Despite the cult classic status of Lee Hazlewood’s 1963 album Trouble Is a Lonesome Town, it was not his performance on that album but rather a song he wrote for Nancy Sinatra, “These Boots are Made for Walkin'”, that got him a record deal with MGM. That song was a hit, and so the label signed Hazlewood to make three records. Those records — 1966’s The Very Special World of Lee Hazlewood, 1967’s Hazlewoodism: Its Cause and Cure, and 1968’s Something Special — have now been reissued by Light in the Attic. The records show Hazlewood’s time before he went off to build his own musical world on the LHI label, and they certainly show MGM taking a risk on the idiosyncratic singer-songwriter. But the albums themselves, thorny and strange but full of gems, still fascinate.
The Very Special World of Lee Hazlewood is the most consistent of the bunch. The arrangements here are lush and melancholy, from the opening sweep of strings on “For One Moment” to the bright bursts of horn on “When a Fool Loves a Fool” to the down-and-out barroom piano of “My Baby Cried All Night Long”, a song sung seemingly by the guy Sinatra stomped down in “These Boots are Made for Walkin'”. The songs here are full of Hazlewood’s dour narrators, guys lost in love or in love and lost or lost in the people that have already left them or are about to. But Hazlewood’s charm and humor shine through. This comes across best, perhaps, in his victory-lap version of “Boots”, where he’s the one singing and in between verses he recounts recording it the first time and how no one thought it was a hit. He also seems to be winking the whole time, knowing that it’s the version with Nancy Sinatra that really works, but he can’t help but put it on this record anyway. The lyrics and the arrangements suggest there should have been some hits here — and some of these songs like “Sand” and “So Long, Babe” got attention in other forms — but Hazlewood’s deadpan delivery meant stardom on his own would remain elusive for the time being.
Maybe that explains how strange Hazlewoodism: Its Cause and Cure sounds. On this record, Hazlewood delves deeper into his eccentricities and doesn’t even pretend to chase hits. There are, still, gems like the bartender pleas of “After Six” and the raucous stomp of “Suzy Jane is Back in Town”. There’s also, however, the spoken-word matador origin story of “Jose” and the nearly spoken-word lament of time passing on “The Old Man and His Guitar”, plus the spoken-word verses of “I Am a Part”. In other words, Hazlewood talks his way through a lot of the record, which might make the lively singing on closer “Dark in My Heart” seem all the more surprising. Hazlewoodism: Its Cause and Cure is one of Hazlewood’s more fascinating, though frustrating records. The dragging nature of the narrative on those spoken-word pieces squanders some pretty great instrumentation — this is some of Hazlewood’s grandest music, period — and there’s something contrarian about the tracklist, burying great tunes like “After Six” in favor of testing us with his long-winded tales of woe. It’s a strange album, one that rewards spending time with it, but it’s also more fascinating for being strange than it is for being as good as its predecessor. The instrumental bonus tracks here, all decent numbers in search of a hook, suggest that the music was the focus, and on “The Old Man and His Guitar” what starts off like bittersweet resignation in his voice turns into a fatigue that paints the sound of the whole record.
If the strangeness of that record is uneven, it is still deeply missed by the time we get to 1968’s Something Special, the most pedestrian of this trio. Hazlewood almost sounds like he’s running out the clock. His singing picks up often where the liveliness of “Dark in My Heart” left off, especially on opener “Shades”. That song keeps the string arrangements and scope that shaped the previous two albums, but from there Something Special revels in stripped-down barroom blooms centered around bass and the piano and scat vocals of Don Randi. Randi’s scatting on the record, early on, is a playful shift away from Hazlewood’s melancholy delivery, but the sameness of Randi’s delivery over time makes his singing seem more like filler than anything else, like a way to beef up undercooked tunes. Some of the best stuff on the record, like “Hands”, starts in dark folk territory before opening up into a blues romp. “Little War” is a stand-alone gem, a spare and heartbreaking song that recalls the finest moments of Trouble is a Lonesome Town and matches with other highlights in Hazlewood’s career. Most of the record can’t match up to those moments, though. “Mannford, Oklahoma” best encapsulates the album’s shortcomings, a song with all the small-town focus of Trouble is a Lonesome Town with none of the strange detail or charm. It’s a sketch of a song that never gets fleshed out. Of the three records, Something Special may be the most pleasant, but pleasant in a background music sort of way. The shift to sparer instrumentation is curious, but it won’t hold your attention like other two records here.
So if these three records are strong but hardly lost classics, they still tell a fascinating story of a singer-songwriter, and a compellingly eccentric artist, given the chance to shine and experiment with his craft. These records have moments that stand on their own, but they also act as an interesting preamble to the creating of Lee Hazlewood Industries. Perhaps at the time of their release, these records seemed like an opportunity, a chance to find a new level of fame or success. But now, in these reissues, they are more compelling as a pivot point, between when Hazlewood created musical worlds for others and when he finally planted his own flag in the ground.