I live in the shadows
Silence my only company
In the year 2000 A.D., Craig Smith had not been crowned as King of the Planet, thereby saving Earth from destruction. That was about all I knew for sure in 2001 as I began my quest to find out more about this mysterious and obviously disturbed man and his music. I pored over the artwork of the Apache and Inca albums, deciphering clues that more often than not sent me chasing down blind alleys. But one by one, some of the pieces started to fall into place.
Before long, I had connected Craig’s name to a group called the Penny Arkade. That discovery led me to Don Glut, who, after listening to the Apache and Inca albums, confirmed that many of the tracks were actually Penny Arkade recordings dating from 1967. Don tracked down Chris Ducey and Bobby Donaho who helped to fill in more of the story, as did their one-time producer Mike Nesmith. These developments ultimately resulted in a full Penny Arkade CD, Not the Freeze, released by Sundazed Music in 2004.
But Craig himself remained elusive. When I contacted the Glen Campbell Music Group in 2001, I learned that he’d stopped by their office to collect song-writing royalties for “Country Girl” as recently as the mid-1990s. The lady there didn’t want to elaborate, but apparently some of the employees were a little spooked by his visits. Nevertheless, she seemed to regard Craig in a kindly way, and was impressed when I revealed more of his songwriting portfolio. She agreed to forward a letter from me to Craig’s last known address. I watched my mailbox hopefully for several weeks, but never received a reply.
In 2004, after exhausting all possible leads, I turn to a private investigator for help. His research confirms what I already knew: that Craig Smith was alive and most probably moving in and out of homelessness. Craig had no credit history under that name, a strong indication that he was living on the fringes of society—no loans, no credit cards, no automobile or property ownership. There was no record that he ever legally changed his name to Maitreya Kali. The investigator also found no criminal record for him. It will be another ten years before I find this information to be inaccurate.
The P.I. also provides me with a list of addresses associated with Craig during the previous 25 years. Along with the family house on Woodbridge Street, there are several apartments in the Studio City and North Hollywood area. I later drive by each of these addresses. All are rundown, low-rent places; all are in the vicinity of North Hollywood Park. Driving past the park in 2004, I spot a familiar silhouette in the distance and hit the brakes; it looks like Craig in the photo outside the temple at Pachacamac on the Apache poster. The car behind me honks, and, seeing no available parking spots, I drive on. Probably just my mind playing tricks on me.
More and more, I feel like I am chasing a ghost. Every time I feel like giving up, a new lead materializes—only to disappear like smoke when I reach out to grasp it.
In August 2004, the investigator comes up with a recent address for Craig—just a month old, in fact. Between May and July 2004, I learn, Craig was residing at the Mark Twain Hotel on Wilcox Avenue, just south of Hollywood Boulevard—about two blocks from the site of the Jade Café. It’s a cheap, downtrodden hotel frequented by transients and the very poor (it has since been renovated). I call the front desk and speak to the clerk, who has only limited command of English. He confirms that Craig had lived there but checked out just a few weeks ago.
“He is a very good person,” the man tells me, “but he is only 50/50—mental problems.”
In an encouraging development he reveals that Craig is also “very nice guitarist,” who sometimes plays his guitar on Hollywood Boulevard, collecting donations from passersby. I leave a message and a phone number to be passed on to Craig should he return, explaining that I want to help him out. The man takes down my number but says he doubts Craig will call back, because, again, “he is only 50/50.” He also re-emphasizes that Craig “is a very good and nice person.” He promises to pass my message to Craig if he sees him and to encourage him to call me collect.
Of course, I never hear from him. Once again I’m left grasping blindly at empty space.
Much later, in 2014, I visit the archives of Los Angeles Superior Court in downtown L.A. and access Craig’s files. As a homeless person, Smith had numerous encounters with law enforcement as a matter of course. He was cited for a number of infractions and misdemeanor violations over the years, and a look through these gives us a small window into his life during the 1990s and 2000s (their misdemeanor records only go back to the late 1980s). It makes for depressing reading, falling into a familiar pattern of a citation, failure to appear, an arrest warrant being issued, arrest after a period of time, an inability usually to pay even the smallest fine, and then time in county jail.
