Time Between Read online

  “Chris Hillman has been a well-kept secret in the history of rock. Yeah, we all know how great he was in The Byrds, but his contributions go well beyond that. Chris was a true innovator—the man who invented country rock. Sorry, Gram, Chris got there first! Every time The Eagles board their private jet, Chris at least paid for the fuel.”

  —Tom Petty

  “Before I met Chris Hillman, I imagined him to be a larger-than-life musical adventurer who had been to the moon and back, lived to tell about it, and was the keeper of a thousand songs and stories. After I got to know Chris Hillman, I learned that he is, indeed, a larger-than-life character—a fearless musical adventurer who has been to the moon and back more than once, and brought back a lifetime’s worth of colorful stories to tell, many of which are within the pages of this book.

  I also came to understand that Chris Hillman is a bona fide pioneering godfather to generations of musical souls who’ve sought inspiration at that divine crossroads where rock & roll, country, bluegrass, folk, honky tonk, and gospel music intersect and harmonize. Chris sings like a Byrd, his is the soul of a poet, he’s the only guy in the world that can properly play ‘Eight Miles High’ on the mandolin, and his bass playing is the essence of great American rock & roll. Chris Hillman is a national treasure, truly a statesman. He’s my brother, and I dearly love him.”

  —Marty Stuart

  “This book brought back a lot of great memories! Chris covers the humorous origins of The Byrds and subsequent adventures, from meeting our heroes the Beatles in 1965 to going on tour together with Marty Stuart and his Fabulous Superlatives in 2018.”

  —Roger McGuinn

  “Reading this book reminds me how much fun it was to be in the Byrds. We didn’t really have a clue about the music biz, but we did love the music and we had such a blast when we were actually doing it. Wish I had known more and done better, but we did create some wonderful art together, and I will always be proud to have been a part of it and to be friends with Chris.”

  —David Crosby

  “I always loved Chris Hillman’s bass playing in The Byrds—really muscular, yet surprisingly nuanced. Never given to flash or anything showy, he concentrated on keeping a death grip on the groove. So, when he would come around the Whisky a Go Go to catch a set or two of our band, The Buffalo Springfield, I was always thrilled. We’d lurk about at the back of the Whisky a Go Go, cracking each other up with flinty-eyed observations regarding the predatory titans of the music business. Chris taught me that it was “all about the songs,” and we agreed that the best thing to do was to write them yourself and publish them yourself. Own the copyright.

  We had a great time putting the Manassas band together in England and creating that telepathic bond that develops playing live onstage or writing songs—open enough to let the other get inside your head and embrace the magic. It was all made possible by the fact that we started out as friends. We had an epic musical partnership for a while, and that Manassas band made some incredible music.”

  —Stephen Stills

  “Chris Hillman emerged from the ashes of The Byrds a seasoned and prolific songwriter. His compositions infusing folk, country, and rock have always been lyrically substantial and melodically memorable. That standard of excellence has never wavered, making him the unvarnished gem of every band he has inhabited. It’s time to applaud his legacy and salute the hands that rocked the cradle.”

  —Bernie Taupin

  Time Between

  My Life as a Byrd, Burrito Brother, and Beyond

  Copyright © 2020 by Chris Hillman, Bar None Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, with the exception of brief passages embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Chris Hillman has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work.

  Book production by Adept Content Solutions.

  Cover design by Patrick Crowley

  Cover photo courtesy of Sony Music Archives

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

  Hardback ISBN: 9781947026353

  Ebook ISBN: 9781947026384

  Published by BMG

  www.bmg.com

  www.chrishillman.com

  For Connie, I’ll love you until time passes me by.

  For Catherine, Nick, and my grandchildren, and for Nicky and Annie, you are all more precious than gold.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Introduction

  01 In Another Lifetime

  02 The Cowboy Way

  03 Carry Me Home

  04 Running

  05 Restless

  06 So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star

  07 Mr. Tambourine Man

  08 Eight Miles High

  09 Devil in Disguise

  10 Sin City

  11 Start All Over Again

  12 It Doesn’t Matter

  13 Long, Long Time

  14 Desert Rose

  15 Pages of Life

  16 Like a Hurricane

  17 The Other Side

  18 Bidin’ My Time

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Discography

  FOREWORD

  OUT OF A CALIFORNIA SKY

  The iconic cover photo of Time Between captures, with the snap of a camera’s shutter, everything about the moment in American musical history when a quintessentially seminal California band forever changed pop culture throughout the world. That band, The Byrds, which would come to be known as “America’s Beatles,” not only reintroduced Bob Dylan as a rock-and-roll songwriting giant with the release of their indelibly cinematic recording of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” but planted a sonic victory flag foretelling the Golden State’s imminent conquests, reshaping, and shared dominance of modern popular music.

  With everything that photo of The Byrds’ founding member Chris Hillman says about the cultural moment in which it was taken, it’s only upon reading here Chris’s telling of his life’s journey and musical evolution that the image fully conveys everything else about the “times” between that moment and the collective moments that led up to it and beyond. In reading his book, I have come to conclude that a very strong argument can be made that Chris Hillman was, in fact, the very soul of The Byrds, always pushing himself and those around him in the band to see the possibilities of, not just what their music was, but what their music could become.

