Leave Me Alone Damnit, Let Me Do What I Please: Lee Hazlewood and LHI
By Wyndham Wallace
Photo courtesy of Mark Pickerel
Without Wyndham Wallace, Lee Hazlewood’s long time European manager and friend, it’s possible that we never would’ve had the opportunity to present to you: Lee Hazlewood - The LHI Years 1968-1971: Singles, Nudes and Backsides. The comp marks the first of many in our intensive Hazlewood series, covering material from not only Lee but also other artists on LHI - remastered from the original tapes - along with Lee’s output for other labels and the films of Torbjörn Axelman. Below Wyndham reflects upon Lee’s massive body of work.
Compiled from his releases for Lee Hazlewood Industries, the label he set up in the mid 1960s The LHI Years 1968-1971: Singles, Nudes and Backsides is a perfect distillation of what it was that made Hazlewood both iconic and, frequently, commercially erratic.
It wasn’t his first label. He’d already earned a reputation as a radio DJ, apparently the first to play Elvis Presley in Phoenix, where he lived. He’d also set up Viv Records in the mid 1950s, whose artists sometimes recorded in the station from which he broadcast, and who included Sanford Clark, the man behind the label’s first big hit, ‘The Fool’ (which Hazlewood wrote and produced, and which Presley would later cover).
After accepting a job as staff producer for Dot Records, he moved to LA, hooking up with legendary producer and publisher Lester Sill, and enjoying success with his old friend Duane Eddy, with whom he invented ‘the twang’ by persuading Eddy to play their simple riffs on the guitar’s lower strings and then recording them as they echoed through a grain tank outside the studio (having shooed the birds who nested there away before each take). Around his 30th birthday, Sill and Hazlewood set up Trey Records, to which they signed a man about whom Lee would later mysteriously rarely talk, Phil Spector, who’d just enjoyed huge success with ‘To Know Him Is To Love Him’, and though they soon closed that down, they then launched Gregmark, enjoying success with The Paris Sisters. But, though Lee’s solo career was also getting underway with the release of 1963’s Trouble Is A Lonesome Town and, a year later, The N.S.V.I.P.s (‘The Not So Very Important People’), he discerned that the ‘British Invasion’ of America, led by The Beatles, heralded a change in popular tastes that failed to suit his working methods, and he decided to retire in order to, as he often told me, “swat bugs by the pool” while he cradled a glass of his beloved Chivas Regal.
His peace wasn’t to last, however. The way he told it, he was press-ganged into producing Nancy Sinatra after his neighbour, Reprise Records’ in-house producer Jimmy Bowen, invited him to dinner and introduced him to Nancy’s father, who welcomed the news – news to Lee too, apparently – that Hazlewood was to produce her next record. “You couldn’t say no to Frank,” Lee would grin when he retold this story, and it was a good thing he didn’t: for five years they enjoyed unprecedented success, with Lee acting as producer, songwriter and, sometimes, singing partner on songs that included the haunting ‘Some Velvet Morning’, considered by many to be amongst the finest duets ever put to tape. This enabled him to set up LHI Records, who released a swathe of recordings in the second half of the 1960s by long forgotten (if unjustifiably so) artists like The Kitchen Cinq and Honey Ltd, as well as some of Lee’s own albums – amongst them Forty, Cowboy In Sweden and the extraordinary Requiem For An Almost Lady – lasting into the early 1970s.
To some, Lee’s work with Nancy Sinatra is his greatest, while for others, it’s the earlier, groundbreaking recordings he made with the likes of Duane Eddy and Sanford Clark which secure his place in the pantheon of rock and roll greats. But for many of those who have delved deep into his catalogue, one that is only now revealing its depths once more with the reissue of records long-deleted and almost impossible to find, it’s his work on LHI that represents Hazlewood at his finest and most unique. These are the albums that helped bring about his renaissance through the 1990s, as the likes of Beck and Sonic Youth, Jarvis Cocker and Spiritualized, sang his praises in interviews until Steve Shelley finally tracked him down. How these records could have fallen through the cracks is perhaps not a total mystery given their sometime eccentric nature, but what a shame that they did.
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