Chris Hillman’s musical life from Byrds to Burritos
LOS ANGELES — Tom Petty once described him as one of rock music’s most well-kept secrets, and Chris Hillman is fine with that.
Sixty-one years after he picked up his first guitar, Hillman says music was never about becoming rich and famous, something he mocked in the whimsical 1967 hit “So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star” that he co-wrote with fellow bandmate Roger McGuinn for the Byrds.
It was never about getting into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, either, although Hillman, McGuinn and their fellow Byrds are there, too.
That’s thanks in large part to the group having laid the groundwork for the musical subgenres folk-rock and country-rock in the late 1960s with songs like Hillman’s “Between Time,” that put a driving, rockbased melody to a country heartbreak ballad, and the band’s interpretation of songs like Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man“that famously featured McGuinn’s jangling, 12-string electric guitar.
None of it was deliberate, but organic, Hillman says now, explaining how he went through a half-century of performance simply pursuing the music that he loved, from bluegrass to folk to country to rock.
“I just had such a passion for the music,“he said by phone recently from his sundappled hillside home overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Ventura, California.
“I never thought I would get paid,“added Hillman, a friendly, modest man of 76. “I was just having so much fun.”
That passion is revealed in his justpublished memoir “Time Between: My Life as a Byrd, Burrito Brother, and Beyond.“It recounts how a carefree surfer kid from a small California beach town had his idyllic 1950s life redirected at age 15 when his mother, having given in to his repeated pleas, bought him a $10 guitar during a shopping trip to Tijuana, Mexico, with the promise that if he actually learned to play the thing she’d eventually help him get a better one.
Not that he didn’t face and overcome plenty of dark moments over the succeeding half-century, beginning with the first and probably darkest, his beloved father’s suicide when Hillman was just 16.
In the following years he’d see numerous friends fall victim to what he calls the hedonistic lifestyle that lured so many musicians of his generation.
Most prominent of them was likely Gram Parsons, who played with Hillman in both the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers and died in a California desert hotel room of a drug overdose at age 26.
A few years before, Parsons and Hillman had written the song “Sin City,“a searing indictment of the Los Angeles music scene’s dark side of money, drugs and fame in those years with the words, “On the 31st floor, a gold-plated door, won’t keep out the Lord’s burning rain.“