More Lee Hazlewood

As a footnote to yesterday’s brief mention of Lee Hazlewood, Richard Hawley interviewed him not long before he died and asked, among other things, about producing Duane Eddy. Hazlewood replied:

It worked out good, you know, about 25 or 26 million records later. I guess it worked out all right.

After Hazlewood went to the Great Studio in the Sky, Hawley paid tribute in the Guardian. Sample:

I asked him about how he got that great reverb sound on his early records and he said they used to rent a grain store from a farmer that they knew. The funny side of it was they used to hire someone with a pellet gun to shoot the birds off it so they didn’t make any noise.

I remember asking him about his favourite cover of one of his songs because there’s so many. He just goes: ‘Well, they’re all shit. [Pause] In fact, the originals weren’t much better.’

He went on: ‘Actually, there is one that was great. My son called me from Las Vegas once and said: “Pops you’ve got to get yourself down here. There’s a girl in a club doing a cover of ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking’”. I said, why the fuck do I have to get on a flight from Phoenix to Las Vegas to see someone do a crappy version of one of Nancy’s tunes that I wrote? And he said, “Yeah, but dad, you’ve never seen it done with a girl playing piano with her breasts.”’

If you don’t know Hawley’s music, I thoroughly recommend investigating it. NZ crime writer Ben Sanders is a fan too, judging by the reference in his 2011 novel By Any Means. Here is Hawley with the title track of his 2005 album Coles Corner: