Pitchfork

I recently packed all my shit into a rental car and moved from San Francisco to Greensboro, North Carolina. My best memory from the trip was driving between Memphis and Nashville, listening to WSM, the home of the Grand Old Opry. There's something about the production in country music from the early '50s to the early '70s. In those days, the only way to get records to sound good coming out of crappy AM radios was to thicken the reverb to the saturation point. This meant that Patsy Cline and Kitty Wells sounded like they were singing about broken hearts from the belly of a hollowed- out submarine. And that, my friends, is a lonesome sound.

Lee Hazlewood, who cut his musical teeth during this time, understands this lonesome sound. Best known as the writer of Nancy Sinatra's hit "These Boots are Made for Walkin'," Hazlewood was an enigmatic contemporary of Phil Spector whose gift for melody and arrangement graced many a hit single in the '60s. On his own records, Hazlewood can be seen as a kind of urban cowboy- meets- Leonard Cohen figure whose thick baritone is consistently in tune and affecting. After moving to Sweden in the early 1970s, Hazlewood's records fell out of print and became much sought after by fanatical (and rich) collectors. Hearing the freshly reissued Requiem for an Almost Lady, one can see what the fuss is all about.

Originally released in 1971, Requiem has a concept-- one you can probably guess from the title. To give you an idea where Hazlewood is coming from, on the liner notes he writes "In retrospect... these songs were not written about or for one lady or two or even three... they are a composite of all my memories of ladies, since I became aware of memories and ladies..." Cheesy? God, yes. And the between- song spoken interludes, laced with similar platitudes about life, love and loss, can be a little hard to endure initally.

Still, taken as a whole, with Hazlewood's stellar production and subtle, understated arrangements (mostly just bass and guitar), the album becomes something greater. An artifact, sure-- sadly, they don't record voices like this any more, all rich and full of romantic atmosphere. But there's something else at work, a simplicity that yields a kind of grandeur.

The melodies (particularly on such weepers as "If It's Monday Morning" and "I'll Live Yesterdays") show that Hazlewood fully understood the power of the 1-5 change. The words are simple storytelling in the country- folk vein-- engaging stories laced with humor and keen observation. And the chamber- tonk production adds a showman's sheen to these roadhouse blues. Dylan was plowing these same fields in the early '70s on New Morning and Nashville Skyline, but he was too confused at that point do it with Hazlewood's panache. Memories and ladies, ah yes... Lee got it right.