Doodletown Pipers fan). “Holly was a very lovely person,” says Heather MacRae. “I got to know her when she was going with Craig and she just seemed so nice. They were just such a beautiful couple, all-American looking. They just looked like they had it all.”
Although Craig was besotted enough with Holly to write a song for her, he’d also developed a major attraction to Peggy Clinger. The Clingers’ lead singer, who’d had a crush on Craig back in ’65, was now 18 and blossoming in the limelight. “Craig was definitely interested in her,” confirms Patsy. “Definitely! And I think that’s one of the reasons that he was coming around so much.” By this time, though, Peggy’s earlier crush on Craig had worn off. “She had grown up,” explains Patsy. “She had now come into her own. She had been dating someone else that she was interested in, and I think that attraction to Craig was not as strong as what it was way back when she was a little girl and looking up at this guy. Craig was crazy about Peggy, and Peggy loved him to death as a friend, but not as a boyfriend.
The Clingers in 1967 in front of their home on Moorpark Street in Studio City where Craig spent a lot of time. L to R: Melody, Peggy, Patsy, Debra. (Photo courtesy Patsy Clinger)
“But we were all in love with him as a human being,” she adds, “including my mom and dad, the whole family. He loved my little brothers and sisters. It was like he was the Pied Piper when he’d come over. I cannot say enough wonderful things about him.”
In the two years since they’d first met in Allentown, Craig had also been through some major changes. That radiant smile was still a constant, but he was no longer the lighthearted folk singer and all-around entertainer he’d been in the Good Time Singers. He was now fixated on his songwriting, and harbored starry-eyed, utopian visions of changing the world. “I think the songwriting was really the thing that was most important to him,” remembers Patsy. “He loved the performing and thought that was awesome, but he was really into writing music and coming up with this great stuff that would kind of shape the world. He had a lot of ideas. He was really a ‘put a little love in your heart’ guy. At the same time, his music was also so melodic. He really was a melody man. So we talked a lot about that and how his voice was so perfect with our harmonies and things like that.”
Patsy began dating Bruce Barbour after meeting him at a Penny Arkade show at Gazzarri’s, and subsequently the Clingers also began holding rehearsals at Mike Nesmith’s house. There was some talk of Nesmith producing them, but they went on to work instead with Terry Melcher and Bruce Johnston, and, a little later, with Michael Lloyd, Kim Fowley, and Craig’s old Grant High School classmate, Mike Curb.
Meanwhile rehearsals continued for the Penny Arkade at the Nesmith house. As arrangements fell into place Mike would take them into the studio to cut demos. Several tracks were recorded during the summer of 1967, first at TTG Studios in Hollywood (run by “Two Terrible Guys”: Tom Hidley and Ami Hadani), where they recorded Craig’s hard-strumming “Split Decision,” along with three of Chris’ tunes, “No Rhyme or Reason,” “Sick and Tired,” and the ‘old-timey’ “You Couldn’t Conquer Me.” Most, if not all, of these four songs dated back to the Chris & Craig days, and were soon cast aside as the group began to find their own, more evolved style of playing.
That style, flavored by the influence of the Byrds and the Buffalo Springfield, was in evidence when Mike took them into Wally Heider’s Studio 3 in Hollywood that fall. There they demoed Smith’s “Swim,” “Voodoo Spell” and “Century of Distance,” and Ducey’s “Lights of Dawn” (with Nesmith lending a hand on cowbell) and “The Freeze.” All of these tracks (along with the TTG recordings) appeared on the Penny Arkade’s Not the Freeze CD, released by Sundazed in 2004. With the notable exception of “Voodoo Spell,” a lively Bo Diddley-beat thumper, the performances on these early versions are a little tentative, as first-take demos tend to be. All would be rerecorded later in more fully formed versions.
“The Freeze,” a seven-minute ‘suite’ constructed from pieces from half a dozen of Chris’ songs, underwent the biggest transformation with the addition of new sections from several of Craig’s songs. “We’d write all these songs, and Craig at that time definitely was a more advanced writer,” admits Chris. “I only had a couple of songs that I thought were worthy, but I had all these tidbits that I created this concept for. We wove it together like a little puzzle. So we flipped my little parts and stuck one of his parts in there, and another of his parts in there. I think there are two parts out of six or seven that are his, and the rest of mine. Maybe that was the beginning of where we were gonna start integrating [as writers], but I don’t know.”
