I’m walkin’ solo
Just like a song when you sing it all alone.
Suzannah Jordan lost track of Craig in 1968, shortly before he left on his travels. With the Pillory she’d had a recurring role on Peyton Place, and recorded half a dozen excellent tracks for A&M Records, all of which remained unreleased. She worked as a staff writer there through the early ’70s. Jim Ford recorded her song “Changing Colors” on his Harlan County album in 1969 and Crazy Horse cut “Rock and Roll Band” in 1973. As Sidney Jordan she recorded a single on MGM’s CoBurt subsidiary, “All God’s Mornings,” in 1970. She also found work as a backup singer, including a period on the road as one of Ike & Tina Turner’s Ikettes. “I was one of the few white Ikettes,” she recalls, “but unfortunately I couldn’t handle the violence that Ike was handing out to Tina. I couldn’t take it. The band would just sit around, but I didn’t last for long because I couldn’t stand watching her get beat up.”
In 1974 Suzannah relocated to the UK where she married Peter Banks, previously the guitarist in Yes and the Syn. Banks’ group Flash was in the process of dissolving so together they formed a new progressive rock band, Empire, with Suzannah—now using the name Sydney Foxx—as lead singer and co-songwriter. In 1977 she and Banks were in Los Angeles attempting to land a deal for the band when they ran into Craig.
“We were living at the Tropicana,” recounts Suzannah. “We’d just come back from England and we were signing with Zappa’s label, Herb Cohen and those guys. We were walking down the street one day and this bum from the street, with his hair all natty, came walking up and I looked in his face and I said, ‘Oh my God! Craig!’ He said, ‘Yeah?’ I said, ‘Suzannah!’”
Suzannah was shocked to see her old friend in a state of obvious homelessness, but Craig appeared to be fine mentally, as far as she could tell. No spider tattoo. No mention of Maitreya. “We took him into the hotel room and he was quite coherent,” she remembers. “I didn’t get to find out what happened. We talked about the old times and the band and Chris. I never felt fearful of him. I never saw any sign of mental illness. I kind of just got the feeling like maybe he took too many acid trips or something and hadn’t come back—that kind of thing—which had happened to people in L.A. But he didn’t seem dangerous or mentally ill, just homeless, like a street person. He seemed happy enough; he didn’t seem distressed or manipulative, like a con man, like some people are. He didn’t need alcohol—none of that. We gave him a meal and I said, ‘Come back, stop by.’ But I never saw him again, just that one day.
“Of course, it’s kind of haunted me all these years,” says Suzannah, who continues to write and record under the name Sidonie Jordan. “What the hell happened? Because he was the last person you’d feel would have mental problems. He was such a bright spark—so charismatic, so happy! He was a real sweetheart. But high achievers like Craig sometimes end up like that. He was like a golden boy. He had so much promise and he did so well in the early part of his career that later maybe he felt a failure to his family?”
David Jackson, Craig’s friend and colleague from the Good Time Singers, also encountered Craig during this period. Jackson, who was still based in Los Angeles, had gone on to enjoy a successful career as a songwriter and a session musician. “I ran into him at the Farmers Market on Vine Street,” he remembers. “He came up to me and I didn’t recognize him. The smile was gone—which is part of the reason I didn’t recognize him, it took me a minute. He told me that he had been traveling and he’d been beaten. He said he was homeless and he was not in good shape, and he said something about being in trouble or causing trouble. I said, ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ and I turned around to pay my bill. When I turned back around, he’d disappeared.”
Black swan moving through grey curtains of mist Watching the dawn for the rising sun While the world still slumbers
In most civilized countries, the mentally ill are cared for, either through state-funded institutional care or outpatient services. But not in the United States, particularly since the massive defunding of public welfare programs that began in the Reagan era and continues to this day. With no social safety net to help them, and no other recourse, hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people end up living—and dying—on the streets of America.
Craig Smith was just one of them. There were short periods in low-rent apartments, seedy crash pads and fleapit motels, but, as best as I can ascertain, for more than 30 years he was mostly homeless.
Throughout that time, with no home to call his own, Craig stayed close to the home he once knew, wandering the streets of Studio City and North Hollywood—the same streets he walked down and played on as a child.
