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Swim Through the Darkness: New biography of musical genius who became tragic acid casualty


Joyrex

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Dangerous Minds has a profile on an upcoming book Swim Through the Darkness, about Craig Smith, an LA pop-folk golden boy who turned psychedelic music genius, turned acid tragedy:

 

 

 

Rock lore loves to romanticize the drug casualty. Of course it’s wrong, but it’s so hard to resist imagining the tantalizing might-have-beens that surround the likes of Syd Barrett, Roky Erickson, and Skip Spence, all of whom suffered from mental illnesses almost certainly exacerbated by their enthusiastic drug use. Pot and acid have inarguably inspired creativity by breaking down the artificial walls between categories that exist only in our minds, but there are people who can’t handle that and lose it. And it’s really not so romantic, especially when the artists who fall through that crack never got the chances that Spence, Barrett, and Erickson had at recognition.

 

Ugly Things’ Mike Stax has authored a new book, Swim Through the Darkness, to be published in September by Process Media, which tells the tale of Maitreya Kali, born Craig Smith in 1945. He should have been a really goddamn big deal—he landed an easy entry to the L.A. music scene in 1963 when he successfully auditioned to be one of The Good Time Singers, a ten-person folk band assembled to serve as backing vocalists, musicians, and skit extras on The Andy Williams Show. Smith was an instant standout in the ensemble, making up for novice guitar playing with fine singing, an ebullient screen presence, and a toothpaste-commercial smile...

 

...During this fertile period, Smith became a successful songwriter on his own, penning country-rock and pop-psych tunes like “Country Girl” for Glenn Campbell, “Salesman” for The Monkees, and “Hands of the Clock” for Heather MacRae. But it was two songs for Andy Williams—the love song “Holly” and a Christmas song called “Christmas Holiday”—that gave Smith serious mailbox money, and with it, the luxury of time and resources to travel when The Penny Arkade fell apart in 1968 without ever releasing a single song. But that travel experience would alter Smith forever. He started his trek in Turkey, intending to make his way to India, merrily smoking hashish and dropping acid along the way. But fatefully, when a group of fellow travelers he’d befriended was ready to move on from Kandahar to Kabul, Smith remained behind. He was to meet up with his companions in just a few days, but two of them, Ann Dignan and Mary Hurley, recall in Swim Through the Darkness not learning what had happened to him for months:

 

Dignan: I ran into some people and asked about him and they said they heard about this American named Craig who went crazy. The rumor I heard was that he was hallucinating on LSD and went running through the market with a knife, threatening people or being threatened, and then just disappeared into insanity.

 

Hurley: The details that they gave were sketchy, but they mentioned seeing Craig in a marketplace in Kandahar looking over the fruit. Then suddenly he had grabbed a knife and gone after a vendor in one of the stalls. Apparently this action provoked an immediate reaction from the man’s friends. The tables turned, and the last thing they saw was fruit, turbans and men flying, and Craig running for his life up over a couple of distant hills, then disappearing over a ridge with the men still in hot pursuit.

 

Apparently Smith got the absolute living shit beaten out of him, and he may also have been confined and sexually assaulted. Whether from the mental trauma, a brain injury, the drugs he was consuming, or a combination of all of them, a previously latent schizophrenia began to come to the fore. He returned to L.A. an entirely different person—disheveled, dour, confrontational, often filthy—and that different person changed his name to Maitreya Kali and recorded a pair of legendary but unobtainable psych albums. The first was Apache, and the second was a double LP combining Apache with another album called Inca. Both combined unreleased Penny Arkade songs with new solo acoustic compositions, some of which are as eerily similar to Skip Spence’s lovely and forlorn post-hospitalization release Oar as his going-berserk-with-a-blade story is to Spence’s alarming axe-crazy breakdown. However, Smith’s refined pop sensibility remained intact, and Maitreya’s music never became as completely dithering as Spence’s did. The albums were vanity pressed in such small quantities that it actually feels kind of disingenuous to even call them releases, and when they turn up at all, the hens-teeth rare originals fetch absurd and prohibitive sums. A German bootleg from 2000 has been the only other way anyone could hear the songs; it sells for mere hundreds, rather than thousands. (The Penny Arkade material was eventually legitimately issued by Sundazed in 2004, as Not the Freeze.)

 

Some of his music:

https://soundcloud.com/feral-house/our-love-has-come

 

https://soundcloud.com/feral-house/swim

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