This is turning out to be a theme week built around items that aren’t conservative, but still rate our attention. Lee Hazlewood certainly did a lot to stand out during the 1960s. There were likely many members of the Silent Majority who were thankful for the songwriter’s manly virtues amongst the flower-power hit parade. Frank M. Robinson wrote a great short story called “A Life In The Day Of,” wherein a calculating white-robed hippie is upstaged by a cowboy with a droopy mustache named Lee. That was a proper tribute.

Anyway, Lee Hazlewood is dead, and we can’t really claim him for the Right. “No Train To Stockholm” is a great anti-war song about Hazlewood heading off to Sweden with his son to avoid the draft. (Never mind that the kid was born in 1955.) “The Girl On Death Row” is about a poor lady who’s executed unjustly, and let’s politely forget “Baghdad Knights”—as heard on Hazlewood’s farewell album, Cake or Death, released earlier this year.

But the majority of Hazlewood’s touching tunes were celebrations of old-fashioned values. Here are the lyrics to “I Might Break Even,” in which we can at least appreciate Hazlewood’s libertarian bent:

        My old barn’s about to cave in
        It’ll fall right on the house I’m in
        My burial insurance is overdue again
        Still, I might break even this year

        I got me a job and I had it made
        I worked three weeks but I didn’t get paid
        Somebody stole my only chicken at late
        Still, I might break even this year

        Well, a taxman says he don’t mean me no harm
        But if I don’t pay, they’re gonna take my farm
        If they do that, just as sure as you’re born
        I might break even this year

        A Republican’s vote fifty cents and a wink
        A Democrat’s vote a dollar and a drink
        If I vote for ’em both, I’ll do better, I think
        And I might break even this year

Make it your own: “I Might Break Even” is from his 1965 album N.S.V.I.P. (Not So Very Important People)—which, sadly, isn’t one of several Hazlewood titles about to be reissued in a few weeks. Don’t be fooled by The Complete MGM Recordings. It’s a fine collection, but recycles N.S.V.I.P.’s artwork without any of the songs.

And, as further tribute to Mr. Hazlewood, here’s the complete text to 1969’s “A Life In The Day Of.”

 

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