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LEE HAZLEWOOD
What could be more alluring? A mysterious,
moustached man who looks like he should be playing supporting roles in
cheap porn movies. He sings with an intoxicating deep, deep southern drawl.
A distinctive pure baritone drawl that seduced the sex kitten of the sixties,
Nancy Sinatra and made her sing 'sex' on the kitsch cult classic, 'Nancy
& Lee'. Their partnership made them America's answer to naughty but
nice French pairing of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin.
He was kitsch, exotic and deeply
alluring. His best work combines fairytale imagery with dark and sinister
undertones. Adored by the lounge core and goths alike for these contrasting
qualities. Singer, songwriter, producer, innovator and visionary, he launched
the careers and crossed the paths with the likes of Duane Eddy, Elvis,
Gram Parsons, Phil Spector, Frank Sinatra and Hollywood.
He is a legend, a real international man
of mystery.
Born on 9 July 1929, in the town of Mannford,
Oklahoma, Barton Lee Hazlewood spent his early years moving with his family
between there and towns in Arkansas and Texas.
After his discharge from the army, Lee attended
broadcasting school in California, and upon graduation was hired by KCKY
in tiny Coolidge, Arizona where he met up with a teenage Duane Eddy and
started recording songs in a local studio..
By 1955 Lee had moved to KRUX in Phoenix
(where he was the first DJ in town to play Elvis), and started the Viv
label as an outlet for his productions. Using Ramsey Recorders as his
home studio, and a pool of talented local players, Lee finally struck
pay-dirt in 1956 with his tune "The Fool", sung by Sanford Clark, birthing
the Phoenix music scene in the process. In 1957, Lee gave up Djing for
writing and producing full-time when he accepted a job as staff producer
with Dot Records, and moved to LA.
Soon after, Hazlewood hooked up with producer
Lester Sill, forming a partnership that would alter the course of American
music. Still making regular pilgrimages back to Phoenix, where he continued
to explore the sounds he was hearing in the now-familiar context of Ramsey
and his erstwhile group of session players, Lee finally broke through
when he suggested that Duane play the simple, repetitive melodic riffs
they had written on the lower strings of his guitar. It was a radical
departure from the searing, high pitched runs of the Chet Atkins style.
Although the sound had its genesis in Lee’s head, he couldn’t possibly
have been prepared for how sublimely it tumbled from Duane’s amplifier,
and just how far the two would be able to take it.
Knowing they had the makings of something
bigger, Hazlewood and Sill began licensing the Eddy masters to Philadelphia-based
Jamie Records in 1958, and enjoyed a huge string of international instrumental
hits which helped define what people were just beginning to call "rock
and roll".
Hazlewood was obsessive about achieving new
sounds, and this pursuit led to the installation of a gigantic grain tank
onto the side of the building that housed the studio. The tank was outfitted
with a mike and speaker set-up, and became a truly monstrous echo chamber,
heard to great effect on those early Eddy sides. Another of Lee’s many
innovations in this period was the "stacking" of bass players: Fender
bass for crispness on top of an upright bass for depth of tone underneath.
It was at these recording sessions that a
young wannabe producer newly recruited by Sill, by the name of Phil Spector,
was to be seen studiously absorbing Lee's unorthodox production methods.
Many of Lee’s hand-picked session players,
including Al Casey, Steve Douglas, Jim Horn and Larry Knechtel, went on
to become part of the legendary "Wrecking Crew", Hollywood’s most in-demand
group of session musicians, and the interpreters of countless milestones
of American music from the 60s and 70s.
In the early 60s saw Hazlewood established
a new label, LHI (Lee Hazlewood Industries), in order to branch out into
new territory both as writer/producer and as a performer, with his first
solo albums, 1963’s Trouble Is A Lonesome Town and The N.S.V.I.P.s, the
following year. In 1967 LHI released the groundbreaking first album by
Gram Parsons’ short-lived group, the International Submarine Band.
By the mid-sixties, Lee had achieved some
significance with mega-hits and artistic milestones, and had garnered
the respect of his peers. With the advent of the British Invasion and
changing fashions Lee had become quite taken with the idea of "retirement"
from the music business. That is, until he met Nancy.
The young daughter of the American icon,
Nancy Sinatra was an aspiring diva with a string of disappointments even
her father’s usually indomitable influence couldn’t make into hits. Thus
she was delivered to Hazlewood by fellow producer and Reprise bigwig Jimmy
Bowen. The result, to almost everyone’s satisfaction, was wall to wall
hits for about the next 5 years.
Described by detractors as a tuneless drone,
Nancy’s voice was more importantly a tough and life-wisened instrument,
and certainly not lacking in a canny sexuality that, inadvertently or
not, anticipated liberated, strong female singing from Nico to Kim Gordon.
Hazlewood would in fact memorably urge the
sixties temptress to "sing like you're a 16 year old girl who goes out
with 45 year old truckers!"
He sculpted, again with the help of his now
famous session men, a countrified pop brew to bathe tunes which, though
not without their "novelty" aspects, were more "novel" in the literary
sense: concisely constructed layers of sophisticated artifice operating
on several levels of meaning, depending on how deep you were willing to
go.
