He told me that he'd spent the first twenty years of his life in Sweden, and often I tried to picture him against a crisp Scandinavian landscape. I tried to see him on skis, or living peacefully with his family in some cold mountain village. From the little he said of Sweden I gathered he'd lived in a small town and his parents had been comfortable people with enough money to send him to college in America.
He spent two years at NYU, living in the Village at one of those residence hotels that cater to foreigners. This apparently unhinged him. Once he was arrested on Sixth Avenue, he said, for pissing on a fireplug like a dog. It cost him ten days in the Tombs, and when he got out he left immediately for New Orleans. He floundered there for a while, then got a job on a freighter headed for the Orient. He worked on boats for several years before drifting into journalism. Now, thirty-three years old and looking fifty, his spirit broken and his body swollen with drink, he bounced from one country to another, hiring himself out as a reporter and hanging on until he was fired.
Disgusting as he usually was, on rare occasions he showed flashes of a stagnant intelligence. But his brain was so rotted with drink and dissolute living that whenever he put it to work it behaved like an old engine that had gone haywire from being dipped in lard.
--Hunter S. Thompson, from The Rum Diary, 1959
Photo credits:
Swedish Skiers
Sad Hunter
Lee Hazlewood's last recording was a spoken word piece set to the music of the Icelandic band Amiina. It's a melancholy little song and Lee's grandfatherly, road-weary vocals are perfect. Not found on an official album, the song was released only as a single after Hazlewood's death and has subsequently gone out of print. Apparently, it was played in public for the first time at Lee Hazlewood's memorial service.
The video for the song is the real treat. It's beautifully filmed and mountain-y and snowy enough to be a permanent fixture at Home Is Where Your Skis Is.
The connection between the band and the man isn't quite clear. The original version of the song "Hilli" was recorded for Amiina's first album, Kurr. Hazlewood's lyrics to "At the Top of the World" somehow made it back to them where they re-recorded "Hilli" and added the vocals. In addition, Amiina recorded a version of Hazlewood's "Leather & Lace" from his 1970 album Cowboy in Sweden. All of it good, all of it deserves to be downloaded and put into constant rotation. Have at it and long live Lee Hazlewood!
He couldn't pin down any specific reason, and didn't bother to repeat the official government line about preserving knowledge of ourselves. Instead, he offered: "It's something you can do where you can actually discover something. There aren't many ways to do that anymore." And that made sense to me. Alvin has fashioned a life that has supported his quest to climb new peaks, to plumb new caves, to ski new slopes no one else has tried before. It's his way of understanding the world, of ordering the universe. It's his religion, his science, his art, to orient himself bodily in places that reveal new views. Rock art sites provide him the opportunity to stand where others long past have been, and to see what they've seen in a time less obscured by civilization.
--William L. Fox, from The Void, the Grid, & the Sign, 2000
Photo credits:
Rock Carving Top
Rock Carving Bottom
