One of our favorite songwriters has left us, we'll be doing our little tribute to him at the next show - LAS VEGAS - Lee Hazlewood, a singer and songwriter best known for writing and producing “These Boots Are Made for Walkin”’ for Nancy Sinatra, has died. He was 78.
Barton Lee Hazlewood died at his home in Henderson of kidney cancer on Saturday evening, the Clark County coroner’s office said.
Hazlewood was most famous for his work with the daughter of Frank Sinatra, including writing and producing such hits as “Sugartown” and “Some Velvet Morning.” He also produced “Something Stupid,” a duet Nancy recorded with her father in 1967.
He also produced for Duane Eddy and Gram Parsons, and performed on a number of solo albums and with Nancy Sinatra in three “Nancy & Lee” albums.
Hazlewood was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2005 and released his final album, “Cake or Death” in 2006.
He was survived by his third wife, Jeane, his son Mark and daughters Debbie and Samantha.
Lee Hazelwood Passes
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, Aug 07 2007 06:56 AM
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Jacki O.
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Posted 07 August 2007 - 10:08 AM
ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh nooooooooooo. sad sad sad. 
one of my favorites. RIP
one of my favorites. RIP
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mancopter
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Posted 07 August 2007 - 11:55 AM
To understand Lee Hazlewood is to understand the difference between country and western. Country is a Nashville thing; western has no center (it's even bigger than Texas). Country is tight; western is loose. Country is about everyone coming together; western is about being an individual, alone.
Hollywood's take on the singing cowboy poisoned country music for decades, leading Johnny Cash to overreach and give in to cowpoke melodrama, getting all duded up for the covers of Sings the Ballads of the True West and Mean as Hell! Even Arizona's own Marty Robbins' vision of the Southwest seemed a little too Howdy Doody at times (that was undoubtedly Nashville's influence).
Lee Hazlewood understood western -- he was born just outside of Tulsa, OK, raised all over the Southwest, and originally based in Arizona when he began his career. Hazlewood's songs weren't narratives, like the stories that country music was so fond of. They were picturesque, like scenes from movies. (As such, they were exceptionally well written, directed, and shot.) While the official country music version of western still looked back to the '30s and '40s, Hazlewood's characters were dark, gritty, and anything but heroic, anticipating the shady sense of right and wrong, the realism, and the complex motives of the Sergio Leone or Sam Peckinpah westerns. (Ennio Morricone could hardly have missed the wonderfully evocative production tricks Hazlewood employed on many of his songs.)
Hazlewood's voice, parched and plain but expressive, evoked the easy dexterity of the cowboy. His knockout productions could be dry or florid -- Thurston Moore dubbed them "country exotica" -- but they matched the feel of the desert, where there are stark contrasts between high and low, dry and wet, or colorful and washed-out. The production always fit the song; Hazlewood was using one of the Western world's most advanced studios and had at his disposal some of its greatest practitioners, including arranger/conductor Billy Strange.
Even his effects recalled the Southwest, with a heavy use of echo bouncing around the mix as if the music were within canyon walls, the harmony vocals behind him usually high and haunted, and the metallic rustling of guitars or chains giving an acrid taste to his songs. (Early in his career, his productions hit the charts in part because of their sound; while Sam Phillips used a stairway at Sun Records for echo, Hazlewood employed a length of rusty pipe.)
Not that Lee Hazlewood was an outsider to all musical tastes, afraid of selling records. He sold millions with his productions -- first with Sanford Clark and Duane Eddy, then with Nancy Sinatra during the heyday of "These Boots Are Made for Walking" and "Somethin' Stupid." But, ironically, because he was so successful producing others, he had no need to keep his mind on the charts while recording his solo material (of course, it's doubtful he would have changed anything even if his pockets had been empty). That may be why his discography is the most consistent, and among the best, in all of country (or western) music. (It's also one of the factors in his remaining an obscurity to all but a cult audience, which he calls his "addicts.")
We'll forgive anyone a late-period miscue like "Dolly Parton's Guitar" (as in, "you've made me happier than....") if his career also includes the utterly down-and-out classic "After Six," the utterly hopeless fatalist anthem "My Autumn's Done Come," the ballsy neo-vaudeville "Suzi Jane's Back in Town," and, of course, that hymn to the twilight, "Some Velvet Morning" (which still gets props 40 years later from artists including Nick Cave, the Tindersticks, and Entombed). That's why Lee Hazlewood's career -- from his debut, Trouble Is a Lonesome Town (1963), to his final album, Cake or Death (2006) -- deserves to be celebrated.
