TIM HARDIN - If I Knew

I carry all ...all I need in a basket, of needless sorrow...sorrrow.

Become heavy from a-waiting on, what seems always to come on...come on tomorrow. 

The first version sounds like no more than a sketch. A tune worked on during those first album sessions in 1964 to serve whatever fragments of lyric he had to hand. It's arrangement, sentiment and place probably taken by "Part of the Wind" on the final LP. Tentative first steps ...baby steps ...away from the cocky Afro-American blues he'd been previously pushing... towards the skeletal, fragile two-minute requiems that would forever define his sound. He'd probably just met her. He came to steal her money take her rings and run, she gave him a reason to believe but from the very off he was agonising how he could hang on to his dream. 

Has what i've been waiting on become further away.... 

Or almost gone ....out of reach for me.

A simple reverb strum on a guitar with clickety-clack hi-hat for rhythm, a little too fast, the imagery at odds with an end of session feel. A red balloon ready to be popped in the studio rest-room. A song discarded like the needles and foil; the habit either picked up as an early opioid cure for physical pain or a souvenir from a tour of Vietnam. It was hard to tell with Tim Hardin mythology. But it fuelled a continental criss-crossing existence on the same circuit as Dylan, Neil, Van Ronk, Rush, Ochs et al, A coffee house fantasy lived through Leadbelly, Guthrie and the delta blues. Hardin's path seemed particularly unsettled. Unstructured. Oregon, New York, Boston, Los Angeles...Vietnam? In LA the songs changed after he met the TV actress and model destined to occupy the most profound moments of his brief 39 years. Now the blues really began.

Has the distance left to go become further away ... far too much for me to know. 

A sea with no beach for me

In 1968, two LP's under his belt, with Susan and child in tow ("I haven't any time for children although I've got a lot"), a live recording captured the tension of a typical Hardin gig. The hesitant at times soulful delivery of the song now slowed down to a rambling semi-jam fiercely held together by jazz sideman used to facilitating his "head arrangements '. It was ragged.Was it just the song or was it him? In the summer at the Albert Hall he'd fall into a stupor on stage suggesting everything suffered on a bad night. Doubled in length the song now evoked the lost at sea metaphor, drifting into the abyss but delivered as though his muse were dragging him to the depths. It was left off the live LP as released at the time, creeping out 40 years later in the post-modern afterglow of his still-born rediscovery. 

If i'm on an ocean without an edge of sand....

Is there any reason in trying.

A record company move to Columbia upped the stakes, but attempts to capture him in the studio was proving difficult. A studio version for an abandoned LP kept the length but sweetened the sound, with bubbling bass, chiming guitars and up tempo drumming. The song now a Marie Celeste captained by LA executives in search of a cross-over folk-pop hit for the Canyon. Eventually the studio moved into his home, the engineers and producers on call to capture him when the mood infrequently took him. It's bizarre title "Suite for Susan Moore and Damion, We are One, One, All in One" and portrait sleeve photos suggest Columbia bankrolled the wedding and reception too. 

If you'd give me a thankful sight of land... your arms...

I believe ...I believe i could hold back my crying,

It would have been a poignant last sweet moment if it wasn't so chaotic. Musically it WAS the relationship, the muse had gone, the family was broken, sales were poor and there was pressure for another album to deliver. What happened in the decade after is text book tragic. Re-location to London to access NHS support for his habit, alienation of the media, badly received recordings, psychological problems, physical deterioration, social withdrawal... O.D in a Los Angeles appartment block on the last day of 1980.

If you'd give me a thankful sight of land...

I believe I could hold back my crying...my crying

If I knew

But on that final Columbia LP he nailed it. The jazz musicians were still hanging on...waiting for the moment of inspiration.The budget now provided sympathetic though certainly overdubbed strings. The music was finally perfect for the lyrics. And time had passed long enough to make the lyrics transcend the junkie woe is me schtick. In 1970 with his family life in tatters, his addictions profound and his career in freefall the time had come...It's a bit like the end of a Fellini film.