I’ll become a mystic man
And I will make a sacred plan
Of portents and a secret phrase
You’ll return, love will stay.
When Craig Smith returned to the States in late 1968 or early 1969, one of the first people he called was Jason Laskay. Laskay, naturally, was happy to hear from his friend, and invited him over. “I was really excited to see him,” recalls Jason. “Like ‘Craig’s back! I can’t wait to see what’s been going on.’ It seemed like a while that I didn’t see him—six months maybe? Then as soon as I saw him…”
He pauses to gather his thoughts, reliving the moment.
“He was trying to be the same,” he continues, “you know, light and happy and airy. But he was just freaked-out and weird. He had this density about him. There was something really out of balance with this guy. He was doing this thing, swaying back and forth a lot and, like, ‘Hey! How’s it going, maaan?’ Then he’d start on about India, and it was weird.”
Craig’s appearance was different, too. He had grown a scruffy beard, his hair was long and unkempt, and his clothes—including a now ever-present Afghan coat—were grubby. “He had that smell of oils and incense and like India crud, you know?” Laskay continues. “He definitely had that ‘I’ve been in India’ smell to him. Everything was, I recall, always dirty—his clothes and his shoes. I remember him wearing sandals and he had dirty feet. He looked like he was living on the street, although I think he drove his car the first couple times I saw him. I knew he was getting weird because of the way he was talking and—being. It was just uncomfortable.”
It’s interesting that Smith talked to Laskay and others about being in India, because after the events in Kandahar it seems unlikely he would have had the means or the motivation to continue his journey. Whether Craig Smith ever made it to India or not appears to be one of the many unknowable facts that complicate the telling of his story. In all likelihood, Craig just preferred to let people believe he’d reached that destination, and there, presumably, found some of the enlightenment he had been seeking. India was part of a mystique he was starting to fabricate around himself, a mystique that may have been a sort of armor to protect him not only from the forces of reality that were pressing in on him from outside, but to contain the seething turmoil raging inside him.
The man who had once been Craig Vincent Smith had been crushed, smashed, and broken. To disconnect himself from the appalling reality of what had happened to him in Kandahar he needed to create a new persona.
In the 1972 film The Ruling Class, Peter O’Toole’s character, Jack Gurney, believes himself to be Jesus Christ. Asked how he arrived at this realization, he explains, “Simple. When I pray to Him I find I am talking to myself.”
Craig Smith must have arrived at a similar conclusion.
It could be argued that all spiritual belief systems are merely man’s attempt to give some kind of meaning to the essential chaos of the universe around him. The elaborate belief system Craig constructed was similarly a means of providing some sense of order and meaning to the swirling chaos within his mind, a disorder or disarray that can possibly be attributed to undiagnosed schizophrenia, likely triggered by the head trauma he’d received from that terrifying attack in Afghanistan.
The messiah or savior complex is a delusion often reported in patients suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Craig’s may have been a classic case of this affliction. It’s only a few short steps from “the kingdom of heaven is within you” to, as Craig later proclaimed, “Christ is Me and no one else.”
In 1969 Craig Smith no longer existed. Studio City Craig, Class President Craig, Good Time Singer Craig, Christmas Holiday Craig, Froggie Craig, Craig the Happener, Chris & Craig, Doodletown Piper-dating Holly-enters-my-mind Craig, Penny Arkade Craig, the Craig his friends and family had all known—gone.
In his place, someone called Maitreya Kali.
In Buddhist philosophy, Maitreya is the next Buddha, prophesied to come to Earth, achieve total enlightenment and lead people into the new age. Maitreya is also a prominent figure in Theosophical literature, a Christ-like New Age prophet. In her 1888 magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine, Madame Blavatsky described Maitreya as “the last Messiah who will come at the culmination of the Great Cycle.” “Bow to Maitreya,” the man who was once Craig would write on his album cover. “Christ is Back. Right On! Schedule … Christ is Me and no one else.”
As Jason Laskay remembers, the name change began as soon as Craig returned from the East. “As far as I remember, it was right away: ‘My new name is Maitreya.’ I just thought, you know: now he’s been to India so he’s got an Indian name, but it still was the weirdest thing and I would still call him Craig, because I couldn’t relate to Maitreya.”
Laskay’s understandable refusal to play along with the name game annoyed Craig. “Don’t call me that!” he’d fire back at Laskay. “I’m not Craig!”
In Craig’s more lucid moments, though, he was able to convey some information about what had happened to him. “There were times when he would be a little more present about what was going on, and I had an opportunity to ask him, ‘What’s going on? Why are you acting kind of strange?’ I would try and tell him, ‘Craig, you’re being really weird and confrontational. What is going on? I didn’t do anything to make you act like this toward me.’ He’d go, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’
“I remember after he got back it was impossible to be around him for any length of time,” he continues, “but there were a couple of times where I managed to sit and talk to him and he told me some more of the stories of what had happened to him. That’s when he told me that he’d been raped and kidnapped in India and all these horrible things happened to him. He was talking about it like it was horrible, but trying to laugh it off, you know? I didn’t know what to say to him. I felt bad for him, but I was ill-equipped to do anything except tell him I was really sorry and ask if there was anything I could really do for him. But he was like, ‘No. It’s cool.’”
In these moments of clarity, Craig acknowledged that the ordeal in Kandahar—or India as he told it—had been the tipping point for his state of mind. “In his saner moments he told me the major cause of him flipping out was this kidnapping and sexual abuse that he went through,” confirms Laskay. “Somehow he related it to his becoming disturbed. There was some logic of that happening to him and then the Maitreya thing coming, and then his enlightenment. It made some sense inside him. That’s how he was trying to explain it. But he was explaining it from the point of view of ‘I’m now this savior person.’”
Shortly after his return to Los Angles, Craig stopped by Mike Nesmith’s house where he spent a few hours with Phyllis Nesmith, Bruce Barbour and Patsy Clinger. Barbour noticed right away that Craig had changed. “He wasn’t the same guy,” remembers Bruce. “It was like somebody had kidnapped Craig. It was a complete body-snatchers kind of deal. He wasn’t the ‘Hey, how are ya?’ kind of guy anymore. Instead he just sat down and kind of went away, crossed his legs, but in a really hard yoga pose that breaks your knees—that seated lotus position—and he’d sit like that for hours. Now that I think about it, maybe it was just a way of not being involved, not having people ask him anything or include him in something.”
Patsy remembers the encounter was awkward and upsetting. Craig—Maitreya—tried to convince them of his mystical powers. Every time one of them would move their arm, cross their legs, or stand up and walk across the room, he would say in a hushed voice, “See! I made you do that!”
It would have been comical if he hadn’t been so serious and persistent about it. “It was sad,” says Patsy. “I was just thinking, ‘Wow! I sure hope he gets back to normal!’ because we had heard either prior or that day that he had been beaten and robbed and left for dead—or something like that. All kinds of stories. So to see him...”
On this occasion at least, Craig didn’t appear dirty or disheveled at all. “He looked ‘good’,” remembers Patsy. “He didn’t look like a homeless person by any means. He looked clean. He was in one of his Nehru outfits.”
Craig (center) chats with guests at Melody Clinger’s wedding reception in August 1969. (Photo courtesy Melody Clinger)
Certainly Craig looked clean and well-groomed when he was a guest at the wedding of Melody Clinger and Jim Bell in August 1969. Two photos snapped at the reception show Craig, bearded but with his hair neatly combed, dressed in an embroidered blue velvet Nehru tunic with matching trousers and leather sandals, a small leather satchel slung casually over his shoulder. He looks relaxed and happy, and there’s no suggestion anything is amiss.
“Knowing Craig the way I did, it would not surprise me if the attack alone in itself—never mind if there was any head injury—was enough to send him over the edge,” theorizes Barbour. “Because he was all about peace and love, and had never encountered anything like that before. That would have been such a betrayal to him that it might very well have been an awakening that he didn’t want to deal with. I kind of think that Craig, because he had such a personality, had never had a conflict with anybody. If I had to guess, I’d say he never had anything but acceptance from anyone he met his entire life. He was personable, attractive, talented—everybody loved him. I really think that attack had to be a turning point. I think if somebody beat him up he would’ve been just so astounded that it may well have turned his head around. It wouldn’t necessarily have taken an injury to the brain to make that a huge incident.”
The personality turnaround was absolute, like the photo negative Craig would choose for the cover of his Apache album: white became black, love became hate, peace became violence, that winning smile a grimace of malevolence or a rictus of defeat.
“The change in him was astounding,” says Barbour sadly. “He was charismatic, handsome, intelligent, talented—he had it all. So it’s just a heartbreaker what happened to him.”
The Penny Arkade had continued for a short time in Craig’s absence. In the second half of ’68 Mike Nesmith had produced some more demos with Dave Turner on lead guitar. When that lineup fizzled, Ducey, Glut and Donaho joined forces with three of the Texas transplants: Davy Jones’ stand-in David Price, who played rhythm guitar, John “Toad” Andrews on lead, and Bob Arthur, who switched off with Don Glut on bass and Hammond B3 organ. The three Texans had all played together back in Austin in the Chelsea, and had been rehearsing together at Nesmith’s place for some time with Bobby Donaho on drums. They’d been hoping to steal Donaho away from the Penny Arkade, but Bobby’s sense of loyalty, and his belief in the songwriting of Chris and Craig, had prevented him from jumping ship. After Craig left, though, Nesmith suggested the two groups merge under a new name, Armadillo.
