Covered: Lee Hazlewood, Volume 2: 1968-2023

Here's Volume Two of my Covered Series albums highlighting the songs written by Lee Hazlewood.

A large percentage of the songs in Volume One were hits. That's much less the case here, since most of this deals with a far less portion of his career, basically from about 1970 onwards until his death (due to cancer) at the age of 78 in 2007.

The first song here, "Some Velvet Morning," was a hit, and is one of his best known songs. What a fascinating song it is. In 2003, the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph placed the single at the Number 1 spot on their 50 Best Duets Ever list. Here's a portion from the article about that list: "These two weirdly complementary sides of Hazlewood's persona unite on 'Some Velvet Morning,' a standout track from Nancy and Lee. On that track, Hazlewood and Sinatra sound like they don't inhabit the same universe, let alone the same song. ... 'Some Velvet Morning' sounds like two songs spliced together by a madman, or an avant-garde short film in song form." 

In the late 1960s, Hazlewood and Sinatra were keeping their successful hit formula going. "Lady Bird" was another big hit song as a duet sung by them, although just to vary things up a bit I've included a version by Virgil Warner & Suzi Jane Hokom instead. (Hokom was Hazlewood's girlfriend in the late 1960s and into the early 1970s.) However, his fortunes changed drastically around 1970, when he decided to move to the Sweden. He ended up living there for ten years. He later claimed that he went there for several reasons, including so his son could avoid getting drafted to fight in the Vietnam War, tax trouble, and bailing out on a failing record company he had tried to run for a few years. One song here, "No Train to Stockholm," details some of his feelings about making that move.

Unfortunately, back in that era, the world was less connected, and going to Sweden was almost suicide for his music career. For instance, his highly successful collaboration with Nancy Sinatra mostly had to come to an end. However, they did reunite occasionally, for instance with an album called "Nancy and Lee Again" in 1972. That contained a Number Two hit in Britain, "Did You Ever." But I didn't included that song here because Hazlewood wasn't involved in writing it.

For much of the 1970s and 80s, he was semi-retired from the music business, although he did release his own albums from time to time. But as more time passed, his music was discovered by younger generations, and his music increasingly achieved a kind of cult status. That led to tribute albums, collaborations, and so on. He also revived his own performing career, including another album with Sinatra in 2004, and a well-regarded final album "Cake or Death," released in 2006, just one year before he died. The song "Baghdad Knights" is from that album.

A lot of the choices here are highly idiosyncratic, meaning someone else putting this together almost certainly would have made many different selections. I tried including at least a little bit of some of his different styles, including three songs he released in his own name, since I couldn't find good cover versions for those. 

This album is 48 minutes long.

01 Some Velvet Morning (Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood)
02 You Turned My Head Around (Ann-Margret)
03 Sweet Ride (Dusty Springfield)
04 Lady Bird (Virgil Warner & Suzi Jane Hokom)
05 No Train to Stockholm (Lee Hazlewood)
06 For a Day like Today (Suzi Jane Hokom)
07 She Comes Running (Waylon Jennings)
08 Paris Summer (Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood)
09 Las Vegas (Lee Hazlewood)
10 Easy and Me (Kathryn Williams)
11 The Cheat (Jarvis Cocker & Richard Hawley)
12 It's Sunday Morning (Kid Loco with Tim Keegan)
13 Baghdad Knights (Lee Hazlewood)
14 The Night Before (Kristoffer & the Harbour Heads)
15 Your Sweet Love (Sungaze)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/15hZDJ7S

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/1jUKwWZhrurYWeZ/file

I don't know what year the cover photo is from. But I think it's from a little later than the cover photo for Volume 1, due to a little more grey in his hair.

