[It fills me (Sean) with pride to welcome Will [Robinson] Sheff to Said the Gramophone. Will is my favourite songwriter on the planet. He leads Okkervil River and stands side-by-side with Jonathan Meiburg in Shearwater. He swims in brown rivers and watches forests burn, he nurses birds and takes lovers to the mountains. Both of these bands are very dear to this blog. Okkervil River's newest LP, Black Sheep Boy, is one of the very finest records of the year, glimmering and flashing, fiercely moving. (I most recently wrote about it here.)
But today Will is here, and he's telling us about Tim Hardin. Please make him feel welcome.]
Tim Hardin - "Eulogy to Lenny Bruce"
Because Black Sheep Boy, the most recent record by my band, is written around a Tim Hardin song and occasionally very lightly references Hardin's life, I've been asked many times this year to hold forth on the topic of Tim Hardin. Journalists ask me to expound on the connection between our record and Hardin, to explain what specifically about Hardin and his music inspired us on to base a record on one of his songs. They want to know: is Black Sheep Boy based on Hardin's biography? Is it based on my own biography? These are all annoyingly difficult questions to answer because I'm not sure there are very simple reasons or even that there's a very close connection. Interested fans, on the other hand, merely want to know what Tim Hardin records to buy. This is a much easier question, so I'll answer it first:
Buy Tim Hardin 1 or Tim Hardin 2. They're available individually on vinyl and together on the CD Tim Hardin 1 + 2, distributed by the Repertoire label and available in the United States as an import. From Polygram you can also buy a decent and very affordably-priced no-frills CD entitled Reason To Believe (The Best Of), assembled almost entirely from Hardin's first two records. Both of these collections contain little-known Hardin gems alongside Hardin's original versions of songs that other artists covered and made famous.
These famous songs were my first exposure to Tim Hardin, and I knew them long before I knew his name. I knew them as sung by artists whom I mostly scoffed at, like Bobby Darin, with his hit versions of "If I Were a Carpenter" and "Lady Came from Baltimore," or the insufferable Rod Stewart crooning "Reason to Believe." When I heard Hardin's original versions, though, I found that they were nothing like those covers. Their arrangements were largely acoustic and elegantly simple, mixing the earnest earthiness of singer-songwriter folk with the sophistication of Cool Jazz artists like Chet Baker. And Hardin's voice - though possessed of a tremolo quality that's very different than what's in style today - was startlingly intimate, emotional, and direct. Hardin's music transported me to the same tender, warm little world that I associate with artists like Nick Drake and Van Morrison, and I realized that both of these artists were probably in fact deeply influenced by Hardin and his then-famous, jewel-like little songs. (These days, Van Morrison is a legendary figure and Nick Drake has achieved a posthumous fame as perhaps the definitive treasured cult songwriter, but Tim Hardin's revival has been slow in coming.)
As I listened to Hardin's first two records over and over again, I also started having that weird proprietary feeling that I get towards Drake and Morrison: no matter how famous their music is, I have this odd and comforting sense that each time I cue up the record they're singing just for me. I became obsessed with Hardin's songs on Tim 1 and Tim 2, with the economy of their language, their swooping, lyrical string arrangements, the halting rhythms of Hardin's acoustic guitar playing. At first my favorite Tim Hardin song was "It'll Never Happen Again," then it was "Don't Make Promises," then it was "Misty Roses," but before long I became especially obsessed with the song "Black Sheep Boy," with its mysterious lyrics and darkly confident theme, which, as far as I could figure out, could be summed up thusly: "I know I'm fucking up - leave me alone."
One night on one stop along a particularly draining solo tour, I spent the night on the floor of Chris Swanson, co-owner of our record label Jagjaguwar. Before going to bed, I scanned briefly through Chris's CD collection - spanning floor-to-ceiling the entire wall next to my sleeping bag - and I came across a Tim Hardin box set. I already loved Hardin's music but I didn't know much about his life, so I started flipping through the liner notes for the box set and I learned that Hardin had written "Black Sheep Boy" while visiting his family back in his hometown of Eugene, OR. During the visit, an old friend offered heroin to Hardin, an ex-junkie who had been clean for several years. Hardin started using again and, as I understand it, didn't really stop until 1980, when he died of an overdose.
