[Moshe]

http://news.independent.co.uk/people...cle2838621.ece

Lee Hazlewood

Songwriter, singer and producer

Published: 06 August 2007



Barton Lee Hazlewood, singer, songwriter and record producer: born Mannford, Oklahoma 9 July 1929; married 1953 Naomi Shackleford (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1961), 1983 Tracy Stewart (one stepdaughter; marriage dissolved), 2006 Jeane Kelley; died Las Vegas 4 August 2007.
Lee Hazlewood was a maverick in the best sense of the word. He was fortunate to come into money early by writing and producing Duane Eddy's hit records; after that, he wrote, produced and performed on a variety of projects, most stubbornly uncommercial. His best-known song is his transatlantic No 1 for Nancy Sinatra, "These Boots are Made for Walkin'" (1966), but there are scores of intriguing compositions which merit attention.
Hazlewood lived by his own rules and his career mirrors that of France's musical auteur Serge Gainsbourg, who also wrote at length about sexual liaisons. "I write songs with double and triple meanings," Hazlewood told me in 2004.
I could play certain of my songs to six- or eight-year-old children and they would just like them as songs. I could play the same songs to teenagers and they would know the reasoning behind them. Older people would say, "I think that's dirty, Lee", but they are not dirty songs: they're just suggestive. I know that my songs are a little different and I would say that I am the best writer of Lee Hazlewood songs.
Barton Lee Hazlewood, born in Mannford, Oklahoma in 1929, was the son of an oilfield worker and the family moved to Arkansas and Texas. He met his future wife,Naomi Shackleford, at high school in Huntsville, Texas. Whilst in the services, he worked on military radio stations in Japan and Korea. As a result, he dropped his plans to study medicine and worked as a DJ in Arizona.
By 1955, he was starting a record label, Viv, to discover and produce local talent. The guitarist Al Casey led his studio band and, in 1956, they recorded "The Fool" with Sanford Clark. Hazlewood credited the song to his wife, under the name of Naomi Ford, in case the radio station noticed that he was playing his own records. "The Fool", with its echo-drenched vocal and insidious guitar riff, is typical of Hazlewood's work. It became a US Top Ten hit, and it has been recorded by many acts including Elvis Presley, Johnny Burnette and P.J. Proby.
In 1958, Hazlewood created a new sound for the Phoenix guitarist Duane Eddy. He encouraged him to use the bottom strings of his instrument and created a primitive but very effective echo using an empty grain tank outside the studio with a microphone and a speaker inside. "When I was in high school, there was a piano player I admired with slicked-back oily hair from New York called Eddy Duchin," Hazlewood recalled,
and he played the melody way down there. I always thought that it would be nice if a guitarist did the same thing. When I first met Duane, I told him that I wanted to make a record with those low notes and he said, "I can do that." I said, "I know you can: you'll find it easy." We sold 25 million records over four years, which wasn't bad.
Duane Eddy and his group, the Rebels, had a hit single with "Rebel Rouser" (Hazlewood's take on the word rabble-rouser) and followed it with several more including "Ramrod", "Cannonball", "40 Miles of Bad Road", "Some Kinda Earthquake", "Shazam!" and a radical reworking of Henry Mancini's television theme "Peter Gunn". In 1960, Hazlewood added strings for Eddy's theme for the film Because They're Young and in 1962 a vocal group for the insidious "(Dance with the) Guitar Man".
Hazlewood's deep-voiced gravitas was ideal for western themes and he released a half-spoken, half-sung concept album, Trouble is a Lonesome Town, in 1963. It was the first of many idiosyncratic projects, but he was also capable of writing conventional pop hits. Dean Martin scored with "Houston" (1964) and Martin's son, Dino, as part of Dino, Desi and Billy, had US hits with Hazlewood's songs, "I'm a Fool" and "Not the Lovin' Kind", both in 1966.
Frank Sinatra was keen for his daughter, Nancy, to have some pop success; indeed, her series of failures for his Reprise label was embarrassing. Hazlewood suggested she should sing in a lower register and asked Billy Strange to arrange a song for her he had written in 1963, "These Boots are Made for Walkin'". With her go-go girl image, Sinatra had a transatlantic No 1 and she and her father had similar success with "Somethin' Stupid" (1967), which Hazlewood co-produced with Jimmy Bowen.
