FEATURE:
Groovelines
Richard Marx - Hazard
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BACK on 28th January…
Richard Marx’s classic song, Hazard, turned thirty. Many might know him best for Right Here Waiting, though I particularly love Hazard. Released as a single from his third studio album, Rush Street (1991), it is brilliant storytelling. You do not get many songs today that have this narrative. Something that is like a murder mystery. The song is about a woman named Mary who mysteriously disappears, and the lead (Marx) is accused of orchestrating Mary's disappearance. He claims his innocence. There is intrigue, twists and suspects in a song about the death of a pure and loved woman. If that were not intriguing and arresting all by itself, the beautiful vocal harmonies in the chorus and the instantly memorable melody hooks you and stays in the head! In April 1992, Hazard peaked at nine on the US Billboard Hot 100. It went on to top the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart, becoming Marx's third number-one single on that chart. I want to bring in a couple of features about the beautiful and haunted Hazard. You wonder what inspired the song and where why Hazard, Nebraska was chosen as the setting. The Prompt wrote about how Richard Marx’s Hazard was a rare songwriting addition to the true crime genre. It remains quite an underrated song. Marx himself, to me, is one of the most original and compelling songwriters ever:
“The song is a brooding meditation on the murder of a young woman named Mary. The crime takes place in the town of Hazard, Nebraska. The protagonist/singer and Mary are friends, possibly more, who often take walks along the river that runs through the town. When Mary goes missing one night, our protagonist finds himself a suspect. This is not surprising, since we learn from the opening stanza how the townspeople had always regarded him with suspicion.
My mother came to Hazard when I was just seven
Even then the folks in town said with prejudiced eyes
That boy’s not right…
The lyrics are admittedly a bit vague. Almost generic. But that is part of the appeal. Mary is any and every victim. Hazard is any and every small town that ever found itself the stage for a murder. It’s Holcomb, Saxtown, and Manitowoc County.
It’s also an underappreciated link in the evolution of the True Crime genre that starts with Truman Capote and runs through to our present time in podcasts like Serial and documentaries like The Keepers.
Well, technically speaking it’s not “True” Crime. There is, to be sure, a real town in Nebraska called Hazard*.
*The story of how Richard Marx picked the name is a fascinating subplot. As he explained in an interview with Songfact:
“That’s the funniest part of the whole song. Because the song was all written except for those two syllables. So I had the opening two lines of ‘My mother came to duh-duh,’ and the rest of the song was finished except for the Nebraska line. And then the Nebraska line actually came because the syllables of it and the sound of it sang so well: ‘and leave this old Nebraska town.’ They sang so well to me that I was like, OK, I’m sold on Nebraska. This is way before the Internet, so what I did was I called the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce and got some very nice woman on the phone and I said, ‘here’s my fax number.’ I was in Los Angeles, and I said, ‘Can you fax me a list of every town and city and municipality in the state of Nebraska?’ So all of a sudden just page after page after page is coming through my fax machine. And I took the pages, I think there were 16, 17 pages worth of tons of names on each page. And I threw them up in the air and picked a random sheet and literally put my finger on the page, and it was Hazard”.
The lyrics do offer this mystery. I do wonder why Marx’s hero would ever be suspected of a crime like murder. I always had the sheriff pegged as the culprit – jealous as he was by Mary’s affections towards someone else. The black-and-white video for Hazard is beautifully shot and told. This Wikipedia article provides further details:
“The music video opens with the protagonist cutting his hair by the side of a creek. Suddenly the ghost of a woman is seen hovering over the creek, accompanying the haunting synths and melodies of the music. Several older men are then seen teasing the protagonist as a child with his mother in the background; the description of his character as "not right" may imply slight mental illness or simply being different. The video then shows Mary, who is depicted as having features very similar to those of the protagonist's mother. Various scenes in this sequence can cause the viewer to become unsure about the nature of their relationship. As the story continues, the town's sheriff is shown taking photographs of the couple and following one or both of them in his vehicle.
It is implied that the protagonist goes to see Mary but catches her making love to an unidentified person as the police car arrives on the scene. Again, the video flashes back to his childhood, where he sees his mother committing adultery. In present time, the sheriff arrives and sees the protagonist, who then flees, leaving his scarf behind on the branch of a bush. He returns home and weeps about Mary.
Mary is then shown alone near the river spoken of in the song. She turns to face the camera, with a look of surprise on her face, and it is then made to look as if she is lying in water. The next morning (as the song states), several people assist in arresting the male character in connection with her disappearance.
While in the interrogation room, the protagonist is shown a white cloth, which the sheriff identifies as the item used to strangle Mary. He then denies that he and Mary were romantically involved, and the sheriff asks if Marx was jealous. At this point, the video reveals a larger picture of the protagonist's childhood: that after his mother's affair, his father leaves her for another woman. He is then shown as a child running out of a burning house, although it is unclear whose it is or if he actually set the fire alight.
Locals are shown vandalizing the male character's home, breaking its windows and setting fire to it. It is implied that he cannot be proved guilty when the sheriff drops him off at his ruined home. As the video ends, a woman walking by covers her young son's eyes, again implying he is an outcast or implicated in her disappearance. The video ends with the protagonist leaving the town once and for all by hitchhiking.
The final scene shows the male character remembering the girl saying to him: "You know, everyone says that I should be afraid of you. But I am not”.
One of those songs that, once heard, keeps coming to mind and you cannot help but playing! I am not sure whether Marx has ever revealed who was the killer in the song and how much of the song’s setting, characters and lyrics were based (albeit loosely) around personal events. Not the murder part, but the attraction to Mary (whether she was based around a crush or young love). A beautifully told and performed song released as a single from 1992, Hazard is a song that everyone should approach and embrace…
WITHOUT caution.