007: Spotlight: Craig Smith
plus self-titled gems from Blåkulla and Victoria
Craig Smith
Of all the lysergic-beyond-comprehension pop musicians of the 60s/70s, Craig Smith is perhaps one of the best songwriters and produced some of the most accessible, excitingly coherent pop music in Apache / Inca, a private press double LP he sold himself on the streets of California. Only a handful circulated about the online market in the past couple decades, original fetching up to $10,000 and pirated copies getting into the mid $100s.
A mix of later solo recordings and earlier unreleased Penny Arkade tracks, Apache / Inca benefits from a brief biographical introduction to its maker:
Craig Smith got his start in music writing for and performing in the Good Time Singers, the house band of The Andy Williams Show, in the early 60s, and bounced around various auditions for television shows and pop groups through the subsequent years, eventually forming the pop duo Chris & Craig with Chris Ducey, signing to Capitol records and producing a few singles with session musicians.
They opened for the likes of the Mothers of Invention (ever heard of ‘em?) and befriended Gábor Szabó, the Beach Boys, and Mike Nesmith of the Monkees. Smith offered to write songs for all of them. Nesmith began producing and financing the full-band version of Chris & Craig, the Penny Arkade, in 1967, leading to a criminally underappreciated pop-rock record.
In late 1968, Smith cultivated his interests in Buddhist philosophy and transcendental meditation with a group of notoriously peaceful musicians called the Manson Family and began experimenting with the notoriously calm-inducing substance called LSD. He left the Penny Arkade shortly after with his songwriting royalties and his guitar and set out to hit the ‘hippie trail’, notoroius for being a place where nothing ever goes wrong. In Turkey, he met three more travelers — one Irish and two American — also intending to go to India, with whom he drove and hitchhiked to Iran and beyond. When he and his new friends passed through Kabul, Afghanistan, Smith left the group for a few days and never rejoined them.
At some point in Kandahar, Smith was robbed, sexually assaulted, beaten almost to death, and possibly kdinapped by a gang, after which he spent time in an Afghan psychiatric institution until the American embassy was able to get him home. Once back in Los Angeles in 1969, Smith took the name “Maitreya Kali” and began publically claiming he was the Messiah. His erratic behavior, along with the changing attitude towards Messianic hippies following the Tate-LaBianca murders, alienated many of his friends, some of whom had to take out restraining orders against him. Although his career had dried up, he still recieved royalties for his earlier songwriting, which funded his two records, Apache and Inca.
In 1973, after selling his copies of the records, Smith planned to go to Ethiopia, but stayed in California, where his mental health continued to deteriorate and he became increasingly violent. After suggesting to his friends that they battle to death with Samurai swords, dressing like a buddhist monk, and tattooing a spider on his forehead, Smith was incarcerated at first the California Institution for Men, then the Deuel Vocational Institution after attacking his mother.
Smith was granted parole on his fourth attempt and released in June 1976. He spent much of the subsequent decades in and out of California psychiatric hospitals, but after a large cut in mental health funding in the mid-1980s that drastically decreased resources, remained houseless until his death in 2012. He continued to make music into the 90s, some of which was collected by the Ugly Things Magazine editor Mike Stax, who wrote the definitive Craig Smith biography, Swim Through the Darkness (2013), which I highly recommend.
Apache / Inca (1972)
Apache / Inca is not the standard off-the-walls fare of “outsider” music, rather its eerieness is thoughtfully controlled — guitars, voice, travel recordings, archival songs, and remarkably-crafted songwriting meticulously arranged by a true lost talent. Never for a second can the mystery, and tragedy, of Craig Smith overshadow or oversell his immense skill as a songwriter and performer and the quality of this truly gorgeous record.
Stunning tracks:
“Voodoo Spell” (Penny Arkade)
“Knot the Freize” (Penny Arkade)
Blåkulla - Blåkulla (1975)
The only record from a very short lived Swedish prog quintet comparable to early Yes with a little more fuzz and folkiness. This record has the characteristic upbeat melancholy of Scandinavian progressive rock that I think is sweet. Really cool driving bass and organs in tracks like “Sirenernas sång”, with the requisite artsy drama and light symphonic currents. When Blåkulla draws influences from other genres, such as the heavy psych/blues notes in “I Solnedgången”, they do so in a way that nicely complements their overall vibe rather than competing with it. Other songs, like “Världens Gång”, carry ominous horns over haunting, slowly accumulating acoustic arrangements. There’s a nice sensibility here for light build and release that makes these guys enjoyable to listen to.
Victoria - Victoria (1971)
A really, really beautiful psych pop demo LP with folk stylings and atmospheric stacks of vocals from this New Jersey group. This re-release of Victoria has fifteen tracks of detailed, full-bodied arrangements, sweeping horns, and luscious harmonies — the original album plus bonus acetate and reel-to-reel mixes.
Much of Victoria is a msytery — the members are mostly uncredited, only 200 copies of the LP were pressed, and little is known about the band overall. The only lore is that the record was recorded by composer and arranger Greg Ruban right before he was drafted to Vietnam, then when he came back from the war, he took the copies of the record to Europe on a motorcycle and rode around trying to promote it for three months, to little success.
From the lush opener “Peace”, the driving jam of “Core of the Apple”, to the hypnotic “Child of Princess”, Victoria offers a wide range of crystalline psychedelic pop-ballads that keep a pscyhedelic pop-ballad fiend like me more than content.