  In the spectrum of California cultural expressions, if James Ellroy’s viscerally tragic scat-jazz autobiographic history, My Dark Places, embodies the antithesis of the world’s “Ozzie and Harriet” vision of post-war 1940s, ’50s, and early ’60s Southern California, then Chris Hillman’s self-penned story unfolds as a parallel universe version of the same time and place that is disarmingly compelling in its succinct directness and profoundly innocent emotional candor. The window he opens onto his and his family members’ lives reveals the California that existed beneath the hazy shimmering mirage that was often viewed from the distance by those of us in the rest of America as an idealized sunlit Hockney-like daydream illusion that we believed existed. Unlike Ellroy’s seductively glamorous seedy tomes that often strut around in gilded counterpoint to the citrus crate bucolic perfection of the Nelsons’ TV world, Hillman’s book resonates in a realm of unaffected honesty, never attempting verbose grandeur, but with every page, paragraph, sentence, and word disclosing a sublime reality.

  That cover photo moment of Chris embodies, simultaneously, the worldly awareness, cultural coolness, and ricocheting angst-riddled earnestness that is uniquely and specifically embedded in the Tom Joad-cum-James Dean/Steve McQueen DNA of California’s versions o
f rock, pop, country, and, ultimately, the LA-born genre of country-rock music. As I remarked in a previous foreword for the book Hot Burritos: The True Story of the Flying Burrito Brothers, and have now reaffirmed after reading the telling of his own story in the following pages, Chris Hillman proved to be a Kit Carson-like California musical frontiersman and pathfinder that all of us who have subsequently followed in modern country and country-rock music used as a crucial navigational beacon to track toward our own musical destinies. In spite of Chris’s varying degrees of chagrin through the years at being given the title, to me and millions of other fans, he will remain forever immortal as one of the principal architects and a founding father of country-rock.

  Dwight Yoakam

  Los Angeles, California, May 2020

  INTRODUCTION

  HEAVENLY FIRE

  It was December 4, 2017, the night of my seventy-third birthday. I was celebrating with my wife Connie, our daughter Catherine, our son-in-law Nick, and our granddaughter at a restaurant near our home in Ventura, California. Nick, a firefighter, received a text at the dinner table around 7:00 p.m. alerting him that a strong brush fire had broken out in Santa Paula, California, an inland city about twenty miles east. There was no indication of an immediate problem.

  As the evening wound down, Connie and I said our goodbyes and made the short drive home. We noticed that the wind had picked up. By the time we pulled into our driveway it was blowing at least seventy-five miles per hour. We went to bed around 9:30 p.m., just after the power had gone out as a result of the high winds—or so we assumed. We went to sleep, but Connie was later awakened at around 11:00 p.m. by the smell of smoke. She ran to the window and saw an angry red glow covering the whole skyline. The entire ridge across the street from us was on fire.

  We had no advance warning to prepare, but we knew we had to evacuate immediately. Having no electrical power, we propped open the garage door with a broom handle and backed out one of the cars. We loaded it up with important papers, our passports, family photos, and icons we had brought home with us from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and two of my prized instruments: a Lloyd Loar mandolin that Stephen Stills gave me many years ago and a Martin D-28 guitar that was gifted to me by the widow of Bill Smith, who had been one of my earliest musical mentors. We kept returning to the house for more things until I realized time was running out and we were in danger. The fire was gaining on us, and we could be trapped if we didn’t get moving. We grabbed our dog Daisy, started up the car, and headed down the hill.

  Having grown up in California, I was used to brush fires and their destructive potential when combined with powerful Santa Ana winds. I could tell that what we were seeing around us as we descended from the neighborhood was serious. This was a firestorm, and it was moving quickly, destroying everything in its path. Our son, who is also named Nick, phoned from Napa County. He had seen the news and was calling to tell us that we needed to evacuate immediately. We assured him we were already headed for safety. My phone rang again. It was John Jorgenson, one of my longtime friends and musical collaborators who happened to live, with his wife Dixie, on one of the city streets down the hill from the fire. He urged us to come to their house. When we arrived, we stood outside their door where we could see the fire roaring across the hillside. Houses were literally exploding. We decided to evacuate to a hotel near the beach to avoid the danger zone. As we left, however, we hit complete gridlock. The county was evacuating families to the local fairgrounds for temporary shelter, and we got caught up in the traffic. The route was overwhelmed with thousands of people from all over western Ventura County heading there with their horses and livestock. I turned the car around to go the other direction, but we soon discovered that the only available hotels were in the San Fernando Valley, almost an hour away. We eventually gave up and headed back to John and Dixie’s for the night.