In 1963, after several years of hits produced for Duane Eddy and others, Lee Hazlewood recorded his first solo LP, Trouble Is a Lonesome Town, which was more an organized collection of demos than a real album. Around the same time, he indulged his yearning for more hit material by cutting a one-shot LP with a group he got together for the purpose of cashing in on the hootenanny folk boom of the early '60s. The name of the group was the Shacklefords, perhaps after his wife's maiden name (curiously, though, they'd recently divorced). Granted, this wasn't the way to record a great album, but folk music rarely sounded catchier than it did on this obscurity. "Muddy, Muddy River" is the highlight, an irresistible singalong about a rising river that's keeping a man away from his woman -- "There sits my woman, don't think she ain't, a little bit of devil, a little bit of saint/I want to kiss her, but I know I cain't, cross the muddy, muddy, muddy, muddy river." The trio then repeats "muddy" no less than eight additional times before a chorus of jaunty trumpets repeats the melody verbatim. Again, not the stuff of music legend, but Hazlewood's production finesse and ability to revel in the gaudier aspects of pop music make it a joy to hear. The harmony vocals are spot-on, with a high tenor echoing through the mix and Lee's deep, rumbling bass easily heard on the bottom.
A warped standup bass and gutbucket guitar usher in "After Six," one of Lee's most plaintive, desperate vocals. The opening words, "Hey there, mister bartender, now have a little pity on me," reveal a man so hard up for alcohol he'd trade anything for a drink. Unfortunately, he's also so poor he's reduced to offering first his watch, then a stickpin, and finally his shoes (!) for gradually reduced amounts and proofs of booze. "I'll give you my watch, for a fifth of scotch, if you don't make fun, 'cause it don't run, no better than I do...after six." That's it -- a deadly simplistic sketch of a nobody man in a nowhere place. -- John Bush
Lee Hazlewood - My Autumn's Done Come
Many of Lee Hazlewood's performances have a gritty fatalism to them. Their characters may be obsessed with death, but they sound far too vital to ever truly shuffle off their mortal coil -- like the 90-year-old coot who holds on to life through sheer effort of will. "My Autumn's Done Come," from 1966's The Very Special World of Lee Hazlewood, is not that kind of song. Lee sounds like vitality is far, far in his past. With a mournful croon, he declares, "Kiss all the pretty ones goodbye, give everyone a penny that cry." He doesn't even sugarcoat what it means to be getting old, giving up all hope of controlling his blood pressure and holding his stomach in. The only point when he sounds like he knows what he wants is when he demands, "water short and scotch tall, a big long black cigar that ain't all." That isn't all: "Hang me a hammock between two big trees/Leave me alone, goddamnit! Let me do as I please."
Lee Hazlewood was like many other Southerners from his generation, with far more than just country in their backgrounds -- think of Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Elvis Presley. But unlike them, Lee looked to some odd sources for his influences: vocal pop may be the strongest, but lounge and vaudeville were high on the list too. All three informed "Suzi Jane Is Back in Town," his hilarious rowdy and ribald duet with Suzi Jane Hokum, a frequent duet partner before Hazlewood began singing with Nancy Sinatra. Burlesque and hokum work amazingly well when they're delivered with a sly wink, and Hazlewood often went overboard purposefully, and comically. Accordingly here, Lee strikes up a well-lubed parade band and adopts a series of voice impressions to stock his town with colorful characters (one of them declares at one point, with shock, "I shaw her shmoke a...shigarette!"). Hokum is definitely up for the challenge, creating a Brooklyn-by-Bedlam floozie and hitting all the wrong notes just right (the band helps her get back on key at the end).
There are plenty of reasons to celebrate the life and art of Lee Hazlewood, but for this writer, Lee's greatest accomplishment will always be creating the most gloriously strange hit single in American history: "Some Velvet Morning," his 1968 duet with frequent collaborator, muse, and purported lover Nancy Sinatra, which somehow crept to number 26 on the Billboard singles chart. Hazlewood produced the session as well as wrote the song and shared vocals with Ms. Sinatra, and it first appeared on her television special Movin' with Nancy and was later featured on their first full album together, Nancy & Lee. "Some Velvet Morning" is a beautiful but elusive celebration of women and lust; the record plays like a finely crafted attempt by one man to reconcile the creative urge with his painfully obvious attraction to some blonde (who doubtless looks a lot like Nancy Sinatra).
