THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
1,016) Maitreya Kali — “One Last Farewell”
The strange, sad tale of a budding pop wunderkind who travelled down the hippie trail* and ended up an acid casualty in an Afghan insane asylum. He left us an album that is “[t]he psychedelic masterpiece nobody heard” including “[a]chingly beautiful, haunting acoustic folk songs” such as this compelling track (Forced Exposure, https://b2b.forcedexposure.com/onesheets/MAM202CD_ST.pdf), truly his last farewell.
In short, as Forced Exposure says:
After a suffering an LSD-induced mental breakdown, Los Angeles-based songwriter Craig Smith renamed himself Maitreya Kali and custom-pressed Apache/Inca, a double-LP documenting his musical, personal, and spiritual journey. His message to the world, encoded on the album jackets in rambling, quasi-mystical Messianic verse, was urgent, desperate, delusional, and disturbing. Recorded between 1967 and 1971, the music tells a different story. Achingly beautiful, haunting acoustic folk songs; luminescent psychedelic folk-rock; eerie, off-kilter acid rock; fragments; field recordings — all meticulously woven into a magical, mesmerizing whole. Apache/Inca is an extraordinary work. Not the dark, self-indulgent ramblings of a cracked Messiah, but a thoughtfully-crafted collection of work by a singer and songwriter of remarkable depth and talent whose world was falling apart. Soon afterwards Maitreya — and Craig — disappeared into the shadows. He died homeless in a North Hollywood Park in 2012.
https://b2b.forcedexposure.com/onesheets/MAM202CD_ST.pdf
Richie Unterberger tells us more:
[The two albums] are among the more interesting rare late-’60s folk-rock psychedelic relics, alternating between full electric band arrangements and solo acoustic guitar ones. . . . The mixture of folk-rock with harmonies, a slight country influence, and sunny Californian pop is . . . reminiscent of Merrell Fankhauser [see #10, 235, 327] . . . . The acoustic cuts, while still pretty, are a bit creepy and odd in the manner of a somewhat less cutting-edge Dino Valente or Skip Spence. . . . There are also some pretty ambitious meditations upon religion, loneliness, and mysticism, although in general the tone is upbeat, the melodies accessible, and the singing pleasantly normal. . . . The electric material . . . was not recorded by Maitreya Kali, but by a Southern Californian 1967 pop-folk-rock-psychedelic band, the Penny Arkade. And the rest of the songs were recorded a few years later by one of the two singer/songwriters in the Penny Arkade, Craig Smith, aka Maitreya Kali. . . . [T]he record covers . . . [were] crudely patched together from photos of the apparent perpetuator, taken on his travels around the world; hand-drawn inscrutable symbols for religious deities and planetary bodies; and rambling written dedications and musician credits. . . . Maitreya Kali was a pseudonym for Craig Smith, a guitarist and songwriter . . . . The liner notes are in a scrambled syntax that only renders them inscrutable, but is of a style that one associates with the mentally ill. For all that, however, the music is often fairly well-produced, well-played, and likable, not at all the kind of acid-damaged mush you’d suspect from the packaging. . . . [A]bout half of the LPs, were unreleased recordings done by the Penny Arkade in 1967, before Smith traveled around the world and got much weirder. . . . [T]hat group recorded quite a bit of material that never came out, produced by Mike Nesmith of the Monkees. Smith was not the sole singer/songwriter of that band; he shared equal time with Chris Ducey, [see #219] with whom he’d done an obscure [and quite good] single for Capitol in 1966 as half of the duo Chris and Craig. When the Penny Arkade broke up without having released anything, Smith took off on travels around the world, funded by his songwriting royalties from covers of his songs by the Monkees (“Salesman”), Andy Williams (“Holly”), and Glen Campbell (“Country Girl”). . . . When he returned to the States, he combined a bunch of unreleased Penny Arkade tracks with more recent, sparer, and spookier recordings he’d done on his own, most likely in the early ’70s. The results were the Apache and Inca LPs, pressed in extremely small quantities, essentially as vanity pressings credited to Satya Sai Maitreya Kali. . . . [I]t’s odd but accessible Californian country-influenced folk-rock. On the most acoustic ballads, there’s a gentle yet spooky mysticism . . . .
