WET Magazine

September 1980

The Heavy Heart of Tim Hardin

Before there was Bob Dylan, there was Tim Hardin. Indeed, throughout the 1960s Tim Hardin turned out an astonishing number of hits (Misty Roses, If I Were a Carpenter, Reason to Believe, Hang On To a Dream, Lady Came from Baltimore, Long Time Smuggling Man). It wasn't just a repertoire of songs that went 'gold' or 'platinum', they were songs that were indisputably classics.

But like Edith Piaf, Hardin's personal tragedy is as well known as his songs. Music mags in the '60s chronicled his drug addiction, busts, shattered romances, and endless litigation over the millions of dollars of royalties earned by his compositions, songs that have been recorded by more artists than any other songwriter of the '60s. Frank Sinatra, Rod Stewart, Joan Baez, Marianne Faithful, Bobby Darin, Richie Havens, The Four Tops, and The Byrds, among others, have forever memorialized Hardin's heartbreaking lyricism.

Yet Hardin is broke and it's always been that way. An endless series of lawyers, agents, managers and record companies have kept Hardin on his knees. Some point to Hardin's long time drug problems as the source of his poverty, - though similar problems have not separated others, say Keith Richards, from their royalty wealth.

It's been almost a decade since Hardin's heyday. His marriage to Susan Morss, his muse, inspiration, and caretaker for so many years, has long been over. For the last few years he has lived quietly with his companion, Janet, in a small West Hollywood apartment in the rear of a shingled cottage. Some half dozen gold and platinum records are on the wall, hung as indifferently as potholders. It is a tidy, clean place, with utilitarian furnishings. Hardin says he is, "Clean, healthy and trying to trim [his] waistline." He's just finished writing an album of new songs, which he is recording.

Ann Louise Bardach: Let's start with the album, Tim Hardin I.  Legend has it that Dylan said you were the greatest song writer of our time when that album came out.

Tim Hardin: Yeah, I played him part of the album one night and he started flipping out, you know. Man, he got down on his knees in front of me and said: Don't change your singing style and don't bleep 'a' blop...

ALB: When did you first meet Dylan? Was it before Tim Hardin I?

TH: '62, '61. I met him when he was taking bennies [benzedrine] and coming by saying, "I wrote a new tune, I wrote a new tune."

ALB: When did you break with Dylan?

TH: We never got together. He's a cold motherfucker, man. He was thinking, he was listening to what everybody said all the time and going, "Uh-hummm, yup," and writing it down in his little photo-fuckin-graphic memory, you know what I mean? Taking pictures of everything and reproducing the whole lick for himself. Then he learned to give somebody else a little credit, by having their picture on the album or something. Fuck him.

ALB: Did you ever play with him?

TH: Yeah. And Jesus. (laughs)

ALB: When did you make your first album?

TH: I made This is Tim Hardin in 1961 and then it came out in 1967. The guy in the studio sold it to Ahmet Ertegun.

ALB: Did you have any problems?

TH: What do you mean? Problems about collecting dough? (laughs) Aw, shit. I never

got any money off him.

ALB: Did Tim Hardin I go gold?

TH: There's not a record I've made that didn't.

ALB: Four albums?

TH: Thirteen. Yeah. Two of them were anthologies so we're really talking about eleven, and two of them were repeats of other stuff, so we're talking about nine. But as far as releases go, it's thirteen [albums]. Right now, I'm so down and disconcerted, you know. People always wanted a piece of me, a piece of my songs. I don't have no protection, no contracts. I just talked to Johan Vigoda (music lawyer) the other night and I told him what happened. He flipped out. We were sitting in front of The Troubadour, Johan, who's a multimillionaire, is sitting there chewing on his own fucking matchbook going "Tim, that's not legal. They couldn't have done that to you." Fuck. But they did it to me and it is legal.

ALB: What did you talk to him about?

TH: I told him how I don't own any of the songs.

ALB: When did you start using junk?

TH: I started using junk when I was sixteen.

ALB: How old are you now?

TH: Thirty-seven. I've stopped.

ALB: Really?

TH: Yeah, except for when I can't.

ALB: That's some way of stopping. You look clean.

TH: I am clean.

ALB: And you've put on the traditional clean-up tummy.

TH: The traditional fifty pounds.

ALB: You started using junk when you were sixteen?

TH: In high school, playing football in Eugene, Oregon.

ALB: How did you get junk in Eugene, Oregon?

TH: In a drugstore.

ALB: You mean you bought morphine?

TH: No. I stole it.

ALB: You stole heroin, pharmaceutical heroin?

TH: Dilaudid, Percodan, morphine.

ALB: But how did you know about it...?

TH: I read about it. I was going out with a girl whose old man was a doctor and I got into his PDR [Physicians Desk Reference]]. I like to read. I got a broken collar bone playing football so I went, "Hey, I can go right over to the Rexall. I know my way in." I lifted the safe, the whole thing.

ALB: Because you had a bad shoulder or because you had some pain between the ears?

TH: No. Physical pain. I never even thought about stopping. 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.

ALB: Did you finish high school?

TH: No. I went into the Marine Corps. '59 is when I went in.

ALB: So you were in Korea?

TH: No, no. We were busy starting Vietnam.

ALB: Were you using dope while you were in the Marine Corps?

TH: Oh, yeah.

ALB: How did you get it?

TH: Corps men, Navy corps men. Spelled c-o-r-p-s-e men.

ALB: How did they get it for you?

TH: They had a key.

ALB: To the medical safe?

TH: Yeah.

ALB: When did you start playing guitar?

