With the triumph of Manassas, Stephen Stills was at the top of his game in 1972. He’d just come off back-to-back smashes with the Crosby, Stills & Nash album and the follow-up, Déjà Vu, with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. His two previous solo albums were both big sellers, and he’d had a handful of hit singles on his own with “Love the One You’re With,” “Sit Yourself Down,” “Change Partners,” and “Marianne.” I must admit I was in awe of the man and, at times, felt a little intimidated working with him because he was such a good musician, singer, and songwriter. But he kept me on my toes and encouraged me to think out of the box. I was still wrestling with my own insecurities in those days, and sometimes I allowed them to get the better of me. I had brought the Burritos back from the dead and led the band during its best period, but now I was back to the old familiar “second in command” position. At some point, I realized that was actually fine with me, as it confirmed that I was most comfortable playing mandolin, acoustic guitar, bass, or singing. All the other stuff that came along with leading a band and taking care of business was fine, but my heart was in making good music.
In the music business, there’s always the danger of the second album jinx. It happened to a lot of artists; after achieving success with a debut release, the pressure was on from the record company for more “product.” This often created problems if the artist didn’t yet have strong follow-up material. To try to meet the demand, the artist would scramble to finish a song in the studio, which could become a very expensive proposition as the clock ticked away on those hourly studio rates. And that’s exactly what happened to Manassas. We continued to tour throughout 1972 before returning to Miami’s Criteria Studios to begin work on our second album with Howard and Ron Albert at the helm. We weren’t ready, and we didn’t have a clear plan of where we were headed with our music. The songs lacked the depth and substance of the first album’s material. The process dragged on for a long time, and we never regained the momentum we had when making the previous record. Not to mention this was 1972 when rock and roll excess was in full swing. It’s no secret that the 1970s was an indulgent decade—especially in the music world. Self-destructiveness ruled the day as hard drugs began to take a toll, and lots of gifted people fell into the abyss. In short, our personal lifestyle choices were not helping matters. In fact, they were causing major problems in the studio.
We finished up the record in Colorado and Los Angeles, finally releasing the Down the Road LP in the spring of 1973. The project was uneven, and the reviews were mixed. We continued touring, but the band started to splinter due to various personal problems, as well as increasing pressure on Stephen to rejoin Crosby, Nash, and Young. Our final stretch of dates ran from September to mid-October, including a show at the Winterland Ballroom where David Crosby and Neil Young joined us onstage.
Our final show was on October 14, 1973, in Marquette, Michigan. There was no big blow-up or anything dramatic that led to the end of Manassas. We just quietly faded away and realized it was time to call it a day. I loved Manassas and loved working with such talented musicians. It was a unique group, and I learned a lot from Stills, both as a guitarist and songwriter. He was a mentor to me, and being in that band toughened me up for what lay ahead. After all these years, I still hold Stephen in high regard as both an artist and a good friend.
In 1972, while I was still a member of Manassas, Asylum Records came up with the idea of the five original members of the Byrds reforming for a one-off album. The project wasn’t conceived as a long-term reunion so much as a collective of Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, Chris Hillman, Gene Clark, and Michael Clarke getting together to perform new material. With CSNY on hiatus, the label thought we might work as a supergroup and, just maybe, we’d even recapture the magic of 1965 while reflecting the current times. It was decided that David Crosby would produce the album. I was still living in Colorado, so I traveled to LA to reunite with everyone to work up the songs for the record. It was good to make music with my old friends again after several years apart, and I think we all felt reinvigorated by the prospect of working together without all the baggage of our collective past.
As for the resulting album, which was simply titled Byrds? It was a noble concept, but a failed undertaking. The songs were lackluster, and we didn’t have strong leadership to guide us. David’s production left a lot to be desired, and he brought in an engineer who was incapable of getting a decent sound on us. The main problem, though, was that we were all so committed to keeping the peace and avoiding old interpersonal conflicts that the material really suffered. Instead of pushing or challenging our fellow band-mates, we were all tiptoeing around each other, carefully avoiding the possibility of reopening old war wounds. Bringing out the best in one another took a back seat to being polite. The two songs I contributed, “Things Will Be Better” and “Borrowing Time,” ranked as lower-echelon mediocrity at best. We were probably all holding back our best material for our own personal projects, and it showed.
