Translations:
Dutch
Terry Lee Hale
The "Unofficial" BiographyThe Short Stuff:
1953 - San Antonio, Texas: Born into an army family Terry Lee attended 10 schools in 10 different cities. After finishing high school in Yakima, Washington he set out for Seattle , then California and continued from there to travel in the States all the while learning to play guitar and write songs. TLH has worked as a carpenter, truck driver, farm and ranch hand, cook, laborer, bar tender, booking agent and various other occupations to support himself, his daughter (as a single parent) and his music. From the first time he heard Bill Haley's "Rock Around The Clock" he wanted to be a guitar player and indeed, bought his first Stella when he was 14. Terry Lee has lived and traveled extensively in America and, since 1993, in Europe as well. Currently keeping a house in Seattle where he has lived since January of 1984, he spends most of his days writing and touring in Europe. While in Europe he resides in France. His first appearances on record were on 1987's - "Lowlife" compilation from Ironwood Records and the following year with the song "Dead Is Dead" on SubPop 200.
Now, there are 12 Cd's released in Europe, all of them on German recording labels starting in 1993 with " Oh What A World" on Normal Records. The next 8 CD's ( Frontier Model, The Wilderness Years, Tornado Alley, Leaving West, Old Hand, Blue Room, Frozen, Tender Loving Hell: The Best Of…) were with Glitterhouse and the last release (Celebration What For) in 2004 with Blue Rose. Also with Blue Rose was one self-titled release called Hardpan and one live CD/DVD - Hardpan Live - featuring Chris Burroughs, Joseph Parsons Todd Thibaud and Terry Lee Hale.
The Long Story:
Hank Williams died the year I was born. Make room for whom? May 12, 1953. San Marcos, Texas in a flat above a bakery. Very, very hot and right in the middle of Texas no less. The hard way for an 18-year-old air force private and a 19-year-old farmers daughter from Norwegian stock to begin a family. I asked him (much later) if it was love? He said he thought so at the time but he wasn't so sure now. I said, yeah I knew the feeling. I don't remember much of those early and hard years. My pa coming in and killing a black spider hanging over my bed. Sneaking down the stairs to watch Zorro on some old B&W television set. Tuna fish casserole. The smell of barns and the hollow of some long dead cedar tree. Christmas and Santa Claus on the roof. My father drinking beer on the wkds and playing brushes on the footstool along with the LP's. The trip out of Texas in the back of an old Nash Rambler with my baby sister. Ferries across a very big river (Columbia?), Hank on the radio (he would always be in and out of my life, always) along with Fats Domino, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Jim Reeves. The long drive up to Washington State and a new life for him. I never saw my Ma again until I was 16 and by then she was just a stranger to me. Too late.
Seeing my first guitar player in a Pentecostal church my sister and I were made to go to every Sunday, the church being set in the middle of some cheap swampland. The preachers name was Bear and along with his wife they had 4 little Bear children. No money there for a piano but I do remember that little red guitar he played (I 'm sure now it must have been a Fender Mustang!) and my utter fascination with the sound. She played trumpet! My older cousin had a lot of 45's and I'd sneak in when he was gone and play all the guitar records, especially liking Duane Eddy and his song "40 Miles of Bad Road". I found a 78 (?) of Bill Haley's "Rock Around The Clock" on the floor in some bedroom closet, which I plumb wore out! I remember seeing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show in '63 (Sunday night 7PM?) and thinking that's what I want to do! Begging my cousin to show me how to play "King of the Road". The hours of practice on an old nylon string guitar: That first D and G chord. Clarinet in school band and the beautiful music that all those inept children managed to honk out. Me, an Army brat- 10 schools, 12 years. No real friends but a good solid imagination and comfortableness with being alone I carry with me to this day. Finally high school in Yakima, Washington home of Gary Puckett and The Union Gap, Oletta Adams, Raymond Carver and my first real friends.
Late 60's and I came awake and alive. My first band- hours and hours of jamming as loud as we could. We called ourselves "Jess" and what the hell did that mean? My first live rock concert was The Youngbloods and opener Mason Profit. I wasn't exactly sure of what I saw but I was sure hungry for more. I never could figure out how to play other peoples songs so I started writing my own. "Sleeping With Mother Earth", TLH 1970 (and I still remember the chords!) was the very first good one. I bought my first guitar with the money I made from picking fruit during the summer with my grandpa. A big Stella that I eventually put my foot through in frustration a few years later. I got kicked out of High School ("graduated early") at 17- too radical they said and "glad of it", said I. Skipped on down to San Francisco and Berkeley, California where I saw my first live blues show - John Lee Hooker. Also Van Morrison, The Grateful Dead, Hot Tuna, Elvin Bishop, etc. San Francisco was too close to what I had run from though (it was pretty dismal there by '72 anyway) and so the thumb, my guitar and I made our way to the East Coast and the great state of Maine. There I was introduced to the sounds of Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Skip James, Odetta, Light'ning Hopkins, Blind Blake and my favorite, Reverend Gary Davis.
