I remember very clearly the first time I saw Craig Smith. It was in 1967 at RCA Recording Studios in Los Angeles. Mike Nesmith of the Monkees introduced us. He was producing Craig at the time, and I was producing the Monkees. Mike wanted me to listen to one of Craig’s songs, which became part of the Monkees’ Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones Ltd. album. I was struck by Craig’s young clean-cut good looks and that beautiful dazzling smile of his. He was so full of life and so full of music. What a great future this lad seemed to have before him.
It was about six years later that I last saw him, and it came as quite a shock. My friend Henry Diltz and I had stopped into a music store on Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles and this fellow walked in off the street with a copy of his album under his arm, which he offered to sell for five bucks. He had the look of someone who had definitely dropped out, all the way. His hair was long and scruffy, and there was a spider tattooed on his forehead right between the eyebrows.
I had no idea who he was. He recognized me however and told me his name, but added that he now called himself “Maitreya.” The transformation was simply unbelievable. What could possibly have happened to that wholesome kid with the bright future?
Mike Stax has spent fifteen years gathering interviews and information. What follows is a searching account, disturbing yet sympathetic, of the life of this talented singer-songwriter and performer who underwent a strange drug-induced psychotic transformation from wholesome, smiling, nice kid, raised in a good home in California, to spending the last thirty years of his life a homeless, unkempt wanderer on the streets of Los Angeles.