Taka Washi. Me. Apache War King. Jesus Kali Inca. Sun Druid.
Craig appears to have completed most of the work on the Apache and Inca albums sometime in 1971. The liner note manifesto on the back of the Apache album includes the date March 29th, 1971. According to one story, Craig had a meeting with Mike Curb—once his high school classmate, now the president of MGM Records—about releasing an album. Curb’s reputation was squeaky clean and ultra-conservative. Only recently he’d purged the label of 18 acts that he felt promoted or exploited drug use, including the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention. One can only imagine his reaction upon seeing Craig again, the once clean-cut class president now a wild-eyed acid guru who insisted he be called Maitreya. As the story has it, Curb ended the meeting immediately and had Maitreya forcibly removed from the building. Curb was not available for comment so this story continues to reside in the “unverified rumors” file.
With a major label release not in the cards, Craig set about pressing up the albums himself, starting with Apache, using the services of a company called Custom Fidelity, Inc. Located in a 12,000-square-feet two-story building on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, Custom Fidelity offered in-house mastering, cutting, pressing, design, typesetting and printing—everything you needed to make a record under one roof. Customers could walk in off the street and order up pressings of as few as 30 copies or as many as 5,000 in jackets printed with their own artwork or designed with the assistance of Custom Fidelity’s graphics department. In early 1972, Craig was one of those walk-in customers. Terry H. Moore, Custom Fidelity’s sound engineer, mastered the recordings in the company’s studio, and John Lyon, their chief graphics artist, typeset Craig’s bizarre rambling sleeve notes (“LSD is to Master of Infinity what wine was to the Piscean Age of Whore. Woe Man Man made sorrowful thru the Woman.”), and assisted him with the layout, which also incorporated titles and subtitles in Olde English font, photographs from his travels in South America and Yosemite, and additional hand-drawn illustrations and notations. (Although he is personally thanked on the back cover of Inca, when I contacted him in November 2015, Lyon denied any involvement in the artwork and requested no more contact be made.)
The Custom Fidelity Company office on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood where the Apache and Inca LPs were mastered and pressed in 1972.
The written notes scattered across each of the albums reveal much about Craig’s fragmented state of mind. While some of it is nearly impossible to decipher, on Apache he lays out his bizarre belief system in black and white. “Christ is Me and no one else,” he explains. He is the chosen one, Jesus Christ and the Maitreya Buddha in one; the reincarnation of Hitler, Gandhi, Paramahansa Yogananda, and maybe John F. Kennedy, too (even though, as Rafael pointed out to him, several of those people were still alive when Craig Smith was born). In the year 2000 all of mankind will recognize him as their King or the planet will be destroyed. “This is my Truth,” he insists. Not the Truth, his Truth. Perhaps the door of doubt was still open just a crack.
The album covers also reveal Craig to be an inveterate name-dropper. All of his celebrity friends from Frank Zappa to Andy Williams to Peggy Clinger to Gabor Szabo get a shout-out, along with famous musicians he admired but presumably didn’t know: John Lennon, Yoko Ono (“Lord and Lady Lennon”), Paul McCartney, Jimi Hendrix, Paul Butterfield, and Donovan, to name just a few. Pretty much every musician, producer or engineer who made a contribution also gets a mention somewhere among the thicket of words, even though Apache also bears the credit “All instruments and vocals by me.” Interesting too, Craig took the trouble to attribute all the correct songwriting and publishing credits on the labels. His diligence in naming names would prove extremely useful during the early stages of my search for him.
Another name crops up repeatedly in the Apache notes: “I love Cheryl Knickelbein. Beginning, middle and an end,” he states, obviously hoping this message would somehow reach her. Cheryl, he writes elsewhere, is Krishna to his Rama and thus they belong together. This appears to tie in with the various mentions of “Male Female Marriage” that crop up on both album sleeves, no doubt a repercussion of their unceremoniously abandoned wedding plans. “Woman and Man must marry to attain clear light of Aum nescience. Men touching each other is homosexual football go, pornography cum. Sex is bliss. The age of suffering is over whether you agree with Maitreya Guru at last or not.”
