IN THE SUMMER OF 1980, Tim Hardin was an all-but-forgotten figure in the annals of American singer-songwriterdom. He was also unrecognisable from the svelte man who had written and recorded the extraordinary songs on Tim Hardin 1 (1966) and Tim Hardin 2 (1967).
"Jerry Yester took me over to a session in L.A. and there was this fat old bald guy sitting there," recalls Erik Jacobsen, producer of Tim Hardin 1. "After all the things I had been through with Timmy, I did not even recognise him. And he didn't say anything to me either, probably because he was so embarrassed about how he'd fallen apart physically."
The first time "Timmy" had come to New York to see Erik, in 1963, the first words out of the singer's mouth were, "Do you know where I can get any shit?" It was a while before Erik learned that Timmy had been using opiate drugs since the mid-'50s.
Like anyone who heard Hardin sing, Jacobsen was stunned by the bluesy, sensual voice, so different from the wholesome tones of other folkies who thronged the happening streets of Greenwich Village. "All you've got to do is listen to a couple of his songs," he says. "He could not sing a bad note."
Equally impressed was John Sebastian, who lived across the street and overheard a cheap demo Jacobsen had made with Hardin. "John came in and said, 'Who the heck is that?'" Erik says. Sebastian, who would soon be fronting the Lovin' Spoonful, proclaimed that Hardin was "the next Elvis". Hardin himself boasted he was a better singer than Ray Charles, "and Ray Charles told me so".
Hardin's fan base would in time extend far beyond his original Bleecker Street peers. From Rod Stewart, who covered 'Reason To Believe' on the B-side of 'Maggie May', to Will Sheff, who based the entire 2005 Okkervill River album Black Sheep Boy on Hardin's art and disastrous life, the man has not wanted for disciples.
"I think Tim was essentially a jazz singer," maintains Gary Klein, who produced Hardin's 1969 concept album Suite for Susan Moore and Damion – We Are – One, One, All in One. "It was so jazz-like, but I don't think too many people understood jazz sung by a guy like Tim, who wrote what sounded like folk songs."
"He was like a metronome," adds Ed Freeman, producer of Tim's 1971 album Bird on a Wire. "He'd sing the first verse three times, then he'd sing the last verse, then he'd sing the first verse again and then the chorus, and his time was so perfect you could just splice it all together and it would work."

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TIM HARDIN NEVER cared much for the Singer-Songwriter tag. "My songs aren't personal," he told Melody Maker's Michael Watts in 1972. "They sound it 'cos it was me who revealed them, but it was my head that got the lightning shot through it. They're just love songs, true songs – songs that are also very naked. They mean what they mean, but tenderly and with reverence."
Nonetheless, 'Black Sheep Boy' was an unequivocal account of Hardin's upbringing in Eugene, Oregon, where he was "the family's unowned boy" despite his "golden curls of envied hair" that attracted "pretty girls with faces fair" (and, later, women that wanted to rescue him from his self-medicated misery).
Part of the problem with Hardin – whose song 'You Upset The Grace Of Living When You Lie' appeared on both Tim Hardin 2 and the live Tim Hardin 3 – was his compulsive dishonesty. "A lot of what Timmy claimed, we have to take with a grain of salt," says Erik Jacobsen. "The whole idea that he was related to John Wesley Hardin was complete bullshit."
"He was the original bad boy," adds Gary Klein. "He told me about his childhood, though I can't remember what he said. He was like a caged animal, wherever he was. He didn't like confinement. He was uncomfortable in his own presence. You just had a feeling that anything could go wrong at any time anywhere."
It was a football injury – a broken collarbone – that first got Hardin into opiate painkillers. "First time I got off on smack," he recalled, "I said, 'Why can't I feel like this all the time?'"
In 1959, Hardin enlisted in the Marines. He claimed he'd served in Vietnam, though it may actually have been Cambodia and Laos. On returning to Eugene, a letter from his high school drama coach secured him a place at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, where he showed up in 1961.
Acting went by the wayside once Hardin discovered the city's folk scene. Here he met fellow junkies Fred Neil and Karen Dalton. Unlike Neil, however, Hardin was – in Erik Jacobsen's words – "a surly and belligerent guy, [though] he could put on a big smile and it was such a change of pace to his usual dour appearance."
Accompanying himself on gutstring acoustic and sometimes backed by Neil and John Sebastian, Hardin began singing bluesy folk tunes at Village clubs like the Night Owl.
"We'd been Twisted to death, so we went back to the roots and folk came into vogue," says Michael Ochs, younger brother of Phil. "I was resistant to folk until I heard bluesy stuff like Dave Van Ronk and Hardin. I needed to hear something either black or rhythmic or both. When I saw Tim at the Night Owl, it was this incredible voice and every form of music I loved."
"From the start he was not Mr. Dependability," says Erik Jacobsen, whose initial efforts to place Hardin with a label had come to nothing. "He would drift in late and sometimes turn in a great set and sometimes fall asleep on stage. I took it upon myself to try and be his manager. I booked gigs for him, including a three-day gig in Chicago where he conned the guy into loaning him money to buy three suits and instead went into his hotel room and shot up for three days straight."
In May 1964, Columbia Records financed a session that degenerated into chaos after he arrived at the midtown studio with a Lower East Side kleptomaniac pal named Pampas.
"I was kind of hanging around with Cass Elliott and Zal Yanovsky," says Jacobsen, "so Cass and Denny [Doherty] and Zal and John [Sebastian] and maybe Felix [Pappalardi] all went up to this Columbia session. Timmy went into the bathroom and got high and was semi-nodding-out between takes. And then the others started smoking pot in the control room and laughing and joking, and the whole thing came crashing down.

