"Listen troopships got the biggest holds in the world, right? Because they’re barracks. Well, raped of beds, shower stalls and everything else, they could be sent straight to Marseilles with a skeleton crew of 38 cats. I was the only cat hip enough to steal 40 pounds for myself. I took it straight down the gangplank in Hong Kong, switched it to heroin and spent the rest of my Marine Corp days cool. Then I got back to the States and got a big surprise . . ." 
Tim Hardin, Zigzag 43

“I was only there for a semester, which is a third of a year, I was in the musicology department, not the music department, and that meant I was dealing with the history of music. Now since I was an adept folkie, with a folkie style – I was supposed to teach people how to play the way I play. To me that was really dumb, so I taught about how Pythagoras figured out tonality, using a string as the substance of the universe, and how you got tones by halving the distance, and thirds and fourths – so you get the twelve interval scale. And then you get the chord pattern 1-4-5, which is the blues chord pattern, which almost everything is based on." Tim Hardin

Connor McKnight and Tim Hardin, Zigzag 43

How Can We Hang Onto A Dream?

"Her maiden name was Susan Morse, but it was just poetic licence to change it. She was so beautiful, man. Not that ‘I want to get next to her right away’ beauty, but real beauty. She was on a show on television, that had the highest rating and it was on during the day. It was called the ‘Young Marrieds’ and she was the star. This is the truth man, rooms as big as this one, full of bags of mail, two high, every week. Some of the letters were terrible. A girl who was five three, weighed 220, terrible complexion, greasy hair, and she’d ask ‘How can I look like you?’ That’s a caricature of sadness.” - Tim Hardin

"He was in a car when he died, he had just ODed on morphine. His chauffer found out he was dead, when he reached back to jiggle him awake, to tell him he better get straight as they were coming into town. The health and happiness hour . . . that was the name of his show on the radio . . . the health and happiness hour . . ." - Tim Hardin

"Goodbye Hank Williams my friend I didn’t know you but I’ve been the places you been."

Extracts from the Homecoming Concert

Ragamuffins tip their hat to the indispensable Zigzag magazine pioneered by Pete Frame and John Tobler. It was the definitive rock journal of its time. We have borrowed from Connor McKnight’s interview with Tim Hardin in Zigzag 43. We have used Tim’s quotes and Connors views on Tim Hardin 1 and 2 to draw a portrait of a unique artist.

“In my wandering sense of time, I’ll try to see enough to rhyme your changing life, in my slipping sort of step I’ll try to do much better yet” – Never Too Far, Tim Hardin

Listen in at Ragamuffin Radio