In 2003, I was trying to make my rent working as a video store clerk here in Austin, TX. Our store was located right next door to a porn shop and the guy who night-managed the porn shop was really friendly. He'd spent a lot of time as a touring musician and a session guy, doing everything from big arena tours in the 80's to European specialty gigs with lesser-known footnotes of 1960's surf rock, and, it turned out, he'd done some session work backing Tim Hardin near the very, very end of Hardin's life. Thrilled that I'd met someone who'd met Tim Hardin, and wanting information that might eventually help with Black Sheep Boy, I pumped him for information about what Hardin's personality was like during the sessions. He answered, "I couldn't even tell you. He was just really gone."
Tim Hardin - "Lady Came from Baltimore"
The song "Black Sheep Boy" appeared on 1967's Tim Hardin 2. It was the third track, and immediately after it was "Lady Came from Baltimore" a love song to Hardin's new wife Susan Morss - referred to as "Susan Moore" in the lyrics - and one of the simplest, purest, and most affecting love songs you'll ever hear. Immediately before "Black Sheep Boy," though, came Hardin's "Red Balloon," which could also be described as a love song - but in "Red Balloon," the object of Hardin's affection wasn't Susan Morss, but heroin:
Bought myself a red balloon and got a blue surprise -The sleeve for Tim Hardin 2 features my favorite picture of Hardin, seen through the window of his house, with Susan Morss standing to his right. Morss is pregnant with her and Hardin's first and only child, Tim Damion Hardin. Tucked inside their cozy little house in Woodstock, NY, Morss and Hardin look so wholesome and so happy.
hidden in the red balloon, the pinning of my eyes.
You took the love light from my eyes. Blue, blue surprise.
We met as friends and you were so easy to get to know,
but will we see each other again? Oh... I hope so.
After Tim Hardin 2, both the quality and the quantity of Hardin's songwriting began dropping off noticeably as his inspiration reportedly just dried up. Tim Hardin 3 was a sloppy but fiery live album; after Tim 4 Hardin took a two year absence and then began work on a home-recorded concept record. Entitled Suite for Susan Moore and Damion - We Are - One. One, All In One, this very ambitious record was supposed to be Hardin's testament of his enduring love for his wife and son, a sort of album-length sequel to "Lady Came from Baltimore." However, Hardin's escalating drug use and increasingly unstable mental state caused Morss to leave him in the middle of recording, taking Damion with her to L.A.
Suite for Susan Moore and Damion - We Are - One. One, All In One is an unbearably sad record, and its sadness comes not from contemplation or from clear-eyed and hard-won wisdom but from how empty Hardin's pronouncements on romantic commitment and fatherly love ring. There's a sense of despair to the album, but deeper than that there's a sense of confusion, of disconnectedness, not just of Hardin from his message but of Hardin from his muse, and maybe from himself. It's one of the most enervating records I've ever heard, full of directionless melodies, words that seem vulnerable and sincere but that barely add up to anything, clumsy and vapid noodling, songs that strain to mean everything and mean less than nothing. Here and there, though, Hardin stumbles onto lyrics as great as in his heyday, as in "Magician," when the clouds seem to part and Hardin presents the listener with what's probably a warped self-portrait, keening:
You should see the troubles that he goes through
to free his house from sin.
Magic wands and weapons together in a room...
Maybe the best answer I could give to the question of why I decided to make a record somewhat inspired by Tim Hardin is that, if I hadn't done it, I wouldn't have had the amazing opportunity to meet Tim Damion Hardin, Hardin's only child.
A few months after Black Sheep Boy came out, I was stunned to receive an e-mail from Hardin's son; he had heard through the grapevine about our album and he'd ordered it off the internet. Then he'd looked up our website and found a contact address. He and I e-mailed back and forth a little bit; he seemed really excited that there were younger musicians out there making music that referenced his father. When he saw that our next tour would take us through Florida - where he currently lives and works as a painter - we agreed to meet in Orlando. I put him on the guest list and, shortly before we sound-checked, this stout and friendly-looking and soulful man in a florid green shirt walked up and introduced himself to me.
I was startled at the ways in which Damion Hardin resembled (particularly around the eyes and nose) the pictures I'd seen of his father, and I was shocked to realize that - for as much as Hardin's music had naively convinced me that in some way I knew him - in the heat of my fandom and my abstract appreciation of Tim Hardin's story I really hadn't seriously considered Tim Hardin as a real human being. Now I was faced with evidence of Hardin in the person of a man who not only resembled him but who had loved him and struggled with his legacy as a human and as an artist in ways far more serious and meaningful than I had.
