Lee Hazlewood’s first LP under his own name, ‘Trouble is a Lonesome Town’ in a sense functions as a chronologically incompatible bridge between the (ineffably wonderful) International Submarine Band sessions he oversaw a few years later and the far more louche / urban MGM albums that established his recording persona for good towards the end of the decade.

Lee’s eccentricities were already getting the better of him here though, and, for reasons best known to himself, he decided to corral his songs together into a sort of proto-concept album, with each track preceded by a ramblin’ spoken word introduction concerning the simple-minded populace of an isolated town named ‘Trouble’ (allegedly based on Hazlewood's own birthplace in Mannford, Oklahoma).

Unfortunately, these introductions – sometimes almost as long as the flawlessly concise songs they’re introducing – are fairly tedious, containing little of the dry wit and off-hand pessimism evidenced in the compositions themselves, and instead hewing toward a kind of cloying Lake-Wobegon-Days coziness. They’re good for one listen at best, and if subsequently scanning through them to get to the good bits on my mp3 player proves a bit of a pain, getting up every two and a half minutes to jog the needle on the original LP must have been absolutely infuriating - one good reason perhaps why ‘Trouble..’ faded into obscurity and Lee exited his deal with Mercury post-haste.

This, needless to say, is a shame, because when you do get to the songs on ‘Trouble..’, they are almost all excellent – disarmingly simple, two minute / three chord country songs that sound so instantly catchy and familiar, you’re amazed no one had written them before. Performed with tight, minimal backing and just enough off-kilter strangeness to keep you on your toes, the breeziness of the tunes and the cartoonish simplicity of the lyrics as ever plays trojan horse to the weird darkness beneath.

As an opener, ‘Long Black Train’verily owns the concept of writing a song entitled ‘Long Black Train’, Hazlewood’s voice crawling snake-like across the title just as beautifully as you might hope as the rhythm section walks the dog behind him; “ninety-nine years, is what he’ll get / I bet it feels like a hundred to Jim”. Yes, one track in on his debut album and I’m already far-gone in thrall to Hazlewoodism.

‘Son of a Gun’, ‘Run, Boy, Run’ and ‘Six Feet of Chain’ are all just as good – happy, laidback sketches of death and sex, imprisonment and criminality that see no reason to break the rhyme scheme or outstay their welcome. Hopefully I’m not just saying this due to the synchronicitous song title, but it’s easy to imagine The Vaselines playing this one a lot as they threw together the off-hand magic of tunes like ‘Ride Me Rory’; a similarly timeless, unhurried feel is very much in evidence.

I suppose it stands to reason that Johnny Cash was a big influence on the kind of style Hazlewood was gunning for here, and, given the Man in Black’s penchant for scooping up catchy, novelty country songs by the dozen during the ‘60s, it’s surprising that his people weren’t on the phone to Hazlewood’s publishers PDQ after this album’s release. (Hell, this stuff’s even in the right key, ferchrissake.) In a different world, I’d bet Cash could have ridden any of these numbers to the top of the charts, perhaps sending Lee’s career off on a rather different path in the process. As it is though, maybe JC, like most everyone else, just couldn’t be bothered to get through the spoken word bits. He was a busy man, after all. Pills to take, prisons to visit and all that.

Well, c’est la vie. Maybe in that world we’d never have gotten ‘Cowboy in Sweden’, or Nancy &  Lee, or ‘Requiem for an Almost Lady’. By plotting his own course straight to the land of the strange, Lee remained his own man, and… that’s the only it could be, I’m sure he’d agree, even if his bank balance didn’t.


I hear that at some point this year, there’s a sorta ‘cover album’ emerging on which various tedious indie-rock types re-record ‘Trouble is a Lonesome Town’ – a good idea actually I think, as these songs have tons of mileage left in ‘em (frankly, every band in the world could benefit from covering one). Details yonder.

Meanwhile, a resissue of the original with a ton of bonus tracks can currently be gotten from Light In The Attic.

Labels: album reviews, country, Lee Hazlewood