Lee Hazlewood, R.I.P.

Lee Hazlewood, the maverick country singer and pop producer known best for his work with Nancy Sinatra in the 1960s and his fathomless baritone voice, died this weekend from complications due to renal cancer. He had turned 78 just several weeks prior. Hazlewood had been first diagnosed with the disease a few years back, and recently he had been almost sardonic in interviews in the face of the short time his doctors had given him to live. He was still recording despite the quick deterioration of his health, releasing his final album in 2006. It was just another example of the cussedness that made him one of pop’s most enduring oddballs.

Born in Oklahoma in 1929 and bouncing around around various Texas oil towns while growing up, Hazlewood, like many future pop producers and songwriters, got his start absorbing what makes a hit song work as a radio DJ, first during the Korean War and then in civilian life in Los Angeles and Arkansas. Though he was already slightly older than rock’s target market at the time, he eagerly played early rock’n’roll hits on his shows, and soon began writing his own, scoring his first Top 10 single in 1956 with “The Fool.” It set the pattern for much of Hazlewood’s later career: a string of idiosyncratic pop songs buffered by stretches of woodshedding. In the following years, he worked his recording booth magic as both a producer and a label owner with a young guitarist named Duane Eddy and taught tricks to Phil Spector before he had fully arrived at his “wall of sound” conception. But after recording his eccentric first solo album in 1963, Hazlewood went into a year-long sulk. Spending the next year producing teen crooners–and bartering the success into another solo album–his fortunes were reversed, to put it mildly, when he was charged writing a hit for a celebrity daughter whose singing career was circling the drain.

Nancy Sinatra was in her early 20s already at that point, but Hazlewood found the perfect vessel, especially for a song he had written with a bassline that sounded like it was strutting down a spiral staircase, a song that sounded both kittenish and like it would kick your ass. “These Boots Are Made for Walking” was a No. 1 hit in 1966, and it is perhaps the only thing in the world that connects both Billy Ray Cyrus and Dave Mustaine, two of the dozens who have covered the bad-ass empowerment chestnut over the years. Hazlewood continued to record funny, spooky solo albums that mixed baroque Brill Building pop, lonesome country, high plains existentialism, and a sagebrush wit. But it was with Sinatra, as a songwriter and producer for a genuine teen idol, that his pop instincts (with an occasional dollop of knowing schlock) would most brilliantly flourish. And in addition to a meal ticket, Hazlewood also found his perfect foil. With Sinatra, he recorded three albums worth of indelible duets–the sleazy, worldly stranger come to town to call on the prim parson’s daughter.

The pair’s tricky, trippy masterpiece, “Some Velvet Morning,” is a mystical nursery rhyme that opens with a melodramatic swell of sugary strings that could track the credits to a Doris Day picture. A carousel-like variation on the motif repeats with each of Nancy’s doe-eyed verses, delivered with all the passion of a talking baby doll or maybe Nico if she had grown up an All-American cheerleader. When Hazlewood takes the mic, however, the orchestration becomes pensive, his cowboy guitar backed by moody horns and strings. By the end, as the dueling verses start to sound like a phasing tape effect, it’s as unsettling a pop song as the psychedelic 60s produced, some freaked out cross between the chiming queasiness of the Rosemary’s Baby soundtrack and Johnny Cash at his gloomiest, released with an arched eyebrow during the height of peace and love. Many modern musicians have tried their hand at it, most of them terribly; in trying to ape the song’s distressed atmosphere, as if it was some kind of proto-trip-hop or art-rock, they somehow forget the humor. Hazlewood had a voice that dripped with lascivious dread and could rub you raw with loneliness. But he also sounded like he was sometimes suppressing a wry smile or a malevolent smirk. No wonder he was later championed by Nick Cave.

Calling Hazlewood’s output since the ’70s “intermittent” would be a compliment. He worked with Gram Parsons, Waylon Jennings, and others when he wasn’t tied up in industry red tape, attempted to rekindle the Sinatra spark with fellow kitten with a whip Ann-Margret, and eventually moved to Sweden, where he starred in films and continued recording. His solo material became something of a rumor in his homeland until he was raised up as an avant-pop totem by the alt-rock generation, especially Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley. Following a long layoff through most of the ’80s and ’90s, he began recording again at the turn of the millennium, releasing the typically mordantly titled Cake or Death just last year, well after he began wrestling with the cancer that killed him on Saturday. (He even reunited with Sinatra a few years back, but it’s no great disrespect to say that the more recent collaboration lacked the some of the verve of their classic sides.) However sporadic, though, his body of work is also a testament to the tweaked magic that can happen when dusty characters following their own special cowboy muse are let loose in the hit factory.