The opening paragraphs of Stewart Lee's foreword to Lee, Myself & I
"All writing is, to some extent, autobiography. It’s an especially egoless writer who can remove all traces of themselves, their own hopes, their own agenda, entirely from their work. In the late 80s, working as a botanical fact-checker, I read Mao-era Chinese plant directories whose pedagogic compilers had made even the natural processes of flowering shrubs fit their own views on the social order.
Wyndham Wallace’s book about the American singer-songwriter Lee Hazlewood, Lee, Myself & I, acknowledges the role of the subjective writer in its very title, as he inserts himself, Boswell-style, into the final act of the story of a more significant figure. From the outset, Wallace admits that the observer and the observed are, in his tale, inextricably intertwined.
Who, then, was Lee Hazlewood? If you were a mainstream pop consumer of the 60s and 70s, maybe you noticed his name as a writing credit on Nancy Sinatra’s ageless ‘These Boots Are Made For Walkin’’, a staple of Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart’s Saturday morning requests show. If you were an underground indie-rock consumer of the 80s and 90s then you’d have seen that same writing credit attached to a slowly resurfacing song called ‘Some Velvet Morning’, covered by Thin White Rope, Lydia Lunch, and Primal Scream.
But you’d rarely have been able to hear Hazlewood’s originals, their holy dirty realist visions suffused with a sexual mysticism and fatalistic humour none of the interpreters’ versions come close to. More revered rock names would plunder Hazlewood’s back catalogue—The Fall, Nick Cave, Megadeth—but in the pre-internet days it remained impossible to simply google your way to enlightenment. Then, gradually, the silver-disc reissues of Hazlewood’s own work began creeping out, and the man himself finally emerged from the cloud of unknowing, a ludicrous, absurd, brilliant Tin Pan Alley genius."
Lee, Myself & I is published on May 19. Order here.
