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Had he been born a half-decade earlier, Timothy B. Schmit might well have been a part of the folk-rock boom in California. As it was, he unknowingly followed a path similar to that of Gene Clark, Roger McGuinn, and Chris Hillman, from folk to rock, the main difference being that he was in his mid-teens at the time and had to wait to make it work professionally. But he made up for it by playing a key role in the histories of two country-rock bands that evolved directly out of that folk-rock boom, Poco and the Eagles, and hit his heyday in the 1970s and early '80s. Schmit was born in Oakland, CA, in 1947, and grew up in Sacramento, the son of a vacuum cleaner salesman whose journeys with his family up and down the Pacific Coast were broken up by music. Schmit's first musical instrument was the violin, which he later followed with trombone, ukulele, and guitar. He also found that his singing voice was not bad and, while he was a little young to become an Elvis Presley devotee when rock &...