Aum Friction Satya Sai Maitreya Kali Mohammed was I no one else or this Globe Explodes
Don Glut’s assessment that Craig was a keg of dynamite about to go off was right on target. The fuse had been lit; the only question was how quickly it would burn down. Had Smith received proper medical treatment when he returned from Afghanistan, his condition might have been corrected or at least stabilized through psychiatric counseling and medication. He may have been briefly institutionalized, as Craig’s mother allegedly told Shirley Knickelbein, but without access to his medical records—which are confidential—it’s not possible to ascertain what treatment, if any, he received. It seems likely he’d been properly medicated when he first knew Cheryl, a period when he also abstained from the use of illegal drugs. Afterwards, though, Smith’s mental condition continued to worsen, exacerbated by his use of marijuana, hashish, and LSD.
Jason Laskay was alarmed by his friend’s behavior, which was becoming increasingly bizarre and threatening. “He would say, ‘Maitreya told me to kill people that I know. That everybody should die.’ Shit like that. Some of his reasoning why he had to kill certain people was because the Maitreya thing was a higher power that was telling him to do that.”
When Craig continued to show up at his house, Jason would often pretend he was not home. “I just didn’t want to be around him,” confesses Laskay. “It was too difficult. He didn’t talk about anything normal, and he didn’t act normal. Sometimes he would walk all the way up the hill to my house and he would just stand in my driveway. He knew there was times where I was just not opening the door. He would stand around staring in your front porch, imagining whatever his powers were creating around him.”
Jason Laskay, ca. 1970.
Craig was exhibiting all the classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, yet at the time people were not equipped to recognize those symptoms. To most people he was just another burned-out hippie. A kid who’d taken too much acid and fried his brain. Another misguided casualty of the love and peace generation.
Maybe he was all of those things, but he was also a ticking time bomb.
Craig took to prowling around the streets, dropping in unexpectedly on acquaintances, or just standing outside their houses staring at the windows or into space. “He used to hang outside people’s houses at all hours and say ‘I’m gonna kill you,’” remembers Jason. “It was just horrible. He would approach people and threaten to kill them or then he would want to be killed. Just this real confrontational, creepy, scary stuff.”
Craig had armed himself and seemed ready to make good on his threats. “He was carrying weapons for a while,” says Laskay. “I remember he said he had a gun and that he was going to shoot people, but I never saw it. And then he had a knife. He had a curved Indian knife, and somebody told me that the cops took that away from him. There was one girl in particular that was particularly freaked out by him because he would go to her house. She called the cops and they were telling her that they couldn’t do anything about it until he really did something violent.”
When Jason called Craig’s brother Gary, he told him the same thing. “I checked in about getting Craig committed because he was so scary and weird to people, and Gary said for him to get committed Craig had to do some harm to somebody. I think they had a restraining order against Craig at that time. They did get a restraining order against him, I think, but then they lost track of him.”
The timeline is hazy here, but the restraining order may have been the result of an incident involving Craig’s father—possibly the same fight Cheryl alluded to earlier. According to one rumor, a heated argument between Craig and his father became physical, and the altercation ended with a china cabinet being pulled over and Craig’s father losing an eye to broken glass. It doesn’t appear that any criminal charges were ever filed in this incident, so most likely it is apocryphal. Had it occurred, surely it would have been more than enough for his family to have had Craig committed. “I didn’t know if there was any physical thing,” comments Laskay. “I think I heard from his brother, and somebody else too, that he went against his dad, and then I think Craig might have told me, ‘I hated him and I wanted to kill him’ or something. But he did it with a laugh, like, ‘But I wasn’t really going to.’”
Craig’s behavior was particularly disturbing in the wake of the Manson Family killings in July of 1969. After the brutal slayings at the Tate and LaBianca residences, the entire city of Los Angeles was on edge. Paranoia was rampant, especially among people in the entertainment industry, many of whom had personal connections to either the victims or the killers.
“When Craig was getting really strange and showing up at my door all the time, and after the Manson thing, I borrowed a gun from a friend of mine to have at my bedside,” confesses Laskay. “I carried it around for about two weeks. It scared the shit out of me, too, that I would have a gun. And then, coincidentally, shortly after that, the guy that loaned me the gun got killed by some drug dealer. He and another guy I knew, they found them tied up in a car and shot and burned. It was a time when it seemed like a lot of people were going crazy. We had a big huge earthquake too [February 9th, 1971]. I remember I was in that stilt house when that first big earthquake came, and we were running down the street, and the gas was going off. Everybody smelled gas. It was like ‘Don’t light any cigarettes!’ It was very bizarre. And the Manson thing really threw everybody off because it was so creepy. Everybody seemed to know somebody around that thing. Jay Sebring cut a lot of people’s hair—it just seemed to reach out and touch a lot of people. It was supposed to be Terry Melcher he was going after, who was Bruce Johnston’s partner.”
Craig appeared to relish his own connection to Manson, as brief as it was. He would frequently bring it up in conversations, and would go on to mention Manson several times on his album covers, once in reference to the Beach Boys, whom he referred to parenthetically as “Man Sons.” It all fed into the darker side of his Maitreya persona, which continued to grow, further obscuring and obliterating the light, carefree person he had once been.
