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
Hazlewood’s wit permeated not only his conversations but his songs. He opens “Poet, Fool or Bum” with a classic couplet, one of dozens over the years: “She came running down the highway, naked as the sun/Said she ‘Are you going my way, poet, fool or bum?’ ” His style was born, he says, very early, mostly as a defense mechanism.
“You had to be very careful in the South, where I grew up, if you were the least bit creative,” he recalled. “Because, you know, you might just be a sissy. You didn’t write about the beautiful rain falling on the morning flowers. You wrote about falling off the back of a wagon. Funny, nothing ever serious — so the girls thought you were cute and the boys thought you were clever.”
Hazlewood, who grew up in Port Neches, Texas, served in the Korean War, where he wrote songs while a DJ for the troops. Upon discharge, he headed to Los Angeles to study broadcasting. He landed a job as a country DJ in Phoenix, and schemed to create the West Coast’s answer to Sun Studios. He wrote songs, contemplated making “non-normal” music and experimented with production techniques. One of these tricks involved harnessing a grain silo as a makeshift echo chamber. Hazlewood used it to create a distinctive twang for local teenager Duane Eddy’s guitar. (Phil Spector was reportedly inspired by Hazlewood’s studio techniques.)
Before returning to Los Angeles in the mid-’50s, the restless Hazlewood would “take the $9.99 round-trip Greyhound” from Phoenix to shop his songs to the labels. The few he sold, “they didn’t do them right,” so he became a producer, went on to release a slew of hits for other artists, coppered his bets and retired to his back porch.
But the Rat Pack had taken a shine to Hazlewood’s sly, countrified humor, and when Frank Sinatra wanted to revive the career of his young, recently divorced daughter Nancy, he coaxed the 35-year-old Hazlewood from retirement. The songwriter scored after penning her 1966 hit, “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” — which Hazlewood advised Nancy to sing “like a 14-year-old girl who messes with truck drivers.” The song isn’t Hazlewood’s favorite achievement, although “it’s made millions of dollars.” (Mentioning Billy Ray Cyrus’ $14-million-selling cover, or Jessica Simpson’s Dukes of Hazzard blasphemy, he noted gleefully, “I got a lot of songs in movies. We rob ‘em blind!”)
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