Armadillo was an odd mix of characters and styles. Ducey, the only real songwriter in the group, had a strong pop sensibility, while the Texans were pushing for a heavier, blues-based sound. In the end they played a bit of both, a compromise that didn’t always work. “It was a good band,” maintains Price. “We were definitely louder and harder-edged than Penny Arkade because John and Bob and I were more rock & roll and blues-oriented. We played louder. We played pretty loud. As a matter of fact we played very loud!”
Don Glut and Phyllis Nesmith, 1968. (Photo courtesy Don Glut)
“Our image changed from being this pseudo-Beatles/Monkees type of group, where we were all individual personalities and it was kind of a happy image, to suddenly these serious old-time rockers, with our roots in various places,” says Glut. “The only roots we had before were in our hair, but now we had the musical roots.”
Armadillo worked the L.A. club scene for several months, including a residency at Pier 7 in Van Nuys and another at a German restaurant in Encino, the Hofbräu. “We did a great version of ‘Hey Joe’ that David Price sang the lead on,” says Don, “I remember to this day it was like the most electrifying moment we ever had in that club was playing ‘Hey Joe.’ We had smoke bombs going off and everything, it was just incredible.”
Don remembers seeing Craig a few times after he returned. Craig even brought him back a gift from his travels, a hashish or opium pipe, which Glut later used as a prop in one of his movies. “After Craig came back I hung out with him a little bit. Craig got invited to the opening party of a women’s clothing store. I said, ‘Hey, there’ll be lots of girls there.’ But there weren’t a lot of girls there, and there wasn’t a lot of food there either.”
Glut quickly sensed that all was not quite right with Smith. The gears in his mind were starting to slip. “He was just getting very strange,” he recalls. “When we went to that party he would say things that would be kind of insulting to people and very condescending. He’d had a tendency before to be condescending, but not like that. He reminded me of the old expression about a keg of dynamite with the fuse ready to go off. And then [later] I heard the story of him putting somebody’s eye out or something, and I decided it was just better not to have anything to do with him.”
The Armadillo, 1968. Photo on left shows David “Spider” Price and Don Glut.
Bob Arthur, Don Glut, Chris Ducey, Bobby Donaho. (Photos courtesy Don Glut)
The Armadillo broke up in 1969. “A couple of things were happening,” explains Don. “One was that Mike wasn’t so financially well off anymore because the Monkees was coming to an end. I think he owed back taxes. And so the writing was starting to go up on the wall. And then I got a call from Chris one day I’ll never forget. He fired me because he thought I was too much of a disruptive force in the band. I had too many things that I complained about and wanted to do. The hair, everything—I was always fighting against having haircuts. Finally he said he thought I was creating too much of a disruption. But then what happened was that the band just fell apart. Not because I left, but because all these other things were going on. Losing Craig was a major part of it. Mike having the income tax problems was another part of it. It was like everything was winding down.”
Soon after Don’s firing, John Andrews and Bob Arthur departed for San Francisco to join Tracey Nelson’s Mother Earth, while Bobby Donaho returned to Texas where he formed a new group, Ginger Valley, which released one single on International Artists in 1970. His last contact with Craig was that year. “I had recorded ‘Country Girl’ with a band I was playing with in Houston, Ginger Valley,” explains Bobby. “I called him and asked him if it was OK. He said, ‘Sure!’ He sounded normal. It was like instant familiarity. I’ve heard these stories about him, but I’m not sure what to believe.”
Ginger Valley, ca. 1969, with Bobby Donaho (center). (Photo courtesy Peter Buesnel)
Don occasionally saw Chris Ducey and Mike Nesmith socially. In fact, after the Armadillo split, Mike produced a session for one of Don’s instrumental compositions, “A Walk in the Park,” with Don on keyboards, Shorty Rogers on trumpet, Bobby Donaho on drums, Mike on guitar and a forgotten bass player. Soon afterwards Don returned to his first love, filmmaking, going on to become a prolific writer and director. As a writer, he’s best-known for his novelization of The Empire Strikes Back in 1980. More obscure, but of greater relevance here is his 2010 vampire novel, Brother Blood. Set in Los Angeles in the late ’60s, the story concerns a suave but vicious black vampire and his foxy female minions who prey on the denizens of the Sunset Strip. Part of the story is narrated by Glut’s Freakout on Sunset Strip persona, Mick Rogers, and the Penny Arkade make a brief appearance in a psychedelic night club scene, as do the Wicks and Armadillo. Glut wrote the book’s original manuscript in 1969, not long after the Penny Arkade broke up, but revised it in the early 2000s before it finally found a publisher.
“The last time I saw Craig would’ve been 1977,” he says. “I went to a revival screening of The War of the Worlds. Producer George Pal and star Ann Robinson and a lot of people to do with the movie were there. It was on Hollywood Boulevard, and I saw Craig standing out there by himself, talking to somebody, and I just turned around and hoped he wasn’t going to recognize me. That was the last time I ever saw him.”