Another of Nancy Sinatra's big songs was "Sugar Town". "I spent a lot of time writing that song," Hazlewood revealed.
"I had written a pretty fair song but I thought it wouldn't happen: the lyrics were too clever and so I rewrote and rewrote it and made it so dumb - you know, "I never had a dog that liked me some." That's a dumb lyric!
Although Reprise expressed their doubts, Hazlewood was confident that the song would be a success.
I said, "You stay on it for three or four weeks and you'll know about it." Nobody believed me. At the time Nancy had been selling 200,000 copies in the first week, but this one didn't happen. It didn't make 20,000. Next week: same again. The label manager, Mo Austin said, "This is your first bomb" but I said, "I think we've still got a hit." About 10 days later, he called me and said, "My god, Lee, we've done 60,000 this week" and it went on to sell two million.
Even more remarkably, "Sugar Town" was about drugs: "I was in a folk club in LA which had two levels," Hazlewood explained.
I could see these kids lining up sugar cubes and they had an eye-dropper and were putting something on them. I wasn't a doper so I didn't know what it was but I asked them. It was LSD and one of the kids said, "You know, it's kinda Sugar Town." Nancy knew what the song was about because I told her, but luckily Reprise didn't.
Hazlewood had continued his own recording career with The Very Special World of Lee Hazlewood and Lee Hazlewoodism, Its Cause and Cure, both 1966. After falling out with MGM over Something Special (1968), he made a stunning solo album for Reprise, Love and Other Crimes, and teamed up with Nancy Sinatra for the album Nancy and Lee, which included their country hit, "Jackson", as well as "Sand", "Lady Bird" and the mesmeric "Some Velvet Morning".
In 1967, Hazlewood started the LHI label and released Safe at Home by the International Submarine Band, produced by his sometime singing partner, Suzi Jane Hokom. The album is often cited as the start of country-rock, but the band could not promote it as they had by then broken up and their lead singer, Gram Parsons, had joined the Byrds. In a fit of mean-spiritedness, Hazlewood objected when Parsons violated their contract by singing lead on the Byrds' album, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, so that Roger McGuinn had to replace Parsons' vocals. Other releases on LHI included The Cowboy and The Lady (1969), an acclaimed album of duets by Hazlewood and Ann-Margret.
In 1970, Hazlewood moved to Stockholm and released an album and a television special, both called Cowboy in Sweden. The following year, he reunited with Nancy Sinatra for the hit duet "Did You Ever" as well as making a highly personal album, Requiem for an Almost Lady (1971). His 1973 album Poet, Fool or Bum, was reviewed by Charles Shaar Murray in the New Musical Express with just one word: "Bum". Hazlewood's 1977 album, Back on the Street Again, included his witty favourite, "Dolly Parton's Guitar".
Following a comeback tour with Nancy Sinatra in 1995, Hazlewood saw a growing demand for his work. Steve Shelley, the drummer with Sonic Youth, reissued many of Hazlewood's albums on CD on his own label, Smells Like. A new album of standards with the Al Casey Combo followed, Farmisht, Flatulence, Origami, ARF!! and Me . . . (1999), which Hazlewood promoted at the Royal Festival Hall.
Another admirer, Wyndham Wallace, issued a new album, For Every Solution There's a Problem (2002) on his City Slang label as well as a tribute CD, Total Lee! featuring alt country and new-wave performers including Lambchop, St Etienne, Tindersticks and Jarvis Cocker.
In 2004, Hazlewood appeared at the Royal Festival Hall for what was a farewell appearance. This was followed by Nancy and Lee 3 (2004) for which Duane Eddy helped create the cavernous sound on "She Won't". His final album, Cake or Death (2006), was as oddball as ever. He commented on the Iraq war in "Baghdad Knights" and discussed his demise in "T.O.M. (This Old Man)".
"I've been around long enough now," he concluded. "I've lived a pretty interesting life - not too much sadness, a lot of happiness, lots of fun. And I didn't do much of anything I didn't want to do."
Spencer Leigh

