Such was the quality of his growly voice and loopy arrangements that the first time I heard him, I stopped what I was doing (flipping through a row of tattered records probably) and wondered, “Who is this guy?” Arthur Lee’s band, Love, had that effect on me too. Perhaps significantly, both men achieved their signature idiosyncratic sounds in roughly the same fertile era of the ’60s. Now, a year and a day apart, they’re both gone. Last month, pundits had been bemoaning the dearth of successors to filmic greats Antonioni and Bergmann, finding only faint echoes to their legacy. But at the risk of heresy, the two Lees may represent a greater loss. Products of their environment – a sort of Wild West of creative experimentalism – both men dove headlong into the contradictory impulses swirling around their troubled minds and presented the jumbled portraits seemingly intact.

Some velvet morning when I’m straight.

I’m going to open up your gate.

And maybe tell you ‚ About Phaedra

And how she gave me life

And how she made it end

(Some Velvet Morning, 1967)

In those opening lines to possibly his greatest song, we get a glimpse of his approach to the art of songwriting: grandiose themes propelled by the most straightforward emotions—sent soaring, in this case, by impossibly dramatic string arrangements. I still get shivers when I hear it. And like the music on Love’s belatedly seminal Forever Changes, his songs somehow maintain the shock of the new and specter of the unexpected, despite groove-wearing multiple listens.

There was a danger to what each ego-mad creator was doing. In Arthur Lee’s case, the risk was madness and violence—both realized. For Hazlewood, the danger with an approach that was like candy-coated dynamite was always going to be ridicule and obscurity. Again, both eventualities were never far from the surface. He had no hesitation in filling his albums with cornball sentiment (“Sugar Town”) or desperately maudlin self-Cowboy in Sweden loathing. Both moods usually inured from self-seriousness by an inborn tone of ironic, amused detachment.

With old Arthur Lee, on the other hand, his detours into sunny-eyed optimism (“Hummingbirds hum, why do they hum, little girls wearing / Pigtails in the morning”) carried with them the menace of a mentally unbalanced soul who could crack at any minute. Look at the distance he travels in the opening lines of a Forever Changes track—from mundane self-involvement to violent impulse in nothing flat, including the most brilliant—and possibly only—reference to snot in rock ‘n’ roll.

Oh, the snot has caked against my pants

It has turned into crystal

There’s a bluebird sitting on a branch

I guess I’ll take my pistol

(Live and Let Live, Forever Changes; 1967)

Inevitably, both men succumbed to the pressures of fame, limited though they were. Arthur Lee ended up in jail; Hazlewood fled to Sweden.

Hazlewood’s now famous exile is responsible for one of the greatest concept albums ever: Cowboy in Sweden, officially the accompaniment to a Nordic TV special. Unofficially, it’s the soundtrack to the greatest film never made. Going beyond even the gravel-and-honey quality of the duets he famously made with Nancy Sinatra, his low-toned mournful lyrics, uttered with the world-weariness of a geriatric, collide with his angelic-voiced female Swedish counterpart to evoke a May-December fling of devastating emotional intensity.

So while Antonioni and Bergmann are on some level irreplaceable, newer versions of Lee Hazlewood or Arthur Lee are simply inconceivable.

Crawdaddy.com