Some musicians write memoirs to settle scores. Others write them to inflate their legend. Chris Hillman, who has spent most of his career standing slightly to one side of the spotlight, seems to have gone for a more unusual route, reminiscing without self-justification or recrimination.
Time Between: My Life as a Byrd, Burrito Brother, and Beyond, was published in 202, and takes its title from one of Hillman’s own songs, from the Byrds’ Younger Than Yesterday. It’s a good choice as that album marked the point where the bass player began to emerge as a songwriter in his own right, and also because he has had a musical life lived in the gaps between bigger personalities.
The early chapters are some of the most interesting. Hillman grew up in rural California, and his account of a ranch childhood, a teenage obsession with bluegrass and the mandolin, and his apprenticeship in groups like the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers and the Hillmen gives the reader a clear sense of where his musical loves lie. He writes about his father’s suicide when he was a teenager, a loss that shaped him, but he does it without self-pity.
Recruited to the Byrds by manager Jim Dickson, Hillman was handed a bass guitar, an instrument he had barely touched before. His telling of those years is clear-sighted. He acknowledges the brilliance of Roger McGuinn and Gene Clark, and he is frank about the friction, particularly with David Crosby, yet he never reaches for the cheap shot. Where there was bad behaviour, his own included, he names it and moves on. Read alongside the classic works which wwe’vecovered before from Johnny Rogan and John Einarson, this is another angle on the times.
The heart of the book is the sections on Gram Parsons. Hillman brought Parsons into the Byrds, watched Sweetheart of the Rodeo take shape, and then co-founded the Flying Burrito Brothers with him. The Gilded Palace of Sin remains one of the foundation stones of Americana, and Hillman’s recollections of making it are full of affection for the music and for the talented, but clearly maddening man who drove so much of it. He neither sanctifies nor dismisses Parsons. Instead, he offers the perspective of a friend who loved him, grew exasperated by his unreliability, and still grieves what might have been. It is one of the fairest portraits of Parsons you are likely to read, precisely because it comes from someone with no interest in maintaining a myth.
The “beyond” of the subtitle covers the incredibly wide range of his post-Byrds, post-Gram life: Manassas with Stephen Stills, the Souther-Hillman-Furay Band, McGuinn, Clark and Hillman, and then the Desert Rose Band, which brought him success on the country charts in the 1980s. Alongside the music runs a steadier thread about his marriage, his family and his Christian faith, which he describes with sincerity rather than sermonising. There is also a touching coda involving Tom Petty, who produced Hillman’s late-career album Bidin’ My Time.
What lifts Time Between above the more self-serving rock memoirs is its tone. Hillman writes the way he plays. Economically, tastefully, in service of the song. The book is relatively short and never outstays its welcome. Some readers may wish for more detail on particular sessions or more gossip, but that restraint is part of its character. This is a man who has outlived many of his bandmates and has chosen gratitude over grievance.
For anyone who cares about the roots of country rock, this is key reading. For anyone who simply wants to understand how a quiet bluegrass mandolinist ended up at the centre of several of the most important bands in our corner of the musical forest, it is a pleasure to spend time with. I’d also recommend the Audiobook, read for the most part by Hillman, who, while not a natural narrator, does a great job of injecting his personality into the reading.
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