In 1963 Lee Hazlewood – the iconoclast’s iconoclast – recorded a concept album: Trouble is a Lonesome Town. Like much of Hazlewood’s output, it found a limited audience at a time when the pop music charts were dominated by The Beatles, Bob Dylan and a swag of disposable pop artists thankfully written out of the annals of music history.
Over four decades after Hazlewood recorded it, Charles Normal found the album in a second hand record bin in Oslo, where Normal was living at the time. Fascinated by the album – including the resonance between its central themes of geographical and cultural exploration and Normal’s own time as a travelling musician – Normal set about bringing Trouble Is a Lonesome Town back to life.
Held together by a Spaghetti Western-meets-Beat-narrative, and with a supporting cast that includes Frank Black, Trouble Is a Lonesome Town is part historical reflection, part sociological musing, part musicological meander. There’s Morricone-styling in Long Black Train, rock’n’roll Joplin ramblings of Son of a Gun, brass-imbued indie folk of We All Make the Flowers Grow and good ol’ boy country rock in Run Boy Run. Six Feet of Chain is coffee shop folk taken south of the Mason-Dixon line; The Railroad is Bosanova rock in its ideal railroad guise. Look at the Woman is dark and dirty, in a West Coast rock sort of a way; Peculiar Guy is a camp version of Lynrd Skynrd.
The dirty Southern title track brings Hazlewood’s journey to an end; the metaphors have taken us through the proverbial good, the bad and ugly of the American Wild West. You assume Hazlewood’s focus was as much allegorical as it was musical. But then again, with Lee Hazlewood you never really know.
BY PATRICK EMERY
Best Track: Trouble Is a Lonesome Town
If You Like These, You’ll Like This: LEE HAZLEWOOD, obviously, but you’ll also contemplate the links with KING GIZZARD AND THE LIZARD WIZARD’s recent concept album
In A Word: Lee