Akashic Records was the name Craig selected for his label, a term taken from Theosophy, and referring to a kind of mystical compendium or cosmic database containing the complete thoughts, memories and emotions of every individual who ever existed, past, present and future. Maitreya’s Akashic Records had a pyramid-shaped logo with the letters L, S and D at each corner on the outside, and A, U and M on the inside, and “Tantric Yoga” at its base. Inside the pyramid is a figure 8/infinity symbol enclosing the numbers 7 and 9, and the words “yang / male / yin / female.” The front cover artwork shows a blurry close-up negative exposure of Craig’s unsmiling bearded face, overlaid with some hand-drawn decorations, including a black widow spider in the center of his forehead, an Apache-style head band, and, chillingly, a patch over his right eye—an addition that could reference the injury he was rumored to have inflicted on his father. Around the face are symbols labeled for Buddha, Maitreya, Jesus, Zeus, Ikhnaten and Hitler, plus larger illustrations of the Sun and Moon, and a handwritten note “Rama + Krishna.” Beneath the album title is “Sound Track from Yosemite” and “Dedicated to Jimi Hendrix.”
Craig also felt compelled to define his music: “Renaissance Rock” was a term that appeared prominently on both the Apache and Inca albums.
The songs on Apache appear to have been compiled from at least four different sources. First, chronologically, are three songs from the unreleased Penny Arkade album recorded in late 1967: “Color Fantasy,” “Voodoo Spell,” and “Swim.” Then there are six tracks featuring Craig alone, accompanied by acoustic guitar. They appear to date from a session that took place in 1970, at the same time he recorded and pressed up the song “Cheryl.” While the packaging and liner notes clearly reflect the discord within Craig’s mind at the time, there’s barely a trace of it in these beautifully crafted songs.
“Ice and Snow” opens the album, a gorgeous, delicate love ballad: “Clear as the wintery weather, stars glisten in your eyes.” It’s followed by the impossibly desolate “Black Swan,” another eloquently poetic song: “Black swan gliding / through a quiet lagoon / Ivy and grass glisten silently / with the frost of morning.” Though couched in flowery prose, the song speaks volumes of the loneliness Craig must have been feeling as, one by one, his friends and family disengaged themselves from his world.
“Music Box” (a.k.a. “Music Box Sound”), “One Last Farewell” and “Walkin’ Solo” (the song that had so impressed Chris Ducey back in ’65) are also beautifully rendered. It’s only on “Silk and Ivory” that the focus appears to blur, just a little. It’s another beautiful love song, but one can sense Craig, the reverb cranked up in his headphones, becoming too deeply submerged in the moment, as if he may never surface for air. Like many of the other acoustic songs, this one calls out for a fuller arrangement: harmonies, electric guitars, even orchestration; here it’s merely a demo, a first sketch of a never-to-be-rendered masterpiece.
The oddest track on the album is “Salesman,” which consists of Craig and Mike Love having a conversation in the studio while listening to a playback of that song over the speakers. On the recording they discuss Love adding some backing vocals to the track. Mike tries out a few vocal lines and tells Craig, “You and I and Brian can do it when he gets back from Big Bear in, like, two days. And tonight or tomorrow we’ll put on the flute with Charles Lloyd.” Presumably this overdub session with Brian Wilson never happened. It’s not known when this version of “Salesman” was recorded. It doesn’t sound like the Penny Arkade, and Chris Ducey and Don Glut have no recollection of recording this song, so maybe Craig tracked a version with different musicians sometime between 1969 and 1971. (Mike Love’s management declined my requests for an interview for this book.)
Medical studies have found that listening to or playing music can ease the symptoms of schizophrenia, and certainly this appears to have been the case with Smith. Cheryl Starsong, Dyane Quinn and Rafael Espericuata all observed that when he was playing his music, Craig appeared focused, positive and essentially “normal.” Much of the music on Apache and Inca was written and recorded under these conditions, including artfully constructed songs like “Ice and Snow,” “One Last Farewell,” and “Sam Pan Boat.” Other than the singularly haunted atmosphere that pervades these recordings, there are no obvious indications that the music is the work of someone suffering from a serious mental illness. But as Smith’s symptoms worsened, it became difficult for him to stay focused for any length of time, and his musical abilities began to diminish. The calm and clarity his music had always provided rapidly receded, replaced by a growing disorientation, and the creative process, which had once flowed so naturally for him, became a confused and often frightening struggle.
