Ex-Byrd Takes Off With Return to Country Roots

For the second time this year, an ex-Byrd is coming to town. In January, drummer Michael Clarke appeared at Winston’s Beach Club in Ocean Beach; tonight, bassist-singer Chris Hillman will be at the Bacchanal in Kearny Mesa.

The two charter members of the seminal 1960s folk-rock group, however, are flying in different directions.

Clarke is touring with a crude bar band he has the audacity to call the Byrds and limping through such vintage hits as “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Turn! Turn! Turn!” and “Eight Miles High.”

Hillman, meanwhile, is touring with the Desert Rose Band, which in the last three years has scored six No. 1 singles on the national country charts and in 1989 was named Band of the Year by the Academy of Country Music.

Hillman said he can’t fathom what it would be like, trading places with Clarke.

“I could never say ‘There but for the grace of God go I,’ in regard to doing the nostalgia thing,” he said. “I’d sooner go back to college or go into some sort of other business. You can’t live in the past forever; you have to go out there and jump into the shark tank, go out and try things.

“It’s also a matter of conscience. When I was in the Byrds, my role--and everyone else’s role--was to enhance Roger McGuinn. It was Roger’s band, Roger’s songs.

“So I can’t go up there and sing ‘Mr. Tambourine Man.’ I don’t have the right. I have to forge my own identity, and that’s why I feel so sorry for Michael.”

That Hillman is forging his own identity in country music isn’t surprising. He’s always been a country boy at heart.

Born in Los Angeles, Hillman and his family moved to San Diego County in 1948, when he was four.

“I grew up in Rancho Santa Fe and Del Mar, a very happy, well-adjusted, middle-class white kid who fell madly in love with hillbilly music while in high school,” Hillman recalled.

After graduating from San Dieguito High School in 1962, Hillman launched his musical career in a long-gone Mission Beach nightclub called the Blue Guitar, playing mandolin with the bluegrass-oriented Scottsville Squirrel Barkers.

A year later, he moved to Los Angeles and played with several country bands--including the Hillmen, the Green Grass Group, and the Golden State Boys--before switching to bass and teaming up with McGuinn, Clarke, David Crosby, and Gene Clark to form the Byrds.

Hillman was primarily responsible for the Byrds’ gradual shift from folk rock to country rock. In early 1968, he recruited studio players for the countryish “The Notorious Byrd Brothers” album. Later that year, he and newcomer Gram Parsons urged the band to cut a full-fledged country album, “Sweetheart of the Rodeo.”

In 1969, Hillman and Parsons left the Byrds to continue their country experiments with the Flying Burrito Brothers. Three years later, Hillman dropped out and spent the rest of the decade playing with various other country-rock outfits, including Stephen Stills’ Manassas and the Souther-Hillman-Furay Band.

He subsequently cut two albums with fellow ex-Byrds McGuinn and Clark, but the old magic, he recalled, simply wasn’t there.

“It was almost like a second job,” Hillman said. “We made a lot of money, but it just wasn’t very creative or rewarding.”

So in 1981, Hillman went solo, recording three albums of acoustic country music and performing in honky-tonks and at bluegrass festivals throughout the country.

“I went back to square one,” he said. “I redefined what I was doing, learned what I do best, and got better as a singer and as a writer.

“In retrospect, it was the greatest thing in the world I could have done. I was out there on my own--without a wall of sound, without other people to bounce the spotlight on--and I realized that I was most comfortable doing country music, which I had started out doing.”

The Desert Rose Band, Hillman said, was a natural progression.

“It just came about sheerly by accident,” he recalled. “In 1985, I was touring with my own acoustic quartet, opening for Dan Fogelberg, and I had no intention of putting another electric band together.

“But when we got off the tour in the summer of 1985, I had a lot of songs that I had written, and my guitarist, John Jorgenson, was pressuring me, ‘Why don’t we go electric? Why don’t we get a pedal-steel player?’ So it just seemed like a natural place to go.”

This acoustic quartet of Hillman, Jorgenson, guitarist Herb Pedersen, and bassist Bill Bryson became the nucleus of the Desert Rose Band, whose other members are pedal-steel guitarist Jay Dee Maness and drummer Steve Duncan.