On February 23rd, 1990, Smith was cited for having an open container of alcohol in public, an infraction. Surprisingly, in 1991 he was arrested in Hollywood and charged with driving under the influence of alcohol. His blood alcohol level was 0.13. A charge of reckless driving was added for good measure. A couple of months later he was charged with a hit and run offense in Burbank. So not only was Craig drinking again, for a period of time he also had access to a vehicle, although court documents suggest that he had neither a license nor insurance. More missing puzzle pieces. Smith failed to appear in court and two separate arrest warrants were issued. After evading law enforcement for a couple of years, Craig was picked up, and ultimately served 12 days in county jail on the drunk driving charge and was again placed on probation. The hit and run charge, for which he also failed to appear, caught up with him at around the same time. After pleading no contest, he was sentenced to nine days and credited for time served.
In May 1995 Craig was charged with soliciting or agreeing to engage in an act of prostitution. Smith failed to appear for his arraignment in Van Nuys Courthouse, where he’d been sentenced to prison more than 20 years earlier. The charge caught up with him ten months later and he spent some time in custody while the case went through the courts. In February 1997 the charges were dismissed. Did Craig resort to prostitution? We don’t know. Presumably he did whatever he needed to do to survive on the streets.
He stayed out of trouble until November 1999 when he was arrested on a petty theft violation, probably shoplifting. Predictably he failed to show for his arraignment in Van Nuys, and a bench warrant was issued with bail set at $20,000. A few months later Smith pleaded guilty and was fined $100 plus court costs. On this occasion he appears to have paid up.
Further misdemeanors on file speak to his homelessness. In August 2002 he was charged with camping or living in a public park in Santa Monica. Needless to say, he skipped out on his arraignment hearing, and it wasn’t until two years later that he faced the Santa Monica Courthouse judge. For the grave offense of sleeping in the park, Craig was sentenced to 16 days in county jail and a fine of $100. He’d already spent 11 days in custody and was credited the additional five days for “good time/work time.” The $100 fine was waived by the court.
Santa Monica cops caught up with Craig again in December 2004 when he was cited for sitting or lying down in the entrance to a downtown building between the hours of 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. In other words: sleeping in a doorway at night. This one dragged out for over two years. The defendant failed to appear “without sufficient excuse,” and a bench warrant was issued. In January 2007 Smith appeared in court and the charge was dismissed. Craig’s next arrest wasn’t until April 2011, another petty theft charge. After the usual failure to appear and bench warrant routine, he pleaded no contest and was sentenced to 30 days. The county jail would at least provide three meals a day and a roof over his head, which may have been better than his living situation on the outside.
The late Eric Caiden used to run the Hollywood Book & Poster shop on Hollywood Boulevard, not far from the Mark Twain Hotel. He used to see Craig on the street there in the early 2000s. “He always had this really scary expression on his face,” Eric told me. “When I went to the post office sometimes he’d be outside there or hanging out across the street from the post office at that transient hotel there, the Mark Twain. I used to see people standing out front of there that were talking to themselves and were just real scary-looking, passing through or whatever. It was one of those places that—well, I’d rather sleep on the streets than go in that place, let’s put it that way.”
It was only after Eric saw pictures of Craig later that he recognized him. “I had no idea who he was. I wouldn’t go up and talk to him or anything. He didn’t seem to be talking to anybody, just staring at people and hanging out in front. A lot of times it looked to me like he didn’t really know where he was. I don’t think he ever had any idea what he was doing or where he was. It was really sad. I mean, obviously the mental illness just totally destroyed him, just took him apart.”
Ric Menck, a friend and fellow musician and music historian, was another person who later identified Craig as the homeless person he’d seen on the streets. “I’ve been living in Studio City since 1997,” he told me. “I saw Craig Smith hundreds of times but I had no idea who he was. He was sleeping in the laundry room of our apartment building for about a week until our landlord kicked him out.”
Perhaps Craig was reliving older, happier memories as he roamed the streets of his old neighborhood. The laundry room where he sometimes slept was on Moorpark Street, about a block from where Craig used to visit the Clinger sisters and sing with them in their home.
