After Armadillo broke up in 1969, Chris Ducey says, “I began the search for who I was as a solo artist.” Still signed as a writer to Beechwood Publishing, he recorded several publishing demos. One of his compositions, “The Jet Song (When the Weekend’s Over),” was recorded for Bell Records by the Groop. The song became a minor hit in Europe, and is now highly regarded by fans of sunshine pop.
Along with music, Ducey also continued to pursue acting. He played a character in a Beechwood-funded Off Broadway musical called Alison, a takeoff on Alice in Wonderland, which also included one of his songs. He also had walk-on parts in a couple of CBS-TV shows. Through his appearance in Alison he met a casting director for Hair and was invited to audition in New York for Hair, which was set to move to L.A. and open at the Aquarius Theater. Had Chris got the part, half of Heather and Her Feathers would have been reunited, but it was not to be. “I don’t think I read very well,” he confesses, “because I was on the plane the next day coming back home to L.A.!”
Fate was on his side though, because shortly afterwards he met Ed Millis: “A really nice guy from New Bern, North Carolina, a UNC grad and a very, very excellent piano player in the Elton John mode. We also had a very exceptional vocal blend, like with Craig and I. Ed had a very, very mellow round voice so we also had a great blend, I feel.”
Ducey and Millis bonded as a piano-guitar duo called Prairie Madness. “We made our instruments into an orchestra,” says Chris. “We mic’d piano and guitar big to fill the room. Two acoustic instruments and two voices turned into a big sound. We went at it sonically, not just musically. From the beginning that was our M.O.”
In late 1969 they became musical directors of an elaborate stage musical called Visigoths, which played at the Ivar Theater in Hollywood. The plot, which Chris describes as “futuristic, historical and semi-blasphemous,” played out in a “time bubble” set with wild visual designs, slide projectors, sound effects, quadraphonic sound and a live band. Visigoths ran for just four weeks, but was forced to close due to cost overruns. “It got bad reviews but the underground people loved it,” remarks Chris. “Al Jardine came and left with his jaw dropped because he dug it so much.”
Another musical celebrity who caught the show was Frankie Valli, who went on to cover its closing number, “Circles in the Sand.” Prairie Madness also cut the song for the first single in 1970, produced by Chad Stuart of Chad & Jeremy for Columbia.
Chris and Ed’s musical partnership continued through 1973, during which time they played shows on both coasts, and recorded a self-titled album for Columbia, produced by Matthew Fisher of Procol Harum. “It’s a very deep, melodic record,” says Chris. “For its time and place it fits in a certain box somewhere. I don’t know what box it is! It wasn’t very successful except for the college market. To this day I think it’s OK. I was proud of that record.”
Prairie Madness, ca. 1971, with Chris Ducey (left) and Ed Millis. (Photo courtesy Chris Ducey)
Chris and his wife Nancy, who by now had two children, had several encounters with Craig during 1970–71. “We’d heard he was back,” recounts Chris, “and I think perhaps I called him or he called me. Then he showed up at the house.”
Chris was disturbed by the changes he saw in his old musical partner. “He looked very…” He struggles to find the words. “His eyes had gone; the gaze he gave you was out there. He had a scraggly beard, as I recall, scraggly hair. His name wasn’t Craig anymore. His name was Maitreya,” he laughs uncomfortably. “We didn’t like that either.”
Craig began showing up uninvited at their house. Late one evening Chris and Nancy arrived home after a night out to find Craig there, haranguing their 13-year-old babysitter about being her personal Christ figure—“Basically as a way of trying to get into her pants,” reckons Chris. Not surprisingly the girl was distressed by the encounter, and Chris told Craig in no uncertain terms to leave. In the ensuing confrontation, Craig turned on Nancy, telling her, “You’re the Inca princess who got between me and Chris! You broke up Lennon and McCartney!”
After a second incident when he again showed up uninvited and acted bizarrely, they realized they needed to remove Craig from their lives. Craig’s mental state seemed to be another disturbing symptom of the dark atmosphere that was shrouding Los Angeles at the time. “A few months later Ed and I witnessed a double murder on Hollywood Boulevard,” recalls Chris. “Then there were fires all around the Valley.” This all added to the impetus to leave. In 1971, the Duceys pulled up stakes and relocated to San Anselmo. “I’ve never left Marin County since.”