It wasn't too long into our conversation that Damion and I discovered that we'd spent a significant portion of our lives living only a handful of miles away from each other. Susan Morss was from Vermont, and after she'd permanently separated from Tim Hardin she moved back up to the Northeast with Damion, and he enrolled in high school in Hanover, N.H. My father was an administrator at Hanover's Dartmouth College and my family lived two towns over - about a 20 minute drive away - in Meriden, N.H. Hanover was my favorite haunt; the only town nearby with a cool video store, a real coffeeshop with crappy art on the walls, a theater that would occasionally show foreign films. I had friends who went to Hanover High. During a sizable period of my life, as it happens, Tim Hardin's son lived a short jaunt down the road from me.
On the subject of his father, Damion Hardin speaks with the kind of wisdom that betrays an entire life in the cool long shadow of those classic songs, haunted by ghastly stories of his father's heroin abuse, stung by harsh judgments on Hardin's later work - like my verdict on Suite for Susan Moore and Damion... - filled with a kind of bitter disappointment in Hardin's failings as a father that I could only imagine, warmed by stray memories of Hardin's kindness and love that I could never be privy to, possessed of an understanding of Hardin's drug addiction that comes from years of battling serious drug problems himself (he's now been successfully clean and sober for eight years).
As it happens, my parents are friends with the daughter of one of Damion Hardin's high school teachers, something they only realized after we'd released Black Sheep Boy. When my mother told her their friend that I'd met Damion Hardin, she expressed her surprise and added "Well, I'm glad to hear that he's still alive."
I found that Damion retained a sense of humor about his father. When I mentioned that Hardin didn't seem all that sober in his sequences in the Woodstock documentary, his son looked at me and said, "ya think?" Before long, though, the jokes got grimmer and Damion confided that his mother had told him stories about when Hardin and Lenny Bruce roomed together that were too disturbing to repeat. "Drugs ruined him," he added, matter-of-factly.
It's true; we too often associate drugs and heavy drinking with wild creativity, but in the case of Tim Hardin - and in many more cases than I think people realize - all of his great work was done in spite of drugs, not because of them. Drugs ruined Tim Hardin as an artist, and in many respects they ruined him as a human being. Still, as he makes clear in "Black Sheep Boy" and, as I guess is part of the point of our little record of the same name, that was his choice.
Which brings me to (finally!) talking about the mp3 I've selected for Said the Gramophone - it's a little bit of a lesser-known Hardin track that only appears on that live album, Tim Hardin 3: Live in Concert and it's called "Eulogy to Lenny Bruce," or "Lenny's Song." It's one of Hardin's longest and loosest songs of the period - stretching to six minutes where most of Hardin's songs barely exceeded two, and rambling and sloppy where most of Hardin's songs were tight and concise - but, unlike Suite for Susan Moore and Damion, every second of it throbs with vitality. Driven by a dirgey waltzing piano, the song circles and circles around itself, sounding like, with every go-round, it's drilling deeper into, and cracking through, a new layer of Hell. Hardin repeats in constantly more anguished tones his tribute to his beloved drug buddy, alternating direct language like
I have lost a friend and I don't know why,with more Dylan-influenced lines like "and Honey Harlow, gypsy burlesque queen / how did she know you needed morphine?" The song pounds and pounds at you and spins around itself interminably, a funeral march soaked though and dripping with pain and sympathy. Maybe too much sympathy. Definitely too much.
but never again will get we get together to die.
Why, after every last shot, was there always another?...
You kid, those teardrops glisten - I know it's hard to listen.
Of course Hardin sees himself in Bruce, but he's not strong enough to recoil, to keep there from being - after every last shot - always another. Through the song, he seems to reach out to the fallen Bruce with the understanding and the indulgence of someone who's falling faster and faster himself. Appropriately, even this relatively rare song of Hardin's has been covered by another artist - Nico, who obviously saw herself in Hardin seeing Bruce, and who felt, maybe for both men, all the frozen tenderness that someone unable to repent themselves can feel.
Damion Hardin told me that, once, when he was rebelling from Susan Morss and had taken a trip to visit his father on the West Coast, Nico dropped in one day for a recording session. I asked him about Nico, what she was like. He answered, "I couldn't even tell you. All I remember was her arm."
[Will Sheff is the lead singer and songwriter for Okkervil River - whose newest album Black Sheep Boy came out this year - and a contributor to the band Shearwater. Sheff's freelance arts criticism has been published in Pop Culture Press and The Austin Chronicle; a sampling of Sheff's writing for the latter publication can be found at here.]
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(buy Tim Hardin stuff at Amazon/Insound/GEMM)
(buy Okkervil River music direct from Jagjaguwar, and Shearwater CDs from Misra)