Craig was 100% musician. Music oozed out of his body and soul. He understood it like the air that we breathe or the light we see. It just was. At 3, his parents gave him a drum set with Mickey Mouse on the bass drum. He played it until it fell apart, so his parents bought him a new one—he graduated to Donald Duck. At 6, he started piano lessons, but the teacher was frustrated with him. He didn’t practice what she gave him, he was composing his own songs instead. At 12, he got his first guitar and would play along to the theme songs from his favorite television series: Robin Hood and The Dobie Gillis Show. He wanted to be Robin Hood, the troubadour who strolled through the woods strumming his guitar because he got all the chicks. He wanted to be Maynard G. Krebs because Maynard didn’t have to work.

The music played relentlessly in Craig’s head. For relief, he began sleeping with a pocket transistor radio next to his ear. Pretty soon, he realized that by morning, he had memorized the lyrics and the arrangements to the songs.

Outside of music, his only jobs were a four-day stint as a cashier at McDonalds during one high school summer, an assistant tile setter, a movie grip, and a gardener. Jobs that paid the bills so he could keep on making music or jobs that he could trade for studio time.

In those days, you could make a living playing music in clubs, bars, and stripper joints. The pay was almost always cash from the till at the end of the night. His bands played San Diego, Catalina Island, Bakersfield, Sacramento, Reno, San Francisco, Anchorage, Alaska and places in-between. They played The Plush Bunny nightclub in East LA on famous Whittier Blvd.; Pick’s Elbow Room in Hollywood; and the Dewdrop Inn in downtown LA. They were regulars on the Sunset Strip at the Sea Witch and Pandora’s Box.

Rock & Roll stardom remained elusive to Craig despite having recorded almost 200 original songs over his lifetime. While still in high school, their manager Bob Knight who also managed Buddy Holly and the Crickets, got them a recording session at Liberty Records, produced by Joe Saraceno and they got brief airplay on KFWB. Jimmy Greenspan of 3 Dog Night and Snuff Garrett were fans of his band.

For Craig, it was never about stardom, or success for that matter. It was about the music…and having a good time. Summer of 1964 found Craig fronting the house band at The Chi Chi Club in Avalon on Catalina Island. For their going-away party at the end of the summer, they pulled all the mattresses out of the rooms and laid them end-to-end filling the entire dance hall. The managers were ok with it, and everyone on the island came for the party that night. It was such a big hit, they had a second going-away party the following night!

In those days, paying quarterly taxes as an independent contractor wasn’t required and tips were not reported. For that reason, at age 65, Craig didn’t receive Social Security or Medicare. If it hadn’t been for his family home, he could easily have ended up destitute on the streets of Los Angeles. But as long as he had a roof over his head, his music continued. His 1973 band Freedom Quest with a then unknown 17-year-old David Benoit played mini-Woodstock concerts throughout San Diego. His final band, the 2012 trio the Craig Ingraham Band with Bill Richardson and Debora Masterson, was cut short due to his illness.

On February 24, 2014, Craig had his first grand mal seizure that lasted a very long ten minutes. The doctors couldn’t figure out why and there was no cure. It was the beginning of a long six-year illness. He was able to control the grand mal seizures with medication but not the petit mal which ironically affected only his speech. The Walking Juke Box was no more.