Total Lee

By all means let us compare mythologies, but don’t let Lee Hazlewood’s canonisation by the alt-country clan obliterate the options. His place is alongside Serge Gainsbourg and Leonard Cohen, ladies’ men writing bittersweet lovers’ dialogue. And Hazlewood’s reputation should stem more from his time spent as a Tin Pan Alley tradesman (Sinatra’s son-in-law, he produced ‘Something Stupid’, wrote ‘Houston’ for Deano and ‘These Boots Are Made For Walkin’ for Nancy) than being the man who sponsored Gram. Above all, he was and is a songwriter supreme.

For Every Solution… gathers together a quarter century’s worth of previously unreleased material. Would that everyone’s outtakes came from the top drawer: his tunes strike an uncanny balance between old-school Nashville rat pack machismo and bedsit sensitivity. ‘Dirtnap’ is a fugitive ballad so morbid you have to smile, with the singer inquiring what becomes of various broken-hearted, who in turn tell him that they feel “Like all God’s promises are broken/It’s like dying on Christmas day/Before all gifts are opened”. ‘Your Thunder & Your Lightning’ meanwhile, seems to take note of Cave doing Cash’s ‘The Singer’, and adds a twangy guitar just to remind you who discovered Duane Eddy. Ingrained in Hazlewood’s nicotine baritone you can hear the strains of those who came after (Tindersticks, Johnny Dowd) as much as those who went before (William S. Burroughs and Joan Vollmer as George ‘n’ Tammy anyone?).

Of course, being one of pop’s greatest ghost writers, Hazlewood is a prime candidate for tribute album status. Some of the selections on Total Lee make delirious sense in conception and execution: Lambchop doing ‘Never Had A Gun’, Calexico and Valerie Leuillot’s ‘Sundown’, Tindersticks’ ‘My Autumn’s Done Come’ (song title of the year so far). Others rewrite the script and come up with surprise endings (Madrugada usher ‘Come On Home To Me’ into Badalamenti’s ‘Pink Room’ and do strange Axelrod things to it, while Jarvis Cocker and Richard Hawley put ‘The Cheat’ through a Suicide shredder). The Webb Brothers tempt fate with LH’s greatest song, ‘Some Velvet Morning’, which cuts between four-four and three-four, between narcotic depression and girl-in-a-wheatfield eeriness, and just about manages to get away with it. By contrast, St Etienne’s ‘Got It Back Together Again’ is neither here nor there.

But for the most part, the cast have kept their nerve.

Considering the evidence and the evidence only, Total Lee is much more than a curio.