"Some Velvet Morning" begins with a string fanfare that's at once subtle and epic; it creeps across the aural horizon like a wave of thick butterscotch, eventually giving way to the low, minor-key menace of a studio orchestra enriched with horns and a harpsichord, laying out a circular melody as Hazlewood drawls, with an arrogance the youthful Burt Lancaster would have envied, "Some velvet morning when I'm straight/I'm gonna open up your gate/And maybe tell you about Phaedra/And how she gave me life/And how she made it end...." Then Hazlewood's verse eases into something that's not so much a chorus as a secondary melody, dominated by high and spectral strings and a 3:4 time signature, as Sinatra, in a voice that suggests a siren who favors white go-go boots, whispers, "Flowers growing on a hill/Dragonflies and daffodils/Learn from us, very much/Look at us but do not touch/Phaedra is my name." Those who've stumbled through Greek mythology will recall that Phaedra was the wife of Thesus, the king of Athens, who fell in love with Hippolytus, Thesus's son born of an assignation with Hippolyte, the leader of the Amazons. But what does this have to do with Hazlewood's tale? Is he supposed to be Hippolytus? And if so, where does this particular Phaedra fit into the picture? "Some Velvet Morning" seems to have precious little to do with Greek myth, but rather feels like an invitation into some dark land of erotic mystery, delivered in a voice that faintly but clearly smells of highly pitched desire, and Sinatra's response to Hazlewood's educated howl sounds like the dreamlike personification of muse and concubine.
If this high-concept appraisal of horniness sounds pretentious on paper, the widescreen splendor of Hazlewood's production and Billy Strange's arrangement (an inspired fusion of psychedelic mind-meld and soundtrack music worthy of some Hollywood blockbuster) is just epochal enough to carry its weight. "Some Velvet Morning" has become an oddball touchstone over the years, inspiring covers from Vanilla Fudge, Lydia Lunch, Primal Scream, and Thin White Rope among others (and if only Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan had had the good sense to give it a try on their 2006 duet album), but there's an ineffable atmosphere and delicious sexual tension to Hazlewood and Sinatra's original that's never been topped. But what exactly does it all mean? The song stubbornly refuses to fully reveal itself, which is a big part of its charm, but Guy Kyser of Thin White Rope probably summed it up as well as anyone when he kicked off a ragged-but-right, guitar-driven cover on the group's live swan song, The One That Got Away, with the words "This song's about waking up with an acid hangover and a boner." -- Mark Deming
Hollywood's take on the singing cowboy poisoned country music for decades, leading Johnny Cash to overreach and give in to cowpoke melodrama, getting all duded up for the covers of Sings the Ballads of the True West and Mean as Hell! Even Arizona's own Marty Robbins' vision of the Southwest seemed a little too Howdy Doody at times (that was undoubtedly Nashville's influence).
Lee Hazlewood understood western -- he was born just outside of Tulsa, OK, raised all over the Southwest, and originally based in Arizona when he began his career. Hazlewood's songs weren't narratives, like the stories that country music was so fond of. They were picturesque, like scenes from movies. (As such, they were exceptionally well written, directed, and shot.) While the official country music version of western still looked back to the '30s and '40s, Hazlewood's characters were dark, gritty, and anything but heroic, anticipating the shady sense of right and wrong, the realism, and the complex motives of the Sergio Leone or Sam Peckinpah westerns. (Ennio Morricone could hardly have missed the wonderfully evocative production tricks Hazlewood employed on many of his songs.)
Hazlewood's voice, parched and plain but expressive, evoked the easy dexterity of the cowboy. His knockout productions could be dry or florid -- Thurston Moore dubbed them "country exotica" -- but they matched the feel of the desert, where there are stark contrasts between high and low, dry and wet, or colorful and washed-out. The production always fit the song; Hazlewood was using one of the Western world's most advanced studios and had at his disposal some of its greatest practitioners, including arranger/conductor Billy Strange.
