Do you remember "If I Were a Carpenter", the folk ballad? Maybe you do. And perhaps you thought it was written by the smiling Bobby Darin, that teen idol crooner for young girls: after all, it was he who cut the most famous version, the one that got the most radio play and climbed the British and American charts back in the Sixties. Riding that wave of success, Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, the Four Tops also recorded it, and later even Robert Plant. And "Reason To Believe"? I bet you instantly associate it with Rod Stewart: in the early Seventies he sang it, tucking it away as the closing track on his finest record, "Every Picture Tells A Story", and that's where his legend began. Not mine.
Right, because people — at least most of the American girls and boys who buy records — well, they don't really bother reading the credits printed inside the sleeve, right below each song title: they're not curious enough to go to the source; it's enough for them to get lost in the notes of a hit single, and they couldn't care less who the original author was. They're happy to keep Rod Stewart, or Bobby Darin. And if whoever wrote it ended up buried under a pile of covers, well, evidently he didn't deserve even a chance in the golden, ruthless, lying music business. That's the story of my life.

Hello everyone, my name is Tim. No, not that Tim some of you — lovers of a certain kind of folk songwriting for visionary, doomed heroes — might be picturing: chestnut curls, an angel's face, the alluring, passionate singer of sirens. No, I never had anything to do with him, even though,
in a certain sense, the other Tim owes me more than a little something, and I'm not talking about dollars, since my manager has already taken care of those (but I'll get to that in due time).
As I was saying, I'm not that Tim, but I forgive you all the same for even thinking it, since by now I'm used to that mix-up, ever since we both set off, just a few years apart. My name is James Timothy Hardin, and as for my legendary ancestor, the nineteenth-century outlaw John Wesley, some little elves from Minnesota dedicated an entire album to him, appropriating that myth in my place. All it took was adding a simple "G" and heading to the cash register.

I had just turned 39 when a heroin overdose dragged me away with it.
Five foot six of lowliness and at least twenty extra kilos: a melancholy teddy bear shedding hair and letting himself drift wherever the current took him. That's what I had become,
ladies and gentlemen. And to think that once I had been talented, and quite good-looking too
(the girls never asked for their money back, if that's what you want to know), with that piercing Marlon Brando gaze, cocky like the young Jeff Bridges in "The Last Picture Show". Yes, well, with my broad forehead and my sideburns, with my hipster air, I had been cool, I admit it. But those days were gone for good, dried up somewhere along with my best inspiration. The fact is I had deluded myself into thinking I could quit hard drugs after twenty years of excess: no more smack, no more methadone or speed. Not even valium. I deluded myself that I could be done with that shit, with those feelings of omnipotence and loneliness. I wanted to do it for Damion's sake, if nothing else. So to compensate, I drowned my dissatisfaction in a thousand midnight snacks, spread out at every hour of the day. And I screwed it all up.

It was sweet Janet, my last girlfriend, who found me lifeless that Monday night.
It was December 29, 1980. For at least three weeks, in the papers, on the radio and in the streets, everyone had done nothing but remember the tragedy of John Lennon, murdered by a deranged fan on the other side of the United States. His "(Just Like) Startin' Over" had just reached number one on the charts, knocking off, thank God, that whiny piece of garbage "Lady" by Kenny Rogers.
It was supposed to be his great comeback, after a few years in retirement.
But back to me, since you've probably already heard John's story at least a billion times.
Well, the mass media in those days did nothing but repeat how saintly and irreplaceable Lennon had been, so no one bothered much with me.
Fate: years of career and right up to the end I remained out of focus, far from the center of the frame.
Partly it was my own doing, no doubt about that; partly Fate had played for me, cheating and still losing the game. Not that I cared at that point. But it would have been fair, honest, that's all. To write about the historical importance, the sensuality of the records Tim Hardin cut between 1966 and 1973. About how his baritone voice had changed the lives of a handful of dreamers, up and down the boulevards of glory or the alleys of despair. About how intense some of his best albums had been and how influential his way of singing had been. I'm not even asking for the Los Angeles Times, but at least Rolling Stone should have given me far more than an anonymous little note about the "glory and success he could have achieved if only he'd had more self-esteem, courage and self-confidence, cleverly dodging certain compromises of the record industry".
Well, that's not how it went, and my rediscovery came damn well posthumously.