The first string of hits, "These Boots Are
Made For Walking", "Sugar Town", "How Does That Grab You Darlin’?", made
Nancy Sinatra a world-wide star, and is perhaps what gave her the confidence
to begin sharing the mike with Lee.
The duet hits that followed include the hardcore
C&W rollick of "Jackson", and the sublime "Some Velvet Morning", perhaps
Lee’s finest moment as a lyricist. It’s important to note that Lee was
stalking the very top of the pops with vaguely cloaked S&M and drug
references, amid other implications of miscellaneous naughtiness, yet
because of the context in which he worked was the epitome of unhip. By
contrast, Lou Reed was addressing similar subjects in his eventually more
celebrated style, but within the hermetic confines of Warhol’s Factory,
an association which inevitably made his "vanguard" work infinitely less
assailable.
Lee’s other Hollywood (mis)adventures included
producing Frank and Nancy’s hit duet "Somethin’ Stupid", writing and producing
the Dean Martin hit "Houston", and the record The Cowboy And The Lady,
a hilarious duet LP with the actress and singer Ann-Margaret. He also
contributed music to the films Tony Rome and Sweet Ride, and even acted
in the latter and in The Moonshine War, alongside Richard Widmark.
Newly minted from this second wave of success,
Hazlewood began travelling abroad, landing in Sweden in 1970, where he
met director Tobjörn Axelman. The two embarked upon a collaboration
which would produce several film and music projects, beginning with Cowboy
In Sweden, and continuing through Smoke and A House Safe For Tigers. The
Swedish Viking label also issued two very rare but strong Hazlewood solo
albums. Requiem For An Almost Lady, released in 1971, is an aching meditation
on love lost (with some harrowing narration), while 13, from the following
year, is a horn-laden departure from the Hazlewood formula that succeeds
on the strength of its exuberantly dazed mania.
It’s during this period that Hazlewood emerged
as a singer and performer inseparable from his writing and production.
He created a singular signature sound synthesising swinging cowboy shanties,
the rhythmic heat of rockabilly, and soaring symphonic pop, punctuated
by dark, poetic lyrics at once esoteric, witty and honest.
By the 90s, the first compact disk issues
of Lee’s solo work - most of them illegal - began to appear on shady European
labels, while his original LHI LPs steadily began fetching higher prices
in the collector’s market. All of this, combined with his reclusive lifestyle
and the enigmatic nature of his available oeuvre, afforded quite a mythology.
Sonic youth drummer Steve Shelley managed
to track down the elusive Hazlewood and sell him on a reissue project,
to be released on his own Smells Like Records label. It was decided that
six old titles would be reissued: Trouble Is A Lonesome Town (‘63), The
N.S.V.I.P.s (‘64), The Cowboy And The Lady (‘69), Cowboy In Sweden (‘70),
Requiem For An Almost Lady (‘71), and 13 (‘72). Additionally, an album
of old pop standards titled 'Farmisht, Flatulence, Origami, ARF!!! and
me', recorded between 1996 and 1998, and featuring Lee backed by his old
pal Al Casey, will be Hazlewood's first domestic release in over two decades.
A CD compilation of 45rpm singles originally released on LHI will round
out the series.
LEE HAZLEWOOD "Cowboy In Sweden"
(Smells Like Records)
 Free
to ramble in the heady post-"Boots" days, a newly minted LEE HAZLEWOOD
travelled abroad, ultimately landing in Sweden, a locale that would inspire
some of his strongest work. His key artistic associate in Sweden was the
film director Torbjörn Axelman, and together the two masterminded
the film and album project COWBOY IN SWEDEN. The album went gold in Sweden,
and was the first of several acclaimed Hazlewood/Axelman collaborations.
Two talented female vocalists are a big part
of Cowboy's sound. Nina Lizell and Suzi Jane Hokom bring heavenly voices
and unique approaches to Hazlewood material which would have been way
too sophisticated, in its humour as much as its subject matter, for mainstream
pop audiences. Hokom was a successful, gender-gap smashing producer in
her own right, her credits including the one and only album by the International
Submarine Band, fronted by a young Gram Parsons, on Lee’s LHI label. Lizell
has maintained a successful singing career, performing throughout Scandinavia
and Europe to this day.
The music on this album is prime Hazlewood:
a singular synthesis of cowboy rambles, rockabilly rhythms and symphonic
pop. His dark, poetic lyrics intertwine hard luck tales, pragmatic politics
and love odes. Peppered with esoteric images and declaimed with wit, irony
and wry honesty, they prefigure the self-conscious/self-referencing mania
of successive generations of lyricists.
Tracks like the almost whispered anti-war
meditation "No Train To Stockholm", the Bacharachian coyness of "Hey Cowboy"
and the honky-tonk-meets-strings of "Pray Them Bars Away" display his
utterly unique muse in full splendour. Evocative, enchanting and in a
class of it's own. Every song creates a distant mood, paints a world,
weary picture and tells a thousand tales or more. Solemnly reflective,
hangover music never tasted this good. Grab yourself a copy now for when
you next hit the bottle!
Check out the following web site for more Lee info:
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/wilkens/Lh01.html
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