Even his effects recalled the Southwest, with a heavy use of echo bouncing around the mix as if the music were within canyon walls, the harmony vocals behind him usually high and haunted, and the metallic rustling of guitars or chains giving an acrid taste to his songs. (Early in his career, his productions hit the charts in part because of their sound; while Sam Phillips used a stairway at Sun Records for echo, Hazlewood employed a length of rusty pipe.)
Not that Lee Hazlewood was an outsider to all musical tastes, afraid of selling records. He sold millions with his productions -- first with Sanford Clark and Duane Eddy, then with Nancy Sinatra during the heyday of "These Boots Are Made for Walking" and "Somethin' Stupid." But, ironically, because he was so successful producing others, he had no need to keep his mind on the charts while recording his solo material (of course, it's doubtful he would have changed anything even if his pockets had been empty). That may be why his discography is the most consistent, and among the best, in all of country (or western) music. (It's also one of the factors in his remaining an obscurity to all but a cult audience, which he calls his "addicts.")
We'll forgive anyone a late-period miscue like "Dolly Parton's Guitar" (as in, "you've made me happier than....") if his career also includes the utterly down-and-out classic "After Six," the utterly hopeless fatalist anthem "My Autumn's Done Come," the ballsy neo-vaudeville "Suzi Jane's Back in Town," and, of course, that hymn to the twilight, "Some Velvet Morning" (which still gets props 40 years later from artists including Nick Cave, the Tindersticks, and Entombed). That's why Lee Hazlewood's career -- from his debut, Trouble Is a Lonesome Town (1963), to his final album, Cake or Death (2006) -- deserves to be celebrated.
In 1963, after several years of hits produced for Duane Eddy and others, Lee Hazlewood recorded his first solo LP, Trouble Is a Lonesome Town, which was more an organized collection of demos than a real album. Around the same time, he indulged his yearning for more hit material by cutting a one-shot LP with a group he got together for the purpose of cashing in on the hootenanny folk boom of the early '60s. The name of the group was the Shacklefords, perhaps after his wife's maiden name (curiously, though, they'd recently divorced). Granted, this wasn't the way to record a great album, but folk music rarely sounded catchier than it did on this obscurity. "Muddy, Muddy River" is the highlight, an irresistible singalong about a rising river that's keeping a man away from his woman -- "There sits my woman, don't think she ain't, a little bit of devil, a little bit of saint/I want to kiss her, but I know I cain't, cross the muddy, muddy, muddy, muddy river." The trio then repeats "muddy" no less than eight additional times before a chorus of jaunty trumpets repeats the melody verbatim. Again, not the stuff of music legend, but Hazlewood's production finesse and ability to revel in the gaudier aspects of pop music make it a joy to hear. The harmony vocals are spot-on, with a high tenor echoing through the mix and Lee's deep, rumbling bass easily heard on the bottom.
A warped standup bass and gutbucket guitar usher in "After Six," one of Lee's most plaintive, desperate vocals. The opening words, "Hey there, mister bartender, now have a little pity on me," reveal a man so hard up for alcohol he'd trade anything for a drink. Unfortunately, he's also so poor he's reduced to offering first his watch, then a stickpin, and finally his shoes (!) for gradually reduced amounts and proofs of booze. "I'll give you my watch, for a fifth of scotch, if you don't make fun, 'cause it don't run, no better than I do...after six." That's it -- a deadly simplistic sketch of a nobody man in a nowhere place. -- John Bush
Lee Hazlewood - My Autumn's Done Come
Many of Lee Hazlewood's performances have a gritty fatalism to them. Their characters may be obsessed with death, but they sound far too vital to ever truly shuffle off their mortal coil -- like the 90-year-old coot who holds on to life through sheer effort of will. "My Autumn's Done Come," from 1966's The Very Special World of Lee Hazlewood, is not that kind of song. Lee sounds like vitality is far, far in his past. With a mournful croon, he declares, "Kiss all the pretty ones goodbye, give everyone a penny that cry." He doesn't even sugarcoat what it means to be getting old, giving up all hope of controlling his blood pressure and holding his stomach in. The only point when he sounds like he knows what he wants is when he demands, "water short and scotch tall, a big long black cigar that ain't all." That isn't all: "Hang me a hammock between two big trees/Leave me alone, goddamnit! Let me do as I please."
