Lee Hazlewood: A Stranger in This Land
The renaissance cowboy cut a wide swath through the West, and inspired a generation of songwriters
By SKYLAIRE ALFVEGREN
LA Weekly: Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - 3:00 pm
At 78, retired and living in Las Vegas, Lee Hazlewood was as deadpan and droll as ever, having recorded his farewell album fully aware of his impending demise. Renal cancer “doesn’t lead into remission, it leads into death,” he chuckled during one of his last interviews, adding that “Even the cats laugh at it.” Hazlewood died August 4, having enjoyed one of the most idiosyncratic careers in American music — one that’s only likely to grow.
Nancy Sinatra made him famous, but his idiosyncrasies made him timeless.
(Courtesy Four Service Productions)
Stitch the talents of Serge Gainsbourg, Joe Meek, Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen into a cowboy, and you’d have an approximation of this singer/songwriter/producer, whose work, wide as the prairie sky, always howled “America” — even when it was recorded in Sweden. Hazlewood’s work was interpreted by Dean Martin and Elvis Presley, covered by artists as diverse as Beck, Megadeth, Primal Scream and Einstürzende Neubauten and blasted by the ATF at Waco to flush rock-star-wannabe David Koresh from his compound. For a time, recalled Hazlewood, he hung his collection of gold records in his bathroom. “When you turned on the light, it was just blinding. People would forget to zip up their pants and everything else. They’d come out and say, ‘What is that, Lee?’ I’d tell ’em and they’d go look. ‘Oh, I know that song, and I know that song.’ But I quit doing that, because it annoyed the housekeeper.”
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