tim hardin: lost along the way
First time I got off on smack I said, out loud, “Why can’t I feel like this all the time?” So I proceeded to feel like that all the time.
TIM HARDIN,
WET MAGAZINE INTERVIEW, 1980
To while away the time on their way to a gig in Cleveland, Paul Simon and fellow band members in One Trick Pony play a game whose object it is to name the most dead rock stars. Tim Hardin comes up, and an argument ensues. One guy insists the drug-plagued 1960s folk-rock hero is alive in Woodstock. A bet is placed: Twenty dollars says he OD’ed.
Life, as Oscar Wilde pointed out, imitates art. Less than six months after the film’s release, the Tim Hardin joke turned sour. Its point, however, remains true: So many rock stars have died that one can hardly keep track of them. Hardin pursued an infamously brutal and reckless manner of existence. Most people who loved the man, or revered his work, had steeled themselves long ago for his end.
For the record, Hardin wrote some of the most indelible, affecting, and frequently recorded love songs of the 1960s. Musicians who knew him in Greenwich Village during that time considered him to be one of the best. John Sebastian, formerly of the Lovin’ Spoonful, played harmonica on Hardin’s early Verve Forecast albums (Tim Hardin I and Tim Hardin II). “Timmy was breaking new ground,” he recalls. “Probably everybody in the Village during that period stole something from his songs—which isn’t exactly singular since we were all stealing from each other, anyway. But Timmy’s talent was singular; he dared to go, both musically and emotionally, where most of us feared to go, and there was plenty to learn from the way he melded rock & roll and blues and jazz into a style all his own.”
During a two-year span in the mid-1960s, Hardin wrote the bulk of the songs that secured his reputation, including “Misty Roses,” “If I Were a Carpenter,” “Reason to Believe,” and “Lady Came from Baltimore,” the latter a frank, self-indicting account of his romance with actress Susan Moore (who later became his wife). And although his own roughhewn readings of his songs never enjoyed much chart success, he still sang them better than anybody else, in a stray, harrowed voice, redolent of his chief vocal idols, Billie Holiday and Hank Williams. By 1970, Hardin’s career had run aground. Beset by marital wrangles, managerial suits, and narcotic funks, he eventually fled to England, where he recorded one wholly unmemorable album, Tim Hardin 9 (1973), and gradually receded into the dark custody of his own legend.
In 1980, he was back in Eugene, Oregon—his hometown—for a while, seemingly intent on a fresh start. Michael Dilley, a studio owner and former high school buddy of Hardin’s, believed it was a serious effort. Hardin had gone off heroin in favor of beer and was in a good mood. “Occasionally, though, it was like he forgot what he was doing. He’d come into the studio, sit down at the piano, and come out with something absolutely gorgeous, and then it would hang there sometimes, like an unfinished sentence.”
On the warm evening of December 29, 1980, responding to a tip from an anonymous caller, police found Tim Hardin’s body lying on the floor of his small, austere Hollywood apartment. He was dead, at age thirty-nine. Just a few nights earlier he had finished work on the basic tracks for his first album in seven years. The centerpiece of the collection, a ballad called “Unforgiven,” is one of the most haunting, lovingly crafted works of his career. It goes like this: “As long as I am unforgiven/As far as I am pushed away/As much as life seems less than living/I still try.”