TH: I got back from the Marines and my high school drama coach, who's a heavy named Ed Racazino. Mr. Racazino. I still call him Mr. Racazino. I can't call him Ed. You know what I mean? He sent a letter to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and I go over to New York. I got a scholarship behind an audition that I just made up.

ALB: You learned how to play the guitar at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts?

TH: No. I left there after about six weeks. I went in there one day and the subway had goofed and I was late and I was rushing to class. They stopped me at the damn office. "Just a minute," and they gave me a pink slip for being late. So I go, "Aw, fuck, not high school again." I had two twenty dollar travelers cheques left and I bought a Harmony nylon string guitar that cost exactly forty dollars. The guy saw that's what I had. I couldn't even afford a guitar book to learn chords with. I figured out some chords on my own and wrote a few tunes to fit what I knew on the guitar.

ALB: What year did you meet your beautiful wife Susan?

TH: '64...'65. I'm not good on dates. Susan came by to see the guy who was taking care of my pad, raking leaves and sweeping out the house, you know. She was the main star of The Young Marrieds, a soap opera which was the highest rated show on TV then, including prime time, and so she comes to the door. I'd never seen her before. She's good looking, you know. I said, "John's not here" and took her right back out the door. We went down and got a hamburger or something and went over to her pad and got it together. It was great.... We ended up at her house eating hamburgers, you know. We also ended up.. You know what I mean? I dug her pad. She had dough on her and everything.... Then Susan comes up and moves into my pad, but this guy, Archie, a hit man I copped from all the time in New York, shows up all of a sudden.

ALB: Why was Archie there? He was a hit man?

TH: Yeah, but he's also a friend of mine and he decided to take over the pad, you know, because I owed him a couple of bucks. One night Archie says, "Listen, man, lend me your car. I got to cop." And I says, "No, man, I can't lend you Susan's car because that's the only car around."

In the morning Susan and I wake up and we go into the kitchen and we look out at the damn place where the car is supposed to be. We look out and the car isn't there. Then we realize, "Fuck me, man, the keys are gone."

About ten minutes later there was this terrible shriek, a shriek of car and tires, and shit,

it plowed into the house across the street, right through the living room window. That was Archie who had stolen the car and was rushing back in desperation because he couldn't find the dough he'd taken to cop with.

I said, "Archie, don't come back in here. I got a .44 magnum." I gave the gun to Susan and ran down the street to distract his attention. He ran after me. He was going to kill me. He could have done me so easy, but I could run. I was down on the corner by a liquor store when the cops came and I said, "He-ulp." Archie ran over my foot and tripped and the cops jumped out and got all of us.

ALB: Did you have dope on you?

TH: Boy, did I ever. There was an ounce in the brick wall outside the house.

ALB: They busted you?

TH: The cops goofed because they didn't have a search warrant or nothing.

ALB: It got thrown out of court. Where did Susan's father come in?

TH: Susan's father was a judge [Judge Morss]. He was called while we were both in jail. I goofed on Archie. I told on him. I couldn't help it. I had to.

ALB: So what happened to him?

TH: Archie got sent back to New York.

ALB: And you had been married for how long?

TH: We weren't married two weeks before Susan left me.

ALB: Your son Damion was already born when all of this happened?

TH: I was holding Damion in my arms at the wedding.

ALB: So you were with Susan two years before you got married?

TH: Call it five. She said, "Let's get married," made up little matchbooks and little mementos and everything. We had fifteen neat people come by and all. I wrote the ceremony myself. The Justice of the Peace was crying. It was so beautiful.

ALB: And then two weeks later, it was over?

TH: Yup.

ALB: The two of you have never gotten it back together?

TH: No. She asked me. You can't make love to someone you really, you really basically hate.

ALB: It's rough for a non-junkie to live with a junkie.

TH: But I was cool. I had gone on a methadone program. Everything was okay, man.... Well, I hit her a couple of times.

ALB: You hit her when you were angry?

TH: It's a killer crime. People ought to be hung for it. It's a bad thing. Guys can kill girls easy. And it kills me that I did it, it just kills me.     (cries; five minute time out)

I never lied to her. She taught me how to lie because her disapproval was so heavy. I couldn't stand it, you know, [being] the dumb peasant. I don't mean peasant. I can't even think of the word.

ALB: There was a class thing there?

TH: Which was part of the reason I loved her so much. I married a girl on the hill. But I'm smarter than she is. She dug that.

ALB: Do you see Damion?

TH: Yeah. That's his school right over there. He's had his father all the time.

ALB: You seem to be one of the few musicians now who isn't a born-again Christian.

Why is that?

TH: Because they might die someday or something. I don't mind. I can watch people die. I've seen them. I've seen people croak and I've thrown them out the window. "Aw, shit man, Manny just died. What the fuck are we gonna do with Manny?" Out the window because you don't want the body in the pad. You might get busted anyway for what you're doing already.

ALB: You mean busted for murder because of someone's overdose?

TH: Who wants that?

ALB: Why did you stop using junk?

TH: It got so fucking inconvenient. And I got broke.

ALB: Are you in a methadone program now?

TH: Nope. I was on methadone for seven years. It's the hardest work there is. I kicked methadone, speed and valium. That's how come I look fat. It's been two years now. I'm in perfect shape except for being overweight.

ALB: You look twenty pounds over.

TH: Try fifty. You didn't ever see me at 140. I weigh 190 pounds now. Do you believe a guy 5'6" that weighs 190 pounds - can still move?

This interview was published in September, 1980. Tim Hardin died of a drug overdose on December 29, 1980.