Covered: Lee Hazlewood, Volume 1: 1956-1967

It's time to highlight another talented songwriter in my Covered series. This time, it's Lee Hazlewood. He's best known for writing hit songs for Nancy Sinatra, especially the huge hit "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'." But he did a lot more than that. He had a quirky style with songwriting, production, and his own singing so unique that he practically created his own musical genre. The intro paragraph to his Wikipedia entry states: "His collaborations with Sinatra as well as his solo output in the late 1960s and early 1970s have been praised as an essential contribution to a sound often described as 'cowboy psychedelia' or 'saccharine underground.'" I found enough interesting cover versions of his songs for two volumes.

Hazlewood had an unusual career, just like how he had an unusual sound. It seems he marched to the beat of his own drummer. Sometimes that meant big hits, sometimes obscure records. 

He was born in 1929, and mostly grew up in Texas. After serving in the military during the Korean War in the early 1950s, he began working as a DJ. This gave him a foot in the door into the music business. He soon started producing and well as selling songs he'd written. His first big hit was "The Fool" by Sanford Clark in 1956. After that, he had the most success in the late 1950s and early 1960s writing songs for guitarist Duane Eddy. His biggest success was with "Rebel-'Rouser," a Top Ten hit in the U.S. in 1958 and a true classic. He wrote a whole series of hits for Eddy, most (but not all) of them guitar-based instrumentals. I only included a few of those here because, in my opinion, most of them are similar to each other and don't really stand out.

Hazlewood's hits for Duane Eddy petered out by the end of 1963, probably due to a change in the public's musical tastes. That was right when the Beatles and the British Invasion hit it big. Hazlewood was so disappointed in the change that he took a break from the music business for most of 1964. 

But in 1965, his career resumed when he got a chance to work with Nancy Sinatra. She was both very beautiful and a talented singer. Plus she was the daughter of music legend Frank Sinatra. However, she'd had a series of nothing but failed singles from 1961 to 1965, and was in danger of being dropped from her record label. Then she began working with Hazlewood. He drastically changed her sound, including having her sing in a lower register, and with a more sultry style. Their first single in 1965 didn't do that well. But their second one was "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'," which went to Number One in the U.S. singles charts and instantly turned Sinatra into a big star. That led to a whole series of hit songs he for Sinatra through the end of the 1960s.

The Sinatra collaboration turned Hazlewood into a minor star as well. That's because not only did he write and produce all her hits, he sang on some hit duets with her as well. It was a very odd combination, since Hazlewood had a low, gruff voice that typically wasn't found on hit records. But the clash with Sinatra's conventionally pretty voice somehow worked, in large part due to Hazlewood's songwriting and production.

The account of his career will continue with the second volume. Note that, on this volume, I generally stuck with the hit versions, even though that means a big cluster of Nancy Sinatra songs in the second half. Those versions are so distinctive and definitive that it seemed wrong to use different ones.

This album is 48 minutes long. 

01 The Fool (Sanford Clark)
02 Snake Eyed Mama (Don Cole with Al Casey)
03 Don't Look Now, but I've Got the Blues (B.B. King)
04 Rebel-'Rouser (Duane Eddy)
05 The Girl on Death Row (Lee Hazlewood with Duane Eddy & His Orchestra)
06 Shazam (Duane Eddy)
07 Guitars, Guitars, Guitars (Al Casey with the K-C-Ettes)
08 [Dance With] The Guitar Man (Duane Eddy)
09 Baja (Astronauts)
10 These Boots Are Made for Walkin' (Nancy Sinatra)
11 Friday's Child (Nancy Sinatra)
12 Need All the Help I Can Get (Suzi Jane Hokom)
13 How Does That Grab You, Darlin' (Nancy Sinatra)
14 Sugar Town (Nancy Sinatra)
15 Guitar on My Mind (Duane & Miriam Eddy)
16 Sand (Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood)
17 Summer Wine (Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood)
18 The Last of the Secret Agents (Nancy Sinatra)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/HjpmSyrP

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/J50fzMok1feovMx/file

I had a hard time finding good color images of Hazlewood when he was young, so I had to resort using an album cover photo. The cover image was taken from a 1960 album called "Something Special."