“I got a call one day from Chris,” remembers Don, “and he said, ‘We got an incredible idea. We’re gonna take all these songs and we’re gonna put them together and we’re gonna make one long song. It’s gonna fill up a side of an album and that’s gonna be called ‘Not the Freeze.’ And he told me the songs they were gonna do. One was ‘Hands of the Clock’; one was ‘Flash Burn’—I forget what else—and then he also wrote some new connecting material that would get from one to the other. What really intrigued me about it was the time changes, because there was a scene where we’d go from 4/4 time to 3/4 time without missing a beat; it just perfectly slid into it. I’d never heard anything like ‘Not the Freeze’ before. It was challenging. It was brilliant, I thought.”
The concept of interweaving several different songs or themes into a complete piece was not without precedent—the Who’s “A Quick One While He’s Away” and Buffalo Springfield’s “Broken Arrow” are two examples—but nobody had attempted it on such a grand scale. With the addition of Craig’s material—including a section from “Hands of the Clock”—and a short Mothers-inspired freakout/breakdown, the retitled “Not the Freeze” clocked in at around 12 1/2 minutes.
Along with the expanded “Not the Freeze,” several more outstanding songs were added to the Penny Arkade’s repertoire during this period, including “Thesis” and “Love Rain” (both by Chris), and Craig’s “Color Fantasy.” By the fall of ’67, Nesmith felt the group was ready to record an album. At the time Mike had a production deal with Dot Records (who later released his Wichita Train Whistle album) and felt he could interest the label in a full Penny Arkade album, or failing that shop it around elsewhere. With this in mind he took the group into RCA’s Hollywood studios, where the Monkees did most of their recording, to lay down the basic tracks for nine songs, with vocal and percussion overdubs added a few days later at Wally Heider’s.
“I wasn’t a particularly good producer,” admits Nesmith, “but I had access to the production tools so at least we got it down. I don’t know whether we were using four-track or eight-track, but it was something pretty minimal that we recorded it on. So they had to play in the studio live, just the same way they played on a rehearsal stage or on a nightclub stage. They had to go in and duplicate the sound. There weren’t isolation booths with multitracks, and you couldn’t stack things up and overdub things, the way contemporary records are made. Basically you went in the studio, there was half a dozen or a dozen mics stuck around, and everybody played—just loud and live.
Chris Ducey recording with the Penny Arkade at TTG Studio, 1967. (Photo courtesy Chris Ducey)
“So that process was also particularly good for this because they really did sound the way they sounded. And the way they sounded was what I was hearing on the streets of Los Angeles in a particularly rare time for Los Angeles. It was the same time groups like the Byrds were playing, and the Springfield were playing and Linda [Ronstadt] was singing—you know, there’s probably six or seven other big musical acts that came from that time that were from around there and once you heard them live they all sort of sounded a particular way. But I felt like Chris and Craig had captured something with the way they were arranging songs that was particularly of the Los Angeles of the era.
“There was also something else: at the time you couldn’t get a record that was longer than two-and-a-half minutes played on the radio; you couldn’t get that kind of airtime, so all pop records tended to be two-and-a-half minutes long. So it was refreshing to hear these four- or five-minute songs, and I mean ‘Not the Freeze’ is what? Twelve minutes long? So that was a big departure! Those big long excursions just didn’t happen musically in popular music either. So all of those things combined to make me think this was something that I needed to take time and do.”
“Lights of Dawn” was one of the standout tracks of the sessions, and was slated to be the lead-off track on the proposed album. Chris and Craig’s bright harmonies ring out over a springy “Taxman”-style groove, soaring to a kind of airborne transcendence on the “Time, time, time, time” bridge. Chris also came up with the inventively structured “Thesis” on which Chris and Craig harmonize over just their own acoustic guitars and some subtle percussion. “Bobby and I played our regular instruments on ‘Thesis’,” remembers Don; “but while we continued to play our parts during live performances of this number, it was deemed more appropriate to delete them from the final mix and leave the acoustic guitars and some percussion to carry the instrumental track.”
Craig’s “Country Girl” was the most commercial song recorded that day, and also the oldest, dating back to their repertoire as a duo. The ebullient harmonies and sparkling country-rock arrangement are suggestive of the Buffalo Springfield—except the Springfield never wrote a song as overtly catchy and commercial as this one. Had it been released as a single, “Country Girl” could have been a hit record for the Penny Arkade. Glen Campbell recognized as much, recording his own version a year or two later. It was included on his Try A Little Kindness album in 1969.