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/maitreya-kali-mn0000195282#biography, https://www.allmusic.com/album/apache-mw0001148319
I now turn to the great Mike Stax, who wrote a book (Swim Through the Darkness: My Search for Craig Smith and the Mystery of Maitreya Kali, https://a.co/d/cVyefT6) on his 15-year quest to get to the heart of darkness:
It was the music that first hooked me. I acquired reissued copies of his solo records Apache and Inca. I didn’t really know what to expect because the cover art was so mysterious, deranged, and disturbed. I expected some kind of spacey, incoherent psychedelic folk music, so I was surprised to find that the music was coherent, and the songwriting and playing accomplished. . . . Some of it sounded like the Byrds or Buffalo Springfield, other tracks were desolate acoustic folk music—and then there were weird interludes with snippets of dialogue. I couldn’t stop listening to it. . . . [T]here was no information out there, just some speculation among collectors. The only known fact was that this strange loner guy who called himself Maitreya Kali had originally been known as Craig Smith . . . . His change around from this very wholesome, talented, happy-go-lucky guy into this very dark, almost Manson-like figure was absolutely fascinating to me. . . . His parents were dead, and I made every effort to reach out to the remaining family, but they were reluctant to talk. At the time, I didn’t know that Craig had badly assaulted his mother in 1973. The family wanted nothing to do with him, and didn’t even want to claim his remains when he died . . . . I talked to tons of people who knew Craig before he left—right up until he had a going away party at [the Beach Boys’] Mike Love’s house—and he was fine at that point. Prior to the trip, he had been happy, outgoing, gregarious . . . . But when he came back . . . he was completely different. Nobody knew what had happened. . . . I found out that Craig’s lawyer . . . had to help Craig get back from Afghanistan, where he’d allegedly been put in a lunatic asylum and couldn’t even remember who he was. He had changed completely. . . . He was now Maitreya, and he believed he was Christ and the Buddha reincarnate, the next messiah. . . . [A]t some point he had a black widow spider tattooed on his forehead . . . . His friends were deeply concerned about the disturbing changes in him. They tried to help him, but eventually they had to push him away once he seemed dangerous. . . . Craig’s mental state was so unbalanced that he had alienated all of his old contacts. Nobody wanted to help him. Reportedly, he managed to arrange a meeting with Mike Curb [see #57], who had been his high school classmate and was, at the time, president of MGM Records. But when Curb saw what Craig had become, he had him forcibly removed from his office. With no record deal possible, Craig decided to have the records pressed himself. He sold them on the street or gave them to friends and they were quickly gone. It’s my firm belief that Craig knew that his mental state was declining rapidly. For that reason, he wanted to gather all of his music together onto these records as a kind of last will and testament to the world, while he still had the faculty to do so.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7bmxzx/swimming-through-the-darkness-the-hunt-for-craig-smith-psychedelic-messiah
Finally, from Stax:
His story . . . is perhaps the most unusual and tragic I’ve come across in all my years writing and reasearching the musicians of the 1960s. I was hoping it would have a much happier ending. One last farewell, Craig, one last goodbye.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=501460159878995&id=89900510433
* Wikipedia tells us that the hippie trail was “an overland journey taken by members of the hippie subculture and others from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s, travelling from Europe and West Asia through South Asia such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh to Thailand.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippie_trail)
Pay to Play! The Off the Charts Spotify Playlist! + Brace for the Obscure 60s Rock Merchandise
Please consider helping to support my website/blog by contributing $6 a month for access to the Off the Charts Spotify Playlist. Using a term familiar to denizens of Capitol Hill, you pay to play! (“relating to or denoting an unethical or illicit arrangement in which payment is made by those who want certain privileges or advantages in such arenas as business, politics, sports, and entertainment” — dictionary.com).
The playlist includes all the “greatest songs of the 1960’s that no one has ever heard” that are available on Spotify. The playlist will expand each time I feature an available song.
All new subscribers will receive a Brace for the Obscure 60s Rock magnet. New subscribers who sign up for a year will also receive a Brace for the Obscure 60s Rock t-shirt or baseball cap. See pictures on the Pay to Play page.
When subscribing, please send me an e-mail (GMFtma1@gmail.com) or a comment on this site letting me know an e-mail address/phone number/Facebook address, etc. to which I can send instructions on accessing the playlist and a physical address to which I can sent a magnet/t-shirt/baseball cap. If choosing a t-shirt, please let me know the gender and size you prefer.
Just click on the first blue block for a month to month subscription or the second blue block for a yearly subscription.
Brace for the Obscure (60s rock)! / Off the Charts: 60s Rock Revelations😊 
That’s a sad story.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, indeed. I need to read Mike Stax’s book.
LikeLiked by 1 person