"We had Gary Burton on vibes, Sticks Evans on drums, and a really good bass player. 'Green Rocky Road', 'Airmobile', and all those blues things, funky things, were cut in those very early sessions. He had such a wonderful sense of timing, in terms of his vocal lines. The darn guy could start almost anywhere, and he would never do the same thing twice."

Confusion remains as to precisely what was recorded at which session, but some or all these tracks later surfaced on This Is Tim Hardin (1967) and the misleadingly titled Tim Hardin 4 (1969).

"With both Tim and John Sebastian, my major mantra was, 'Can you write a song?'" says Jacobsen. "I got them both writing songs at the same time.

Running out of money, Jacobsen shopped Hardin to the New York production duo of Charles Koppelman and Don Rubin. "Obviously Tim was a junkie and he was trouble," Koppelman recalls, "but he had an incredible voice – great range, great rhythm – and incredible songs."

"Erik was raving to me about Timmy," confirms Rubin. "At that very first meeting I fell in love with the guy. He was such a compelling songwriter, tragic yet incredibly sensitive, and he played me some songs on guitar that day and I said, 'That's it, we're going to work together'."
Tim Hardin 1 was released in July 1966 on Verve-Forecast, a division of MGM launched by Jerry Schoenbaum. By the time the album appeared, Hardin had split for L.A., where he saw much of fellow junkie Lenny Bruce.
"Timmy said to me one day, 'You wanna meet Lenny?'" says Gary Klein, who'd moved to L.A. to open the West Coast office of Koppelman-Rubin Productions. "I said, 'Are you kidding?' So he said, 'Can you come by and pick me up? Oh, just one thing, I owe this chick in the Valley some money. I gotta run in and give her some bread and then we'll go meet Lenny.' It was a three-minute stop and we're driving back to Hollywood and Timmy has this thing in his hand – a little red round ball. I didn't know what it was. I didn't know there was heroin in there. Later I heard 'Red Balloon'.
"Lenny looked awful, he was in a bathrobe that was open, he was obese. When I saw the movie Lenny it was uncannily accurate. Lenny wouldn't shoot up with Timmy because his works were rusty. Timmy didn't care."
In August 1966 – the very month of Bruce's squalid overdose and death – 'If I Were a Carpenter' was recorded by Atlantic Records star Bobby Darin at L.A.'s Gold Star studio.
"Bobby was dressing differently," says Don Rubin, who co-produced the track. "He let his hair grow; he wanted to become part of this hippie counterculture of the '60s, so he called Charles and myself because he knew we were involved with several successful writers. On our first encounter with him, we played him the Spoonful's 'Daydream' and he didn't like it. Then 'Daydream' became a big hit, and at a subsequent get-together we played him 'If I Were A Carpenter' and he said, 'Well, I turned down "Daydream" so I'm certainly not going to turn down this one…'"
'Carpenter' not only cracked the Top 10 – earning Hardin his biggest payday to date – it became his most widely-covered song, recorded over the ensuing years by the Four Tops, Johnny and June Carter Cash, Robert Plant and dozens more.
Prone to biting the hands that fed him, Hardin initially raged at the way Darin had appropriated his vocal style for the song. In 1974, by contrast, he claimed he had personally coached Darin through the performance of 'Carpenter', "trying to teach him the essential string of what makes my voice sound the way it sounds".
Like 'The Lady Came From Baltimore' – which Darin also recorded – 'Carpenter' was ultimately inspired by Hardin's love for Susan Morss. As Susan Yardley, she was one of the stars of daytime soap The Young Marrieds; she also hailed from a prosperous East Coast family that, intentionally or not, made Hardin feel like a "dumb peasant" if not actually the thief of 'The Lady Came From Baltimore'.
"It was easy to fall in love with Tim," says Gary Klein. "He was really a charming guy and he saw something in her that he really loved, but it was such an unusual couple from my perspective. I think that how she saw her role: 'I'm gonna straighten this guy out and I'm gonna take care of him and make him better.'" It was Morss who appeared with Tim on the cover of Tim Hardin 2.