Patsy Clinger still lived in the area and remembers seeing Craig on several occasions in the late ’70s and early ’80s, either walking along the street or waiting at a bus stop, and looking increasingly unhealthy and disheveled. Around 1981 or ’82, she was having dinner with her family, including sister Debra, at Tiny Naylor’s on the corner of Ventura Boulevard when she spotted Craig. “He was sitting in the little overflow area and I said to my husband, ‘I know that’s Craig Smith. I’m sure of it.’ And I was going to go over and say something, and I thought, Oh boy. Should I? I was apprehensive, but all of a sudden we got eye contact. He looked at my eyes, I looked at his. He got up from the table, he walked over and he said, ‘Are you Patsy Clinger?’ And I said, ‘I sure am. How are you, Craig?’”
Craig joined them at their table and they talked for a while. He had gained some weight. His hair had thinned out, but he was still wearing it in the style of the Beatles. He also had a beard. Patsy noticed that he had on the same velvet Nehru jacket he’d worn to her sister Melody’s wedding more than a decade earlier. It was now grubby and frayed. They made small talk. He asked about her family, and, intriguingly, mentioned he’d been doing some recording. “He was coherent,” remembers Patsy. “He was kind, he was respectful. He didn’t ask anything of me. But even though he was there, he was far off. He had that glazed-over look. But the fact that he recognized me—that had been a lot of years!”
“He was really not himself,” remembers Debra Clinger. “He was not the same person that I remember him being. Patsy was the one that recognized him. He was pretty disheveled, pretty bad, very dirty—just sad, really sad.”
It was in the early ’80s that Jim Roup began to first see him around the neighborhood in Studio City. “I was working at St. Michael and All Angels Church Day School up in Coldwater Canyon,” recalls Jim, “and would see Craig occasionally standing by the church during the day. He might’ve been listening to the kids taking piano lessons inside, or the church organist practicing for the Sunday services. He looked a bit disheveled with a fat belly and a Beatle haircut. I recognized him from walking around Studio City and seeing him on the bus.”
The church’s Reverend Stevens didn’t like the look of Craig and instructed Jim to tell him to move along if he saw him again hanging around the school or the church. But Jim never did have occasion to do that.
Ken Morgan, who you may recall as the kid brother of Craig’s childhood friend Jeff, remembers running into Craig in 1985 at the Kirkwood Bowling Alley where Ken was working at the time. The bowling alley was part of Jerry’s Famous Deli, a bar and restaurant on Ventura Boulevard, walking distance from the Smith family home. “I didn’t recognize him at first,” says Ken. “I couldn’t tell it was him. He looked like he’d just got hit in the head or something because he had a big lump on his forehead. Then somebody told me, ‘It’s Craig Smith.’ I talked to him and told him who I was. He just said hello. It wasn’t a ‘long time, no see’ thing. We just said hi and stuff like that. I said, ‘I can’t believe that’s you!’”
Craig was now 40 years old, and from his appearance it was obvious that he was homeless. Could the lump on his forehead have had something to do with the removal of the spider tattoo? Craig came into the bowling alley a few more times after that, once with another homeless man from the neighborhood called Bradley White. “Bradley was kind of a bizarre guy,” says Ken. “Everybody knew him. He’d sometimes wear women’s shoes. He ended up getting murdered. Craig came in with him one time at the same time—I don’t know if they were together or not.”
Bradley was one of a small tribe of homeless men who sometimes hung together in Studio City at the time. Another was Russ Turner, a prodigiously talented pianist who’d worked with Frank Sinatra, Smokey Robinson, Martha Reeves and Boz Scaggs, and written arrangements for Buddy Rich and Lainie Kazan before a serious alcohol problem sent his life off the rails. The parking lot of Hughes Market on Ventura and Coldwater Canyon Boulevard, and a vacant lot across the street from there, were gathering spots for Bradley, Russ, and other hard-drinking transients like Johnny Bird and Bucky. The street behind Jerry’s Famous Deli and the bowling alley was another. Brian Lally was a bartender at Jerry’s in the mid-’80s and sometimes hung out with them after hours, drinking and taking drugs. “Except for Russ, who was dirty and missing a few teeth, they were pretty cleaned up,” Lally remembers, “but then they would drink too much and go wild. A couple of the guys had cars and went to the Laundromat. They slept in their cars. Back then you could park on the street behind Jerry’s Famous Deli, which was a meeting point for those guys. There was a street back there and you could park all night and nobody would bother you. That’s when they had the Queen Mary, which was a transvestite bar, a singing female impersonator place right off of Whitsett. There were a lot of hustlers in the alley back there. It was a strange time in Studio City back then.”