The only guy who really delivered the goods on Byrds was Gene Clark, who provided some redemption with his songs “Full Circle” and “Changing Heart,” as well as his renditions of Neil Young’s “See the Sky” and “Cowgirl in the Sand.” But that wasn’t enough to save us. The record came out in March of 1973. We weren’t trying to recreate the past of eight years earlier, but the album didn’t even remotely sound like The Byrds in their heyday, which only ended up disappointing the fans. Unsurprisingly, there wouldn’t be any kind of tour or band reunion to accompany the failed experiment. In the end, it wound up being the final Byrds album.
While we were recording the Byrds album I stayed at the Chateau Marmont on the Sunset Strip. Gram Parsons was living there at the time, sharing a room with a filmmaker named Tony Foutz. The pair lived on the floor above me, so when I had a few friends over to celebrate my birthday on December 4, 1972, Gram showed up too. It was a welcome surprise. As I always say, you couldn’t stay mad at Gram for too long. The night started out nicely enough but later turned ugly. Even though Gram had stopped using drugs, he was drinking heavily and could be a mean drunk.
The more Gram drank, the meaner he became, tossing out insulting off-handed remarks to those in the room. After working all those nights in the country/western bars around LA with The Golden State boys, I had little tolerance for obnoxious drunks. Things were getting very uncomfortable as the party became an awkward scene worthy of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. As the evening wore down, everyone seemed to get up at the same time and make for the door, leaving me with a very inebriated Gram Parsons. It seemed he’d driven them all off. Jesus said we’re supposed to forgive others “seven times seventy” times, but after having forgiven Gram more times than I could count, I’d had it. I went into DEFCON 2 level “Hillman mad,” which was a terrible place to be for both me and whoever happened to be on the receiving end of my vitriol. Verbally speaking, I let Gram have it with both barrels before picking him up with one hand by the back of his pants and the other on his collar, like you see in hundreds of old movies. It actually worked! I kicked open the door, threw him out, and slammed the door shut behind him.
As I began picking up bottles from around the room, I could hear Gram moaning outside my door. “You don’t understand, Chris,” he pleaded as he banged on the door. “We’re brothers. I love you, man.” I moved over to the door and looked through the peephole to see my old friend staggering outside. He looked like a broken man. “I love you too,” I called through the door. “I won’t ever stop caring about you, Gram, but it’s over. We’re done.”
I didn’t see Gram again until the following July when tragedy struck the Byrds family and the tight-knit Southern California music community. My dear friend Clarence White was struck and killed by a drunk driver one night as he was loading up his car after a show in Palmdale. I—along with just about everyone I knew in the music business, including Gram—attended Clarence’s funeral at St. Mary’s Catholic Church to pay respects to a brilliant musician and frie
nd who had touched us all with his unique guitar style. I had known Clarence since we were both teenagers playing bluegrass, and one of my regrets in life is not having stayed in The Byrds longer to have gotten to work with him more than I did. It seemed so senseless that such a unique talent would be taken from us so suddenly.
After the service, we all went out to the gravesite for the burial. Gram and our old road manager Phil Kaufman, who was still working with Gram, were pretty drunk. Understandable, as we were all so upset about losing Clarence. In their altered state, Gram and Phil made a pact that day. Should anything happen to either of them, they agreed that, whichever of them died first, the other would take his friend’s body out to Joshua Tree National Monument in the Mojave Desert and light the remains on fire.