  I slept through the night, but Connie didn’t. At about five in the morning she saw a fire battalion chief parked with a bank of engines, holding the line where the hillside neighborhoods met the flatland. She asked if it was possible for him to check his interactive map to see if our home was still standing. He promised to do more than that. “I’ll go up and check for you,” he told her, “and I’ll call you in twenty minutes.” He kept his word. When Connie answered her phone, he said, “If I have the right place, I think your house made it, but everything around you is gone.” When the sun rose, we decided to drive up the hill to check on our home. “It’s possible,” I told Connie as we got in the car, “that the house is gone. We might not have a home anymore.” She squeezed my hand. “But we’re alive,” she responded, “and that’s all that matters.” Connie has always had a wonderful way of putting things in perspective.

  As we rounded the last curve to our driveway, there stood our house. Fire had consumed two rooms of our home but, by the grace of God, it was still standing despite the total devastation all around us. The surrounding area was an eerie sight. Entire homes were reduced to rubble. It looked more like a bombed-out scene from war-torn Syria than the familiar neighborhood streets I drove every day. Smoke was still rising from the ground, gas lines were burning, and the wind was whipping up toxic ash that floated in the air all around us. I saw some strange and unfamiliar faces on our property. Possible looters. Our front door was smashed, and a number of windows were broken. With no way to secure the house, I decided to stay the night. With a mask over my face, a flashlight in one hand, and a Glock 26 nine-millimeter pistol in the other, I was prepared to take on whatever might come along. We were able to secure the property the next day, and I decided not to stay another night, with the air so toxic.

  It was the next morning, when we were checking the damage, that we discovered what happened the night of the fire. Four Ventura County firefighters from Simi Valley Station 41 stopped by to check to see if there was anything still smoldering on our roof. They told us that after we evacuated and the worst of the firestorm had passed, they were checking on the homes that had survived so they could extinguish any remaining blazes that might threaten houses that hadn’t yet burned. It was about three in the morning when they pulled up to our house just in time to see our neighbor’s burning balcony collapse through our kitchen window, setting our kitchen and den on fire. The city generators weren’t activated, which rendered the neighborhood fire hydrants useless. Hoses were left in the street as firefighters hooked up, only to discover that there was no water. But the crew of Station 41 calculated that they had just enough resources left on their engine to save our home. They broke down the front door, rushed in, and extinguished the flames. Fire had already consumed the two rooms, but their quick action saved the rest of the house from total destruction. We are eternally grateful to that team of first responders who saved our home, led by Captains Lance Austin and Jon Jelle.

  Hotel rooms were difficult to come by for a few days, but our insurance agent came through with a hotel at the harbor. That became our home for several weeks until we could relocate to a large and comfortable furnished house near the beach for the next eight months. Everything from our home that was not destroyed would be moved into storage at a restoration company while repairs were undertaken on our battered home. It was bad, but it could have been much worse. The Thomas Fire, as it was named, burned over 280,000 acres and was the largest wildfire in modern state history until it was surpassed by an even bigger blaze the following summer. Many around us lost everything. As the fire moved north, mudslides completely overran the city of Montecito and twenty-three people lost their lives, as their homes and neighborhoods were swallowed up by a torrent of flowing mud and boulders. We were affected but, as Connie reminded me, we were alive. We’d survived it.

  The Thomas Fire wasn’t the first fire I ever faced. In fact, it was the third time that a blazing inferno drove me from a home. And, over the course of my life, I have faced down and survived plenty of metaphorical fires too. I’ve been confronted by personal struggles, and I’ve lost people I loved deeply. I’ve
overcome the ravages of disease. I lost an earthly father too young and found a heavenly Father that I only wish I’d found sooner. I’ve experienced the highs, lows, temptations, and triumphs of life as a professional musician. I was blessed to have been a member of The Byrds, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Manassas, Souther-Hillman-Furay, and The Desert Rose Band, where I survived countless miles of endless highway pursuing my dreams. I was honored to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but my greatest honor is being a husband to Connie, a father to Catherine and Nick, a father-in-law to their spouses, Nick and Annie, and “Papa” to my granddaughter and grandson. I’ve lived a very full life, and God has blessed me abundantly.

  I was born on December 4, 1944. One day, when my time on earth is finished, that date will be chiseled in stone. It will be followed by a dash and another date will be chiseled next to it. My faith teaches that we are only passing through this earthly realm, so that’s when I will be reunited with my loved ones who have gone before me. But I do believe that what happens in the dash between those dates matters. That’s why I want to tell you my story. As time moves on and history fades, those dates might become what’s remembered about Chris Hillman. Let me tell you about the time between. At least so far.

  CHAPTER ONE

  IN ANOTHER LIFETIME

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?” the old man roared as he snatched the rifle from my hands. Whenever he used that voice I knew I was in trouble. “Dad, Dad,” I protested. “I didn’t mean to! He ran right in front of me just when I was pulling the trigger!” I had just shot our family beagle in the rear end with my Daisy Red Rider BB gun. My father shook his head and stomped off, getting about forty feet away before abruptly spinning on his heels to face me once again. “That was one hell of an excuse,” he shouted back in my direction. I could detect the faintest hint of a smile, but he managed to maintain his parental composure. Our ever-faithful beagle was fine, but I wasn’t. Sure, I was feeling a little guilty for what I’d done to the dog, but the real reason was because I knew I wouldn’t see that rifle again for a long time.