I was living in L.A. during that final period, in a modest, cluttered apartment full of broken records and empty beer bottles on North Orange Drive, in West Hollywood. It was great, though.
Just five blocks and you could head down Santa Monica Boulevard eastward, straight to the beach. I went there often, you know: down there almost nobody recognized old glories, let alone "Almost Famous" types like me. So I could just relax, on my own. Besides, it's never really cold in Los Angeles, not even in December. In moments of calm and clarity I liked to lie down on the sand and reflect on my hows and whys. It was therapeutic, in a way. And destructive.

I was born on December 23, 1941 on the West Coast, in Eugene, Oregon. Hal, my father, was a jazz musician; my mother Molly was also a professional musician, a violinist in the Portland Symphony Orchestra. Which is to say: the hot, forbidden stuff of Black musicians in bed with academia and the concert halls of Ku Klux Klan subscribers. Not a bad combination.
I was an only child and I always had a fairly harmonious relationship with my parents, pretty normal, without any real highs or lows. Often they were away on tour, so they left me with the neighbors. I read, chased trains, climbed the trees behind their property.
My folks deserve credit for bringing music into the house. I certainly wasn't one of those precocious talents who perform around town at a tender age, trained like monkeys by someone else.
I wasn't obsessed with expressing myself through music, nor did I ever touch a guitar until high school. Don't get me wrong, I was capable of spending hours on the patio, listening on the radio to Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, and later, Elvis Presley and the other delinquents of rock'n'roll. Music alone, though, didn't win all my attention: there was sport, movies, girls. I studied acting in high school and my teacher, the Italian-American Ed Racazino (God bless him), played a part in my story. I played football, I was a promising quarterback. Then I broke my shoulder and dropped out of high school. Also because, in the meantime, some unpleasant rumors had spread about my early love affair with certain drugs: in fact, even back then I was already stealing little bottles of Dailudin or Panthaton from the local drugstore. I'd swallow the pills and feel a pleasant sense of calm and tranquility. A dazed balance that let me walk on clouds without a care or a responsibility in the world. With that stuff I could face my restlessness on equal footing, or at least sweep it under the rug. I learned I couldn't do without it anymore.
I left the team and school and joined the Marine Corps, to bring glory to my country and have some fun around the world, on President Eisenhower's dime. It was 1959.

For a year and a half I marched with my fellow soldiers through Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, back when the war was still just a possibility being weighed in some back room. It was out there in the Far East that I truly learned to play guitar: credit goes to my bunk neighbor, the smiling Jim Goodwyn, the ice-eyed beatnik. Even over there, finding drugs was never a problem: more often than not, we'd manage to score some. Then, on nights of the full moon, when we weren't marching or drilling for war, while my buddies wrote letters home to their families or girlfriends, I wrote songs. Mostly built on old folk and blues chord changes, in the style of the genre's masters. I came home more restless than before, and maybe a bit more of a man too. It was my old acting teacher, that Racazino I mentioned earlier, who wrote me a flattering letter of recommendation addressed to the American School of Dramatic Arts in New York City. My parents, broad-minded artists that they were, had come to terms with it: I wasn't going back behind those damn school desks, I had other plans in mind, even if I still didn't know exactly what they were. And so, aboard a Greyhound bus, I crossed America, flying straight as an arrow toward my target: Greenwich Village.

