January 28, 2007
Music
One Last Walk for the Man Behind ‘These Boots’
By SIA MICHEL
HENDERSON, Nev.

LEE HAZLEWOOD is ready to die. Suffering excruciating
pain from renal cancer, Mr. Hazlewood, the reclusive
singer, songwriter and producer doesn’t have much time
left, maybe a year if he’s lucky. So he has been
preparing for what he calls his impending “dirt nap.”

He has decided he wants to be cremated, and to have
his ashes strewn on a Swedish island where he composed
some of his favorite songs. He has chosen his epitaph:
“Didn’t he ramble,” referring to his loner-drifter
nature. He has already given away most of his gold and
platinum records, which he earned making hits for
Duane Eddy, Dean Martin and Nancy Sinatra, including
“These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” one of the most
famous pop songs of all time. He has released his swan
song, the quirky album “Cake or Death,” which hit
stores last week. And he married his longtime
girlfriend, Jeane Kelley, in a drive-through ceremony
in Las Vegas.

“It was like going to McDonald’s,” Mr. Hazlewood said
of their November wedding, sitting in his living room
in a small, tidy house. “You stay in the car and go up
to the window. The preacher was a Frenchman.
Afterwards my granddaughter threw rose petals on the
hood.”

Mrs. Hazlewood, smiling, said: “He just wanted to make
me a legal woman. After 15 years together.”

Mr. Hazlewood, who was married twice before, kept
cracking dark jokes about his health (“Dying really
drives your price up”), though he stressed that being
“ready to go doesn’t mean you’re through with your
life.” He dotes on his grandchildren and
great-grandchildren, whose pictures adorn a wall in
the TV room, next to a huge portrait of himself,
wearing shades. But, he said: “I’m 77. I’ve been
around long enough now. I’ve lived a pretty
interesting life — not too much sadness, a lot of
happiness, lots of fun. And I didn’t do much of
anything I didn’t want to do.”

True, he is one of the more iconoclastic figures of
20th-century pop, a cantankerous, hard-living
innovator who walked away from fame and fortune
whenever he felt like it. One of the major hitmakers
of the ’50s and ’60s, he helped Duane Eddy shape
twang-rock, transformed Nancy Sinatra into a megastar
and, on his LHI label, released what is widely
considered the first country-rock record, by Gram
Parsons’s International Submarine Band. And he made a
series of beautifully oddball solo albums that were
mostly unheard in America, until a member of Sonic
Youth reissued them in the ’90s.

Today Mr. Hazlewood is sadly unsung, which is partly
his own fault. He spent decades trying to disappear,
flitting between Europe and the United States —
particularly those states with no personal income tax.
“I’m kind of a bum,” he said.

His quirky genius stems from a desire to make sounds
he never heard before; he summed it up as “not normal”
music. In the ’50s he was inspired to stick a
microphone and an amp in a grain elevator, to capture
the spooky reverb effect heard on Mr. Eddy’s classics.
Some conspiracy theorists think he inspired Phil
Spector’s “wall of sound” (the two men briefly worked
together), or that Mr. Spector even stole the
production technique from him.

“Phil was not influenced by me at all,” Mr. Hazlewood
said emphatically. “His records were just genius, and
if you think I would have come up with the wall of
sound and given it to Phil Spector, you’re out of your
mind.”

Mr. Hazlewood’s own music grew increasingly
experimental over the years. Born in the tiny town of
Mannford, Okla., he favors vaguely country-western pop
with sweet melodies and symphonic orchestration, sung
in a stunning baritone as deep and sticky as a tar
pit. “I think his voice has the kind of stature that
Johnny Cash’s had,” Beck said. “It has a gravity that
allows him to be sincere and tongue-in-cheek at the
same time. It’s that immense voice of experience, not
expecting any kindness from humanity other than a
spare cigarette.”

