In an excerpt from his new memoir 'Time Between,' Chris Hillman recounts his time with the Flying Burrito Brothers, Gram Parsons and the end of the '60s
remain touchstones — timeless in song and sound, but also in that borderline tragic way, where the stories and themes feel like they could’ve been plucked out of yesterday. On “Sin City,” the song, Hillman and Parsons weave together vignettes of late-Sixties tumult that still feel strikingly familiar.
I usually woke up early in those days and, one morning, I got up and started writing a song: “This old town’s filled with sin, it’ll swallow you in / If you’ve got some money to burn….” I sketched out a couple of verses and a chorus and decided I’d better get Gram out of bed to see if he thought there was something to the idea.
After Chris came on board, we identified our next suspect. “Sneaky” Pete Kleinow previously sat in with The Byrds a few times and was one of the strangest steel guitar players I’d ever heard—plus, one of the more interesting people I ever crossed paths with. Sneaky’s other line of work was stop-motion animation, which he excelled at. He worked on shows like, while also playing clubs with Smokey Rogers and the Western Caravan. It was Smokey who gave him the name Sneaky Pete.
With our A&M deal in place and our album completed, it was time to fine tune our stage presentation. Growing up watching the country music shows broadcast live out of Los Angeles in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, I was always drawn to the clothes the performers wore. Their rhinestones and exaggerated embroidery made for an unforgettably multidimensional musical and visual experience. There were two main western tailors in LA back then: Nathan Turk and Nudie Cohn.
Gram Parsons was so smooth he could charm anyone — man, woman, or child — out of the gold in their teeth. I think he developed this gift as a survival mechanism, growing up in a Southern family of eccentric characters whose love of money and deceitful ways were right out of a Tennessee Williams story. Gram went to work convincing A&M to send us by train on this, our first tour of the Midwest and East Coast. I was to blame in the political maneuvering too.
A couple of months before leaving on the train tour, Gram and I had moved from the house in Reseda to yet another ranch-style home in Nicholas Canyon, just above Hollywood. We had left that house just prior to our departure from Union Station, so when the tour was over, we staggered back to LA to the new house that Phil found for us at the end of Beverly Glen Boulevard.
Before the murders were solved, police were following every lead they could. Michael and I had a good friend from our Byrds days named Charles Tacot, an older guy who ran with Dickson and a lot of the Hollywood crowd. Charles, who’d been a small arms instructor in the Marines in his younger days, was a tough, no-nonsense kind of guy you could count on to watch out for you. After the murders, I opened up theone day and saw Charles’s name as someone they were interested in talking to.
Despite the triumph of getting Gram to the show, it still turned out to be a strange night. We played fine, but headed home afterward while our roadies Frank and Robert packed up the equipment. A bunch of gangbangers jumped them and tried to steal our gear, but they managed to survive. Robert later told me that Frankie saved his life that day. Frank was all of five-foot-five, but he was an ex-gang member himself and a guy you wouldn’t want to mess with.
With Chris Ethridge gone, we needed to bring in a new band member who could handle the chaos. I decided to return to playing bass, as I’d done as a Byrd, and recruited my old friend Bernie Leadon to play guitar. Bernie had left Dillard & Clark at the same time Michael departed, and he’d been playing in a group called The Corvettes, backing up Linda Ronstadt. Bernie was a fantastic singer and musician, and I was thrilled when he decided to switch gears and join us.
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