A songwriter living on Cape Cod named George Gritzbach (Flying Fish Records) with great patience showed me how to play Elizabeth Cotton's song, "Freight Train". I spent the next year learning how to play that song and a whole lot of others. My very first live show was on the Cape along side of George. I'd bought an old Gretch Tennasian guitar before I'd left Washington for $90. Mint condition and I' m sure worth a damn site more than the little amplifier, mixing board, microphone, and naked speakers I traded it for! But I wanted to be a solo musician and I needed a PA so I traded that beautiful guitar, built some speaker boxes and got my very own gig! 3 years I lived out there but I ended up broke and so hitched back to Washington to work the fruit and get up another bankroll.
I ended up in a Country &Western band for one year in Yakima. 6 nights per week, 4 sets per night, $20 dollars a night. Stockman's Bar & Grill. It's gone now of course but… Mostly all cover songs that Fred sang (I was the "lead" player and Bob Hicks was a kick-snare stand up drummer) in the style of Marty Robbins but I did sing a couple of my own and a few Johnny Cash songs. It was a great education for a young guitarist for sure! A short stay after that in southern Oregon working the hop harvest and saving money. Back to the east coast for another stab at the Folk world but it was much too stifling for me and so I took off to Chicago along with my first custom-made Froggy Bottom guitar (which would be stolen from me years later out of the trunk of my car in Seattle).
3 days after my arrival in the Windy City I walked into a small blues bar carrying my guitar, sporting my western threads and cowboy hat. "Elsewhere on Lincoln" was the name of that bar and they are still there today although in a larger and nicer space. A pretty woman sitting right by the door at the bar said, "Hey there sugar, want to be my guitar player"? She was kinda laughing when she said it but I said yes. I had just met my future wife and singing partner for what would be the next 6 years of my life. She sang in the style of Lil' Greene, Janis Joplin (how she hated that connection but it was true) or a Patsy Cline. A big, ole country girl from Michigan already with two small children but I didn't give a damn. I fell in love and thought I'd found myself the perfect partner! I continued to travel only now with a small family. I was trying to absorb and learn the many different styles and sounds that make America the great musical country she is. Chicago, Boulder, back to Austin (where my daughter Liza Lee was born in '77), up to Lansing, Denver, Yakima, Denver.
We were a duo called Hale and Sarow (pronounced sorrow). I wrote all the songs and she sang 'em with me backing her up plus a few covers thrown in for the bar crowds we mostly played for. $100 dollars a night we got way back then and I'd get up in the morning's 5 days a week to go work as a carpenter building other peoples homes. I didn't care though. I was in love, and doing what I wanted and getting better every day doing it. Finally though, I think all those miles and hours took their toll on us and I left her in Denver.
Along with my guitar, I took my daughter Liza Lee (age 4) by mutual consent and we headed for Mexico where I thought I could find some peace in a little beach hotel or tourist place where someone might be interested in a 'genuine' American songwriter. Ha! I (mostly) left my guitar in the case for the next few months and just watched and listened to the wonderfully talented musicians and singers of Mexico. Los Angeles was the next stop for us but with no car and no clubs for songwriters (1983) this was a very tough city. I wanted and needed to be playing again and Liza needed to be in school. So once again we headed back to the Northwest. I knew I could at least find work there and I'd heard the school system in Seattle was pretty good (it was).
I landed in Seattle, Washington January of 1984 at the age of 30 years old. I had a 7-year daughter and owned 1 guitar, a handful of pretty good songs and the clothes in one suitcase. Seattle would become the place I would live in the longest. Those middle 80's years for me were good ones I remember. Liza was growing up healthy and strong and was happy in school and at home. I was writing songs like crazy and practicing all the time. I still had to work as a carpenter for a while but I also started working part time as a bartender on the weekends and supplementing that income as a booking agent. And always, of course, gigging whenever and wherever I could.
