Lee, Myself & I: Inside the Very Special World of Lee Hazlewood by Wyndham Wallace

From a stellar career in pop to rumours of fleeing the wrath of Frank Sinatra, Lee Hazlewood’s world was rarely conventional, freighted with destructive mood swings, writes James McNair.

Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra on The Hollywood Palace TV series in 1968. ABC Photo Archives / ABC via Getty Images
Powered by automated translation

Lee, Myself & I: Inside the Very Special World of Lee Hazlewood

Wyndham Wallace

Jawbone, Dh77

“Never try to meet your heroes. It always ends in tears.”

Such is the sage and prophetic advice that Wyndham Wallace is offered by a university chum. As one reads this improbable tale of how Wallace became friend, confidant and manager to cult US songwriter Lee Hazlewood – the man who wrote Nancy Sinatra's perennial pop gem These Boots Are Made for Walkin' – another adage seems apt: be careful what you wish for – you just might get it.

When Wallace first "encounters" Hazlewood in 1993, it's via a black-and-white illustration of the great man adorning the sleeve of A Marriage Made in Heaven, a 7-inch single by the UK band Tindersticks. Wallace, at the time a music-biz newbie, is about to become a London-based PR for obscure US post-rock bands. He can't yet put a name to Hazlewood's face, but fate has a spell to cast and introductions to make.

In time, Wallace will be party to Hazlewood's impressive stash of showbiz anecdotes; to his amusingly-bilious faxes, his eccentricities and demands, his fine company and his customised cigarettes. In time, Lee Hazlewood will affectionately rechristen Wallace "Bubba" and refer to him as his "fourth child". Wallace will even read the eulogy at Hazlewood's funeral (he died of renal cancer in 2007, age 78). Not for nothing is Lee, Myself & I described as an account of what it's like to "befriend your hero, then watch him die".

These days, Wallace is a Berlin-based music journalist. This is his first book. In a typically arch foreword, left-wing British comedian Stuart Lee cranks up the disparity between the author – “Wallace is a virtual aristocrat ... born and bred to rule alongside Cameron and Osborne ...” – and his infinitely cooler, much more roguish subject. But Lee is also grateful to Wallace for his sizeable part in the “critical rehabilitation” of Hazlewood, something that has led to the wider availability of his deliciously idiosyncratic back catalogue, a diamond seam tapped by everyone from Elvis Presley to Beck to Primal Scream to Lana Del Rey.

Wallace is in on Stuart Lee’s gag. Early on, he jokes that his highfalutin-sounding moniker came “courtesy of parents who’d plausibly named me during a high-scoring game of Scrabble”. Imagine the public schoolboy’s delight, then, when having finally dared to contact Hazlewood directly, he receives a faxed reply that begins thus: “Dear Wyndham Wallace, If I had a name like Wyndham Wallace I would not associate with anyone with a simple name like mine. However, since you have lowered your self to such depths, how can my old Indian heart (west not east) not respond favourably.”

Wallace’s route to Hazlewood came via Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, who, in 1998, employed him to handle UK PR for reissues of some of Hazlewood’s albums. We learn of this – and of Wallace’s earlier, whirlwind romance with Hazlewood’s music – via flashbacks. When the book opens it’s 1999 and the author is in New York to meet his hero for the first time. His nervousness about what Hazlewood will think of him is played as a comic set-piece, but the pair get on swimmingly.

Up until then, speculation about the whereabouts of the Oklahoma-born, Texas-raised record producer and songwriter had been rife. Some said Hazlewood had become a monk. Others claimed he had long since fled to Sweden to escape Frank Sinatra, who had allegedly gone on the warpath after hearing rumours of shenanigans between Hazlewood and his daughter, Nancy.

