Yet another formative figure from my youth has gone to join the house band upstairs. Lee Hazlewood was one of those moody, romantic figures on which I modeled myself unsuccessfully as a yout. A maverick, a mystic, a bruised romantic.
I still play the seminal Nancy and Lee album sometimes, and one of my favourite albums of last year, Ballad of the Broken Seas by Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan, owes a massive debt to the innocence corrupting experience dynamic that he and Nancy Sinatra had going on. (I always wondered about Nancy and the obvious thing she had for older men – a fixation that reached it’s creepy climax on Something Stupid – a love duet with her own dad. Urgh.)
By way of tribute, this is Summer Wine, one of my favourite tracks of Lee’s, interpreted with the help of Swedish chontoose Siw Malmkvist. (via WFMU’s Beware Of The Blog)
So long, cowboy.
EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS 