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Lee Hazlewood& Nancy Sinatra 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.
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.
Five old titles were reissued: Trouble Is A Lonesome Town (’63), The Cowboy And The Lady (’69), Cowboy In Sweden (’70), Requiem For An Almost Lady (’71), and 13 (’72). 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. |
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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.
