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...
Do you see the humor first in a situation, or use humor to get around the horror of a situation?
If you throw humor in it, about the time they’re about to put the knife in, they’ll break up, they’ll laugh at it. I know you can hear a beautiful love song—but I probably didn’t write it—and know that it’s great. Like you can take a beautiful death song and say it’s great, too, but you don’t have to go do it! I’ve got a song nobody’s ever heard in America called “Dirt Nap Stories.” This was written way before I had cancer. Texans say, “He’s takin’ a dirt nap,” meaning he’s dead, he’s in the ground. So when I was writing this song about these things that happen to these various people ... it came out way too serious. It bothered me to death. And then I came up with a line that I really like, but I wondered if they would take that as meaning too much; the last line of each verse is, “He died on Christmas day, before all the gifts were open.” And I thought that is funny. That is funny to me. And surprisingly, more kids have come up in Europe and said, “That’s a funny time to die, Lee, that is really funny. That sounds like old Lee.” And I said, well, thank you very much, I’m glad you didn’t take it serious. They don’t even play it in America, but in Europe, it’s just an excuse for my dark humor.
Have you given any thought to the afterlife?
First of all, I’d like to go out the way I came in—quietly. No great, real serious thoughts about that, or else probably I wouldn’t be cremated. That was one of the stipulations in my trust, that I be cremated. My grandmother was a half-blood Creek Indian, and they cremated people all the time. So I thought, it was my grandmother that taught me to read and write when I was 4 years old. I don’t believe in an old gray-headed man who sits on a mountain and every time you do anything bad, he hits you on the head with a hammer ... or streets paved with gold. I figure you just go back to the stack. But if you have to come back a second time, I think you should come back as a cockroach. You can’t kill those sons of bitches!
Skylaire Alfvegren is a local freelance writer.
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