This article started as a Toppermost post. It grew and grew way beyond that. I’d written the Toppermost based on what I already had and knew, then had a knee operation and was in recovery. I spent the time of being confined to home and partly immobile, in researching, downloading the later (and very early) rarities which were new to me, and expanding the piece. It owes a massive debt to NancySinatra.com, which is full of information and quotes. Few if any artistes communicate with their fan base as she does.
The edited version is on Toppermost, where writers select their ten favourite songs. That’s not relevant here, but I will repeat the lis of ten (we all love lists), and add another ten as “shortlist.”
MY TOP TEN (chronologically):
These Boots Are Made for Walkin’
Sand
Summer Wine
Sugar Town
Something Stupid
Jackson
Some Velvet Morning
Arkansas Coal
Did You Ever?
Burnin’ Down The Spark
TEN MORE:
So Long Babe
How Does That Grab You Darlin’
Friday’s Child
Bang Bang
Hook and Ladder
Drummer Man
Annabell of Mobile
Kind of A Woman
Dolly & Hawkeye
Flowers
Nancy Sinatra. I hadn’t realized how much I liked her. I started with buying her Reprise 45s as they came out, and noticed right away that the B-sides were unusually strong; as good or better than the A sides. The bass sound was always incredible too. I was never a Frank Sinatra fan (Sorry). I was Bob Dylan & The Beatles generation and to me Frank Sinatra was a previous generation’s style and music. For decades Somethin’ Stupid was the only Frank Sinatra recording in the house (though I now have several albums … I got older and less blinkered in my tastes).
Nancy Sinatra’s critical reputation has suffered from a strong streak of rock snobbery. The first two editions of Rolling Stone Album Guide simply skipped her. The third gave her albums a dismissive two stars, then the fourth skipped her again. In The Heart & Soul of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles, Dave Marsh included Lee Hazlewood’s production of Rebel Rouser, then dissed his “silly duet” with Nancy on These Boots Are Made For Walking. OK, Dave, but a “duet” is a song with two singers. Lee does not sing on it. Maybe you should actually listen to it. In Rat Pack Confidential, Shawn Levy was gratuitously nasty mentioning ‘terrible songs,’ but was more interested in her shorts, boots and go-go dancers.
But the tide is changing, and things get better … in 2015 Rolling Stone placed Nancy & Lee ninth in their list of Twenty Greatest Duos of All Time. David Hepworth placed Summer Wine on his list of “Greatest B sides of all time” in 2018. He’s right.
Basically, she suffered because she was popular music aristocracy right from the start, and her elaborate musical arrangements indicated a silver spoon beginning.
In 1999 she was quoted:
NANCY: I’m still “Frank’s kid” which is absurd at this point.
She spoke to The Telegraph in 2004:
NANCY: My peers don’t care. To them, I’m Frank’s daughter and all I ever did right was to be born to him. I have never been accepted. I’ll never make the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They’re never going to let me in. They gave Barry Sadler the Grammy for Ballad of the Green Berets the same year that Boots came out. And who ever listens to that now?
Tim Geary interview, 14 June 2004
Another quote:
NANCY: I used to write three- and four-part harmonies for my YWCA club in high school. We used to win all the song contests. But people would say, ‘Look who her father is. He probably did the whole thing.
An astute comment is from Nancy Sinatra: Rock Goddess a 2004 article in The New York Times:
JODY ROSEN: In part, Ms. Sinatra was a victim of the cultural politics of her time. Rock ‘n’ roll divided the nation along generational lines, but Ms. Sinatra remained agnostic, a stubbornly independent hip square who kept a foot in both camps. Her high hemlines, big boots and tough-girl vocal style were nothing if not modern. But she also recorded standards, and she remained closely associated with her father, the towering symbol of the previous musical era. (The pair sang several duets, including the fizzy No. 1 hit “Somethin’ Stupid.”) From today’s perspective, her refusal to choose musical sides looks refreshingly cosmopolitan; but in the eyes of the first wave of rock critics, it placed her on the wrong side of the generational gulf.
New York Times, 26 September 2004
Most of the rock critics of the late 60s / 70s era were my age or slightly older, early R&B adopters, and we were prejudiced against the whole swingin’ rat pack Sinatra / Martin / Davis aura. It happens again and again with music. The first rock ‘n’ rollers dismissed the Swing era. We Beatles / Stones fans dismissed the era of teen idols named Jimmy, Bobby, Billy, Frankie, Johnny, Micky, Willy, Tony or Freddie. The punks dismissed prog. The indie bands dismissed the new romantics. That’s why a new, younger generation of listeners, musicians and critics have been able to take an unbiased view of her work and appreciate it properly.
Time dilutes rock snobbery. I remember when the rock snobs hated ABBA and The Carpenters, both now lauded. All these years later, with so many songs, so many albums, Nancy Sinatra’s quality as a singer is apparent. In terms of “second generation artists” I can’t think of any that were more successful, or more accomplished, than her.