At that exact moment in history — we're talking 1961 — the neighborhood was living through a genuine renaissance: America's finest talents pounded the pavement, wandering artists roaming the streets, the coffee houses, or the chicest living rooms; young painters, sculptors, writers and poets, singer-songwriters. Everyone was either moving in or crashing at someone else's place, quietly swarming through the night between Bleecker and MacDougal Street, Thompson, Sullivan, or Washington Square Park. What times those were: you could listen to Coltrane at the Village Gate until the smallest hours, or Miles at the Vanguard, then step outside and randomly bump into some figure from the Beat Generation, Andy Warhol trailed by his bizarre entourage, Maya Angelou, Pete Seeger, or Woody Allen, who in those very days was just starting out doing stand-up comedy at the Duplex. As for me, I spent six weeks attending classes at the drama academy, after which I got kicked out, guilty of one too many late arrivals. Those people were obsessed with punctuality, and I, evidently, wasn't cut out for such a regimented life. With my last 40 dollars I bought a guitar, a nylon-string Harmony.

And so began my proper apprenticeship as an aspiring professional folksinger: alongside other rookies destined for legend (among them Bob Dylan, freshly arrived from Hibbing, Minnesota — a talent still raw, yet already remarkably sensitive at absorbing other people's vibrations, moods and ideas... he listened to and stockpiled everything, then reworked it and threw in his own secret ingredients), we drifted from club to club: there was Gerde's Folk City, the Bitter End, the Café Wha?, the Gaslight. Listening to us was a mixed crowd of leftist students and soldiers on leave, gorgeous art students and ruthless young rivals, all waiting for their turn on stage to steal the show from you. Around the wooden stages of those Village dives I got to know nearly every songwriter responsible for the American folk revival. I don't have the time or the will to name them all: I'll just mention my oldest and dearest friends, Karen Dalton and Fred Neil. Both were like older brothers to me, reference points with whom I shared everything in those very first years of my career.

I lived that life for a couple of years before moving to the university district of Boston and Cambridge, which was likewise packed with clubs tuned right into the folk revival: "Blowin' In The Wind" in the Peter, Paul & Mary version was ringing out everywhere back then. It was in a coffee house around there that I was approached by banjo player Erik Jacobsen, right after my set of traditionals and covers. Erik had been struck by my voice and my repertoire, and wanted to whisk me back to New York in a hurry to record something under his production. That was exactly what I'd been waiting for. My chance had finally come. In '63/'64 we recorded a whole batch of demos and test tapes for Columbia Records (the same label as Dylan and Billie Holiday): "House Of The Rising Sun," "Hoochie Coochie Man," and other stuff like that, plus a few of my own original songs. It all seemed to be smooth sailing from there, given the folk boom shaking American cities — but that's not how it went for me. Columbia dropped me and tore up the contract. All that material came out years later, in a haphazard fashion. I didn't lose heart, though, and in 1965 I headed to Los Angeles, the city of angels, ready to be caught off guard by whatever came next.

My blonde angel, my obsession, my new muse, was named Susan Yardley, and she was a young soap opera actress on the TV show "The Young Marrieds." We met on Venice Beach one Sunday afternoon, and it was love at first sight. Her quiet, never-arrogant charm enchanted me. She laughed at my jokes, she was loyal and devoted, and I wrote every one of my songs for her. She agreed to quit her job and move back with me to New York, since in the meantime I'd been given a second chance, this time with the Verve Forecast label. The woman you see on the cover of my second album is her, Susan, pregnant with our son Damion, who's 45 now and works in real estate somewhere down in Florida. She was the one who inspired me in the summer of 1966, when I wrote the songs for "Tim Hardin 1." It was a solid debut record, full of declarations of love and unease, of mystery, dreams and responsibility. Jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton, one of the best around, played on it, as did the harmonica of my old friend John Sebastian, who by then had found success with the Lovin' Spoonful. Aside from a handful of folk-rock numbers that flow by like clear water, I fondly remember some of the finest songs in my catalog: "Part Of The Wind," "Misty Roses," "It'll Never Happen Again," "How Can We Hang On To a Dream?" And then, of course, "Reason To Believe," my most powerful folk ballad, my signature piece. In post-production they added strings to the original recordings — not a great idea, since all they did was weigh everything else down.

