Lee Hazlewood never achieved the success he deserved. A less raucous Phil Spector with a handlebar mustache, he specialized in a truly original brand of cosmic cowboy music — pop harmonies combined with country twang set under a cigarette-smoke voice caked in dirt. His records, as an artist and producer, were always slightly off-kilter and never commercially popular. The one exception is “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’,” a song he wrote for Nancy Sinatra which topped the Billboard Hot 100 charts in February 1966. His greatest body of work, however, only recently discovered, is that which he recorded, or oversaw, under the banner of Lee Hazlewood Industries. Most of these recordings, which have been collected in a gorgeous box set titled “There’s a Dream I’ve Been Saving: Lee Hazlewood Industries 1966-1971” (Light in the Attic Records), are reaching a wider audience for the first time.
Hazlewood, like many early pioneers of the independent music industry, was something of a raconteur. Before launching a career in music, he studied medicine, did a tour of duty in the Korean War, and was a radio deejay in Phoenix. It was at that final job, where he found he had a knack for discovering hit songs, that he began writing his own. Making Greyhound trips from Phoenix to Los Angeles, he began shopping his songs to publishers and labels with little luck at first. When the songs did get picked up and recorded, he found the artists and producers didn’t really understand the music he was writing. It didn’t sound like the record that was spinning in his head.
Lee Hazlewood Industries, a clubhouse-of-misfits-slash-record label, located on the Sunset Strip, was still a few years away. On the long strange trip there, Hazlewood would work with the guitarist Duane Eddy (whose vibrating guitar sound would become a staple of Hazlewood recordings), start and finish Eden Records, a subsidiary of Decca, and grow that famous mustache of his. He also began dating Suzi Jane Hokom, who would become the label’s art designer, in-house producer, recording artist, and all-around muse.
The music in the box set, which ranges from Hazlewood’s solo records — including the bizarre and surprisingly good soundtrack to “Cowboy in Sweden,” a television project Hazelwood produced and starred in — to collaborations and a smorgasbord of bands and artists, highlights what made the label unique. It never settled on one sound. Why focus on one when you have so many different types of music, sometimes all squeezed into a single song? Unfortunately, it was this chaotic foundation that reportedly extended into the day-to-day operations of the label.
Hokom’s contribution to Hazlewood’s music, rarely discussed in previous considerations of his career, is finally catching some rays of the spotlight. While Hazlewood, in his own recordings, tended to lean toward country or folk, typically with lush orchestration, it seems Hokom, almost a decade younger than Hazlewood, introduced the new sounds of rock-n-roll. The songs she worked on had a laid-back, stoned vibe reminiscent of the Los Angeles scene built in Laurel Canyon that was growing around them.
Hazlewood favored the Svengali image, which is evident in his relationship — personal and professional — with Hokom, as well as his collaborations with Nancy Sinatra and Ann-Margret. There was a bit of 1960s liberation in his vision, with his encouragement of Hokom’s creativity, specifically, that was tempered by his patriarchal control. He was fiercely loyal and wanted his collaborators to succeed, but only so far. His name, his image, was still at the front. When they came too close to challenging his control, even without realizing, he pulled away.
It was this hardheadedness, a tricky balance between fostering chaos and flaunting power, which many believe did him in. (A notoriously litigiousness man, Hazlewood was responsible for Gram Parsons being removed from the final version of “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” by The Byrds.) When things got too crazy, and the money wasn’t rolling in, Hazlewood ran away. He settled in Sweden, where he continued to make music and venture into other projects.
This period is arguably one of his most creative. “Cowboy in Sweden,” released on DVD for the first time as part of the box set, is ambitious in the way that so many projects of this nature were during the period. There is a sense that the ideas were unfiltered. Money wasn’t an issue. You just created, and kept creating. People watched and listened, or they didn’t. It didn’t seem to matter.
But as the music business turned into a monolithic enterprise in the 1970s, and the major labels swallowed up the smaller ones, Hazlewood would be pushed out. There was no room for him in the new structure. He wouldn’t record again until the ’90s and sadly, after a few superb comeback albums, passed away from renal cancer in 2007, just as he was finally accepting the cult fame that had grown around him during his time away from music. His willingness to create music on his own terms, outside the traditional music industry, will inspire artists for decades to come. In an interview late in his career, included in the box set, he lays his theory of working in the music industry, simple and plain: “It’s all suits and you do your best to avoid them.”