"Frankly, I think Tim Hardin 1 is better than Tim Hardin 2, because Erik was a great producer," says Don Rubin. "Charles and myself were okay, but we were more in the executive-producer vein than hands-on. We were hands-on with Tim Hardin 2 because it was the only way to get it done. We had to have a lot of patience in the studio with him. He didn't have his own band, so we put together a rhythm section, but he played every song different with each take. And I mean, we did get good performances out of Tim… in between his visits to the men's room."
When Erik Jacobsen and his own partner Bob Cavallo could take no more of Hardin's antics, Rubin convinced Koppelman that they should take over Hardin's management. Yet even they had their limits, and when Hardin nodded out onstage at London's Royal Albert Hall on July 18, 1968, it was the last straw for them too.
"Even when Tim was really feeling well and behaving well," says Gary Klein, "there was always that underlying troubled person who you didn't know – sort of like a pit bull."
Klein was at the production helm for 1968's Tim Hardin 3, recorded at New York's Town Hall. Taping Tim live was a gamble that fortunately paid off. "From my perspective it was not a great recording," Klein says, "but I think what he liked about the live album was that it was musicians playing with him."
Klein also produced 'Simple Song Of Freedom', a Bobby Darin song that ironically gave Hardin the only Top 40 entry of his career. The contrast with Suite for Susan Moore… couldn't have been more pronounced: 'Simple Song' was just that, a Pollyannish plea for harmony put together in Nashville with pedal steel and chirping girl backing singers. Suite, on the other hand, didn't include a single song that anyone could have hummed to save his life.
The experiment of Suite's recording makes you wonder who at Columbia could possibly have green-lit such a project. A remote mountain house near Woodstock had literally been wired for sound by engineer Don Puluse, with every room set up with microphones, the cables running through to the Hardins' son's nursery, where Puluse had installed a console and board. It was stipulated that tape should run 24/7 to capture every stray moment of inspiration.
"When you talk about doing something original, this was the mothership of originality," says Gary Klein, for whom Suite proved an unlikely springboard for big '70s hits by Glen Campbell, Dolly Parton and Barbara Streisand. "Don couldn't believe it. He said, 'Gary, this is going to be some ride.' We had these box trucks that would make trips up to the house, filled with two-inch tape. And this was all approved. It was a project that was the first of its kind and maybe the last of its kind."
While Susan Morss made tea and baked cakes, local musicians came and went – some of them only credited on the album as "Keith", "Buzz" or "Philippe", presumably because no one thought to write down their last names.
"Most of the people who heard the album scratched their heads and said, 'What the fuck are we gonna do with this?'" Klein says of Suite. "It was just out there, and they'd paid a lot of money for it. I'm surprised they even released it, to tell you the truth."
Even arch-fan Will Sheff struggles with Suite for Susan Moore…, writing in 2005 that "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".
A mere two weeks after tying the knot with Tim in a small private ceremony – he held the two-year-old Damion in his arms as a local Justice of the Peace presided over the nuptials – Morss, to whom Suite had been an extended poetic letter, took her son and left the rambling mountain house in Onteora. "I can't make love to you anymore," Hardin claimed she had said to him. "You can't make love to someone you really… basically hate."
Hardin's state of mind after Morss abandoned him can be gauged by his stoned performance at the Woodstock festival – and by how lost and disoriented be seemed in the backstage footage shot of him in the bleary light of dawn.

