Search - Lee Hazlewood :: Trouble Is a Lonesome Town

A Play on the Western Genre

Kurt Harding | Boerne TX | 12/02/2003

(3 out of 5 stars)

"It took me a while to warm to this CD. The narrative introductions to some of the songs are so cornball I cringed on first hearing them. But then, there is something about the album that keeps bringing me back. It must be the mixture of wry humor and cold truth mixed in with the utter corniness of it all that does it.
Lee Hazlewood is a man of many talents, but it wasn't a sure thing this early on that being a singer/songwriter was one of them. But the concept of this album was unusual then, and its unusual today. I don't know what the sales figures were when Trouble Is A Lonesome Town was released in 1963, but I'd wager they were modest. Its looking back at the whole of his career that make his music so compelling now.
The characters Hazlewood talks and sings about on this recording are mostly exaggerated types you may find in a cheesy TV western or B movie. Guys like Emery Zickafuce Brown and Sleepy Gilloreeth are names that could only come from the pen of a second-rate script writer. And then there is the Indian (full-blooded, of course) who would drink the embalming fluid if Gilloreeth the undertaker took his eye off him for an instant. Not exactly PC, but Hazlewood is half-Indian himself, so we can let that slide.
My favorites are the humorously truthful "We All Make the Flowers Grow", The Railroad, the elegiac Look At That Woman, and the opaque Peculiar Guy. For that matter, if you can get by the narrations, most of the songs are at least fairly decent. But then, my tastes in music range wide and deep, so heed this proviso.
If you have not heard this CD before, you need to be a pretty hardcore Hazlewood fan to really enjoy this "play on the western genre". A couple are gems, but the rest may take several listens before you warm to them. I give it 4 stars for originality, but overall the music is a solid three."

It's....different.

08/25/2003

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Lee Hazelwood's solo albums are, shall we say, an acquired taste. HE probably was as serious as can be when he was making them, but many listeners are likely to think that their legs are being mightly pulled by songs like "We All Make The Little Flowers Grow." Which I think is what makes this album work in the end...you can take it either as a serious concept album or as the most mawkish put-on ever, but it's entertaining on either level...and I doubt you'll end up playing it only once."

It's a place to be born, it's a place to live, it's a place

Grigory's Girl | NYC | 07/27/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is Lee Hazlewood's first solo album. It's one that's not really talked about much, unlike Requiem for an Almost Lady or Cowboy in Sweden. Some think it's total corn. I happen to really dig it. It has the look, feel, and sound of the best of traditional folk/country music. It's a concept album of sorts, about a town called Trouble and its colorful inhabitants. It feels like an old time country radio show, which is probably intentional, as Hazlewood got his start in radio years back. Despite the occasional corniness (which I can forgive), it has some of Lee's most moving and poetic songs, like Long Black Train, Son of a Gun, We All Make the Flowers Grow, and Run Boy Run. Lee's narration before each song is funny and amusing (and light years away from the dark narration of his later masterwork Requiem for an Almost Lady), and this is a really funny, sad, and brilliant work. It's definitely Lee Hazlewood, and this is where it all started for Lee's amazing solo career."