Penny Arkade: Shining a Light on the Shadow Band of ‘60s Psych
Their lost, Mike Nesmith-produced album is finally on vinyl
For decades, Penny Arkade was practically a myth, but their initially unreleased album reveals that they ranked right alongside the best L.A. bands of the ‘60s.
“Over the years,” says Penny Arkade bassist Don Glut, “we became this sort of shadow band that people would hear rumors about, but nobody had any substantial facts or heard the music.”
Adding to the mystique surrounding the band, their two gifted singer/songwriters, Chris Ducey and Craig Smith, each hold their own curious place in rock history.
The late Smith’s strange, sad journey is a long, bizarre story fully chronicled in a book by Mike Stax. But briefly: After Penny Arkade he blew his mind on LSD, disappeared down a rabbit hole of Eastern mysticism, changed his name to Maitreya Kali, and recorded a cult-classic double album before his long spiral into madness, violence, prison and worse.
AUDIO: Maitreya Kali “Old Man”
Pre-Penny Arkade, Ducey had a solo album deal that got scuttled after the record was finished and sleeves were printed. The label drafted hungry folk-rocker Bobby Jameson to quickly write and record new tunes with the same titles, altered Ducey to Lucey, and put it out as Songs of Protest and Anti Protest in 1965. Decades afterward, that too became a cult classic, while Lucey’s original version was finally released in 2012.
Ducey and Smith first met through their participation in yet another mid ‘60s near-myth. They co-starred in The Happeners, a planned TV series about a fictional Greenwich Village folk trio. If it lasted, it would have premiered in fall of ‘66, same as The Monkees. “I think The Happeners was a more serious answer to the Monkees,” says Glut. “It wasn’t a goofy comedy like The Monkees was.” But things went south, and the show never got past the pilot episode.
Smith (previously part of folk group The Good Time Singers) and Ducey formed a real-life musical partnership as Chris & Craig, releasing one 45 for Capitol in 1966. Then they began assembling a backup band, posting an ad for a bassist that was answered by Glut. They rehearsed for months in a Hollywood studio, with Buffalo Springfield in the next room.
After a split with their management, they briefly folded up shop. But soon Glut got an encouraging call. They were regrouping as a real band, rather than two singers plus backup. They would be called The Penny Arkade, and their new manager was none other than Mike Nesmith, who would have been The Happeners’ rival. They began practicing in earnest at Nesmith’s mansion in the Hollywood hills.
Smith and Ducey were on fire. “They were coming out with new songs almost every day and they were all good,” remembers Glut, who was joined in the new quartet’s rhythm section by drummer Bobby Donaho.
It was a hell of a time to be a rock band in L.A., when the likes of The Doors and the aforementioned Springfield were house bands you could see on any given night at Sunset Strip clubs. And as the pet project of the coolest Monkee, Penny Arkade was at the epicenter of it all.
“There were always rock stars hanging around,” remembers Glut, “coming up to Mike’s place while we were rehearsing. When we recorded some of our early stuff, I remember the lead singer of Beau Brummels [Sal Valentino] was in the next studio, we hung out with him. When we were recording in a different place, [Three Dog Night singer] Danny Hutton came over and hung out with us. We felt like we were really part of that whole rock ‘n’ roll scene. We went to see Mike once at the Troubadour and Linda Ronstadt was hanging out with us. All your heroes are suddenly your friends.”
It seems nobody was a better friend to the band than Nesmith himself, who became their producer when they started recording.
“Mike was great,” says Glut. “He was funny, he was always very supportive, and if you were doing something unusual that he really liked he would comment on it. I don’t remember him ever not liking anything.”
Smith and Ducey both had individual voices as songwriters, but when their vocals blended, they sounded either like a single entity or like an invisible third party was singing along with them. “Their harmony was so perfect,” says Glut. “If you wanted to compare them, Chris would be John Lennon and Craig would be Paul McCartney. They meshed perfectly well together.”
Ironically, while Smith would later venture beyond the pale both musically and personally, he was originally more of a pop songwriter at heart. His tunes were covered by some high-profile people including Andy Williams (“Holly”), Glen Campbell (the Penny Arkade tune “Country Girl”), The Monkees (“Salesman”) and more. In the context of the band, some of Smith’s contributions (“Country Girl,” “Century of Distance”) wouldn’t have sounded out of place coming from their former studio mates Buffalo Springfield.
