When I search Lee Hazelwood in google I get corrected, "Lee Hazlewood" and see only references to Nancy Sinatra and various other pop successes. I've never seen any mention of any of the instrumentals. Is this a different Lee Hazlewood whose fame simply relegates our instrumental songwriting her to thourough obscurity, or were all his instrumental hits just not worth mentioning?

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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.

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.

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.

He also wrote Baja

DANG! DANG! DANG!!!!!

we are not worthy... we are not worthy

Ironically he was the deeper of the artists compared to Lou, yet was considered un-hip. man. Is that not the way of popular music even today?

Thanks for the post HBKahuna!

THe NEpTuNeS

lou who?

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HBkahuna

Brian
Source?

Google.

Even more at http://web.inter.nl.net/users/wilkens/Lh06.html

Google doesn't produce content...but googling for your text, it looks like you got it from here:
http://www.smellslikerecords.com/leehazlewood/hazlewood.php

I'm sorry I'm being a stickler here. I'm just trying to avoid the situation that exists on Cowabunga where a certain someone posts random facts scoured from the web without any attribution, thus making it look like he is the author or subject matter expert, when in fact he is just parrotting stuff he found. (I'm not accusing you of that...)

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image

The Glaciers album I mentioned in another thread includes 3-4 great Hazlewood penned surf (ski) instros. Those are also on the Al Casey "Surfin' Hootenanny" album but here they are completely re-recorded versions under new titles.

image

T H E ✠ S U R F I T E S

I love Lee. A true musical genuis.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POo3bxr4SE8

Forgive me for posting this weird anecdote, but it was one of the stranger encounters I've had with a certain snotty local record nerd who shall hereafter only be known as "M----".

So, some years ago I drove up to Nashville with Rip Thrillby and Johnny Knox to do an interview with Duane Eddy and Nokie Edwards. I got back two days later and was walking on a cloud, proudly displaying a couple of photos from the encounter to everyone who would stand still long enough to let me brandish these treasures.

And then I run into M----.

Me: "Look at this. I was in Nashville and got to interview Nokie Edwards and Duane Eddy."

M----: "I have no respect for Duane Eddy."

Me: (Stunned) "Why's that?"

M----: "Because of his long association with Lee Greenwood."

Me: (After a long silence) "Oh, I didn't know he worked with Lee Greenwood. I only knew about how he worked with Lee Hazlewood."

M----: (After a longer silence) "Oh...That's right...Never mind...Duane Eddy's cool."

Me: (Slack-jawed silence)

BTW, Here's a thumbnail of the photo I was sharing. Left-to-Right are Rip Thrillby, Duane Eddy, Nokie Edwards, and Johnny Knox. This was taken upstairs in a climate-controlled private room at Gruhn's Guitars. I believe the combined prices of the instruments at the edge of the frame was close to $100,000.00. (I tried posting the full-size image, but it overwhelmed the borders of this forum page.)

[image](http://img326.imageshack.us/img326/6292/scottduanenokijohnnyuw9.th.jpg)

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