Finding the ending becomes the beginning Kaleidoscope of change is due
It’s not until 2010 that I make contact with Jim Roup, the Studio City resident who had sighted Craig on the streets numerous times since the early ’80s. Every neighborhood in America—certainly in Southern California—seems to have at least one “homeless guy” who becomes a familiar part of the local landscape. In my neighborhood it’s a fellow called Tony. In part of Studio City, it was Craig, although sightings of him were irregular and infrequent.
“I’ve seen Craig at various times for the last 30 years,” Jim told me. “He has always looked disheveled and homeless-looking. He put on some weight and has lost some hair on his head. Sometimes he has a kind of Beatle haircut, when his hair is clean. He just stands around. I’ve never seen him talk to anybody. Once every six months I will run into him on Ventura Boulevard or on a bus maybe. I didn’t know who he was until my friend Jeff at the Texaco station pointed out he was on records. Then I find out he went to school with the Morgan brothers and was a local Studio City dude.”
Being a ’60s music fan, Jim’s curiosity was piqued and he began to attempt to engage Craig in conversation. “At first he did not want to talk to me at all,” he recalls. “He would walk away from me. Then later he became more talkative when I would bring up people in the music business he knew.”
Before long, I was receiving emails from Jim every few months, reporting on his or his friends’ occasional encounters with Craig on the street. Craig was not always responsive, but over time he appeared to become more comfortable with the attention, on one occasion even autographing Jim’s Good Time Singers LP. He also mentioned playing state fairs with the group. Occasionally he’d accept some money from Jim, but on only one occasion did he ever ask for any. At various times he chatted briefly about some of the musicians he’d worked with, including Jim Gordon, Hal Blaine, Glen Campbell, Andy Williams, Mike Post and Ed Cobb. “He told me once he had a falling out with Brian Wilson at Capitol over something,” recounts Jim. “He also talked about doing the record with Heather MacRae and how he was a Laurel Canyon friend of Richie Furay. I told him one time ‘Salesman’ was a good song. He told me, ‘No, I don’t think it was very good.’ He talked about ‘Not the Freeze’ too. He loved Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen, and he asked where drummer Jimmy Gordon was. I did not elaborate to Craig about his sad fate.” When one of Jim’s friends told Craig how much he liked his music, Craig rolled his eyes and quipped, “That’s because I am talented.”
Brian Lally saw him, too. “He’d be walking around with a blanket on him, kind of dragging behind him,” he remembers. “He’d go into that Starbucks on the corner of Lankershim and Magnolia and he’d get a drink, and he’d just sit in there and just stare. He had that faraway stare.”
Now that I knew some of Craig’s regular haunts, I made a point of searching for him every time I was in Los Angeles, but he was never around when I was. Had I lived in the L.A. area I could have devoted more time to seeking him out, but I was 135 miles away in San Diego and my work and family commitments there didn’t allow me the luxury of any Jim Rockford-style stakeouts. By this point, Craig was certainly aware of my interest in talking to him and telling his story, but he had not been responsive.
Meanwhile, another fan of Craig’s music, Mike Medina, had also been attempting to track his whereabouts. Mike spoke several times to an LAPD officer who patrolled the San Fernando Valley. According to the officer, he encountered Craig most often in the Studio City/North Hollywood area, often on Ventura Boulevard, but had also run into him unexpectedly in Van Nuys, Burbank or Sun Valley. He said that Craig didn’t seem to frequent any of the regular homeless encampments or shelters. The officer would go weeks without seeing Craig and then he’d turn up and be around for a while before disappearing again.
The officer said that Craig didn’t appear to be ravaged by drugs or alcohol but “definitely is not all there, mentally.” He said that most of the time, Craig would be pleasant and reasonable, but on other occasions wouldn’t respond to them at all, verbally or otherwise. These blank, unresponsive spells were also described by others who encountered Craig. One can only speculate, but the symptoms are highly suggestive of degenerative brain disease, which is often triggered by violent head trauma, and, particularly if untreated, can worsen considerably over time. One violent incident in Kandahar in 1968 was most likely the tipping point that sent Craig Smith’s life on its slow downward spiral. A gradual homicide victim. In many ways maybe I really was searching for a ghost; the real Craig Smith had died back on that trail a long time ago.
