For rock music fans, the acid casualty is a cherished archetype. Syd Barrett, Roky Erickson, and Skip Spence are the three best-known examples. Psychedelic voyagers who sailed too close to the edge only to plunge into a permanent Alice in Wonderland world. Eccentric, childlike creatures or mystical shamans, stuck in a looped alternative reality that is forever ’67, ’68, ’69, the moment of their fall.
But when that carefully constructed fantasy is disassembled and the cold facts are laid bare, there’s no romance to be found. Only pain, confusion and misery. An undiagnosed predisposition toward mental illness, often hereditary, triggered by an overindulgence in hallucinogens, exacerbated by the tenuous, often chaotic nature of a musician’s life—the facts are strikingly similar in every case.
In the case of Craig Smith, there were other factors that contributed to his fall, as I learned when I investigated the story of his strange, complicated, and ultimately tragic life. It’s a story that took me over 15 years to assemble yet—to my eternal regret—will never be entirely complete. It is a story that begins in the safe, wholesome, sticky-sweet heart of American family entertainment and ends on the cold, dark streets at the outside fringes of society.
As he ambles down Ventura Boulevard, Craig Smith looks very much like a typical “homeless” person—shabby, unwashed clothes, scraggly, unkempt hair, sun-baked skin, and the tired, haunted eyes of a man who checked out of ‘normal’ society a long time ago. To passersby he’s just another of a legion of walking wounded who roam the streets and alleyways of America. To me he’s the missing piece of a strange, scattered puzzle I’ve been trying to assemble for more than a decade.
The missing piece? Strike that. Craig Smith is the puzzle.
There are an estimated 578,000 homeless people in America; around 82,000 of those are in Los Angeles County, where the climate is more conducive to living rough and sleeping outdoors. Every one of them has a story, though few would have the facility, much less the motivation, to tell it to you. Even if they did, it’s doubtful any would have a story quite like Craig’s. It’s hard to believe it now, but once upon a time, everything was golden for Craig Smith. In the 1960s, he was a bright-eyed, all-American boy with a pitch-perfect singing voice and talent to spare. For almost three years, his eight-miles-wide smile beamed out of television sets across America on a regular basis. The songs he wrote were recorded by some of the biggest names in the entertainment business. And he had a rock group of his own, the Penny Arkade, featuring some equally talented young musicians. On the surface everything was golden—until his life took a sudden left turn into a terrifying darkness no one could ever have predicted.
In 2012, at the age of 67, Craig Smith should have been living quietly and comfortably on his songwriting royalties, not scraping by in poverty on the unforgiving streets of Los Angeles. How, when and why did it all go so horribly wrong?
That’s the puzzle I’ve been trying to piece together, ever since 2001 when I first heard the albums Craig released himself in the early 1970s. But by then he wasn’t Craig Smith anymore, he was Maitreya. Satya Sai Maitreya Kali. Privately released in an edition of no more than a few hundred copies—probably a lot less—those LPs were called Apache and Inca. Apache appeared as a single LP, and then together with Inca as a double album. The people who knew Craig personally at the time remember it only as a double LP. My own introduction to Apache and Inca came via an unlicensed reproduction on the German Shadoks label.
The amateurish homemade cover artwork was unusual, to say the least, with its quasi-mystical symbolism, incomprehensible liner notes, lists, dedications and quotes from the famous and the infamous. (“Underground at Last. Maitreya is.” — Adam West, Batman.) Along with this confusing flood of words and names are shadowy vacation snapshots from Peru, Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, Yosemite and the Galapagos Islands of a toothy hippie squinting into the camera or off into the distance. Inside the gatefold cover, more pictures, more cryptic prose, lyrics annotated and interrupted with seemingly random asides and associations. On closer reading, Maitreya’s dense, mystical, often disturbing typed notes are a manifesto, peppered with repeated references to Christ, Buddha, Krishna, LSD, sex, violence, meditation, yoga, famous musicians, and a woman called Cheryl.
His real world identity is revealed in the very first sentence of his manifesto: “Craig Smith saved the planet, did you? He died for a righteous cause.” The manifesto goes on to declare Craig Smith the new Messiah: “Bow to Maitreya. Christ is Back. Right On! Schedule. Saturn will Legally wed Earth in 2000 A.D. Christ is me and no one else.”
The music then would surely be as rambling, unhinged and unfocused as the words on the cover. Not at all. The songs are focused in crystal-clear symmetry, the musicianship is excellent, the vocals outstanding. The unexpected quality of the music ambushes me. Some of it takes my breath away.
Stylistically it’s all over the place. Some of it sounds like the Byrds or the Buffalo Springfield, other songs are completely solo and acoustic, unerringly beautiful, haunting pieces that record collectors might dub “loner folk,” and there’s a couple of strange, partially electric numbers that are more difficult to get a handle on. Some of the songs are linked by pieces of dialogue, aural snapshots of his travels. This isn’t just an album of music; it’s a journal of some kind. A message to the future from a lost, self-deluded soul.
“Compiled over a Ten year period of Agony,” reveals the liner notes. “I bring Music Thru a Dream. Magic is Me. Thru a Dream. Poor me.”
Poor Craig Smith, the leper Messiah. Who was he? What happened to him? Where is he now? I needed to know. Using the bizarre prose on the album cover as my map, I set out to follow his trail. It was 2001 A.D. (one year after the wedding of Earth and Saturn); little did I know that 14 years later I’d still be trying to put together the scattered, impossible puzzle pieces of this man’s life.
In a letter to Eudora Welty, the great detective novelist Ross Macdonald likened the past to a vast ocean moving beneath all of our lives. That analogy came to my mind often as I dived into the past in search of answers, clues, any scraps of information at all about this mysterious, apparently deeply disturbed musician about whom nothing at all was known beyond the strange notations on the jacket of an impossibly rare record. “Go down, swim through the darkness, strange things to find there,” sang Maitreya. “Be sure to follow your directions now, you might find your mind there.”
Or lose it.
What started as a research project to dig up information on an obscure cult artist turned into a seemingly endless journey into a dark, often impenetrable past, a search for answers that only seemed to turn up more questions, fueled by an idealist’s belief that a lost soul could somehow be found and pulled back into the light of day. In some ways, the search itself became the story.
What follows, then, is part music biography, part mystery, part detective story. The story of not only Craig Smith’s swim through the darkness, but my own.