[Everyneurotic]

no.
fucking.
way.

man could write a mean tune.

[sonicl]

What can one say? RIP.

 

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, where they settled long enough for Lee to attend high school and meet his future wife, Naomi Shackleford. After a stint at SMU in Dallas, Lee was called into service in Korea.

After his discharge, Lee attended broadcasting school in California, and upon graduation was hired by KCKY in tiny Coolidge, Arizona. It wasn’t long before his eccentric on-air performances, which consisted of conversations between an elaborate dramatis personae with all the voices done by Lee himself, garnered him a local following.One devotee, a teenage guitarist named Duane Eddy, began dropping by to rid the station of its excess country records. Lee befriended Duane and the two began fleshing out some songs Hazlewood had written, along with Duane’s pianist buddy James “Jimmy Dell” Delbridge, at a local studio. The trio also began driving to Phoenix for country music shows, where they met the young guitarist Al Casey, an important ally in the years to come.

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 base, and a phalanx of talented local players including Eddy and Casey, Lee finally struck paydirt in 1956 with his tune “The Fool”, sung by Casey’s high school chum 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 which housed the studio. The tank was outfitted with a mike and speaker setup, 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.

What most people don’t know is that observing these sessions, and no doubt absorbing most of Lee’s innovative techniques, was a young wannabe producer newly recruited by Sill, by the name of Phil Spector. And it’s also no coincidence that 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.

The early 60s saw Hazlewood establish a new label, Lee Hazlewood Industries (LHI), and 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 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 (not to mention a swimming pool and a nice little stockpile of Chivas Regal). So with the advent of the British Invasion (which was itself profoundly fueled by those pioneering Duane Eddy records), and the sea-change brought upon the Industry by more self-contained artistic projects (e.g. the Beatles et al), he had become quite taken with the idea of “retirement” from the music business. That is, until he met Nancy.

http://www.smellslikerecords.com/leehazlewood/

[sonicl]

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 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 which, inadvertently or not, anticipated liberated, strong female singing from Nico and Pat Benatar to Kim Gordon and Joan Jett. Hazlewood, naturally, saw these elements for the strengths that they were, and knew exactly how to highlight them sonically. He sculpted, again with the help of his now famous session men, a countryfied 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 worldwide 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 ironically, 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 from a critical standpoint.

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 an album called The Cowboy And The Lady — a hilarious duet LP with the actress and singer Ann-Margret. He also contributed music to the films Tony Rome and Sweet Ride, and even acted in the latter, and alongside Richard Widmark in The Moonshine War.

Newly flush from this second wave of success, Hazlewood began traveling abroad, landing in Sweden in 1970, where he met director Tobj–rn Axelman. The two embarked upon a collaboration which would produce several film and music projects, beginning with the music and film project Cowboy In Sweden, and continuing through the films 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 between-song 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. After hearing these 70s albums, one gets the feeling that Lee is perhaps the best interpreter of his own ideas, and without a doubt the albums benefit from everything he had developed up to that point: a singular signature sound synthesizing swinging cowboy shanties, the rhythmic heat of rockabilly, and soaring symphonic pop, punctuated by dark, poetic lyrics at once esoteric, witty and honest.

Towards the end of the 70s Lee gradually retired (again) from music, taking up short residences in different locales across the globe and working only sporadically. 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.

After Rhino Records reissued their hit 60s duets on CD as Fairytales & Fantasies, Lee and Nancy reunited in 1995 for a small-scale world tour to rave reviews. Backstage at the Limelight in NYC, the members of Sonic Youth were able to meet the man, and two years later drummer Steve Shelley managed to track down the elusive Hazlewood and sell him on a reissue project, to be released on Shelley's own Smells Like Records label.

In April 1999 Smells Like Records began reissuing rare recordings by one of pop music's most original and endearing -- yet largely unsung -- iconoclasts. Difficult to find even on the original LP format, the albums had been fetching high prices among collectors for years, and by the early 90s imported CD bootlegs were rampant. SLR wanted to bring these gems to the compact disk legitimately, and affordably, for the first time, in order to raise the profile of this singular American artist.

The series commenced with the 1970 release Cowboy In Sweden, the first of a series of albums recorded in Sweden, and Farmisht, Flatulence, Origami, ARF!!!, and me, a collection of popular standards recorded in 1997, which was the first new Lee Hazlewood album released domestically in nearly two decades. Over the next six months, SLR released Trouble is a Lonesome Town, his spare and simple solo debut, Requiem for an Almost Lady, an aural anatomy of a bittersweet breakup, and 13, a barnstorming, brass-laden funk record. May 2000 saw the release of The Cowboy & The Lady, an album of duets with 60s screen legend Ann-Margret. Additionally, a brand new 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.

Lee’s music has been covered over the years by the likes of Einsturzende Neubauten, Petula Clark, Lisa Germano, Dusty Springfield, The Jesus and Mary Chain and Billy Ray Cyrus. “Boots” and the Duane Eddy tracks continue to make appearances in films, some recent ones including Full Metal Jacket, Forrest Gump, Fargo, Natural Born Killers, Feeling Minnesota and Austin Powers.

[Savage Clone]

Love the Lee.
Rest In Peace; you were one of the very best.

[fugazifan]

RIP
brilliant
listening to
these boots are made for walking-the complete mgm recordings

RIP. You were great while you lasted.

[nicfit]

Damn, EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING worth something is dying??? RIP.

Originally Posted by nicfit

Damn, EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING worth something is dying??? RIP.

Don't worry, I am still alive. For now.

[MellySingsDoom]

RIP Mr Hazlewood.

[Pookie]

I was doing my Round 10 mix tape last week and put My Autumn's Done Come on it. One of my very favourite songs.

Above and beyond the kitsch/ironic/easy listening twaddle that's cool to like. A completely unique songwriter.

And I shall revive my old avatar in tribute.

[Florya]

Lee is free
RIP

[fugazifan]

here is an article that i wrote about him...
http://www.staticandfeedback.com/Music/0308haze.html