Wallace learns that talk of Hazlewood's asceticism is ill founded. Now 69, he is living with his much younger partner Jeanne in Kissimmee, Florida, "where an alligator eyes him every day as he drinks Chivas Regal by his pool". In the ensuing chapters, Lee, Myself & I drip-feeds further choice details, Hazlewood emerging as the bon vivant and loveable bar-fly we'd like him to be, yet freighted with a darkness than can prompt destructive mood swings. "[The Korean War] taught me two things", Hazlewood tells Wallace at one point: "How to run and how to cry." Only after Hazlewood's death does the author learn that he was prescribed lithium for depression.

The real-life events of the book give it a natural and compelling structure. Having met his hero, Wallace immediately ups the ante by inviting Hazlewood to play a comeback show at London’s Royal Festival Hall. He is to be part of the 1999 Meltdown festival, which is being curated by a life-long Hazlewood fan, Nick Cave.

Hazlewood drives a hard bargain re his appearance fee. He wants to be paid in advance, and has Wallace collect him from the airport in his dilapidated Volkswagen. He also endures an ominously poor rehearsal with his chosen musicians, but cometh the hour, cometh the man. All the same, Wallace is mortified when Hazlewood – synonymous with cool before his re-appearance – takes the stage in a vulgar gift-shop sweatshirt bearing the slogan “Movie Facts”.

Wallace’s affectionate, yet warts-and-all portrayal of his hero also gains traction from reproductions of Hazlewood’s fax messages, wherein his boss’s opinion of the press is plain. “These unimportant 2nd year journalism students I’ve given many, many hours to are not only brain dead ...” runs one communiqué, “... they are assassins!”

As the author spends more time with Hazlewood, he assembles the jigsaw of a life less ordinary. We learn that the famed record producer Phil Spector’s trademark Wall of Sound might owe something to his apprenticeship with Hazlewood. There are tales of nights out with tennis ace Björn Borg and James Bond actor Roger Moore, of the hobo who cured Hazlewood’s childhood stutter, and of the itinerant lifestyle that took the singer-songwriter to Germany, southern Spain and, yes, Gotland, Sweden.

Along the way, Wallace dispenses acute metaphors and similes: "The place is as silent as a run-out groove"; "My thoughts like balls in a bingo machine", and he proves an indispensable guide to Hazlewood's music. Who knew his 1964 album The N.S.V.I.P.'s had songs about an alcoholic dragon and a man who thinks he's a goose? Or that a UK critic had reviewed Hazlewood's 1973 album Poet, Fool or Bum with just one word: "Bum"?

The gags are plentiful and nicely told. It seems fitting, somehow, that having contracted cancer, Hazlewood opted to call his final album Cake or Death, lifting the name from a sketch by one of his favourite comedians, Eddie Izzard.

But the story can end only one way and there is an affecting poignancy to the final third of the book, even if, in the face of death, Hazlewood’s knack for a wry turn of phrase doesn’t desert him. “Lee doesn’t buy green bananas,” he tells Wallace, self-referentially. What a great euphemism for The Reaper’s proximity.

Hazlewood's final birthday party, where he briefly dances with Nancy Sinatra, is beautifully sketched. Similarly, when Wallace tells of sitting with a rapidly declining Hazlewood while they listen to his version of A Very Good Year, Ervin Drake's beguiling 1961 song about an old man's wistful gaze in the rear-view, it's hugely touching.

Before they take their leave of one another Hazlewood will bestow a final gift: the chance for Wallace to collaborate with him on a song. But first he must dupe Wallace into penning a lyric inspired by “an old Finnish fairy tale he’d once heard about an island where the snow tasted of sugar”.

"The man himself [has] finally emerged from the cloud of unknowing, a ludicrous, absurd, brilliant Tin Pan Alley genius," Stuart Lee suggests of Lee Hazlewood, and as Hazlewood himself would doubtless acknowledge, Wyndham Wallace – or Bubba, as he now probably prefers to be known – has helped facilitate that. The pleasingly unconventional Lee, Myself & I might in fact be two life stories for the price of one, but it dusts down the Hazlewood legend and makes it shine.

James McNair writes for Mojo magazine and The Independent.