[sonicl]

What can one say? RIP.

 

Born on 9 July 1929, in the town of Mannford, Oklahoma, Barton Lee Hazlewood spent his early years moving with his family between there and towns in Arkansas and Texas, where they settled long enough for Lee to attend high school and meet his future wife, Naomi Shackleford. After a stint at SMU in Dallas, Lee was called into service in Korea.

After his discharge, Lee attended broadcasting school in California, and upon graduation was hired by KCKY in tiny Coolidge, Arizona. It wasn’t long before his eccentric on-air performances, which consisted of conversations between an elaborate dramatis personae with all the voices done by Lee himself, garnered him a local following.One devotee, a teenage guitarist named Duane Eddy, began dropping by to rid the station of its excess country records. Lee befriended Duane and the two began fleshing out some songs Hazlewood had written, along with Duane’s pianist buddy James “Jimmy Dell” Delbridge, at a local studio. The trio also began driving to Phoenix for country music shows, where they met the young guitarist Al Casey, an important ally in the years to come.

By 1955 Lee had moved to KRUX in Phoenix (where he was the first DJ in town to play Elvis), and started the Viv label as an outlet for his productions. Using Ramsey Recorders as his home base, and a phalanx of talented local players including Eddy and Casey, Lee finally struck paydirt in 1956 with his tune “The Fool”, sung by Casey’s high school chum Sanford Clark, birthing the Phoenix music scene in the process. In 1957, Lee gave up DJing for writing and producing full-time when he accepted a job as staff producer with Dot Records, and moved to LA. Soon after, Hazlewood hooked up with producer Lester Sill, forming a partnership that would alter the course of American music.

Still making regular pilgrimages back to Phoenix, where he continued to explore the sounds he was hearing in the now-familiar context of Ramsey and his erstwhile group of session players, Lee finally broke through when he suggested that Duane play the simple, repetitive melodic riffs they had written on the lower strings of his guitar. It was a radical departure from the searing, high pitched runs of the Chet Atkins style. Although the sound had its genesis in Lee’s head, he couldn’t possibly have been prepared for how sublimely it tumbled from Duane’s amplifier, and just how far the two would be able to take it.

Knowing they had the makings of something bigger, Hazlewood and Sill began licensing the Eddy masters to Philadelphia-based Jamie Records in 1958, and enjoyed a huge string of international instrumental hits which helped define what people were just beginning to call “rock and roll”.

Hazlewood was obsessive about achieving new sounds, and this pursuit led to the installation of a gigantic grain tank onto the side of the building which housed the studio. The tank was outfitted with a mike and speaker setup, and became a truly monstrous echo chamber, heard to great effect on those early Eddy sides. Another of Lee’s many innovations in this period was the “stacking” of bass players; Fender bass for crispness on top of an upright bass for depth of tone underneath.

What most people don’t know is that observing these sessions, and no doubt absorbing most of Lee’s innovative techniques, was a young wannabe producer newly recruited by Sill, by the name of Phil Spector. And it’s also no coincidence that many of Lee’s hand-picked session players, including Al Casey, Steve Douglas, Jim Horn and Larry Knechtel, went on to become part of the legendary “Wrecking Crew”, Hollywood’s most in-demand group of session musicians, and the interpreters of countless milestones of American music from the 60s and 70s.

The early 60s saw Hazlewood establish a new label, Lee Hazlewood Industries (LHI), and branch out into new territory both as writer/producer and as a performer, with his first solo albums — 1963’s Trouble Is A Lonesome Town and The N.S.V.I.P.s — the following year. In 1967, LHI released the first album by Gram Parsons’ short-lived group, the International Submarine Band.

By the mid-sixties, Lee had achieved some significance with mega-hits and artistic milestones, and had garnered the respect of his peers (not to mention a swimming pool and a nice little stockpile of Chivas Regal). So with the advent of the British Invasion (which was itself profoundly fueled by those pioneering Duane Eddy records), and the sea-change brought upon the Industry by more self-contained artistic projects (e.g. the Beatles et al), he had become quite taken with the idea of “retirement” from the music business. That is, until he met Nancy.

http://www.smellslikerecords.com/leehazlewood/