A couldn’t-have-been-foreseen new archival release by the late, great Lee Hazlewood is about to come out. Sourced from an unlabeled tape that was recently discovered (!), 400 Miles From L.A. 1955-56 is a set of demos Hazlewood recorded when he was just starting out. These are intimate and revealing recordings of the young Lee—and Dangerous Minds has a preview.
In the mid 1950s, Lee Hazlewood was married with a young family, and working as a disc jockey for a Phoenix radio station. But he was also an aspiring songwriter, having picked up the craft in 1953. The following year, he met guitarist Duane Eddy, and the duo Eddy was a part of cut two Hazlewood compositions for a 45, which Lee had pressed onto vinyl. In ’55, Hazlewood started taking bus trips to Los Angeles to pitch his songs to record companies. Time and again, he’d get rejected, then get back on the bus and head home to Phoenix. Realizing this approach wasn’t working, Lee came up with Plan B.
Hazlewood started his own label, Viv Records, with the idea that various artists would cover his songs. Viv put out eight singles, but none were successful, so again, Lee moved on. He signed a deal with the MCI label, which led to the release of his song “The Fool” by rockabilly singer Sanford Clark. The track was a big hit, cracking the top ten. Lee Hazlewood was now on the right path.
Trouble is a Lonesome Town (1963) ended up being Lee’s first LP, though it wasn’t intended as such. Lee submitted the album’s demos to Mercury Records, thinking the material would be recorded by another artist, but the label wanted to release it as is. Hazlewood was now a songwriter and an artist, something he hadn’t planned on. Trouble is Lonesome Town is about the various characters that inhabit the fictional town of Trouble—a country concept album released years before rock acts started putting out records of this type. Trouble revealed that at this early stage Hazlewood was already a great storyteller, songwriter, and yes, artist, with a deep, distinctive southern drawl of a voice.
400 Miles From L.A. 1955-56 illustrates that Lee was a actually a significant talent long before his debut full-length arrived, and only just a couple of years after he started writing songs. The full Trouble concept is here in an early draft, while the other half of the collection is a set of strong tunes, many of which are previously unknown in Hazlewood’s oeuvre. One such number is “Five Thousand and One,” and it’s one of my favorites from the set. Over the course of the recording, Lee sings in a manner that’s atypical for him, but oh-so-pleasingly strange.
Hear the premiere, after the jump…