Where the crystal ocean finds the shore
Diamond waves reflect the love we shared before
Through the silence
Holly enters my mind.
By the middle of ’68, it was apparent that the Penny Arkade album was not going to be released. Nesmith recalls interest from not only Dot but also Elektra, while an article in Tiger Beat mentioned Buddah Records, but in the end nothing came of it. “He could’ve sold that record for $100,000 to Jac Holzman at Elektra,” remembers Bobby Donaho, “but Holzman wanted to take it and put on effects—you know, put on a synthesizer, because the Moog was happening, and do some things to it and sweeten it up. And Mike wouldn’t have any part of it. He was a purist about it. He said, ‘That’s definitely just a four-piece band and that’s it! All live except for the vocals.’”
By now the band’s association with Nesmith was fading out. The Monkees’ TV show had been canceled earlier in the year, and Nesmith was focused on other projects, including the making of Head. Sensing it was the end of a chapter, Craig Smith decided it was time to move on. “He came over to my place when I was living in an apartment in Hollywood,” remembers Don. “He didn’t say he was coming over. There was just a knock at the door and there was Craig. He was acting a little aloof—but then Craig was always a little aloof so there wasn’t anything special about that. He just sat down and said, ‘I’ve decided I’m leaving the band. I just wanted to let you know in person.’ And that was it.”
“He’d gotten a big royalty check, I think, for something,” remembers Chris. “And he decided to travel. It was kind of an open-ended deal, not an ‘I quit’ thing. He didn’t say how long he was going for.”
The royalty check was almost certainly for “Holly,” which Andy Williams had recorded for his album Love, Andy. Laskay is pretty sure he and Craig attended the recording session. Released in November 1967, the album put Craig’s name in some exalted company: it also included songs written by Brian Wilson and Tony Asher (“God Only Knows”), Burt Bacharach and Hal David (“The Look of Love”) and Bob Crewe and Bob Gaudio (“Can’t Take My Eyes Off You”). Andy’s lush, breathtakingly romantic version of “Holly” is one of the album’s highlights. Love, Andy spent 36 weeks on the charts, peaking at #8. On May 14th, 1968 it was certified Gold, meaning that over half a million copies had been sold. “Holly” was also released as a single in several countries (it topped out at #113 on the Billboard chart in the U.S., but reached #4 in the adult contemporary chart). Williams’ recording of “Holly” was followed by a version by Jim Pike of the Lettermen. It was released as a solo Pike single on Capitol in June 1968, and also appeared on the Lettermen’s Goin’ Out of My Head album.
By that time, Craig was no longer seeing Holly Mershon, the girl who had inspired the song. “I always thought it was a weird combination, him and her,” remarks Laskay. “It didn’t seem to fit.” Another chapter ended. In 1969 Holly married session guitarist Hugh McCracken. (She did not respond to requests for an interview.)
“Craig got a big check, I remember,” says David Price. “He got a very big check, as a matter of fact. He told us about it, and off he went.”
For almost five years Craig Smith had been working in the entertainment industry pretty much nonstop, never quite finding the big breakthrough he’d been looking for. One can only speculate as to his state of mind, but Craig must have felt it was time to reevaluate his goals and ambitions. He’d become deeply interested in meditation and Eastern philosophy, and, as mentioned earlier, had been experimenting with LSD.
With the Penny Arkade going nowhere, the financial windfall from “Holly” and “Salesman” offered Craig the freedom he needed to travel the world, explore new horizons and perhaps pursue a more spiritual path. It would prove to be a fateful turning point.
The decision to leave the band and travel to India and elsewhere appears to have been an impulsive one. As was so often the case, Craig did not discuss his plans with his friends until they were already in motion. “I don’t think he said anything until he’d decided on his own and bought his ticket,” remembers Laskay. “It’s not like he asked me to come with him. Later he did, he said, ‘Why don’t you come with me and we can go together? I’m going to go to India. I’m going to do this and that…’ But I had no interest in going to India. It never had any appeal to me. It did on the surface, like, yeah, oh wow, everyone’s in India, and it looked real nice with the Beatles and the Maharishi and stuff, but India wasn’t like that. I somehow knew that, because I had seen all of those pictures of them throwing dead bodies in the Ganges River, and I just thought, man, I never wanna go there. I think Craig dug the idea of dirty and decrepit. He kind of got into that, and I’m sure he thought it was the thing to do to gain enlightenment and just do what a songwriter should do.”