Lee Hazlewood was like many other Southerners from his generation, with far more than just country in their backgrounds -- think of Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Elvis Presley. But unlike them, Lee looked to some odd sources for his influences: vocal pop may be the strongest, but lounge and vaudeville were high on the list too. All three informed "Suzi Jane Is Back in Town," his hilarious rowdy and ribald duet with Suzi Jane Hokum, a frequent duet partner before Hazlewood began singing with Nancy Sinatra. Burlesque and hokum work amazingly well when they're delivered with a sly wink, and Hazlewood often went overboard purposefully, and comically. Accordingly here, Lee strikes up a well-lubed parade band and adopts a series of voice impressions to stock his town with colorful characters (one of them declares at one point, with shock, "I shaw her shmoke a...shigarette!"). Hokum is definitely up for the challenge, creating a Brooklyn-by-Bedlam floozie and hitting all the wrong notes just right (the band helps her get back on key at the end).
There are plenty of reasons to celebrate the life and art of Lee Hazlewood, but for this writer, Lee's greatest accomplishment will always be creating the most gloriously strange hit single in American history: "Some Velvet Morning," his 1968 duet with frequent collaborator, muse, and purported lover Nancy Sinatra, which somehow crept to number 26 on the Billboard singles chart. Hazlewood produced the session as well as wrote the song and shared vocals with Ms. Sinatra, and it first appeared on her television special Movin' with Nancy and was later featured on their first full album together, Nancy & Lee. "Some Velvet Morning" is a beautiful but elusive celebration of women and lust; the record plays like a finely crafted attempt by one man to reconcile the creative urge with his painfully obvious attraction to some blonde (who doubtless looks a lot like Nancy Sinatra).
"Some Velvet Morning" begins with a string fanfare that's at once subtle and epic; it creeps across the aural horizon like a wave of thick butterscotch, eventually giving way to the low, minor-key menace of a studio orchestra enriched with horns and a harpsichord, laying out a circular melody as Hazlewood drawls, with an arrogance the youthful Burt Lancaster would have envied, "Some velvet morning when I'm straight/I'm gonna open up your gate/And maybe tell you about Phaedra/And how she gave me life/And how she made it end...." Then Hazlewood's verse eases into something that's not so much a chorus as a secondary melody, dominated by high and spectral strings and a 3:4 time signature, as Sinatra, in a voice that suggests a siren who favors white go-go boots, whispers, "Flowers growing on a hill/Dragonflies and daffodils/Learn from us, very much/Look at us but do not touch/Phaedra is my name." Those who've stumbled through Greek mythology will recall that Phaedra was the wife of Thesus, the king of Athens, who fell in love with Hippolytus, Thesus's son born of an assignation with Hippolyte, the leader of the Amazons. But what does this have to do with Hazlewood's tale? Is he supposed to be Hippolytus? And if so, where does this particular Phaedra fit into the picture? "Some Velvet Morning" seems to have precious little to do with Greek myth, but rather feels like an invitation into some dark land of erotic mystery, delivered in a voice that faintly but clearly smells of highly pitched desire, and Sinatra's response to Hazlewood's educated howl sounds like the dreamlike personification of muse and concubine.
If this high-concept appraisal of horniness sounds pretentious on paper, the widescreen splendor of Hazlewood's production and Billy Strange's arrangement (an inspired fusion of psychedelic mind-meld and soundtrack music worthy of some Hollywood blockbuster) is just epochal enough to carry its weight. "Some Velvet Morning" has become an oddball touchstone over the years, inspiring covers from Vanilla Fudge, Lydia Lunch, Primal Scream, and Thin White Rope among others (and if only Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan had had the good sense to give it a try on their 2006 duet album), but there's an ineffable atmosphere and delicious sexual tension to Hazlewood and Sinatra's original that's never been topped. But what exactly does it all mean? The song stubbornly refuses to fully reveal itself, which is a big part of its charm, but Guy Kyser of Thin White Rope probably summed it up as well as anyone when he kicked off a ragged-but-right, guitar-driven cover on the group's live swan song, The One That Got Away, with the words "This song's about waking up with an acid hangover and a boner." -- Mark Deming
#5
Jacki O.
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Posted 10 August 2007 - 03:25 PM
They had a great tribute to Lee Hazelwood on NPR today. Anyone catch it? it was very interesting, talked about Phoenix and Duane Eddy.....it was good.
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