Given that Gram was already on a destructive path, it was sad but not surprising when he died of a drug overdose two months later on September 19, 1973. He was twenty-six. Gram was at his old haunt, the Joshua Tree Inn when it happened. Just before his body was put on a plane in Los Angeles to be shipped back to his step-father in New Orleans, Kaufman and Gram’s friend Michael Martin borrowed a hearse and convinced the airline personnel at LAX to turn the body over to them. They drove Gram’s remains back out to Joshua Tree and, in an alcoholic stupor, honored the pact by dousing the open coffin with gasoline and throwing a match on the body. Eventually, the charred remains were found and the police figured out that Phil and Michael were responsible. Since there was no explicit law on the books about stealing a body, they were charged with stealing the casket, paid a fine, and that was it.
Gram’s story has been told many times, so there’s no need to go through all the details yet again. His legacy lives on with loyal fans around the world that still hold him close in their hearts. To many, he was a legend. To me, he was a musical partner and friend. Our few short years together were complicated and often frustrating, but despite his gregarious charm, I don’t think Gram had many real friends. In fact, I believe there were only three people who really knew, loved and understood Gram Parsons: me, Emmylou Harris, and Rev. Jet Thomas, who was his student advisor at Harvard during Gram’s brief time there. In the end, none of us could save him.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
LONG, LONG TIME
Souther-Hillman-Furay. David Geffen, who was the head of Asylum Records, came up with the idea of putting J.D. Souther, Richie Furay, and me together in the hope of creating another “supergroup” in the vein of CSN. I knew Richie from Buffalo Springfield and his band Poco, and I knew J.D. from Longbranch Pennywhistle, his duo with Glenn Frey that was a precursor to The Eagles. We were all considered singer/songwriters, which was the musical identity the 1970s was built on. On paper, joining forces looked to be a sure-fire winner.
In reality, the chemistry between the three of us was a little slow taking hold at first. We cautiously approached one another other like stray dogs, determining if it was safe to proceed. Rather than collaborating, we each brought our own songs to the table, and everyone’s material had his own personal signature attached. As we began arranging the vocals, however, the music started to gel. I brought Paul Harris and Al Perkins into the group from Manassas, and Phil Kaufman even came back on board for a short time as our road manager—all veterans from my past campaigns. We still needed a good drummer. One day I happened to run across Jim Gordon, who had stepped in to play on The Notorious Byrd Brothers when Mike Clarke went AWOL. Jim was one of the greatest drummers in the business. He had just left working with Eric Clapton in Derek and the Dominos and was looking to do something new. He was also an in-demand studio session player, but even though making the decision to join a touring band would cut into his studio work, he decided to go with us. With everyone contributing his own songs, we had plenty of material to begin recording.
Richie Furay recommended we use Richie Podler and Bill Cooper to produce and engineer the album. They were well known, having recorded and produced Three Dog Night with great success. We cut the sessions at American Recorders in Los Angeles with Richie and Bill, two of the most eccentric but talented studio guys I had ever worked with; they knew how to make hit records. With a great group like Al Perkins on steel guitar and lead guitar, Paul Harris on keyboards, and the phenomenal Jim Gordon on drums, I was happy to go back to playing bass full time.
The first album, The Souther-Hillman-Furay Band, was released with an extensive tour of the US. It started off fine, but we then discovered that Jim Gordon had some serious mental problems. He could be violent and unpredictable. We had no idea about the extent of his issues when he was hired, but I started to figure it out after he attacked me one night in a Holiday Inn bar. He was sitting by himself a few feet away from where I was sitting with some of the other guys in the band. I’m not quite sure what triggered the outbreak, but all of a sudden, a glass came flying toward our table, shattering right in front of me. I had a fierce temper in those days, so this was like poking a tiger through the bars of a cage. I got up, brushed the glass off of my shirt, and walked over to where Jim was sitting. I slammed him in the nose with an open palm strike—an old street technique I had learned in my Kenpo karate days. Jim was a good 250 pounds and about six-foot-four inches tall, so I knew if he got loose, he would take me out. Thank God, he backed down.