The album got good reviews (I was warmly received at the annual Newport Folk Festival), but it wasn't a big success. So Verve immediately asked me for more material to release, songs I finished recording that same summer, which ended up on my second album, "Tim Hardin 2," in spring 1967. It was a step forward, albeit a relative one. That record included "If I Were a Carpenter," another ballad for my Susan: Bobby Darin's cover of it did well on the charts, peaking at number 8 in the United States, and I, believing my glorious career was now paved smooth ahead of me, celebrated with a solemn bender in the Lower East Side, in the company of a homeless man. Then I shot up heroin and went home completely out of it. It was right around that time that it became a genuine addiction: I was at the mercy of heroin, a slave to its effects. And, like everyone at first, I also told myself I could quit whenever and however I wanted — nice story, Tim, tell it to someone else. Things were also starting to take an ugly turn with Susan: sometimes I'd hit her at night, coming home from some bar and feeling like I was being put through the third degree. Right afterward I'd hate myself for it, but in that moment, I don't know, it was as if someone else took control of the situation and did things in my place. To make it up to her I kept writing her songs, but it never worked, because then I'd end up hitting her again, out of my mind.

One of my finest concerts (April 1968 at New York's Town Hall) was recorded by the Verve staff and became "Tim Hardin 3: Live In Concert." My band for the occasion included a stunning Mike Mainieri on vibraphone, plus a second guitar, rhythm section and keyboards. We rehearsed together very little: I was used to performing solo, or at most as a duo, to maximize earnings and have immediate cash on hand for family expenses and drugs. That record contained several of my "classics" (though it makes me smile to call them that, as if everyone truly knew them the way they know the Beatles by heart), and my voice is in good shape throughout. Despite that, the album didn't sell. On top of that, fueled by certain drugs, I'd by then developed a kind of "stage fright" that kept me from doing long tours, which didn't help my career take off. In that sense, 1969 was the year of big opportunities. Verve dropped me after a disappointing "Best Of," but Columbia Records (yes, the very label that had let me go years earlier), evidently hungry for new (?) talent, signed me. I immediately recorded a 45 of a Bobby Darin cover, "Simple Song Of Freedom," which timidly poked into the American Top 50: in a way, it was my way of thanking Bobby. Even though I'd never been a fan of his, he was the one who'd recorded one of my songs and introduced it to a wide audience. I moved with Susan and Damion to the Woodstock area, not far from where Dylan and other artists had also settled. Unfortunately, the place was starting to lose the magical aura people told me it once had: mercilessly overrun by strung-out hippie kids who'd wander into your house at night and make love on the living room couch. I remember once smashing a bottle of Jack Daniel's over the head of one of those lunatics, who'd scared my wife. Then I drove him to the hospital.

I was supposed to open the Woodstock Festival, on the afternoon of August 15, 1969: one of the four organizers, Michael Lang, was a good friend of mine, and he'd assured me that playing there would be THE big opportunity to finally relaunch my career. I accepted the offer: I'd recently gotten off heroin (though I was still hooked on methadone and alcohol), things were going well, and in short, I felt I could pull it off. They told me there'd be a crew filming a documentary and, above all, hundreds of thousands of people, come from all over America to take part in that collective binge of "Peace, Love & Music." And so, on the afternoon of the first day, while all us musicians were backstage in a common area set up with wooden tables and chairs, chatting and jamming together, Michael comes to find me. I'm sitting there, unaware, in a corner, running through my repertoire, convinced my set would go on at nightfall. Lang sits down next to me and gently informs me that Sweetwater (the band meant to open the Festival) are still stuck in the ocean of traffic leading from the local airport to Yasgur's farm. And he asks if I might want to kick things off instead. In that moment, stone sober, all my proverbial "stage fright" comes rushing back. We're already more than an hour behind schedule and the kids sitting out there are starting to overheat, to get restless. No, I can't handle it. So I timidly explain to Michael that I don't feel up to it, that I can't do it, that even my band hasn't arrived yet. Luckily he doesn't push, and moves on down his list of options: he'll eventually convince Richie Havens, and his performance would truly go down in history, the kind that gives you chills. As for me, I took the stage at dusk for a double set, first solo acoustic, then electric with the band. The first part went fine, but the second was something of a disaster. I was pretty drunk, and improvising live with unfamiliar musicians simply didn't work. It was a huge flop, and when people talk about the Festival, well, it's not to remember Tim Hardin.

