Tim Hardin’s struggles with addiction are mirrored in Black Sheep Boy, his heartbreaking tale of alienation from his family.
I think of Tim Hardin in the same category as Tim Buckley: two tragic figures whose songwriting straddled folk, blues and jazz. And both called Tim, obvs.
Hardin might be less revered than Buckley but Bob Dylan once described him as “the greatest living songwriter” after hearing his debut album in 1966. And he wrote and sang two songs that became standards after being hits for other artists – Reason To Believe and If I Were A Carpenter.
This, though, is my favourite. The moody, maudlin and ineffably sad Black Sheep Boy has heartbreaking lyrics reflecting on his alienation as “the family’s unowned boy” after a visit home to his parents: “If you love me let me live in peace.”
I have to confess I knew next to nothing about Hardin’s life and music until I heard the concept album inspired by him by a band I adore, Okkervil River, including their version of the song Black Sheep Boy.
Probably because his songs are best known through others’ interpretations, starting with Bobby Darin’s top ten hit with If I Were A Carpenter in 1966. Then there was Rod Stewart (Reason to Believe), Scott Walker (Lady Came From Baltimore), Fred Neil (Green Rocky Road) and Nico (Eulogy to Lenny Bruce). Plus countless others.
The son of orchestra violinist and jazz bassist from Oregon, Hardin had joined up with the Marines at the age of 18 and was posted to Vietnam where he discovered heroin, the drug that would kill him after a 20-year battle with addiction.
After he was discharged he moved to New York and began his music career on the emerging Greenwich Village folk scene in the early 1960s, alongside Dylan and the rest. He also appeared at Woodstock in 1969, singing a compelling version of If I Were A Carpenter.
If ever there’s a gig I’d love to have seen, it’s the one in September 1968 when Hardin and Van Morrison each played an acoustic set at the Cafe Au Go Go. But not as much as the one in November 1975, after he had moved to England to try and kick his heroin habit – only to become addicted to barbiturates instead – when he performed as guest lead vocalist with Can at two UK concerts.
Sadly, it was to be a brief collaboration: a huge argument between Hardin and the German band broke out after the London concert, during which Hardin threw a television set through a car’s windscreen outside on Drury Lane.
After several years here, Hardin returned to the USA in early 1980 – seven years after his last album – and began writing and recording songs for a planned comeback; only to die of an accidental heroin overdose in his Hollywood apartment at the age of 39.