Light in the Attic’s latest batch of Lee Hazlewood releases draws from an era when the producer/singer/songwriter was at the peak of his industry success. After moving to California in the early 1960s and making some interesting records with subpar musicians, Hazlewood scored big in 1966 with Nancy Sinatra’s feminist flip of a song he wrote called "These Boots are Made for Walkin'." In those days, hit-making songwriters and producers for other artists were rewarded for their hard work by getting to make albums themselves—see Carole King, Randy Newman, Van Dyke Parks, and Hazlewood’s own collaborator Jack Nitzsche. So though Hazlewood was still recording with Frank Sinatra’s fledgling label Reprise, MGM offered him a deal following the release of "Boots" to put out some "writer’s records" of his own, even though his previous solo outings had sold next to nothing. Prior to his stint at MGM in 1966 and 1967, his own recordings had been modestly arranged, acoustic-guitar-based recordings in the pop-country vein. The MGM deal gave him the leverage to do something very different, making tracks that sounded as big or even bigger than the hits he’d produced for others.
Though these albums were recorded in the space of less than two years, they sounded very different from each other. The Very Special World of Lee Hazlewood, one of the most straightforward albums in his career, serves as a primer on his style and showcases all of his contradictory impulses. It’s Hazlewood at his most maximalist, building a wall of sound to rival Phil Spector’s. Most of the tracks on The Very Special World feature full orchestras passing ideas back and forth in flowery counterpoint, choirs instead of backup singers, and contributions from the in-demand studio musicians known as the Wrecking Crew.
Of all the MGM recordings, the songwriting on The Very Special World is by far the most consistent, and features a handful of the most subtle and sensitive songs Hazlewood ever wrote. "I’m Not the Lovin' Kind" is a beautiful bossa nova with unusually sensitive singing, a triumphant string and horns call-and-response from arranger Billy Strange that manages to anchor just off the coast of faux-Jobim parody while retaining its humor. "I Move Around" is a travelogue Lee would re-record several times later in his career, most notably on his 1972 classic 13. Here, in a simple folk arrangement, it explodes into the kind of sweeping, cinematic climax Hazlewood seemed unable to talk himself down from during this time. His vocal performance is controlled and wistful instead of bitter and stoic—as his renditions of so many songs would become when left to his own devices. But the album’s most important contribution to the Hazlewood songbook is the lethargic, lounge ballad "My Autumn’s Done Come," which embodies his ethos as well as any standalone recording ever has. With its hypnotic pacing, odd chord changes, and dreamy but crystalline production, it’s easy to see how it would influence Galaxie 500’s Dean Wareham, who sang the song’s particular praises in a 2015 interview.
The kitschy experimentation at the sidelines of The Very Special World comes fully to the fore on its follow-up, 1967’s Lee Hazlewoodism: Its Cause and Cure, a record that finds Hazlewood backing away from traditional songwriting while still widening his musical palette. The first half of record, featuring a series of character sketches, is one of the weirder sides in a discography chock full of them. Two of its biggest production numbers are tragic narrative recitation songs that are very much products of another time, shaped by particularly elaborate and exotic charts from Strange. "José," the Flamenco-styled story of a poor Mexican boy who develops a life-enveloping passion for bullfighting ("He lived for one thing and nothing more/ He had to be the very best matador") and "The Nights," steeped in the percussion of Blaine and insistent interjections from a wraithlike studio choir, tells the picaresque story of a white woman who runs off with a Native American who lives a "hard" life hunting buffalo in the Dakotas. Despite the dated storytelling, these arrangements are indicative of the almost comically expansive vision Hazlewood and Strange had for these sessions. The ethos is borne out further in the bonus tracks: recordings billed to "Lee Hazlewood’s Woodchucks" that read like a bid on the part of Lee and Strange to get their foot in the door in the mood instrumentals market.
Hazlewood productions never got bigger than on the aggressively disparate Hazlewoodism; even the most half-assed of these songs—say "Suzi Jane Is Back in Town," a gag-filled novelty record that would have fit right in on the Dr. Demento show—has five to six Wrecking Crew guitars stacked on it. Though it frequently feels like Hazlewood sent ideas to Strange to be charted before he had more than a sketch, Hazlewoodism nonetheless adds a handful of excellent entries into the Hazlewood canon. The most essential track is its biggest outlier: "After Six," a stripped-down, two-chord showcase for the guitar playing of his frequent collaborator Al Casey that’s also an alcoholic’s rant to the bartender in the vein of the Sinatra (Frank) "One for My Baby." It’s Hazlewood’s dry, dark humor and conversational phrasing at its best ("I’ll give you my shoes for a glass of booze/ If you won’t tell that they don’t smell/ No better than I do after six").
The irreverent small-combo approach showcased on "After Six" would be the entire focus of Something Special, the one Hazlewood MGM album that sounds like a demo, and the most patently uncommercial of the lot. The songs on the miniature record were all done with the same septet: guitars, upright bass, drums, and Hollywood jazzer Don Randi’s invasive hard-bop piano and—yes—throaty scatting. The sessions were done in just two months in 1967 and they had a distinctly live, sloppy sound. Multiple songs have the air of partially-improvised lyrics, the most patent example being "Stone Cold Blues," a five-minute goof which ends up with the verse: "If Martoni’s is such a good place to eat and drink and be good/ Why do they call the steak Sinatra, and the hamburger Hazlewood?" The whiskey-soaked atmosphere was indicative of the looser, more sentimental direction Lee was to take on his later records, when he was answering to no one but himself. Songs like "Fort Worth" take in a more wistful, sad-sack quality: "Don’t know if I can forget you/ Don’t know I’m even gonna try/ But you’re gone and I let you/ Guess I’m not much of a guy." The reissue improves this head-scratcher of an album: Bonus tracks "Moochie Ladeux" and the hilarious "The Lone Ranger Ain’t My Friend" are among the most carefully wrought and unusual songs on the record.
This group of albums, along with his final Reprise album, 1968’s Love and Other Crimes, would prove to be Hazlewood’s long farewell to the major studio system. He was already making moves to broaden his eccentric empire with his own LHI label. In a way, everything after this was Hazlewood sliding slowly toward the full-on retirement he had been contemplating before "Boots," while making some of the greatest music of his career along the way (see Requiem for an Almost Lady and Cowboy in Sweden).
With music like this, the question always looms: To what extent do we become enamored of it based on its cultural novelty alone? Becoming a diehard Hazlewoodian requires romanticizing this hectic time, when major corporations were gladly funding unabashed insanity in music and film. But Hazlewood’s personality is too overbearing to make this the type of music one loves simply because it was allowed to exist. Whether he’s fulfilling a bar-room, surrealist-Johnny-Cash raconteur role, or embodying the consummate professional and pop craftsman, Lee Hazlewood never sounded like he was posturing or overreaching. The capriciousness of these albums feels like a direct reflection of a split, contradictory consciousness: He was resistant and sometimes openly defamatory toward hippie rock'n'roll, yet always at pains to not fall behind, clad in floral shirts and flamboyant suits. But his music never sounded like Hazlewood doing what he thought others wanted him to do.