“At that time in history it was kind of a cool thing to do,” reflects David Price. “The Beatles had gone to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and all that kind of thing. I’ve always been kind of a spiritual guy too, so I looked at it on that level and said, ‘OK, he wants to go with his quest.’ But that was about it, and I didn’t think a whole lot about it after that until he came home, of course. I wasn’t surprised that he would go off on his own because, as I say, he was very intense and he was very sort of self-sufficient—self-... I don’t wanna say self-centered; we all were self-centered. I mean if you stand onstage and do stupid stuff you’re self-centered. But I remember at the time not thinking it was odd. But I didn’t connect it in my mind with him being a very spiritual guy. I think I probably looked at it more as a copycat thing. ‘The Beatles have gone, these other guys have gone; I’ll go too.’”
There was a going-away party for Craig at Mike Love’s huge rustic house in Bel-Air. Various members of the Beach Boys were there, along with Bruce Barbour, some of the Clinger sisters, and an assortment of Hollywood somebodies and nobodies. Notably absent were any of the other Penny Arkade members, or Jason Laskay. “Craig was weird sometimes with privacy stuff,” Jason remarks. “He may not tell you certain things, like there was a party going on at Mike’s. He may decide not to mention it for whatever reason, if he didn’t see you on the day that he was telling people. He had those kinds of weird little idiosyncrasies.”
Patsy Clinger remembers Craig in a gauzy white Nehru outfit, love beads, bell bottoms and sandals, jabbering excitedly amidst clouds of pot smoke about going to India to seek enlightenment with the Maharishi and other gurus. “He was going to go to India,” she remembers. “He wanted to be at the feet of those he revered—that was his life now. That’s what the whole experience was about, becoming more and more in tune and capable in that whole mysticism thing.”
As Mormons, the Clinger family was uncomfortable with the esoteric spiritual path Craig had chosen, but also genuinely concerned for his safety while traveling. He’d be making the trip alone with a guitar and a backpack as his only luggage. “We were all concerned when he was leaving,” remembers Patsy. “Because, to go on an open-ended trip to a place like that where you don’t really have any connections, any protections, and it’s like a new, wild, wild, crazy frontier—and only to seek to be with whatever the master was, whether it was the Maharishi or whomever.”
The Clingers’ concerns were not unfounded. Craig Smith’s going-away party was in a very real way a last farewell to the lighthearted, outgoing, smiling person they all knew—or thought they knew. “He came back definitely tilted,” says Chris Ducey quietly. “Not the same person who left.”
After leaving Los Angeles, Craig stopped off in New York City where he visited Heather MacRae. Heather had relocated to New York in late 1967 and had appeared on Broadway with her new boyfriend, Walter McGinn, in Here’s Where I Belong, a musical adaptation of East of Eden. The play opened—and closed—to terrible reviews on March 3rd, but soon afterwards she joined the cast of the immensely successful musical Hair, playing the part of Sheila. “I was living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with Walter, and Craig came and visited us and stayed with us,” she remembers. “By that time he was very much into the hippie thing; he was completely different from his All-American Andy Williams period. He looked very different: his hair was longer and he wore long robes and he was into chanting and Buddhism. He seemed a little nutty, but I didn’t think he was that crazy. He would meditate and chant at the little altar and stuff. But that wasn’t any crazier than anything else that was happening in those days.”
While there wasn’t anything especially unusual about Craig’s behavior, Heather was struck by the intensity of his new beliefs. “He clearly went from being, as we all say, the golden boy, to all of a sudden becoming a Buddhist and becoming totally obsessed with it—not that that was unusual in the ’60s, but he just was obsessive about it. It wasn’t mild. He was forcing me to chant with him. ‘You’ve gotta chant with me!’ ‘Wait! I don’t really want to chant.’ ‘No, you have to, you have to...’ He was really pushing the issue, and he was very intense about everything.
“Maybe Craig was always intense,” she wonders, “but his intensity was covered over with the smiling?”