It’s re-assessment time. Last year (2018) Bobbie Gentry’s box set Chickasaw Country Child was selected as Reissue of The Year by Mojo (and by me). It was near the top in every other roundup of releases. Nancy Sinatra is due just such a respectful and comprehensive box set, and I believe it would gain similar acclaim.
EARLY YEARS ON REPRISE
Frank Sinatra founded the Reprise label at the start of the 1960s – its first 45s appeared in the UK (distributed by Pye) in September 1961. Sinatra had been negotiating to buy Verve and was beaten to it by MGM, and in retaliation set up his own label with several disgruntled Verve employees, most notably the accountant, Mo Ostin. Nancy Sinatra signed for Reprise in 1961. It remained Frank Sinatra’s own label, until 1963 when he sold it to Warner for 1.5 million plus a third share of the combined company. Warner saw buying out Reprise as a mere sweetener to obtain Sinatra’s acting services.
New Musical Express Annual 1962. Reprise Cover advert
Back in 1961, it wasn’t a cool label, and at that point, neither was Warner Bros:
FRED GOODMAN: Like Warner Bros. Reprise was not in the rock ‘n’ roll business, as this was music Sinatra was vehemently and publicly opposed to. The Reprise roster was a mix of Sinatra’s Las Vegas cronies like Sammy Davis Jnr and Dean Martin, plus Jo Stafford, Rosemary Clooney, Dennis Day, The McGuire Sisters and Dinah Shore – all well past their commercial peak. Early Reprise albums like The Ol’ Calliope Man Visits a German Hoffbrau, Sing Along in Greek, The X-15 and Other Sounds of Missiles, Rockets, Jets and Lou Monte’s Great Italian-American Hits had nothing on Warner Bros when it came to dreck.
Fred Goodman, The Mansion on The Hill, 1997
Robin & The 7 Hoods, UK EP. Reprise’s public image
JAMES KAPLAN: (Nancy Sinatra) had originally been signed to Reprise on the condition that she not record any rock ‘n’ roll. Obediently she cut a few novelty songs with the former Mousketeer Annette Funicello’s producer, a man named Tutti Camarata.
James Kaplan, Sinatra The Chairman
Kaplan wrote a long book on Frank Sinatra, and I wonder where he got the ‘condition not to record any rock ‘n’ roll.’? It seems possible. Frank’s quote is well-known:
FRANK SINATRA: Rock ‘n’ roll smells phony and false. It is sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiteration…it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth.
(Frank Sinatra 1957, in ‘Western World’)
Elvis Presley had replied in dignified tones:
ELVIS PRESLEY: It’s the greatest music ever, and it will continue to be so. I like it, and I’m sure many other persons feel the same way. I also admit it’s the only thing I can do. He has a right to his opinion, but I can’t see him knocking my music for no good reason. I admire him as a performer and an actor, but I think he’s badly mistaken about this. If I remember correctly he was also part of a trend. I don’t see how he can call the youth of today immoral and delinquent.
Frank’s quote was already four years old by the time Nancy signed with Reprise. Frank had helped organize the ‘Welcome Back’ show when Elvis left the army, and had Nancy greet him on his return with a box of dress shirts. Presley was booked to appear on Sinatra’s TV Special for Timex, Welcome Home, Elvis a month later for a then unprecedented $125,000. On that show, Nancy Sinatra duetted with Frank on You Make Me Feel So Old (Young).
Then Frank recorded Everybody’s Twistin’ to align himself with the dance craze. People change.
HER EARLY REPRISE SINGLES
Nancy Sinatra’s early attempts are available digitally as Bubblegum Girl Volumes 1 & 2. She often sounds little girlie in contrast to her later songs. The quality on download is surprisingly crisp and clear. Available digitally recurs a lot – some of her albums haven’t been treated to the comprehensive CD reissue programme one would expect. Japan had a penchant for early Nancy – a 1994 CD Tonight You Belong to Me collects it together.
Bubblegum Girl, Volume 1
The titles of her 45s alone say it all.