That feeling of disorientation is readily apparent on the two songs that bookend side two of Apache, “Love is our Existence” and “Revelation,” which are almost certainly the last tracks recorded for the album. On both, Craig sings through a rotating Leslie speaker, giving his voice a gurgling, underwater effect. He sounds like a drowning man, flailing desperately and ineffectually against the current. Swimming beneath the vocals are a clumsily strummed acoustic guitar, and some crude, out-of-sync bass and drums, most likely played by Craig himself via some slapdash overdubbing. “Love is our Existence” is the more structured of the two songs, being a rewrite of the old Chris & Craig-era song “Century of Distance,” with new “love and peace” lyrics: “Peace offers no resistance / Once we find that love is our existence.” On “Revelation,” though, the melody and chords sound improvised on the spot, a hastily thrown together platform for the song’s message—which comes not from Craig Smith but directly from Maitreya Kali. “Someone’s out to get you,” he sings, “I think it’s gonna be me, for my name is Maitreya.” “Revelation” (a.k.a. “Revelationed Trip,” according to the lyric sheet) is the most extreme manifestation of Smith’s madness, a place where schizophrenia and psychedelia collided and imploded into a confusing blur. As well as presenting some of the more cosmic elements of Maitreya’s worldview—including references to meditation and astrology—the lyrics also address the darker forces he was battling within himself:
Leave behind the shadows,
Terror lurks at night,
Demons haunt the darkness,
Find the light.
For all its out-of-focus confusion, “Revelation” was clearly an important song to Craig. He also released it as a seven-inch single on Akashic Records (as “Revelations”—plural) on the B-side of Zappa’s favorite, “Voodoo Spell.” According to the label, “Revelations” was “co-produced by Maitreya Kali and Steven Douglas,” suggesting that Craig might have reconnected with his old Capitol Records producer for the “Revelation” / “Love is Our Existence” session—although the bizarre, amateurish nature of those two tracks makes that scenario rather unlikely. Only one copy of the single has ever surfaced.
“I’d die for this Album so Bless it.”
The Inca album appears to have been pressed in the summer of 1972, several months after Apache. In one of the typed inserts, Craig mentions that it is his 27th birthday. That would have been on April 25, 1972. A handwritten notation thanking Custom Fidelity’s graphic artist John Lyon is dated July 10th, 1972. While the cover artwork of Inca gives it the appearance of a standalone release, it only appears to have been issued as part of a double-album set paired with Apache, the two records housed back to back in a lavish gatefold jacket with their separate artwork pasted onto the inside and outside panels. Craig spared no expense on the double-album pressing, which included three different printed inserts, including a foldout poster of him posed at the ruins of the Pachacamac temple in Peru, as well as a bizarrely annotated lyric sheet. Some copies had additional paraphernalia inserted, things like joss sticks and feathers.
For Inca Craig came up with a new record label name, United Kingdom of America Records, with a crown-themed logo and the slogan “10,000 years”—presumably a reference to his future reign as the planet’s monarch. “Like a Holy Scripture Love fills this Album,” his notes begin. “It is composed of songs and dialogue.” Indeed, all the songs on side two of the album are interspersed with dialogue taped on his travels in South America, mostly snippets of casual conversation with young women. This time the album’s front cover featured a grainy photo of a church he’d visited in Ecuador, along with the same Olde English type as Apache, additional handwritten notes and an illustration of his Froggie character, smoking and intoning “Aum.”
The back cover of Inca shows more photos of Craig’s travels in Central and South America, including two with Pocha Cárdenas (“Miss Peru 1970,” according to Craig’s scrawled caption; she was actually a runner-up). The liner notes appear as short bursts of free-associated words arranged in long columns, and there’s a stronger undercurrent of violence than on Apache. Along with repeated exhortations to “Bow or die,” he writes: “Death Swords are in order. Guns will do. In Revenge for Jesus Blood. Atahualpa and Jesus were Witches. King of the Inca. Son Worship is Swords. I am King!” The word ‘punk’ also crops up several times: “Punk grow Beard. Nature. Ornate. Bow. Magic is Love not Punk.”
