By the time Chris Hillman made Bidin’ My Time, he’d basically talked himself into retirement. Five decades of bands, bust-ups, reinventions, and the occasional accidental revolution will do that to a person. “I didn’t really have any intention of recording again,” he remembered. “I said, well, I had a great time, five decades, I had a great career, and I did everything I ever wanted to do and then some.”
Then Tom Petty called.
Hillman still sounded a little stunned by how quickly the whole thing shifted. He’d run the idea past Herb Pedersen, then rang Petty almost apologetically: Are you sure you want to do this? Can you make the commitment? Petty didn’t flinch. “He said, ‘Do you want me to do this?’ I said I’d be thrilled to work with you. He said, ‘Well, let’s do it.’ And there it was.”
Petty agreed to produce without even hearing the songs first. Hillman tried to talk him out of that part, too. “I said, ‘You haven’t even heard my songs.’ He said, ‘I’m not worried.’ I said, ‘But I’m worried.’” Petty just shrugged it off. If something wasn’t working, he told Hillman, he’d say so and they’d either fix it or grab another tune. “Which once again speaks volumes of the man,” Hillman said. “And his skill at producing records, as evidenced by all the great Heartbreaker records that came out.”
In the studio, the supposed “last rock star” behaved like the world’s most overqualified runner. Hillman kept coming back to one tiny detail: “He was there every day on time in the studio, and he would bring in coffee every morning. Not once somebody who worked for him – he’d bring in a tray of coffee to the place. It speaks exactly of who this man was. He was so humble.”
Hillman had known Petty since the late ‘70s, but only really got him in those last two months of sessions. “It’s hard for me to ever… I never could look at him as a rock star, and he was such a force in music around the world.” After Petty’s death, Hillman was still processing it. “Yeah, he leaves me a little sad,” he admitted. “It was tough for everybody in the world, I think. Tom really reached out to everyone. Everybody could identify with Tom Petty. He was like everyman… They became America’s band.”
Petty, for his part, refused to see Bidin’ My Time as any kind of swan song. Hillman told him how grateful he was for this “great last record in my career.” Petty shot back instantly: “What are you talking about? We’re not done yet. I’ve got other plans for you.” As final conversations go, that one’s brutal and beautiful in equal measure.
The record they made together plays like Hillman’s 50-year highlight reel, not that he planned it that way. “At the end of the record I said, this is almost like a concept,” he said. There’s the bluegrass DNA from 1963–64; the jangling ghost of the Byrds; the dust and drift of the Flying Burrito Brothers; even echoes of Desert Rose Band. The title track, written back in 1987 for Desert Rose and shelved, ended up making more sense from the far side of all those years. “It’s better that it’s recorded now at the age I am,” he said. “More years have passed… It’s interesting how people look at the meaning of ‘Bidin’ My Time.’ I never analyze my own music is my motto.”
Plenty of the songs came with their own time-warp built in. Hillman wanted to cut Gene Clark’s “She Don’t Care About Time,” with Petty leaning into that classic Byrds shimmer. “It sounds so much like the Byrds as I wanted it to be,” he laughed. “He had these subtle, inspiring things he would say or do in the studio. He got it out of me.”
“Walk Right Back,” the Everly Brothers chestnut, wasn’t even supposed to be on the album. Hillman was just singing it around the studio when Petty’s producer radar went off. “Tom just heard her singing it in the studio and he stopped everything. We recorded it right there. He said, ‘We gotta put this on the album.’ He was absolutely right. It fit perfect.”
Then there was “Here She Comes Again,” a song that somehow waited nearly four decades for tape. Hillman and Roger McGuinn had written it in 1979, played it a couple times live with McGuinn, Clark & Hillman, and then lost it to the ether. All Hillman had was a dusty live recording. “Someday I want to record it,” he kept telling himself. “I loved the hook to it.” Bidin’ My Time finally gave it a home, with McGuinn overdubbing from Florida “right up his alley.”
Of course, if you’re going to invite ghosts, you might as well go all in. Hillman cut “The Bells of Rhymney” again, this time with David Crosby and Herb Pedersen, stacking two of the great tenors around him. “I wanted to sing that song with both of those guys, which we got to do,” he said. Crosby flew in, knocked his part out in an hour or two, and left his old bandmate beaming.
For all the nostalgic weight, Hillman still felt connected to the bigger story – the one that started with a phone call asking if he could play bass. (He said yes. He absolutely could not.) “What made the Byrds unique was that we didn’t really know what we were doing,” he said. “We just plugged in and went for it. That was the magic.”
He still believed that ‘60s run – from the early Beatles through Revolver, from the first Byrds singles through ’67–’68 – was its own secret society. “Yes, I do feel like I was part of a great club,” he said. “I was a very lucky guy.” Back then, labels actually stuck with artists through a couple of albums instead of dropping them if they didn’t go platinum on impact. Imagine that.
Somewhere in all of this, Hillman also quietly finished a book — a manuscript about growing up in a small California town in the ‘50s, discovering folk and bluegrass, then having his brain rewired like everyone else when the Beatles hit Ed Sullivan in ‘64. He insisted it wouldn’t be a score-settling memoir. “They’re all nice,” he said of the stories. “I don’t put down anything that denigrates anybody I worked with.”
Petty’s death meant rewriting the epilogue, of course. It also meant that the album-ending cover of “Wildflowers” hit a lot harder than anyone expected. Hillman had only learned the song when Petty asked him and Herb Pedersen to perform it at the MusiCares tribute in his honor. “I said, this is a great song, we need to record this,” Hillman remembered. Petty gave his blessing immediately: “I’d be honored.”
They closed Bidin’ My Time with it, because it felt right. Then, nine or ten months later, it suddenly sounded like prophecy. “Especially the last verse… you’d be long free of all trouble,” Hillman said quietly. “It just was one of those perfect moments where everything fit together. I doubt if I could ever replicate anything on that level again.”
And if anybody could have bullied the Byrds into one last flight, Hillman swore it would’ve been Tom Petty. “He knew all of us really well,” he said. “If anybody could have put the Byrds back together for one album, it would have been Tom Petty.”
Instead, he helped Chris Hillman make one more great record – the kind you only get after a lifetime of not really knowing what you’re doing, and somehow getting it right anyway.
Listen to the interview above and then check out Chris Hillman's cover of "Wildflowers" below!