Even though the atmosphere had soured, tainted by one too many hipsters, I stayed around Woodstock until 1971-72. My contract with Columbia called for three albums, and that's exactly what I gave them. "Suite For Susan Moore & Damion," my most ambitious work, came out in '69. It featured four long experimental suites, all dedicated to my wife and son. Trumpet, saxophone, keyboards and guitars: more than anything, one long avant-garde singer-songwriter happening, hardly accessible and even less catchy. It didn't go over well and sold even less than the previous ones. So I tried to get back on track with the following two albums, focusing on the work since Susan, in the meantime, had left me, tired of being nothing but a muse or the "angel woman" who then took the beatings. She left with Damion, and I can understand her: there was no communication left between us, only desperate, melancholy sex or furious fights. Anyone in her place would have done the same. And I didn't even have the excuse of being a spoiled rock star who let her live like a princess. No, sir. I recorded "Bird On A Wire" (1971) and "Painted Head" (1972) before leaving Woodstock for good. The first one we finished in New York City, with the help of session players of the caliber of Joe Zawinul, Ralph Towner, Mike Mainieri. Well produced, beautifully played and arranged. I sang better than ever: among the ten tracks on the tracklist was the Leonard Cohen song that gave the record its title, along with another classic, "Georgia On My Mind," made famous by Ray Charles. "Painted Head," on the other hand, we finished at the legendary Abbey Road Studios in London, where I'd finally settled after a string of wanderings around America (Hawaii, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Colorado).

The London album was packed with covers, partly because I really wasn't able to write original songs anymore — my best inspiration felt distant, lost somewhere I couldn't reach. That said, the record too is full of excellent guest musicians (among others I remember Peter Frampton, the percussionist from Traffic and Cat Stevens' guitarist, Elton John's vibraphonist, and the drummers from the Shadows and Joe Cocker) and it sounds great, but something was off. I was off. I howled at the moon on songs like "Nobody Knows You When You're Down & Out," and the situation couldn't have been more real. I no longer had my loved ones, my records — including the recent ones — were selling very little, to the point that even Columbia dropped me. The main reason I'd moved over there was methadone, provided free by the National Health Service: that's the truth, the music burning inside me like a demon had less to do with it than you'd think. I inspired pity even in Susan, whom I hadn't seen in years and who'd come all the way out there in a desperate attempt to reconcile with me. I'd written to her saying things were going great: well, they weren't.

I recorded one last album in England in 1973, "Nine," for Gm Records, a small independent label owned by Rod Stewart's manager, who by then had made his money off an album containing my "Reason To Believe." On that occasion I wrote my last original songs, and also sang other covers like James Taylor's "Fire & Rain." To promote the record I took part in the Reading Festival, but my performance went almost unnoticed by a crowd that was there mostly to cheer on the progressive rock of Genesis or the virile rock-blues of Roy Buchanan. A similar fate befell my tour with Tim Rose, another American songwriter who'd missed the bus to glory: a year older than me, he'd go down in history as the first to come up with the slow version of "Hey Joe," heard and played in a Village club by Hendrix himself, who later made it universal, putting plenty of his own stamp on it. Tim and I were often drunk during that run of shows: we couldn't even figure out what kind of audience was coming to see us, given that we weren't big names. As for the rest, I'd rather forget my London years: I didn't accomplish anything artistically relevant. I rarely left the house, just fed my addictions in the dim light, waiting for something. Which never came, and eventually pushed me to pack my bags. In 1976 I went back to America, first to Seattle, then again to Los Angeles, where I temporarily patched things up with my wife and son.

