A Quote by Chris Hillman

I was a lucky kid. You could have got 10 kids to be in The Byrds who were better than I was. — © Chris Hillman
I was a lucky kid. You could have got 10 kids to be in The Byrds who were better than I was.
I just got into it like a lot of people through the rock 'n' roll bands in the late '60s that turned to country music, like The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, but particularly through The Byrds because of Gram Parsons, Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman (with their 1968 album Sweetheart of the Rodeo). They kind of introduced English kids to Merle Haggard and George Jones and the Louvins (brothers Charlie and Ira).
There was a point when comics were considered to be mainly of interest to kids, and it was decided that kids could relate more to someone their own age than an adult. So suddenly all these previously grownup comics were lousy with sidekicks: Aquagirl, Aqualad, Robin, Kid Flash, Speedy, Stripesy... the list goes on.
I was a completely normal kid, the school nerd. In Year 8 and 9 I got picked on. I was a freak- no one understood me. I was the kid who wanted to be abducted by ET. Then all the losers left in Year 10. But I was quite good at school, and very artistic. In Year 11 it turned around. I became one of the coolest kids in school. I was in school musicals- the kid who could sing. It was bizzare. I loved school. It's an amazing little world. The rules inside the school are different from the outside world.
I remember that first week at the Whisky and the gigs we (The Buffalo Springfield) did with the Byrds, We could really smoke ! That band never got on record as bad, and as hard as we were. Live we sounded like the Rolling Stones.
In Brooklyn, the block wasn't very long or very wide, and not that many kids were out there, either. But when I got to Florida, there were a lot of kids on my block, young kids, older kids, and they could play outside until the sun went down and have fun.
A lot of my friends were a lot into theatre a lot earlier than I was. A lot of my friends were kids who were in The Broadway Kids and the kids auditioning for Gavroche in 'Les Miz.' I was never that kid. I was weaned on Michael Jackson. Not literally, because that would have been odd.
I was always the kid down the street who got the other kids to put on a show. But it was only when I was 19, and discovered ballet and contemporary dance, that I got interested in the fact that you could have a whole evening of dance - rather than just waiting for the dancers in a musical.
First, you've got to get the job. "Yeah, I can do it," I would say. When I was a kid, I could do anything. Lucky nobody ever asked me if I could fly a jet plane.
I would say basically the commonplace observation that kids aren't going to earn as much as their parents is now is a coin flip at this point. Are you going to do better than your parents? It's a 50-50 chance, whereas if you were born in the 1940s or 1950s, you had more than a 90 percent chance you were going to do better than your parents. So basically almost a guarantee for most kids that you were going to achieve the American Dream of doing better than your parents did. Today, that's certainly no longer the case.
It was better to be known as the kid who could draw than as the short kid.
I think what makes the Byrds stand up all these years is the basis in folk music. Folk music, being a timeless art form, is the foundation of the Byrds. We were all from a folk background. We considered ourselves folk singers even when we strapped on electric instruments and dabbled in different things.
I loved playing the stuff we did in the Byrds. It was a good band. I was lucky to be in it.
When I was coming up as a kid, there were programs that kept me out of trouble and on the straight and narrow in South Central Los Angeles, and I always felt that when I got to a stage where I could provide similar opportunities to kids then I would do that.
I see parents who want their kid to be better than the kid wants to be. I tell parents to encourage kids to find their passion. You can give them the opportunity to do many things.
You is born lucky, and it's better to be born lucky than born rich, cause if you is lucky you can git rich, but if you is born rich and you ain't lucky you is liables to lose all you got.
You can do better than this.” The best slogan I can think of to leave with the kids of the U.S.A. would be “We can . . . and we’ve got to . . . do better than this.
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