Amid the usual cryptic notes is an appeal for “financial contributions” to “The Satya Sai Maitreya Kali Foundation for the Advancement of Meditation,” which could be sent to Maitreya c/o Hal Kant at his Beverly Hills office. “Do not delay, or you may not have a Planet at Peace.” Whether Craig succeeded in eliciting any donations is not known, but in the early ’90s, Rich Haupt, a record dealer from Texas, contacted Kant in an attempt to reach Craig and connect with copies of the records. Kant was cordial, mentioning that Smith had written a song that appeared on an Andy Williams Christmas album, alluding to an undisclosed illness, and explaining that he was now in charge of his “trust.” Beyond that, though, his response was pointed: stop looking for Craig Smith. Convinced it was a dead end, Haupt abandoned his search.
The fact that Smith’s songwriting royalties were being paid into a trust fund administered by Kant raises some interesting questions. Presumably this arrangement had been instigated through legal channels by his family after Craig’s mental breakdown on the grounds that he was incapable of dealing with his own financial affairs. But when had this arrangement begun? And how much of the money he earned from his music was actually reaching Craig or being used to help him in some way? That’s not to suggest there was necessarily any impropriety, but in light of later events these questions seem especially pertinent.
Moving on to the musical content of Inca, side one opens with three Penny Arkade tracks, “Lights of Dawn” and “Thesis” (both written by Chris Ducey, who is duly credited on the label copy) and the epic “Not the Freeze” (retitled “Knot the Freize” [sic] on the label and insert), a medley or suite of song pieces written by Ducey and Smith. In the notes, Craig says, “Christopher Ducey (reincarnated Christopher Columbus) and I […] wrote ‘Not the Freeze’ rock opera together in July of 1965.” Craig’s timeline is a little off there—the two didn’t meet until October of that year, and didn’t write “Not the Freeze” until 1967.
The side ends on a spooky note with Craig singing a short song about the birth of Jesus called “Jesus Owns.” We have no way of knowing for sure, but I suspect this is a much earlier recording—perhaps a demo for a proposed Andy Williams Christmas song, dating from around the same time as “Christmas Holiday.” Although Craig sings the lyrics in third person, the implication, I suppose, is that the song is about him. The song ends suddenly with the lines, “Though the world’s been changing, in my heart I feel the same.” It’s followed by a long, drawn-out “Aum” sound, most likely a kangling, a horn instrument played during Tibetan Buddhist rituals such as funerals. The instrument is fashioned out of a human femur, most often taken from a murderer or someone who suffered a violent death. The same mournful, foghorn-like sound, possibly recorded by Craig while on his travels, opens and closes the Apache album.
Rafael gives some insight into the importance of the “aum” sound to Craig. “As we were hitchhiking we would often meditate,” he explains. “Sometimes when we were meditating—or even if we weren’t—a funny thing would happen. If a plane would fly overhead, he would think of the sound of the plane as the universe saying ‘aum.’ We’d often chant ‘aum’ along with that phenomenon happening. It was kind of nice.”
Side two of Inca opens with that same “aum,” followed by three solo acoustic songs, likely dating from the same 1970 session as those on the Apache album. “Sam Pan Boat,” written or at least completed during the period he was living with Cheryl, is one of Craig’s most memorable and affecting songs, built around some elegant guitar picking, its mystical lyrics evidently inspired by his travels in the East.
Magical Sam Pan boat journeys through the Sun
Touching the amber light inside everyone
Gem-laden palaces, treasures that abound
Sitar and koto play soothing tranquil sounds.
“Fearless Men” was clearly inspired by the war that was still raging in Vietnam at the time. One of Craig’s more ambitious songs, the arrangement and the lyrics emphasize the contrast between war and peace, while pointing an accusing finger at the complacency of the American public, distracted and subdued by stocks and bonds, football, and alcohol. Craig’s self-image is projected into the song too: he stands on a hill, dressed all in white, an enlightened savior figure observing the carnage around him. One lyric seems to address, obliquely, his split personality, the banishment of Craig in place of Maitreya: “Ask my name / It’s silly to reply / For you are surely I / And you’re gone away.”