Only the walls of Jerry’s Famous Deli separated the Studio City outsiders from the Hollywood insiders. “A lot of musicians and famous people were coming in the bar when I was bartending,” remembers Brian. “It was a real happening place at the time, from Bob Dylan to Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, David Letterman—at that time in the ’80s they all came in to eat. John Candy was at the bar, Michael Keaton, Tom Hanks, Jeff Goldblum, Al Jarreau; Bobby Womack was a regular there. Lisa Marie Presley came in when she was 18, and she looked just like her father so I served her. Brian Setzer was sitting there talking to Lisa Marie about rockabilly. She didn’t tip me, so when she came back I told her to get out. That was kind of what the bar was like at the time. Bradley was up and down the street back then, and the guy who owned the car wash on Fulton and Ventura would leave the outside light on in the back of the car wash so Bradley could read before he went to sleep. So it was like a small town. It was just a different world not that many years ago. Bradley always had a book with him, and he was always wearing a knee-length denim coat with like lambskin on the inside, and a pair of pumps.”
Bradley’s father was Robert G. White, a Hollywood screenwriter who’d worked on some of the old Charlie Chan movies. Bradley had buzzed around the fringes of the movie industry like an angry mosquito since the ’60s, an outsider persistently trying to find a way inside. Like countless other dreamers, he had a pet project he’d been trying to get made for years. One time at Lally’s apartment he got on the phone to Michael Landon’s production company and demanded to speak to Landon about his project. When the receptionist wouldn’t put him through, Bradley screamed obscenities at her: “Don’t you know who I am?” he yelled. “I’m fucking Bradley White and you’ll rue the day you crossed me!” Bradley had one simple ambition, which he explained to Brian, and anyone else who’d listen: “I just want to produce my project, and then dance on top of a piano on the Tonight Show in a pair of high heels.”
Further outside than even this tribe of rank outsiders was Craig Smith. He would have crossed paths with Bradley and the gang on the street, but their interactions were minimal. There was a social hierarchy even among the homeless that marked Craig as an outsider because of his mental condition. Increasingly withdrawn and uncommunicative, he was a pariah even among pariahs. Bradley, Russ, Johnny and the rest were there for the party. They gathered together to drink and take drugs, to pool their limited resources, and to protect each other. Brian Lally regularly spent time with them from 1984 until 1988, but never once did he see Craig in their company. Craig was invariably alone. From the early ’80s onwards, there’s no evidence that he socialized with anyone at all. He appeared to live inside his own head, in a kind of self-imposed solitary confinement.
Some of the other Studio City transients showed a great deal of resourcefulness when it came to their living situation. Brian Lally still laughs when he tells of some of their exploits. “This wasn’t Skid Row, it was Studio City,” he explains. “Over on Whitsett Avenue, across from the golf course, there was a string of five or six empty houses. And, again, it was a different time and they didn’t put a fence around them the whole time. So the houses were abandoned and so you had all these guys—Bradley and Russ and Bucky and Johnny and there were other homeless guys all over there. They’d broken into the houses, and they’re great old Valley homes which have brick built-in barbecues in the back and swimming pools. So these guys are back there living the life of Riley! They were barbecuing, they were drinking, they had boom boxes going—it was incredible what these guys got into! There are a lot of homeless people that have mental problems, but these guys were just drunks and they would see a situation and they would just capitalize on it. It was crazy and it still makes me laugh that they had this row of houses. There must have been a dozen of them in the pools, drinking, with the barbecue going. Right in the middle of a street of very expensive homes—that was the whole weird thing about it. Finally the cops ran them out, but for a while it was just insane!”
