Lee Hazlewood: cynical cowboy bard
September 27, 2007 Not long before he died, the man who wrote "These Boots Are Made for Walkin' " and much, much more sat down for a wide-ranging, freewheeling interviewContinued...
How do you write songs?
Someone once asked Al [Casey, Hazlewood’s longtime guitarist] what the process was behind my songwriting. And he says, “I’ve been around Lee for years, and I don’t understand him at all. I know he writes some good songs, but you’ve never heard of them. He’ll write 9,000 verses and throw it all away, and then write another song around two lines of it.” He said, “I’ve seen him do that. It makes me sick.”
Your solo albums have been wildly diverse; you used Billy Strange’s
spaghetti-Western arrangements on Lee Hazlewood-ism: Its Cause and Cure, big brass on 13, you invented “cowboy psychedelia” with The Cowboy and the Lady ... MGM didn’t even release Something Special, and your masterpiece, Requiem for an Almost Lady, was only released stateside in 2000.
Ah ... you don’t know where a person comes from by what kind of music they listen to. You think, I’m a Southerner, it’s got to be blues—and certainly, I love the blues and cowboy music ... or if someone’s Northern, it’s gotta be jazz, or something like that. I’ve found that not ever to be true. Whatever music pulls your ear to it.
Decades later, your compositions would be covered by Beck, Nick Cave, Sonic Youth; it seems like every so often, you’ve been rediscovered, with no effort on your part. In 1999, a number of your solo albums were rereleased ...
I was never rediscovered—I was discovered. If you’re a collector, and you’re a little bit mad, and you’re under 30, then I guess I sell records here ... I slowly started finding out that these records that were 15, 20 years old, that had been rereleased, the kids—and everybody that’s still in their 30s is still a kid to me—the kids were buyin’ ’em.
And that same year, you played some dates in Europe.
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