But there were moments, days perhaps, of clarity for Craig. Susan Hannon manages a large apartment building on Fruitland Drive in Studio City. On April 17th, 2009, Craig stopped by there looking for an apartment to rent. “He came to my front door and I let him into my office,” she remembers. “He was dressed rather like a wandering nomad in a kind of robe. It was brown and blue. He smelled really, really bad, but he was polite, and he was nice, he was kind, he was open. He said, ‘I’m really looking for a place to live. I used to live up on Multiview.’ In our neighborhood Multiview is like a street that has a lot of really, really nice homes on it. I said, ‘Really?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I was a musician and that’s why I’m looking for an apartment. Please don’t think that because I’m dressed like this that I don’t have any money. I do have money coming in.’”
In fact Craig did once live up on Multiview—in 1967. That home is now worth well over a million dollars. “So he did not appear to be on drugs or delusional,” Susan continues, “but his outward appearance would suggest that he was having a moment of clarity. That’s what was so incongruous. He was totally together. So I said, ‘Oh, that’s interesting!’ He said, ‘Yeah, I used to have a band and I get money from music and stuff, and that’s the deal.’ I didn’t have any apartments available so I said, ‘Well, leave me your phone number...’ He said, ‘Well, I don’t have a phone number right now,’ and I said, ‘OK. You can always stop by.’ And he said, ‘OK.’ And he left and everything was fine. But he was very disheveled, very dirty. It was kind of strange talking to somebody in a very logical manner who was just in such bad physical shape.”
She went on to describe Craig’s appearance in more detail. “He looked like he’d been out in the sun a long time. His hair was very long and blond and kind of wispy. You could see at one time he’d been a very nice-looking man. He was quite overweight—because as one of my other friends who lived on the streets told me, you get fed a lot of sweet food from people. I just thought it was odd that I’d never seen him before and I never saw him afterwards, yet some of my tenants told me, ‘Oh yeah, I saw him all the time.’ I just thought it was so odd.”
This interaction with Susan Hannon must have been one of the rare moments when Craig was shown some genuine kindness and respect. Several of Susan’s immediate family members have battled mental illness, so she could empathize with Craig’s condition and she treated him like a human being. “The funny thing about it,” she says, “was that I was so touched by it that I came in the next day and I Googled him. And sure enough...” Susan found a blog that reviewed the Apache and Inca albums and posted on the message board there. “I just kind of put a call out to say, ‘Hey, this guy’s wandering around. He needs some help. I just met him and I think somebody should try and take care of him.’ I was kind of putting it out there.” I saw the post, as did a number of other people. But Susan never saw Craig again. My search continued.
In September 2010 there was a breakthrough. My friend Chris Marsteller, who also plays guitar in our band the Loons, spent most of that summer working in North Hollywood, so I apprised him of the locations where Craig had been sighted and he agreed to keep an eye out for him. It took all summer, but finally one evening in September Chris spotted him outside the Pizza Man fast food restaurant on Lankershim Boulevard. By the time Chris had pulled over and parked, Craig had entered the restaurant, so Chris followed him inside. “I was apprehensive,” remembers Chris. “I remember you warning me that you didn’t know what his reaction might be, but the guy at the Pizza Man knew him. He wasn’t afraid of him. He accepted Craig without even knowing more than what Craig was at that time: a gentle, broken man.”
Chris introduced himself to Craig and handed him a copy of Sundazed’s Penny Arkade CD and a recent issue of the magazine I publish, Ugly Things, and explained what each of them was. Craig smiled affably as Chris explained that we had been trying for so long to reach him so we could get his story and help him out. “Yeah, yeah,” he smiled. Would he call Mike Stax at this phone number as soon as possible? “Yeah, yeah,” he smiled again.