Mr. Hazlewood’s wry tales feature boozers and misfits,
stooges and undertakers, summer wine and dames on
death row. There are O. Henry endings, cheesy
voice-overs and concept albums about Loserville
(“Trouble Is a Lonesome Town,” 1963) and bad breakups
(“Requiem for an Almost Lady,” 1971). Today his sound
is often called cowboy psychedelia, best represented
by the trippy “Some Velvet Morning.” But it’s a genre
of one: no one else has ever sounded quite like him.

He had a knack for mainstream pop too. Dean Martin
interpreted his jaunty wandering-man lark “Houston,” a
huge hit in the mid-’60s. They bonded over a love of
scotch: Mr. Martin was a J&B man, Mr. Hazlewood drank
Chivas Regal. “Here’s Dean Martin drinking J&B and I’m
drinking something which is twice as much money and
twice as good,” he said, shaking his head with mild
disgust. “I didn’t drink to get drunk. I drank as a
reward, and I only drank the good stuff.”

Soon Frank Sinatra wanted him to fix the floundering
career of his daughter Nancy. Despite a decade-plus
age difference, Mr. Hazlewood and Ms. Sinatra hit it
off; they remain close friends. He thought that she
was too cutesy, that she needed to seem more like
truck-driver-dating jailbait. “He was part Henry
Higgins and part Sigmund Freud,” Ms. Sinatra said by
telephone. “He was far from the country bumpkin people
considered him at the time. I had a horrible crush on
him, but he was married then.”

Romance rumors swirled, but they never had an affair,
Mr. Hazlewood said, “and now we’re old enough to tell
you if we did.”

When he played her “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,”
a song he’d written in 1963, she knew it could be huge
as soon as she heard the descending, quarter-tone bass
line. By 1966 it was a No. 1 hit, and she was known as
a sassy go-go-boot-wearing sexpot who doesn’t let any
man push her around. She and Mr. Hazlewood recorded a
long string of chart-hogging duets — “Sundown,
Sundown,” “Jackson” — transforming a short
30-something with a bushy mustache into an unlikely
pop star. “He called us the beauty and the beast,” Ms.
Sinatra said.

She hated being alone, so they shared a dressing room
during tours. The problem was, Mr. Hazlewood walked
around naked, which was fine with her but didn’t sit
well with visiting journalists. She begged him to put
on some underwear.

“In those days I didn’t wear shorts, ever,” Mr.
Hazlewood recalled. “Showing my butt is not any big
thing with me, never has been.”

Ms. Sinatra said: “Nature boy. He was proud of his
assets.”

Luckily her father didn’t mind. “We got along great,”
Mr. Hazlewood said. “Frank thought I was about
two-thirds funny, and I thought he was about 90
percent clever. He had names for everyone. He called
me Country. But I could never get used to hearing
someone call Frank Sinatra Daddy.” The two men worked
together on “This Town” and “Somethin’ Stupid,” a hit
duet with Nancy.

In 1969 Mr. Hazlewood was asked to work his magic on
the bombshell actress-singer Ann-Margret. They posed
naked for the artwork of the album “The Cowboy & the
Lady.” Well, almost: she’s wearing a strategically
placed umbrella, and he’s wearing a gun.

“We were extremely cold,” Ann-Margret said in a
telephone interview, “but we had such fun. He had that
darling, aw-shucks demeanor, but he was sharp — and a
bad, bad boy.” (No affair, Mr. Hazlewood said: she was
married.)

Then, at the height of his success, Mr. Hazlewood
shocked everyone in 1970 by suddenly moving to Sweden,
where he lived for much of the following decade. He
recorded some of his finest solo work there (like the
gorgeous “Cowboy in Sweden”) but his career never
regained momentum.

“It was crazy,” Ms. Sinatra said. “And he really left
me in the lurch. He kept shooting himself in the foot
all the time, and I never knew why. He was always his
own worst enemy.”

MR. HAZLEWOOD could barely sleep the night before his
interview, wracked with organ-deep aches that even
“doping up” didn’t ease. He was told he had cancer
about a year and a half ago, and has since lost a
kidney. The operation left him with a large, unsightly
bump on his side. “If you’re going to die of cancer,
you might as well have a hump,” he said.