Craig’s more recent compositions had taken a psychedelic left turn, both musically and lyrically. The shimmering guitars and entrancing harmonies of “Color Fantasy”—as well as Craig’s hazy, mysterioso recorder solo—perfectly complement the wide-eyed wonder of the lyrics, which are overtly suggestive of an LSD experience:
Stained glass multiplies
The rainbow world before my eyes.
And all the violets and jasmine leaves
Explode in color fantasy.
If Craig was had been experimenting with LSD, though, he appears to have kept it to himself at the time. “We were just smoking a little bit of pot,” remembers Ducey. “At least that was all I was doing. I don’t know what he was doing; I wasn’t with him every second of the day.” “Craig and I never took LSD together,” insists Jason Laskay. “I took a little acid with Richie Baskin, but I was too paranoid to take drugs. But I’m sure Craig could have taken it because he would get out there sometimes. We used to go out sometimes and we would be so stoned that—you know those streets that have the grass in the middle, like on Sunset?—Craig would pull up onto that and we’d drive through the sprinklers like at 1 in the morning, out of our minds, laughing and stoned. So, yeah, I think he would do other stuff like acid. I think he knew that I didn’t do it or that I was afraid to take it so he didn’t offer it to me after a while.”
Going back to the album, the lyrics of “Swim” were also psychedelically inspired:
Go down,
Swim through the darkness
Strange things to find there
Thought pools making their reflections
Inside your mind there.
On an earlier recording, the song’s coda warned “You might lose your mind there,” which was revised to the more positive “You might find your mind there” for the second version. The middle section—with Craig gasping in awed wonder—actually sounds like an acid trip peaking. Don Glut chuckles at that assessment: “We were just making noises. We were all yelling stuff in the background, and because of my comic book connections, if you listen you can hear me yell ‘Flame on!’ and ‘Holy Moley!’—which are what the Human Torch and Captain Marvel used to say. I also shout ‘Om-Mani-Padme-Hum!’ which was the magical phrase used by the Green Lama.” On the earlier demo some of the band members sing the names of their wives or girlfriends: “Fancy Nancy” in Chris’ case, “Jodie Commodie” for Bobby, and “Holly everywhere” for Craig. “When we played ‘Swim’ during live gigs, we varied what we said during the freakout,” adds Don. “When we played at the Magic Mushroom club in Studio City I sometimes gave the oath Green Lantern said while charging his power ring.”
The band’s sense of humor is also in evidence on “Voodoo Spell,” which was to have ended the first side of the LP. The song finishes with a burst of jungle drumming followed by some brief spoken dialogue: “Listen! The drums have stopped beating,” Chris whispers fearfully in a fake English accent. “Oh, it’s so quiet!” responds Craig in a girlish falsetto. “That’s what I don’t like about it,” adds a manly John Wayne voice. “It’s too quiet.” “I suggested the ‘jungle drums’ ending and did the John Wayne-inspired voice,” explains Don. When Craig passed a tape of the album along to Frank Zappa, Zappa scribbled a note that “‘Voodoo Spell’ is probably the best item on this tape.” This endorsement meant so much to Craig that he reproduced Zappa’s note on the back of the Apache album.
Side two of the album was to begin with the epic “Not the Freeze,” which, impressively, was recorded in one take with no edits or splices. “By the time we got to the lengthy piece, it was already 2:00 in the morning,” remembers Don. “We’d been recording all night and the hours had taken their toll. Consequently, the plan was to do a ‘scratch’ recording, played straight through without stopping, myriad time and tempo changes and all, with no overdubbing, and then come back another day to perform the ‘real’ version. We got through the track—miraculously all in one take—and walked into the control booth. There a very pleased Mike Nesmith, sitting at the control board, informed us that our performance and its recording were just fine. It was our only-ever take of ‘Not the Freeze’ in its expanded form and was a ‘keeper.’ Had I known that, I would not have, almost immediately upon reaching the end of the piece, leaned my bass guitar against its amp; you can hear a subtle ‘thump’ if you listen closely.”
Ducey’s “Love Rain,” with Glut on fuzz bass, and a new recording of Smith’s “Century of Distance” completed the second side of what was hoped to be the first Penny Arkade album (although Glut remembers the last two may have been designated as non-LP extras).
Had the completed Not the Freeze album been released, it may not have changed the world, but it would have established the Penny Arkade as a group of note, and Smith and Ducey as songwriters to be reckoned with. Especially if preceded by “Country Girl” as a single, it would most definitely have made an impact.