Craig posed for a couple of photographs holding the CD and the magazine. He was wearing a T-shirt with photos of the two Bush presidents and the slogan “Dumb and Dumber.” By now he’d lost a lot of hair, but his smile revealed the same white, even teeth that had beamed out so winningly from American TV sets almost a half-century before.
“It was sad to see what he’d become,” reflects Chris. “I remember feeling like I hoped this wasn’t too humiliating for him. Hoping he didn’t feel like a freak at a freak show might feel. It was awkward. In the end I had accomplished what I had set out to do, but I hadn’t considered the consequence of the results, which was a sadness.”
I lived in hope of that phone call from Craig for some time, but deep down I knew it would probably never come.
I made a couple more visits to Craig’s neighborhood without sighting him, and Jim Roup’s encounters with Craig began to dwindle. My quest appeared to have reached yet another dead end. Finally, in August 2012, I decided to make one last attempt to find him. I compiled a map marked with all of the known addresses associated with Craig, as well as the spots where he had been sighted in recent years. I arrived in Studio City early one morning and set about visiting each one of them in turn as well as combing the surrounding streets and park areas.
I stopped first on Woodbridge Street, a quiet tree-lined street just off Coldwater Canyon Boulevard, a few blocks north of Ventura Boulevard. The house where Craig grew up has been torn down or remodeled. In its place is a quite large two-story home enclosed by a tall, leafy hedge. I get out of my car and stand awhile, half expecting Craig’s face to appear in one of the windows like some kind of spooked Boo Radley. But there’s no one to be seen. I’m chasing ghosts again.
It’s the same each place I go: a handful of low-rent apartments, all on side streets off of Ventura Boulevard, a cheap motel on Magnolia Boulevard where he often stayed (I later spot the same location in an episode of The Rockford Files), the liquor store where he’d sometimes buy food, the tiny Pizza Man restaurant, North Hollywood Park with its morning joggers and sweatsuited moms pushing strollers. I sit for more than an hour in the nearby Starbucks, as Craig often did—until he’d sit too long, spacing out, and be asked to leave. I sip my coffee and scribble notes and corrections on the manuscript of this story, but most of the time my eyes are darting around, hoping to catch a glimpse of the man I am writing about. Today he doesn’t seem to be around.
After several hours of fruitless searching, I take a break and head south on the Hollywood Freeway, exiting on Hollywood Boulevard. I drive by the landmark Capitol Records building, where Chris and Craig once recorded, make a quick detour past the seedy Mark Twain Hotel, then head west along Sunset through Hollywood to Beverly Hills. There I visit the Paley Center for Media, whose vast archive of television shows I know includes a video copy of the pilot episode of The Happeners. In their comfortable air-conditioned screening room I sit down and watch The Happeners for the very first time. I’m not sure what to expect, but I am impressed at just how good it is: the writing, the acting, the music, the cinematography, the production values—the entire look and feel of it.
And Craig. I’ve seen numerous photos of him, talked to many people who knew him, caught glimpses of him in video clips from The Andy Williams Show, listened to his music endlessly—this guy had been inside my head for more than a decade. But this is the first time I’ve seen him on film, center-stage, in motion, speaking, acting, playing guitar, singing. On film you can begin to get a sense of the real person: their facial expressions, their body language, the cadence of their voice, the way they interact with those around them, the way they express themselves. On that television monitor I saw for the first time the real Craig Smith. Here was the guy I’d been searching for all this time. I could now see in front of my eyes the charisma so many people described to me, his ease and confidence in front of the camera, his captivating singing, his sincerity, his goofy humor, his innate likeability, his star quality. Craig Smith, at that moment in time, looked like a guy who could have accomplished anything.
When the final credits had rolled, I tore back to Studio City, convinced that I would find him. But four hours later, standing beside the Los Angeles River at the spot where Woodbridge Street dead-ends, a few hundred yards from Craig’s old home, I realize it’s time to give up. Craig Smith is nowhere to be found. I’ve reached another dead end.
Eight weeks later, on October 11th, 2012, Mike Medina hits me with a bombshell. “I’m numb as I write this,” begins the email. “I found that Craig is deceased. He died on March 16th, 2012. He’s listed as an unclaimed person with the L.A. County coroner’s office.”