Picking himself up
Chris Hillman reflects on good times with Gram Parsons, David Crosby and more
“My underlying message in this book is that you cannot give in. Pick yourself up. My God, don’t give in. Get up off the ground and keep moving.”
— Chris Hillman
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 in the book 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 the back of 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