After four years together, Chris and Ed’s musical partnership came to an end in late 1973. The following year Chris scored a record deal with Warner Brothers, which resulting in a 1975 solo album, Duce of Hearts. “It was kind of a mish-mash,” admits Chris, “but a lot of fun to make.” When the album failed to sell, he dropped out of the music business for a while and concentrated on writing and video. Like so many of Craig’s closest friends and collaborators, Ducey went on to a rewarding life in the arts and entertainment field. He has continued to write and record new music, as well as experimenting with his art in different visual and high-tech mediums. Always moving forward, he’s one of the smartest and most tirelessly creative people I’ve ever met.
After 1971, Chris never saw Craig Smith again. For the most part he banished him from his mind completely. “What a guy. I hope he’s OK,” he told me as we sat in his living room in 2002. “I don’t wish Craig any ill harm at all. I hope some people helped him. I hope he made fortunes on all his royalties in music and has the best medical care in the world and is living in some kind of pill heaven somewhere.”
Sadly though, that was not the case.
All of the people who’d known Craig Smith before he’d left on his travels were disturbed and ultimately heartbroken by the changes they saw in this once cheerful, outgoing and inordinately talented young person. Heather MacRae had known Craig longer than any of them, and had been the last to see him before he’d left on his travels. When he’d visited her in New York in 1968 she’d not found anything particularly unusual or concerning about the changes in his appearance or his interest in Eastern mysticism. But when she saw him next, about a year later, his personality had taken a much darker turn.
After her divorce from Gordon MacRae, Heather’s mother had married Ronald Wayne, the producer of the Gleason show. Heather was staying with them in Golden Beach, Florida, and Craig called and asked if he could visit them. “My mother at the time was doing The Jackie Gleason Show down in Florida, that’s why I was down there, and she and my stepfather allowed him to come and stay in the house with us,” she explains. “My family loved him.”
Heather MacRae, ca. 1972.
Heather went to Miami Airport to pick Craig up. She waited at the gate, but there was no sign of Craig. “He didn’t get off the plane. I waited until everybody got off the plane—in those days you could go meet the planes and wait right there where everybody got off the plane. All the flight attendants were coming off, and I said, ‘Look, is there anybody else on the plane? I have a friend named Craig…’ And they said, ‘Oh… Does he have a robe on?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, probably.’ They said, ‘Yes, he’s still on the plane and we can’t get him off.’”
Eventually someone was able to get Craig off the plane, but Heather was horrified when she saw her friend again. “He looked really, really crazy,” she says. “He was scary.”
Craig’s visit didn’t last long. “He was clearly really insane,” says Heather, “and my stepfather wanted him to leave the house because they woke up and he was standing over them with a knife. He was staying in one of the guest rooms and he was walking around in the middle of the night and he had a knife. My stepfather said, ‘I don’t want him here. He’s scaring me’—because he was really kind of scary.”
From Miami, Craig next headed to the Bahamas. “He went off to the Bahamas for a day trip and I think they kicked him off [the islands] because he was so scary. It’s such a sad thing because I don’t really know what happened to him. He lost his mind.”
The last time Heather saw Craig was in late June of 1972 when she was performing in Jesus Christ Superstar at the Los Angeles Amphitheater. “It was the opening of the Amphitheater, before it was enclosed,” she recalls. “It was outdoors at the time. Jesus Christ Superstar had been on Broadway and this was the premiere production that opened the whole Amphitheater season. We had trailers as our dressing rooms, and I remember there was a knock on my door and there was Craig. I was like ‘whoa,’ because I didn’t know how he got back there. I said, ‘Craig, how are you?’ I was trying to really just be calm about it, but he did scare me a little bit … He looked homeless and derelict, and he said he wanted to say hi to me. I don’t know how he knew I was there, but I guess he saw my name and just walked up. There really wasn’t much security.”
Craig’s appearance had deteriorated considerably since the last time she’d seen him. “He looked really scary—greasy hair and weird and skinny and strange and... scary. He was scaring me. He was scaring everybody, and just totally looked insane, and would say weird things, as I recall.”
Ted Neely, who was playing the starring role of Jesus, was also around. After giving him a long, intense look, Craig told him, “You’re gonna die on the cross.”
Heather was polite to Craig and attempted to humor him, but he was creeping everybody out. Eventually she had to have somebody escort him out. “I don’t think I ever saw him again. I might have seen him on Ventura Boulevard wandering around, but that was probably the last time that I ever really saw him that I recall.
“I’ve never heard anything about him since then,” she continues. “I just know that it was really such a shame because he was a totally, wonderfully gifted person. It might have been drugs, but, I mean, let’s face it, most of us in the ’60s did go through our drug period and take hallucinogens and stuff. But I never would have thought that Craig would’ve taken any drugs. He was just so—God! He was just so Mr. All-American! Not like a square or anything but just really… It just blew my mind. He was really one of my closest male friends ever.”