Lee Hazlewood RIP

Songwriter, producer, singer, and all-around musical iconoclast Lee Hazlewood died Saturday, August 4, in Henderson, Nevada, after a three-year battle with terminal renal cancer. He was 78.

Hazlewood was best known as a producer, songwriter, and sometimes duet partner of Nancy Sinatra. He wrote the smash "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" and recorded two full albums with Sinatra, 1968's Nancy & Lee and 1972's Nancy & Lee Again. Their most famous collaboration, though, was the 1967 single "Some Velvet Morning", which reached #26 on the Billboard pop chart but has had a lasting impact through scores of cover versions by a wide variety of artists, including Vanilla Fudge, Primal Scream & Kate Moss, Lydia Lunch, My Dying Bride, Entombed, Slowdive, and Hungarian jazz guitarist Gabor Szabo.

Though it lacks the country & western elements that so often characterize his work, the song is a powerful demonstration of the peculiar genius that turned Hazlewood into such a widely respected figure later in life. Hazlewood presages the whole song by qualifying everything he's going to do: "some velvet morning when I'm straight," he sings, immediately placing himself in an altered state. He sings of a woman named Phaedra who "gave (him) life" and "made it end," possibly alluding to the Phaedra of Greek myth, who took her own life when jilted by her lover (and whom Hazlewood named a daughter after).

Hazlewood sings over a huge, reverberant backing that harkens to crooner productions, while Sinatra's interjections come over a twinkling, triple-meter passage dripping with psychedelic orchestration. The lyrics he gives her in response to his somewhat menacing promises are a string of nature images. It's a truly strange, exciting song that's as hard to classify as the man who wrote it.

Hazlewood was born Barton Lee Hazlewood in Oklahoma just in time for the stock market crash and the Dust Bowl and spent his childhood following his oilman father around the Great Plains and the Gulf Coast. He served in the Army during the Korean War, disc jockeying for Armed Services Radio in Japan, a profession he continued into civilian life as he began writing songs.

Sanford Clark's 1956 Hazlewood-penned and produced rockabilly single "The Fool" was one of the earliest hits Hazlewood had a hand in, and it's an early indicator of the direction Hazlewood's own music would ultimately take: a sad sack narrative about a man who wishes he hadn't left his woman. The arrangement features nothing more than an electric guitar and a clicking percussion instrument saturated with slapback echo.

It was a prelude to his work with twang king Duane Eddy, which produced the smash "Rebel Rouser" and attracted the attention of a young Phil Spector, who visited the studio to study Hazlewood's taping technique. His production work over the next ten years established him as a unique talent who was capable of scoring the occasional hit in spite of a broad lack of interest in following trends.

His own solo work largely failed to register in the pop world, but he created a large body of eccentric, deeply humane recordings full of dejection and rough breakups. It was particularly in his solo work that he discovered the threads running from European existentialism to American country music. His first solo album, 1963's Trouble Is a Lonesome Town, was a concept album in the same sense that many of Frank Sinatra's 1950s albums were concept records, grouping songs that dealt with a single theme, in this case, small-town romance and despair. Much of his lyrical ethos can be summed up in these lines from Dean Martin's "Houston", written by Hazlewood: "I'm a face without a name/ Just walkin' in the rain."

For me, his style comes together most thoroughly on 1970's Cowboy in Sweden, recorded for Swedish television (Hazlewood moved to Sweden partly to ensure that his son wouldn't be drafted and sent to Vietnam). "Pray Them Bars Away" is a masterful prison narrative, but Hazlewood's heavy baritone and slight twang are balanced out by lush orchestration and a cello fanfare, a juxtaposition that perfectly marries his seemingly contradictory sides. The album cover features Hazlewood in a blue suit, lying next to actress Nina Lizell on a rocky Baltic beach, kissing a horse on the mouth while director Torbjörn Axelman holds the reins.

Hazlewood largely retired from recording after the late 70s, but returned after a resurgence in interest in his work in the 1990s, as his aesthetic found a new home in the music of bands like Lambchop and the Tindersticks. He recorded the comeback album Farmisht, Flatulence, Origami, ARF!!! And Me… in 1999 for Steve Shelley's Smells Like Records imprint, which also began a campaign to reissue his solo catalog.

His final album, last year's Cake or Death, appeared several months after his cancer diagnosis, but he nevertheless worked hard to promote it, granting interviews and even traveling. The album was just as ornery and uninterested in conceding to expectations as anything Hazelwood ever recorded-- he could have had any musician he wanted, but instead chose friends and family members. His singular way of making music was always his stamp, and now it's his lasting legacy as well.