Through the instrumental
'twangy' guitar music of ace guitarist Duane Eddy of whom I had
a bunch of vinyl singles and albums in my collection I became
interested in the music of Lee Hazlewood. In the mid sixties
I bought my first Lee Hazlewood 45 single and listened to songs
like 'The girl on death row' and 'Words mean nothing'. Lee with his deep baritone voice accompanied by Duane Eddy and his orchestra.
But the first album I bought was in the late sixties when I discovered
the - nowadays hard to find - 1968 German MGM album 'Something
special' in a record shop and since that year - but in an irregular
way because of its scarceness - I bought all the material I could
track down. From that moment on I searched for other 45 singles
and albums with that deep baritone voice that could so easily
lay a world of emotion in just one word. Listen for example to
songs like 'Hands', 'Summer night' or 'The nights' ('.....from
old comes new and new is life and life is an eternal thing.....')
and you will understand what I mean. It is my experience that
once you are hooked on his music you will enjoy it more and more.
Although Lee & Nancy Sinatra had a bunch of worldwide hits
in the years 1967 and 1968 ('Summer wine', 'Lady bird', 'Some
velvet morning' and 'Jackson') I didn't fully appreciate these
duet songs in those days. Not before 1991(!) I bought their famous
duet albums on vinyl and now - like so many 'addicts' as Lee
calls his fans - I consider the duet song 'Some velvet morning'
as one of my favourites.
Sometimes I ask myself what had come out if Lee had not done
those duet songs with Nancy. We had never heard of 'Some velvet
morning' and 'Summer wine'? I don't think so for then he had
sung them with another female singer but could not cash in on
the worldwide success of 'These boots are made for walkin'' by
Nancy.
Like so many fans in
Europe, the UK and the US I didn't know what Lee was doing between
1970 and 1995. It was rumoured that he changed homes between
Sweden (and we knew because Torbjörn Axelman and Lee won
the 'Golden Rose of Montreux' prize for the Swedish TV special
'The N.S.V.I.P.'s'), London, Paris, Germany, Helsinki, Spain,
Las Vegas, Phoenix and Florida. Thanks to the fact that since
1991 I continued collecting his records I became aware of the
singles and albums I was missing in my collection made in Sweden
and Germany in the period 1970-1977. As no one had ever made a complete discography on Lee I started to make it in 1991 and it took me 10 years to complete it. But still now and then new issues show up from East Asia or South America.
Lee Hazlewood showed an enormous versatility. He was not only known
as a singer but also as a talented arranger, composer, producer
and actor and did an awful lot of production and supervision
work for artists like Sanford Clark, Al Casey, Duane Eddy, Nancy
Sinatra and Dino, Desi & Billy.
Photo courtesy of Eric Walet
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the following people who made contributions to this site
(and I'm sure I forgot some of them):
Milo
van den Assem (The Netherlands): Lyrics
Henk Gorter (The Netherlands): Labels, Productions and Compositions
Peter Grandysa (US): Labels
Kristian Grimeland (Norway): Discography
Mike Hutchinson (US): Picture gallery
'Spectropop' Martin (US): Productions
Hugh McCallum (UK): Labels, Discography
John Phillips (UK): Discography, Album and single sleeves , Rarities
Bengt Sildén (Sweden): Discography
Sigbjørn Stabursvik (Norway): Discography
Wolfgang Sturmberger (Austria): Album, EP and single sleeves,
Rarities, 'Moonshine war'
Thierry Vanholm (Belgium): Single sleeves
Notes:
Monitoring Lee's presence on the Web is much more of a labor than it used to be.
When I first launched this site, search engines yielded about 25 'Lee Hazlewood' links on the entire Web. Now it's more than 275.000! So, if you'd care to suggest an important Lee Hazlewood link which I've missed, please do.
Please
send your remarks, additions, corrections, opinions, questions,
etc. to:
You
can send your e-mails in one of the following languages:
English, German, French, Spanish or Dutch!
LATEST
UPDATES OF THIS WEBSITE
Kia licenses Lee Hazlewood's 'Run boy run' for their Kia Sportage commercial.
September 2009
'Tequila makes her clothes fall off', the final Nancy & Lee recording will not be part of the new Nancy Sinatra CD album. Hopefully this will be included on one of her next albums.
October 2009
'Can't let her see me cry' by Mark Robinson (= Lee Hazlewood) is included on the UK Ace Records Various Artists CD album titled 'You heard them here first: Rock icons before they were famous' (Ace CHCHD 1219). This is one side of his 1962 promo record on Sylvester. The other side 'I've made enough mistakes today' will problably be issued on Volume 2.
August 2010
Ace Records (UK) has planned to release in August 2010 a CD album of Lee Hazlewood compositions performed by
various artists as part of their Songwriter series. For a track list see the 'Discography' under 'Tributes'!