Next comes what sounds like some pillow talk between Craig and a girlfriend. In the liner notes he refers to being in bed with a girl called Karen (“Karen was 16 now she’s 18”) at the famous Sportmen’s Lodge, an upscale hotel, popular with Hollywood celebrities, located just a few blocks down the street from the Smith family home.
“Cheryl” follows, a sweet, unabashed love song: “Here by you / life is grand / we make two people in love / peace is our plan.” That sweet and innocent tone continues with the Penny Arkade’s “Country Girl,” before the side ends with another acoustic number, “Old Man.” A looped recording of swirling bagpipes leads into the song itself, blending artfully with Craig’s finger-picked acoustic guitar intro. “Neil Young I wrote this in ’68,” notes Craig on the insert, referring to Neil’s song of the same title and similar theme. However, Craig’s song is closer in tone to Bryan MacLean’s “Old Man” on Love’s Forever Changes. Craig encounters an old man sitting beneath a tree and goes on to question him about the meaning of life. “Love and pain are one and the same,” the old man teaches him. “And that’s what made his wise heart sing.” The song is also interesting in that it mentions the relationship between a mother and child, perhaps in reference to his own conflicted relationship with his mother: “Love is a mother caring for her children / Pain when the child must go away.”
In the dialogue that follows on the record, Craig is heard having a conversation about a tattoo he wants to get, a black widow spider on his forehead: “Right on my third eye,” he tells somebody. He seems to be choosing a design: “No, not the fuzzy-wuzzy, that’s too much. I’d like a clean, sort of symbolic—you know, like an Aztec would do, except better, of a—I mean they couldn’t cope with the black widow. That’s why their generation is dead.” More on that later.
The album ends with an eight-second snippet of a song called “King,” clearly directed at Cheryl: “Well, if I’m the king, you know you’re my queen forever.”
Around this time, Don Glut remembers getting a call from Craig out of the blue. “Around early 1973, Craig phoned me and told me that a local FM station was going to play ‘Not the Freeze.’ I tuned in and listened. The DJ, obviously not into the piece, cut it off after only a minute or two.” Don was a little disconcerted when the DJ announced that the track was by not the Penny Arkade but simply “Maitreya.”
So what did Craig Smith hope to accomplish with the Apache and Inca albums? On one level, maybe he really believed that these records would bring his music and his message to a wider audience; that these privately pressed editions might inspire a bona fide major label release that would bring his vision to the people of the world, who would then bow down before their Master.
But I believe there’s another level of consciousness happening here: reality. The nagging voice of reality must have been gnawing all the time at the obstructive tangle of delusions that was tying Craig’s mind in knots. Because, unless they were groping on the sidewalk for their dropped car keys, no one was bowing to Maitreya. Not even Cheryl Knickelbein, his soul mate and future Queen to his King. She’d dumped him. In those increasingly rare moments of clear reflection, Craig would have been painfully aware of all this. He knew who he was, where he’d been, and where he might be going.
Despite what astral beings may have told him in his family’s backyard, he was not Maitreya Kali at all, he was Craig Smith from Studio City. And he was slowly losing his mind. Sinking beneath the waves of a cold black ocean.
What had always meant the most to Craig Smith throughout his life? Music. Music was who he was. Music was his only magic. And now he was beginning to lose even that. “Compiled over a Ten year period of Agony. I bring Music Thru a Dream. Magic is Me. Thru a Dream. Poor me.”
The music on Apache and Inca represented the sum total of Craig’s musical accomplishments, more or less. He knew he was losing his mind, just as surely as he’d lost his friends, his family and the girl he loved. This music might be the only music he’d ever make. These songs were likely the last he would ever write. Apache and Inca were Craig Smith’s last will and testament; his own personal Akashic Records; his last message to the world, sealed into a vinyl canister and pushed out into an ocean of darkness: This is who I am, this is who I was. “This is my Truth.”
“I’d die for this Album so Bless it.”