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AGAINST ALL ODDS, Columbia kept faith with Tim Hardin, though they warned producer Ed Freeman as to what to expect of his new charge.
"I approached the record with a prejudice that he was going to be very difficult," Freeman says, "and he was. He would come into the studio and he was pretty messed up. He wasn't actually on heroin at the time, but he would drink, like, a bottle of Crème de Menthe. And he was on Methadone. He was at the tail end of his career creatively, and I had to piece a lot of stuff together with Scotch tape."
When Bird on a Wire made little more impact on the charts than its curate's-egg of a predecessor had done, Hardin figured it was time to move on again – to England, where in 1971 he recorded most of his final Columbia album with former Shadow Tony Meehan producing and a stellar cast of sidemen that included Peter Frampton on guitar. Sounds' Penny Valentine described Tim in an interview as "a sad, stumbling man whose work displays a constant personal struggle".
Painted Head sounded like the blue-eyed country-funk that Dan Penn, Delbert McClinton and friends were cutting in the American South in the early '70s. This time, however, not a single Hardin original made the cut, perhaps because he hadn't written any. Instead the covers stretch from hambone Willie Dixon blues to ballads by Pete Ham and Randy Newman. Fittingly, perhaps, the album concluded with a long country-soulful working of 'Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out'.
Hardin made one last underwhelming album in England – prosaically titled Nine and released on Billy Gaff's GM label – before returning to America. What happened in the subsequent three or four years of the decade remains mysterious to this day. "From 1975 on," Phil Freeman recalled, "no word reached home at all. His friends, myself included, wondered about his whereabouts and condition."
By the time Hardin resurfaced in L.A. he had somehow managed to kick his junk habit. Not that he seemed remotely proud of doing so: reunited with Phil Freeman at the end of 1979, he bemoaned the fact that "two and a half years ago I had a good-looking complexion, clean-shaven, hat, suit, trim, slim and trim, sylph-like". He added, rather incoherently, that he had "people in Brazil – or somewhere that I don't know where they are – that I really should catch up with and… ask them if they have any of the money left, and please give it back to me before I shoot them". He added that – adding insult to financial injury – he still owed $427,000 to the IRS.
If the Freeman-produced Homecoming Concert – 11 of his most famous '60s songs recorded at Eugene's Community Center for the Performing Arts on January 17, 1980 – suggested Hardin was back on musical track, alcohol was now contributing to abusive and harassing treatment of his ex-wife.
It was Don Rubin – one half of the partnership he accused of taking advantage of him – who held out a last lifeline when he asked Hardin to play him some new songs.
"I went to Orange Drive the very next day and Tim played me 'Unforgiven' and 'Judge And Jury'," Rubin remembers. "I said, 'You're back!' I think he had gotten in touch with a few things that had happened and was trying to deal with them straight, and that's probably what caused him to write 'Unforgiven'."
Recorded at The Band's old Shangri-La studio in Zuma Beach, 'Unforgiven' was a 'Wind Beneath My Wings'-style AOR ballad shot through with guilt over Susan and Damion – and later given a lush, overblown treatment by Joe Cocker. Hardin also cut demos of other songs that mixed remorse with resentment. "You've gone because you think/I couldn't be the way I should," he sang on 'If I Were Still With You'. "Have you forgotten all the things I stopped/To show you that I could…"
Hardin was found dead of a heroin overdose on Monday 29 December, 1980, six days after his 39th birthday and three weeks after a murder – John Lennon's – that totally overshadowed the passing of this semi-obscure singer-songwriter. Curiously it was also three weeks after another overshadowed overdose, the death of the Germs' Darby Crash just ten minutes' walk away from North Orange Drive.
Hardin's influence has filtered through to the music not only of Okkervill River but of Tindersticks and Ron Sexsmith (who cited Hardin's first two albums as templates for how he wanted his own debut to sound).

"[His] music transported me to the same tender, warm little world that I associate with artists like Nick Drake and Van Morrison," Will Sheff wrote in 2005, "and I realized that both of these artists were probably in fact deeply influenced by Hardin and his then-famous, jewel-like little songs… 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."

Older veterans of the '60s/'70s singer-songwriter era have also tipped their hats to Hardin. "[He] had a huge effect on me as a songwriter, probably the most direct influence as far as feeling like I could make complete-sounding music with an acoustic guitar," J.D. Souther told Debbie Kruger in 1997. "I thought he had a style and a gift that really had bits of everything in it. You could hear that he loved country music, 'cause the forms were simple and there were not very many chords. And folk music, too. But you could also hear that he loved jazz; he sang with this kind of fluid almost legato style that was not as angular as most of the bluegrass that I was listening to."
Phil Ochs had written presciently of Hardin's talents three decades earlier, noting that "if such a form as folk rock does exist, the nuances and phrasing qualities of his voice easily make him the master interpreter". Hardin, he added, "can take the rhythm and blues idiom and handle its guttural intonations without any unnatural strain on his voice, which at the same time has enough depth and feeling to simulate the sweet lyrical sound of a stringed instrument."
If drugs dominated Hardin's life and remain central to the story of his career, we must never forget what made him special. In the words of Ochs' brother Michael, "Charlie Parker said, 'To those who think it was the heroin that made me great, just think what I could have had without that limitation…'"