Lee Hazlewood - Strung Out On Something New: The Reprise Recordings (2008)

A curious thing about the legacy of cult weirdo Lee Hazlewood is how it's been shaped by the mere availability -- or better still, the unavailability -- of his material: all of it was difficult to find for a long, long time but as it started to eke out on CD in the late '90s, it was the late '60s and early '70s recordings, even the early sides for MGM, that appeared, never the Reprise Recordings that perhaps accounted for his strongest impression in the public in the '60s. Rhino Handmade rectified this wrong in 2007 with the release Strung Out on Something New: The Reprise Recordings -- subsequently released in a less limited incarnation in the U.K. -- which rounds up all of his Reprise recordings apart from his duets with Nancy Sinatra: the acoustic 1965 LP The N.S.V.I.P.'s, 1966's Friday's Child, 1968's Love and Other Crimes, plus two non-LP singles and a host of Hazlewood productions for other Reprise acts, including Jack Nitzsche, Duane Eddy, Sanford Clark, and Dino, Desi & Billy. There's a little bit of everything that Hazlewood dabbled in here, from ironic folk to spooky symphonic productions, but it mostly lays between those two extremes as he ambles through loping country-rock, tongue-in-cheek blues, weirdly arch supper club jazz, and melodramatic pop. There is much here to appreciate, sonically speaking: Hazlewood was a master of the studio and this was the era when he was at his peak, creating a sound that was super-slick yet strangely otherworldly, but he was arguably at his best when he was crafting these sounds for other artists, which is why it's quite welcome to have Strung Out on Something New filled out with productions. Here, it's possible to appreciate Hazlewood's imagination without (most) of his affectations getting in the way, as they do on his solo Reprise LPs. Certainly there are those who find the folk send-up of The N.S.V.I.P.'s clever and find the Americana of Friday's Child and Love and Other Crimes satiric, not kitsch, but Hazlewood at his heart always was a Hollywood huckster, existing primarily on the surface. This made for a great producer but a problematic recording artist, for his strengths battled his eccentric indulgences equally. For those in the cult, the eccentricities outweigh the indulgences, for those outside looking in, it is merely excessive, but Strung Out on Something New showcases these two tendencies better than any single Hazlewood package, so it's useful as a divining stick to sort out the two camps.