Like a lot of other people, though, Smith was starting to turn on to psychedelia, both musically and chemically. And the hazy “Color Fantasy” sounds like a direct result of his early ventures into the realm of LSD.
Ducey’s tunes offer plenty of intriguing left turns. “Thesis” is full of trippy lyrics and unorthodox chord changes. The snaky melodies and psychedelic imagery of “Lights of Dawn” would have been right in tune with the time and place. But the wild ride of 12 ½ minute epic suite “Not the Freeze” is far and away Penny Arkade’s most adventurous item.
It’s a song suite that had few precedents in 1967 apart from The Who’s nine-minute “A Quick One, While He’s Away.”
“They would experiment with time changes in the middle of a song, really experimental stuff for its time,” recalls Glut. “Those songs [in ‘Not the Freeze’] started off as separate songs. One day Bobby and I came into the rehearsal studio and Chris and Craig said, ‘Guess what, this is gonna be one song now.’ We recorded it, and then they added more to it and made it longer! It would go from 3/4 time to 4/4 time without missing a beat. We did the vocals separately, but when we played that song, it was about two in the morning, we did it in one take. We didn’t do a second take. We thought we were rehearsing it, and then Mike said, ‘Oh, that’s perfect!’”
With Nesmith as coach and cheerleader, Penny Arkade cut what should have been one of the era’s finest L.A. psych albums. Nesmith shopped it around and the tracks were met with interest, but things didn’t pan out. “Mike was looking for a perfect deal,” says Glut. “He got offers from, Kama Sutra was one, I can’t remember who the other ones were. But the deal was never the one he wanted. So, we never made the deal, and then The Monkees fell apart, and Mike couldn’t really afford having a band to worry about that he was producing. And everybody kind of forgot about us.”
By that point, Smith had more on his mind than the machinations of the music business. “Craig got involved in two things very heavily,” remembers Glut. “One of them was drugs. And all these Eastern philosophies and religions. And he kind of flipped out. He said, ‘I’m leaving the Penny Arkade and I’m gonna go off and find my own identity.’ He went to Asia and all these different places. It was his own dream and his own warped interpretation of things based on the philosophies and the drugs he was getting into. He did some very strange things.”
Penny Arkade soldiered on for a brief bit as a three-piece, and the four songs here from that period are just as powerful in their own way. “Year of the Monkey” sounds eerily contemporary and astoundingly similar to what The Flaming Lips would be doing three decades later. But the band’s days were numbered. They morphed into more of a heavy blues-rock band called Armadillo for a short time, but that was pretty much it. “We were just another band playing in a nightclub,” says Glut, “we didn’t have that personality or that sense of fun anymore.”
In 2004, the Penny Arkade album was finally released on CD by Sundazed Music. Bonus tracks included the post-Smith tunes and a batch of great early songs that Glut encountered quite unexpectedly.
“I didn’t even know what they were because they were recorded backwards on the flip side of a reel to reel tape,” he reports. “I played them on my recorder and it was all backwards, it got flipped when a friend of mine made a dub for me.” He sent the tape to Sundazed and it was sorted out. “They could have been lost forever. It’s amazing that was preserved at all, and it’s amazing that I found them.”
Sundazed’s new double-album version of Not the Freeze (with two differently colored records) marks the first time Penny Arkade’s album has ever been released in the format for which it was originally intended. Better late than never. Ducey went on to make solo albums and form the band Prairie Madness, among other things. Renaissance man Glut gained renown as a filmmaker, writer, and more. But for all his accomplishments, he looks back on the least known with the most pride.
“I’ve had quite a few careers and I’ve enjoyed them all,” he says. “But the music was the best.”
- Numbers: Kraftwerk’s ‘Computer World’ at 45 - May 14, 2026
- Tentative Decisions: How Talking Heads Grew up in Public - March 13, 2026
- How The Mamas & The Papas Made ‘California Dreamin’’ a Reality - February 26, 2026
You May Also Like
-
December 20, 2019 -
July 20, 2018 -
March 10, 2023