It was hard to tell how much of this persona was real, and how much was a put-on. Craig seemed to take sadistic enjoyment in pushing people’s buttons, frightening them with outrageous statements or violent threats. But there was a volatility to his words and actions that was undeniable. “You never know what was truth and what was sensationalism coming out of him,” remarks Laskay. “Because he was always trying to shock people or scare them or put them off somehow. Sometimes he would bring people over, too. In ’70, when I was still living up on Sunswept, I remember he brought up some guy-he-kind-of-met-on-the-street kind of guy, who was really like a homeless criminal that you would never let in your house. Craig would be like, ‘This is my new friend.’ I remember they just sat outside my house in the grass for a while.”
Craig also seemed to have some kind of uncanny radar when it came to locating the whereabouts of old friends and acquaintances. He would often show up uninvited in the most unlikely places. “It really got scary,” says Laskay. “He would show up at things that you had no idea how he would know or find out. I remember that happening at places I was at where he would just show up and people were just floored.”
David Price had one such memorable visit around early 1970.
“I was married to my first wife and we had moved into a house on a street called Vista Del Monte in Van Nuys,” he remembers. “I was sitting in the living room there one day by my lonesome—my wife worked and I was of course a musician so what was I doing? I was hanging around. And I remember looking out the front window and seeing this really strange-looking guy with a beard, lots of hair all over the place—a very homeless, street-looking kind of guy—striding across my front lawn. He came up and he knocked on the door. I opened up the door and said, ‘Yes?’ and I recognized that it was Craig. And he was like, ‘Hey! Dave!’
“I have no idea how he found me there. I don’t know. So I said ‘come in’ and we sat in my living room and he basically told me about his adventures—his trials and tribulations, I guess—very intensely, which is what he was, and with a real hard edge to it. He was acting very, very volatile and unpredictable. So I’m sitting there, I’m a guitar player and so I hang out in bars with loads of drunks and stuff, so I wasn’t intimidated by it, but I was thinking to myself, ‘This guy has got off the bus in Crazy Town. He’s not operating well.’ So I was trying to kind of talk to him.” He laughs nervously. “I remember this fairly well because it was an intense event. I was trying to talk to him about how he was doing, whether he was getting any help or anything. ‘Do you have a place to stay?’ You know? ‘What’s going on?’ And he would just ramble on about this stuff, about India, and about being attacked and being robbed and all of this other stuff, and he got more and more agitated.”
Price was shocked by Smith’s appearance, which was so opposite to the wholesome, clean-cut image he’d had in the Penny Arkade. “He looked like he had been sleeping in dirt for a couple of months. He had a wild outgrowth of a beard; his hair was just in a tangle and all over the place. He was very, very, very darkly tanned, a dark reddish tan like you’d get if you were out in the elements a lot. He was in a terrible shape. Terrible shape.”
Even more disturbing was his behavior. “One of the things he kept doing while we were sitting in my living room was… I would start talking and he would hold his hand up, like palm facing me, and sort of push through the air at me and tell me that he was ‘reading my energy’—particularly when whatever I was talking about was displeasing to him. He would go, ‘Ooh, that’s so negative. I can feel your energy.’”
The first time this happened was when David reacted unfavorably to his new name, Maitreya. “He told me that was his name and I just kind of looked at him and said, ‘Really?’ That was the first time the hand went up and he was ‘Oooohh! You’re being negative. You’re bumming my deal.’”
Craig appeared to believe he was physically pushing away the bad energy emanating from Price. “He was absolutely serious,” declares Price. “That I will tell you.”
After some time, Price was eventually able to persuade Smith to leave. “Finally I did the basic, ‘Well, I gotta go’ and kind of threw him out, and got in my car and drove away like I actually had some place to go. That was my first run-in with him when he came back, and it was very disturbing. After that I heard from various people that they’d seen him and everybody’s reaction was the same: ‘Wow, man, he’s really gone off the reservation.’”
Blue Mountain Eagle with David Price, bottom right.
Price had one more encounter with Craig, a year or two later. “The last time I saw him was truly strange,” he remembers, “because I was driving from Hollywood to the Valley up Laurel Canyon. Laurel crosses Mulholland at the top of the ridge—you go over that ridge and now you’re heading down into the Valley. Coming up from the Hollywood side, just before you get to the light at Mulholland there’s kind of a curve to the left and a curve to the right and then you’re at the light. And off to your left is like a canyon and there’s just wild brush that goes down, there’s no houses there. I was driving along, and I have no idea how he even knew it was me, but as I came around the curve to the left I saw just out of the corner of my eye two figures coming up out of the brush, which I thought was strange, so I looked over there and it was Craig. He looked a little different. Probably a little more—presentable is probably not the right word, but a little less wild. But there was some guy was with him; they both looked like guys who were living in bushes in the canyon. And I kept driving—I didn’t really recognize it was him at first, I just saw these two figures come up. And as I got to where the curve goes back to the right, I hear this voice screaming my name, and I look in the rearview mirror and it’s Craig standing there in the middle of Laurel Canyon screaming my name. And I, uh, I kept on going. I’ll tell you that right now: I kept on driving.
“I don’t make light of his situation,” he adds, “but at the time, when I heard him screaming I looked in the rearview mirror and I figured out who it was—the guy’s standing in the middle of the street, with other cars going by both ways, waving his arms and screaming my name at the top of his lungs. ‘Spider!’ I think he was calling, which was my nickname. I made the light and disappeared into the Valley and that was the last I saw of Craig.”