One thing I liked about Seattle back then was that there wasn't a real heavy pressure to be or sound like anything or anyone. We were so far from everywhere (geographically that is) that you could just about invent any kind of sound or noise you wanted to. This was to be the perfect atmosphere for me to put together all those different sounds and styles that I'd been hearing and collecting over the past years. The audiences were small, the clubs were few but it didn't seem to matter so much then. (Although perhaps over this long distance of time my memories are distorted and a lot of those frustrations of living in the wastelands have been forgotten!). I met a drummer (Chris Adams) in late '84 and we started a little electric band calling ourselves "Need-A-Bass"!
I worked because a few shows later we met Jack Endino who would come aboard as our bass player and we renamed ourselves "The Ones". Garage rock at its best I think and one day I hope to re-release the 17-song cassette/LP we made. Also I continued to work as a booking agent (5-0 Tavern, The Central, Squid Row, Crocodile Café, Weathered Wall) and over the next 7 or 8 years I had an excellent front row seat for a real exciting musical time in Seattle. That is another story and has been told better by others but the best part for me (besides the music) was that I met and made some great and lasting friends along the way. Anyway, The Ones closed down after 1 year. I tried to put a few more bands back together with Chris but we couldn't find the right combination of players. Quite naturally then I started really concentrating on developing my open tuning style of solo guitar playing and continuing my songwriting efforts.
The middle 80's was the time when the world started to pay attention to rocking "acoustic" singer- songwriters. Some early pioneers from those days I remember being inspired by were Peter Case, Luka Bloom, Violent Femmes, Billy Bragg, Richard Thomson and Michelle Shocked. I started opening up for local rock bands as a solo act in the late '80's (i.e.- Walkabouts, Screaming Trees, Soundgarden, Danger Bunny, Green Pajamas, Young Fresh Fellows, Skin Yard, Pure Joy, etc) and worked on making as much noise as possible so that I wouldn't get killed or booed off the stage. I loved playing loud too!! Sneaking into studios with musician buddies and engineer friends Bruce Calder and Johnny Rubato during off-hours, I managed to make the first of my 4 solo cassette/LP's entitled "Fools Like Me" in 1988. (A compilation of all of those early tapes was later released on Glitterhouse as "Wilderness Years").
Finally in 1992 I got a phone call late one night from the German label Normal Records asking me if I would be interested in releasing my latest LP cassette on their label (Europe only). Of course I said yes and the rest is history as they say. My time as a booking agent and bartender were (and needed to be!) over. The city had moved from being a backwater, end-of- the-road city onto center international stage. Thousands of bands and scensters were moving there along with all the other vultures. I had a lot of frustrations about all of it, both personal and professional. My debut album in 1993"Oh What A World" was to be a prayer answered. I released just that one Cd with Normal before moving over to the Glitterhouse label, which would be my home for the next 10 years. 2004's release "Tender Loving Hell- the Best of Terry Lee Hale" was a compilation of all of the 8 CD's I released with them but it would be the last. That Cd included as a bonus the now out of print "Oh What A World". Cycle complete.I first came to Europe in the spring of 1993 as support act for a Walkabouts tour(10 shows I guess it was). I went back that next fall for my own tour and while on that tour I made some new friends at one of the gigs we were doing in the Bretagne city of Concarneau. After the show that night I was invited to return and visit with them, which I did. I was offered and then accepted an empty flat to use during my subsequent visits.
That offer and gift was basically the how and why I was able to start a life in Europe. I was also very lucky to have had the freedom to say yes! I still keep my home in Seattle (although sublet now) and visit there regularly as the city is still important for me. Most of my family is gone now but those few that remain are all located in the Northwest. Liza is married and with a 5-year daughter all of her own. She family lives in New Haven, CT. I've since moved on from CC but I'm still happily based in "old Europe".
In 2001 I joined forces with Blue Rose artists Joseph Parsons, Todd Thibaud and Chris Burroughs to form a project band named Hardpan and we released one well-received, self-entitled CD in 2002. In 2004 I signed with Blue Rose Records and released my 10th CD entitled "Celebration What For" in March. That record was recorded in Zagreb, Croatia using Croatian musicians and production.
I continue to travel and work all over Europe as a solo act and also doing the occasional band tour. Once or twice a year I return to the States with my guitar and continue to make efforts there with my music and songs. As has been said before "what a long strange trip it's been". I wouldn't have had it any other way though. So far it's been a very rich and rewarding life. My blessings are many and I do count them. I still very much enjoy the traveling, writing, playing my friends and the Life. See ya down the road!