Nonetheless he looked and sounded surprisingly good,
dressed like a young rocker in baggy black pants,
tinted shades and a baseball cap with an embroidered
dragon. He seemed much younger than 77, given his
sarcastic asides and tales of Viking skeletons and
fights at Hollywood restaurants. Far from prickly, he
was charismatic and self-deprecating, asking his wife
to finish some stories because “she tells ’em much
better.”

He doesn’t listen to much music anymore, though he
said he loved Beck “before I even knew that he was a
fan.” Beck was turned on to his music by Steve Shelley
of Sonic Youth, who gave him a tape in the early ’90s.
Meanwhile rockers like Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker were
saluting his music as forgotten art, not kitsch. A few
years later Mr. Shelley got permission to reissue some
of Mr. Hazlewood’s out-of-print albums on Smells Like
Records, his indie label; they sell about 5,000 to
10,000 copies each per year, according to the label.

“This all surprised the hell out of me,” Mr. Hazlewood
recalled. In 1999 he released a comeback record with a
self-sabotaging title: “Farmisht, Flatulence, Origami,
ARF!!! and Me.”

“I don’t know if I was born to be in this business or
not,” he said.

He originally wanted to be a doctor. He was raised
“like a Gypsy,” as his father was an oil wildcatter
and the family followed him around Arkansas, Kansas
and Texas, settling in Port Neches, Tex., during Mr.
Hazlewood’s high school years. One grandfather was a
judge, married to a teacher who was half American
Indian; the other was a rancher who taught him how to
ride horses and herd cows.

“I had the happiest childhood on record,” Mr.
Hazlewood said. “People tell me I’d have been a much
better songwriter if I had a sad one.”

Mr. Hazlewood studied medicine, but left school to
serve in the Korean War. Later a stint at broadcasting
school led to a songwriting hobby and a radio D.J. gig
in Arizona. By the mid-’50s he was championing an
unknown guitar virtuoso named Duane Eddy.

Mr. Eddy appears on “Cake or Death,” reinterpreting
the original, pre-Nancy version of “These Boots,”
which has a ghostlier melody few have heard before. An
eccentric collection of new songs, covers and
reworkings of Hazlewood classics, the album is far
from a soft-focus, navel-gazing meditation on death.
Mr. Hazlewood is going out the way he lived, fearless
and cranky: he slams the Iraq war on “Baghdad Nights,”
mocks gated-community types in “White People Thing”
and proudly salutes his liberal beliefs — “I never did
vote Republican” — in the bluesy “Anthem.” “Fred
Freud” imagines Sigmund Freud’s down-home American
brother and features Mr. Hazlewood’s favorite lyric:
“No kisses or posies can kill your neuroses.”

But at the end he suddenly grabs for the heart: the
melancholy, string-driven ballad “T.O.M. (The Old
Man)” presents a dying singer who accepts that the
world will be just as beautiful without him. He wrote
it for his new wife, the only woman he said he was
ever in “real love” with. A former military police
officer, she is no-nonsense and extremely kind. “I
kept waiting for love to get boring, and it never
did,” he said.

In the song he wonders “what forever will be like.”
And he’s still not sure. “I think that any part of you
that’s good or interesting might go back to this
collective something that started it all off,” he
said. “And that’s as deep of an explanation as I can
give you.”

Suddenly he shouted out to Mark Hazlewood, his son:
“Are you up there eavesdropping? Well, you should be,
because you’re going to have to do this for me when
I’m dead.”

Everyone started laughing. Black humor is the family’s
coping mechanism. “We all joke about my death in this
house,” Mr. Hazlewood said. “Even the grandkids.”

But later, as Mrs. Hazlewood drove a reporter to a
taxi stand at a nearby casino, she confessed: “This is
so hard on all of us. I really don’t want to lose him.
I can’t even imagine living without him.”

“I’ve been thinking of getting a glass vial of his
blood,” she added. “So I can clone him when the time
and technology is right.” One day 21st-century pop
could get a lot stranger.




Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company


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