Some friends and fans went so far as to organize an eccentric "Homecoming Concert" for me in Eugene, Oregon, my hometown. It was supposed to be a documentary film and a live album, but my health made the former uninteresting and undermined the success of the latter, which came out posthumously as a bootleg. Around that same time, through my manager, I sold off all the publishing rights to my songs. He was the one who talked me into it, and to this day I remain convinced he secretly pocketed a huge chunk of the proceeds from that sale. I was furious about it, but I had no proof, and besides, I was too often strung out on hard drugs to even be presentable at a meeting. After one final, terrible fight, I lost Susan and Damion for good. And it did little good that I finally managed — for once, truly managed — to quit heroin, speed and Valium for good. Sure, I was clean and vaguely presentable, I even had a new, young girlfriend looking after me, Janet. But I kept drinking and stuffing myself with food, putting on weight and losing my hair, until I turned into the melancholy, angry bear I described at the start.

I felt cut off from everything in my final years: America and the world were changing drastically, and I couldn't keep up with those shifts. I was out of tune, out of time, out of place. Like a Vietnam veteran left lame, alcoholic and without a family. Nobody wants anything to do with him anymore, despite having served his country and earned his honor. Like him, I too felt like a wreck, moody and hot-tempered. Being sober during the day, and able to survive on the money from selling my publishing rights, I'd go down to the beach to think. My thoughts almost always ran in one direction: in my more honest moments I could admit that I had failed, and not solely because of outside forces.

I wasn't devilishly handsome like James Taylor or Francoise Hardy. I never had the magnetic charisma of Jim Morrison, or possessed the Gift of sound like Jimi Hendrix, or of words, like Bob Dylan. Sure, I had a striking voice, deep and passionate, I was a decent acoustic guitarist and I wrote a few notable songs. But on their own, those gifts and those facts weren't enough, weren't sufficient to make the big leap, to ride the great wave. And on top of that, I'd never truly been part of a music scene, the way, say, San Francisco's psychedelic scene was one. Even back in my early days in Greenwich Village, I never really made friends with the folk crowd; I'd play when it was my turn, then head out and wander around on my own through the smoky New York night, just like De Niro in "Taxi Driver," lost in who knows what thoughts, or, more simply, wasted and drunk. Overcome by that dark side I felt inside, that fragility, that restlessness, that moody introversion which, turned into stage fright, kept me from doing long tours around America — a strategic move that would have gotten my name out there, gotten people listening to my records. I never did promotion, radio or newspaper interviews. I followed my instinct, did things my own way, never took advice. Often causing trouble. I never showed up at the clubs that mattered, never played on other people's records, nor did I have affairs with beautiful, famous singer-songwriters. Drug addiction was the only thing that gave me peace, that gave me calm.

Other than that, I was a loner, sullen, stubborn, violent and moody, and who knows whether I'd really have been suited to fame, on the cover of Rolling Stone and on everyone's lips. Maybe not, maybe things turned out fine as they did, even if it could have ended better, and there are quite a few things I'd do differently, if only I had the chance. Starting with my relationship with my wife and son. You can bet on it. That, and plenty of other things, is what I thought about during my derailed afternoons on Santa Monica beach, staring at the waves. When the last beer was finished, I'd struggle to my feet, brush the sand off my shoes, and, to the encouraging notes of John and Yoko's "(Just Like) Startin' Over," I'd drive home, telling myself that maybe it was better this way.

Ride the wave of great music

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