The living wasn’t always so easy. Many times they’d set up camp under the Laurel Canyon overpass at the L.A. River. That’s where Russ and Johnny were one night in August 1989, along with a few other friends, including 32-year-old Rocco Froio. Some of them had been shooting heroin. According to Turner, who later described the incident in a book he wrote with his mother, Wings Born Out of Dust, Froio was already dead from an overdose when Russ arrived on the scene. Rather than call police or paramedics, Johnny and another guy, Paul, dragged Rocco’s body up to street level and dumped it in the bushes. The coroner ruled the death to be an accidental overdose, but Rocco’s father, Rick Froio, a music industry executive, suspected foul play and set about finding who killed his son. He placed a sign at the place where Rocco’s body was found asking for information, and roamed the area asking people if they saw anything. His persistence paid off. Witnesses came forward, and John Bird was charged with murder and the sale and transportation of heroin. Prosecutors accused Bird of shooting up Rocco with a lethal dose of heroin while he slept. Eventually the charge was reduced to involuntary manslaughter and Bird was sentenced to four years in prison.
Johnny Bird later died after being hit by a car on Ventura Boulevard, right in front of Jerry’s Famous Deli. “It’s a big curve right there,” says Brian Lally, “very dangerous for pedestrians. Cars come between 30 and 50 [MPH] around the corner, and they don’t see you. John would be drunk and he’d step off the curb and put both his hands out, with his palms up like he was saying ‘stop,’ and would just walk across that street. Every time, cars would be locking up their brakes. And then one night he did it in the rain, and that was the last time he ever did it.”
Bradley White never did get his project made. “When his mother passed away she left him some money,” recalls Lally. “I heard he got like twelve hundred dollars in cash, and then another $200 a month in a trust fund.” Bradley took his money, scored some heroin and checked into a hotel along with a pimp and a couple of other lowlifes. Reportedly he had a lot of money on him, and was bragging about it. By the end of the night, Bradley was dead and his money had disappeared—along with everyone else in the hotel room. His death on March 28th, 1988, was ruled a drug overdose, but word on the street was that the real cause was a quick, sharp blow to the head.
In January 1993, the Los Angeles Times wrote a story about Russ Turner, who was still homeless and playing piano for tips in a Studio City barbershop—after first “downing two malt liquors to take the edge off his aches.” The article quotes jazz singer Lainie Kazan, whom Turner had worked with in the ’70s as her musical arranger and conductor. “I love Russ Turner,” she said. “I prize him for his spirit and his soul. I still play the music he orchestrated for me years ago because it’s the finest work I have in my library. It’s broken my heart to have to sit by and watch Russ self-destruct. There are musicians all around the country waiting for Russ Turner to kick his habit and come back to us. We’re waiting with open arms.” The singer regularly helped out Turner with money, food and clothing, but to no avail. Turner died around 2003 without resuming his career in music. His body was reportedly found in a park frequented by homeless people.
Perhaps Craig Smith heard Russ Turner play as he walked past the barbershop near Laurel Canyon and Magnolia Boulevards. But there was no more music for Craig. Nor any Lainie Kazans to hand out care packages. No L.A. Times reporters to tell of his plight. Certainly no caring mother to help him write his book. It’s not known what contact, if any, Craig had with his family after his release from prison—the Smith family has maintained a policy of silence. Charles Gabriel Smith died on May 29th, 1978, at the age of 64 after suffering a stroke and aspiration pneumonia. Carole Smith outlived her husband by 20 years, passing away on April 18th, 1998 from respiratory failure caused by chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. She was 82.
Ken Morgan ran into Craig again in the early 2000s in Santa Monica. “I gave him money to get something to eat,” recalls Ken. “We sat and talked for a while, he and me and my friend, but he started rambling off at other stuff. You’d just run into him once in a while in different places. It was weird. I’d see him in the Valley and then sometimes I’d see him in Santa Monica. I saw him in the Third Street Promenade. He’d even go into Venice once in a while.”
Ken only vaguely remembers the subject of Craig’s “rambling off.” He thinks it may have had something to do with space aliens. More interesting is what it didn’t have anything to do with: Maitreya Kali.
Craig’s Maitreya Kali persona had been haphazardly, desperately constructed of eggshell-thin materials. Not surprisingly, it was soon trampled into brittle pieces by the marching feet of time, incarceration, and the punishing reality of day-today survival. All indications, too, are that Craig’s mental condition was continuing to deteriorate. At a certain point he may no longer have had the capacity to bear the heavy load of a full-time messiah complex. By the end of the 1970s Maitreya had slipped beneath the surface to join the chorus of other voices in his head.