That wasn’t the only incident with Gordon. His behavior was getting scary. One night, we had to stop the car on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and let him out. Richie actually fired him on stage at one point. It was ten years later, in June of 1983, that Jim came home to his mother’s house and proceeded to beat her with a hammer and then stab her to death. At his trial, he claimed to have been hearing voices. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and sentenced to sixteen years to life for second-degree murder. This very talented man now sits in the psychiatric ward of the state prison in Vacaville, California, where he’ll likely remain for the rest of his life. An unbelievable horror story.
Another change that had to be made came when I let Phil Kauffman go as our road manager. That’s when Ronald Perfit came into the fold. Ronald had worked for Richie’s band, Poco, and ended up helping SHF. We became fast friends, and he was the absolute best road manager I ever worked with. In fact, he worked with me all through the ’70s and early ’80s when he wasn’t working for The Eagles, Jackson Browne, or Tracy Chapman. Ronald could keep everyone on the road laughing and relatively calm with his gift of making everything happen with less stress. His handwritten itineraries and daily memos were priceless. He was one of the brightest guys I have ever known and will always hold a special place in everyone’s hearts. He passed away in 1997, and I still miss getting his famous crazy postcards.
There were several great relationships that came out of the Souther-Hillman-Furay period. The first SHF album reached number eleven on the Billboard album chart and earned Gold certification. We sang and played well, but, ultimately, we never fully came together in the way I’d hoped. It was as if we were three separate singer/songwriters performing with a backup band rather than functioning as a fully cohesive group. We lacked the substance and depth that The Byrds had, and somehow it just never felt “right” musically.
In August of 1974, SHF played a show at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, where I reconnected with someone very special. I first met Connie Pappas in December of 1968 when I was hanging out with Michael Clarke at the Troubadour. Mike turned to me and said, “Look who’s coming through the front door; it’s the Pappas sisters, Reneé and Connie.’’ I told him I didn’t really know them, but that I’d sure like to meet Connie. I’d had my eye on her since seeing her at the Golden Bear, where she worked part time in the office for her cousin, George, who owned the club. Mike said, “I’ll get them to come over.” He introduced us, and we talked for a few minutes before the girls headed into the main room to hear whoever was performing there that night. Connie was so beautiful, and after our brief conversation at the Troubadour, I realized that not only was she beautiful, she was very intelligent. What a refreshing concept a
fter some of the women I had been out with the past few years!
The next day, I called Reneé and asked her if I could take Connie out. “That’s totally up to her,” Reneé said. “I suggest you give her a call at Sunset Sound where she works.” I did, and we went out for our first date. We continued to see one another other, and we had so much fun together whatever we were doing. One time we drove out to Joshua Tree—with my two dogs Ned and Sophie along for the ride—just to watch the sun come up. Thank God, she loved dogs too. Connie was even there with me for the infamous Burrito Barn Dance on the A&M Records lot. My previous dating habits bordered on major promiscuity, but with Connie, it was as if we were always on an innocent high school date every night. Prior to that 1974 show at the Civic, the last time I saw Connie was when she drove me to Union Station for the infamous Flying Burrito Brothers train tour. We exchanged postcards and letters for months, but we never got back together after that. Our lives were going in different directions.
It was five years later when I saw her again. Connie was backstage at that concert, and oh my God, she looked beautiful. In the meantime, she’d risen up the ranks to become the vice president of a successful international music management company and had been invited to the show by some of the executives at Elektra/Asylum Records. It seemed like we talked forever that night. What she did for a living wasn’t my concern, other than being very proud of all she had accomplished in those five years. My concern was hoping she would forgive me for ending our relationship so abruptly. Unfortunately for me, Connie would spend the next several months and virtually the entire next year traveling around the world for her job. This was before cell phones, so our communication was primarily leaving messages on one another’s answering machines. I couldn’t stop thinking about her, but it just wasn’t yet possible to really establish a long-term relationship. The timing was not in our favor.
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