A Byrd looks back
OFFERS LITTLE ROCK ’N’ ROLL DRAMA, JUST ACCOUNTS OF MUSIC AND MUSICIANS
Chris Hillman says there was never any grand plan behind his decision to write about his life in music, a career that spans six decades as co-founder of legendary bands such as the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, and his later success as the leader of the Desert Rose Band. “I started this as a fun project to leave something for my kids and grandkids,” he says from his Ventura home recently. “To write something about what Papa did, what Dad did.
“And the only other thing, there were so many inaccuracies written about the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers that I thought, OK, I was there, I’m going to clarify this, be honest with it all.
“But I had no grand illusions.”
“Time Between: My Life as a Byrd, Burrito Brother, and Beyond” delivers on Hillman’s simple goal, sharing stories from his childhood in rural San Diego County as a boy in the ’ 50s to a musical career that took off in the early ’ 60s and hasn’t stopped since.
For a rock ’n’ roll memoir, Hillman’s tale is noticeably wholesome, touching on the bad behavior of the times only lightly while keeping its focus on the music and musicians who made it. That’s entirely by design, he says.
“I wasn’t going to write another ‘rock star writes his memoir,’ ” Hillman says. “My memoir is not about any salacious stuff. I just wasn’t that kind of person.
“I didn’t feel it was relevant to write about the people I worked with that did not make it, that made some bad decisions with their lives about drugs and alcohol, this and that,” he says. “I said it mostly diplomatically, that people had issues.”
And his publisher at BMG Books was understanding of that from the start, Hillman adds.
“I said I’m not going to give you a Led Zeppelin exposé,” he says. “With all due respect to those bands, I’m not going to give you a rock ’n’ roll book. He said, ‘ We don’t want that kind of book; just tell your story,’ and that’s exactly what I did.”
Early chapters describe a childhood of adventure in the wilds of Rancho Santa Fe, where his father relocated the family in 1946 when Hillman was 2.
“It was absolutely idyllic,” Hillman says of days filled with exploring the open land around their home, eventually astride his trusty horse Ranger. “It was ‘Leave It to Beaver’ or ‘ Spin and Marty.’ Growing up was wonderful.”
As a teen, Hillman took up the guitar, then the mandolin, falling hard for the folk music and bluegrass revival of the late ’50s. That world crashed hard around him, though, when in 1961 his father grew deeply depressed, drove to a motel in San Clemente and took an intentional overdose of sleeping pills.
His father’s suicide turned the family inside out, Hillman says in the book and in conversation. He and his younger sister moved to Los Angeles with his mother where she could find work. (Two older siblings had already left home.)
The music scene of the early ’ 60s provided some solace, but the trauma and anger over his father’s action lingered for decades, Hillman says.
“After my dad died, I was 16,” he says. “I was angry for probably 20 or 30 years — into my career, successful, as an angry guy, getting into issues with abandonment. Suicide is just dreadful; it’s so bad for a family.”
Life was tough in the aftermath, but in time compassion replaced anger; understanding filled the hole where questions once lived.
“My dad was a good guy, as I say in the book,” Hillman says. “He was really, really a wonderful man. Principled, honest, hard-working, creative. He was a newspaper editor. And he just came to this despondent place.”
Today, Hillman says, he sees how that early heartbreak and loss built in him a resilience that served him through the rise and fall of bands and friendships, failure and success.
“My underlying message in this book is that you cannot give in,” he says. “Pick yourself up. My God, don’t give in. Get up off the ground and keep moving.
“I love the old Baptist hymnals,” says Hillman, who later in life found faith as a born-again Christian and, later still, converted to the Greek Orthodox faith of his wife, Connie. “The troubles and trials, and they’re always going to get to the other side and all that.”
As for those misconceptions in other books about the Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers, Hillman doesn’t want to point fingers at any specific books or authors, choosing instead to emphasize the accuracy of his own.
“There was a lot of emphasis on, of course, the mythological status given to Gram Parsons,” he says of the Byrds’ collaborator on their groundbreaking country-rock album “Sweethearts of the Rodeo,” with whom he later founded the Flying Burrito Brothers.
“And he was a wonderful guy,” Hillman says. “Believe me, I did write great songs with Gram. I had a very focused guy for about a year and a half, and then we lost him. He didn’t die then; his focus was on other things. He was totally unprofessional.”
That same lack of commitment to the band was behind the Byrds’ decision to fire David Crosby, too, he says.
“I still love David,” he says. “I talk to him once a month usually. But it wasn’t working. He wasn’t involved. He wasn’t into the group.”
Yet even with Parsons, who died in the early ’70s, and Crosby having disappointed him with their failings as bandmates, Hillman writes of them with the same empathy and loyalty he exhibits toward friends and musicians throughout his life.
A sense of fair play always was and still remains an important part of life, he says.
“I even sat one person down that I was working with and I said, ‘ You’re paying us too much money,’ ” Hillman says. “I’ll tell you who it was because it’s not harmful. It was Stephen Stills. I sat him down [when Hillman joined him for the band Manassas], and I said you’re paying us too much.”
Stills was confused in that moment, but Hillman says he never doubted the rightness of his decision.
“I felt it was my duty to do that,” he says. “But he was a very loyal friend to me and has always been.
“David Crosby has been there for me a lot of times. And Crosby, I don’t think we’ll ever work together, but he’s a sweet guy. If I need him to sing on something, he’s there.
“One time I said, ‘Here, I’m going to give you something for coming down,’ ” Hillman says. “He said, ‘ I’m not going to take your money; I’m your friend.’ ”
Roger McGuinn, who with Hillman and Crosby is the third surviving founder of the Byrds, has remained a similarly close friend over the decades, culminating most recently in the 2018 tour with Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives to celebrate the 50th anniversary of “Sweethearts of the Rodeo.”
“I’ve got to tell you, that could have been the best tour, or one of the best tours, I’ve ever been on in my life in five, six decades,” Hillman says. “We had such a good time because there was just a genuine respect between everybody on that stage.”
Every show on that tour, which kicked off with two at the Theatre at Ace Hotel in Los Angeles, was recorded, and Hillman hints that maybe in the not-too-distant future he, McGuinn and Stuart will get together to talk about releasing something from the shows.
The previous year, Hillman released his first solo album in a dozen years, a terrific collection of songs produced by Tom Petty, who’d grown up a huge fan of the Byrds. Crosby, McGuinn, members of Petty’s band the Heartbreakers and other longtime friends contributed to “Bidin’ My Time.”
Hillman says that when that album was finished, he thanked Petty for all his work on it, mentioning that it was probably going to be his final release. Petty just gave him a look and said, “I’m not done with you yet.”
But in October 2017, two weeks after the album was released, Petty died, putting an end to any idea of a sequel or reunion. “He would have been the guy to get the Byrds back into the studio,” Hillman says. “Roger and Tom are real close friends. David knew Tom. If anyone could have gotten us into the studio to do an album, it would have been Tom Petty.”