FINAL LEE
Wyndham Wallace, friend and manager of Lee Hazlewood, pays tribute to the iconic singer, songwriter, label boss and producer who died of cancer on August 4th, 2007
Two days before Lee Hazlewood’s 78th birthday I sat in his lounge with a pile of CDs playing songs to him that he wrote and recorded years ago. Amazingly he’d not heard them for well over a decade. The itinerant lifestyle he’d always led meant he travelled light, and as well as giving away all his gold discs he had no copies of many of the rare albums that these days change hands on Ebay for small fortunes.
He sat in his chair, legs propped up on cushions to ease the pain of his cancer. After a while he twisted his frail body towards me, eyes twinkling, a smile creeping across his face.
“You know what, Bubba?” he said in a voice that still retained its honeyed gravel quality. “I quite like me.”
Just how many people liked Lee Hazlewood as well is only now starting to become clear. Due to his insistence on shunning the spotlight throughout most of his career most people have little understanding of the extraordinary impact his work had on popular culture. Everyone knows 'These Boots Were Made For Walking', the song he wrote and produced for Nancy Sinatra early in a run of tremendously successful singles and albums. Some people know other songs they worked on, like the extraordinary duet 'Some Velvet Morning' and the subversive 'Sugartown' (about LA kids taking acid). But his influence extends way beyond these ambiguously licentious pop hits of the 1960s.
Starting his career as a DJ, Lee was the first to play Elvis in Phoenix, Arizona. As a producer and songwriter he invented the “twang” that his protégés Duane Eddy and Sanford Clark made famous, and he also gave Phil Spector his first studio experience, something Lee humbly denied had any impact on Spector though the early foundations of the Wall of Sound are clearly evident on Lee’s productions of the period. As a record company mogul he produced and released Gram Parsons’ first album as part of the International Submarine Band. And as svengali he shaped Nancy Sinatra’s career, produced Frank and Nancy’s classic Somethin’ Stupid, wrote and produced Dean Martin’s Houston and even recorded a duets album with Ann Margret.
It’s his solo work, however, that won admiration from the likes of Jarvis Cocker, Beck, Nick Cave (for whom Lee performed his first ever British solo show at 1999’s Meltdown Festival), Richard Hawley, Primal Scream and Sonic Youth, whose Steve Shelley persuaded Hazlewood to allow him to reissue rare albums in 1999 that propelled the growing interest in Hazlewood’s career. At last people could again hear Lee’s solo debut, Trouble Is A Lonesome Town, rich in spoken word vignettes and stunning songwriting; Requiem For An Almost Lady, one of the most beautiful but anguished break-up albums of all time; and Cowboy In Sweden, dripping with Hazlewood’s trademark sentiment and dark humour. They’ll all live on, alongside other albums due for reissue later this year, his latest album Cake Or Death – as incisive and eccentric as ever – and the amazing records he made with Nancy.
But I have lost a friend as dear to me as any. I first met Lee in New York after Steve Shelley hired me to work as Lee’s UK publicist. I was so nervous I started smoking again after two years. He called me Bubba, simply because he liked the absurdity of it. Over the next eight years I slowly became more involved with him, largely due to our unlikely but growing friendship. We travelled to his beloved Sweden, all round Europe, and he welcomed me into his home wherever he lived: Ireland, Texas, Las Vegas. He could be a difficult sonofabitch – he fired me late last year, and I only knew I had been reinstated because in an interview a day later he included me in a list of his three best friends – but underneath the fiery, stubborn exterior beat the heart of a man whose generosity to those he loved knew no bounds.
He celebrated his final birthday surrounded by friends and family. Nancy Sinatra sat at his feet as he regaled us with anecdotes, then they danced together and performed Jackson one last time to the assembled guests. He was as stubborn in the face of death as he was in life, but having made his final farewells he started to fade. When I embraced him goodbye on July 14th I knew I wouldn’t see him again. As Lee sang so poignantly, “Sooner or later we all make the little flowers grow.”
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