The Byrds’ Chris Hillman reunites with old friends on new album

By Randy Lewis / Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — Byrds co-founder and ace musician Chris Hillman is on the verge of releasing “Bidin’ My Time,” a new album he’s recorded with Tom Petty co-producing, but at his home office and study in Ventura in August, the artist is in a reflective mood.

He reaches down toward a phalanx of instrument cases lining one wall of the building in which he conducts much of his business these days.

He snags one of the smaller ones, unzips the protective cloth cover, unsnaps the hard-shell case underneath and removes a gorgeous Lloyd Loar F5 model Gibson mandolin that looks as if it came out of the factory yesterday. It’s 93 years old.

“Stephen Stills gave this to me,” Hillman, 72, says softly. “He’d invited me to Florida to play on some sessions, and one day he said, ‘You know that mandolin you’ve been playing onstage? It’s really bad.’”

Hillman said he knew. The sound, he confessed, was poor. Stills said, “‘Here, try this one,’ and handed me this one. I played a little on it and I said, ‘Man, this is beautiful.’ He said, ‘It’s yours.’”

Hillman, who recently had considered himself more or less retired from the recording studio before putting together “Bidin’ My Time,” pauses, seemingly taken back to the early ’70s. With Stills, Hillman would form the band Manassas, one of several historically significant acts Hillman has on his resume. Hillman, with Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, Gene Clark and Michael Clarke, would launch the Byrds in 1964 and help kick-start the genre of folk rock.

“I said, ‘You can’t give this to me,’” Hillman said as he continued the tale of the mandolin. “Stephen said, ‘You got us our first job at the Whisky a Go-Go — it’s yours,’” referring to the equally influential rock-country-folk band Buffalo Springfield.

Hillman demurs. “Hey, I was just a bass player and I told Elmer (Valentine, the Whisky’s founder) there was this new band he ought to hire.”

In many ways this is the story of Hillman’s life: As a creative artist and musical collaborator, he’s often quietly ceded the spotlight to peers who’ve been happy to soak up more public attention and adoration.

“At the start, nobody really knew who he was when he was in the Byrds, what was really there,” David Crosby, 76, said of his longtime friend with whom he is reunited on “Bidin’ My Time,” out this week.

“At the beginning he was just standing there playing bass,” Crosby recalled. “But as soon as he started writing and singing, people figured out, ‘Oh, I get it.’ Then when he did his own band, the Desert Rose Band (in the 1980s and ’90s) it was plain he was excelling as a singer and a songwriter. He was the whole package, and it was fun to watch people discover him.”

Crosby reconnected with Hillman recently on a new rendition of the Byrds’ standard “The Bells of Rhymney,” which opens the new album produced by two friends of long standing: Byrds acolyte Petty and bluegrass country singer and instrumentalist Herb Pedersen.

McGuinn also adds his voice to Hillman’s again on “Here She Comes Again,” a song Hillman wrote in 1978 for the short-lived McGuinn, Clark &Hillman trio long after they’d last sung together in the Byrds.

“What I always liked about that song is that it captured the Beatles/Byrds ‘65 feel,” Hillman said, “and it did that without a fluff lyric.”

“I didn’t go looking for this,” Hillman said of his latest project. “I was more or less retired. We spend most of our time now chasing thieves,” he said, referring to tracking down copyright infringement issues with the help of his wife, semi-retired music publicist Connie Pappas Hillman.

Yet “Bidin’ My Time” contains nods to virtually every phase of Hillman’s musical life, with acoustic bluegrass, jangly folk-rock and sweet country-rock that lend a full-circle quality to the project, which concludes with Hillman’s version of Petty’s song “Wildflowers.”

The new collection makes a couple of nods to the band in which he shot to national fame, including another Byrds update, this one also featuring McGuinn in a contemporary rendition of Clark’s “She Don’t Care About Time,” a non-album track that originally was released as the B side of the 1965 “Turn! Turn! Turn!” single.

Hillman’s post-Byrds path could support a pop music family tree of its own.

He left the Byrds to form the greatly influential country-rock group the Flying Burrito Brothers with latter-day Byrds member Gram Parsons — another beneficiary of Hillman’s ear for promising talent. It was Hillman who persuaded Parsons to check out a young singer Hillman had heard in a club in Washington, D.C., which led to Parsons’ introduction to future country great Emmylou Harris.

The ’70s were also when Hillman teamed with Stills in Manassas before moving on with singer-songwriter J.D. Souther and Buffalo Springfield alumnus Richie Furay to launch the short-lived Souther-Hillman-Furay Band. He then reconnected in the late ’70s with two former Byrds to create McGuinn, Clark &Hillman, another conglomeration that sounded more like a law firm than a rock group.

The ’80s brought another career rejuvenation for Hillman when he formed the Desert Rose Band, a group that included his old friend and early band mate Herb Pedersen along with steel guitar great Jay Dee Maness and multi-instrumentalist John Jorgenson.