Cuff Links & A Tie Clip / Not Just Your Friend 1961
Tonight You Belong To me / You Can Have Any Boy 1962
Like I Do / To Know Him Is To Love Him 1962
June July & August / Think of Me – 1962
You Can Have Any Boy / Tonight You Belong To Me 1962
I See The Moon / Put Your Head On My Shoulder 1963
The Cruel War / One Way 1963
Thanks To You / Tammy – 1963
Where Do The Lonely Go / Just Think About The Good Times 1964
This Love of Mine / There Goes The Bride 1964
True Love / The Answer To Everything 1965
then
Think of Me / Tonight You Belong To Me was issued in Scandinavia and Italy in 1963, and as a 3 track EP in Italy along with Pensa Me
Her first release was Cuff Links & A Tie Clip, on her Dad’s own label Reprise in September 1961. This guy turns up for a party formally dressed with cuff links and a tie clip. Wrong day. She’s got her pin curls in and is wearing chinos. She’s singing about having a party anyway (but just for two) with a hi-fi and the lights down low, just like easy listening LP sleeve photos, and we get a conversational interjection from a petulant male voice (Marty) complaining she’s got cold cream all over her face, a barrier for snogging no doubt. She removes his cuff links and tie clip. In other words, slight raunchiness, the girl leading the action, a touch of undressing even, and a contrasting male voice in dialogue. That’s four years before she met Lee, but in the same territory in a milder way. A lot of similar humorous stuff was a hit at the time. There was a whole genre of ‘clothes songs’ circa 1958-62 … Tight Skirt & A Sweater, Bobby Sox to Stockings, Pretty Plaid Skirt & Long Black Socks, Venus in Blue Jeans, Red Blue Jeans and a Ponytail, White Bucks and Saddle Shoes, No Chemise, Please, Straight Skirt, Checkered Continental Pants, Black Slacks, Blue Serge and White Lace. The fashion industry had discovered teen spending power. The music industry reflected it.
British single. In 1961, a picture sleeve was rare in the UK. A colour picture sleeve was extremely rare. (Collectors note that copies with a picture sleeve are valued at £20).
NANCY: I wasn’t really interested in a career. I was a happily married young woman, who wanted to be a good wife and raise a family. But when I told my father that I thought I could make a hit record, he said, ‘Try it.’ In those days, it didn’t cost a fortune. I went to Tutti Camarata, who was Disney’s musical director and produced Annette Funicello’s records, and told him that I wanted to do what she was doing, only with a couple of changes. One of my first singles for Reprise, ‘Like I Do,’ was successful in Japan, Italy… all over the world, except the United States. And my dad said, ‘You’re right, you do know how to make a hit record.’ Also, I repaid his recording company’s investment, which was very important to me.”
At that point, her father could make an album in three days with elaborate orchestration for $22,000. Nancy had chart hits in Italy from 1961 on … Like I Do was a major Italian hit (#2 in 1962). The Sinatras had some useful Italian connections, perhaps. A big Italian hit was an achievement as it was one of the largest European markets. In 1961, Italy was the coolest country, and Italian records were infiltrating the British charts at the time.
From Billboard
Like I Do is a set of lyrics to Dance of The Hours (La Danza delle Ore), from La Giaconda, just as Allan Sherman did soon afterwards with Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh. Hers was the first release of Like I Do, and also went Top Ten in South Africa, Japan and The Netherlands. In the UK Kay Starr and Maureen Evans covered it, and Maureen Evans got a major #3 hit in early 1963, and she skipped the novelty spoken bits in Nancy’s version, which improved its chances. In both the UK and the USA, they flipped Nancy’s original and put Phil Spector’s To Know Him Is To Love Him on the A-side, a bizarre choice as the Teddy Bears original had already been a US#1 hit in 1958.
She continued focussing on Italy, recording Italian language versions of Think of Me (as Pensa Me), There Goes The Bride (as Ecco Espossa) and True Love.
A lot of the problem was being assigned producers from her dad’s era, like Tutti Camarata and Don Costa who pigeonholed her in the little girl category, coupled with a series of covers and weak songs. Camarata had helped get Disneyland Records under way in 1956, and he was a great arranger and conducted classical albums and produced 300 albums at Disney. Camarata was born in 1913 and came to prominence in the Tommy Dorsey era in the 1930s. Hardly the cutting edge guy for a girl in 1961.
Don Costa was ten years younger, and was a great Frank Sinatra producer. Costa had her re-make Put Your Head On My Shoulder, and he had arranged Paul Anka’s #2 hit version back in 1958. Then The Lettermen charted with it. So what chance did another version have? These guys were still living in the sheet music era, where the song, not a particular recording, was the property and you had as many people record it as you possibly could.
NANCY: the [bubblegum] music didn’t help. It was crappy music. It was OK in its time because there were a lot of us doing it. Like Lesley Gore and Annette [Funicello] and me. We had great arrangers like Don Costa and Tutti Camarata, but it was just not quality stuff. They walked the edge between pop and rock, but they never fell over the edge into rock. And it’s sad, because we could have made much better records earlier on.
The Believer, 1st July 2014
To my ears, they also walked close to the edge between pop and easy listening. The other “pop” girls like Lesley Gore, Brenda Lee and Helen Shapiro got more rocking arrangements. Take It’s My Party by Lesley Gore … the backing is simpler, sharper and more rhythmic. The backing chorus could be the other part of a girl group, not a chorus of staid male vocalists and female vocalists. You can almost hear the tuxedos and long frocks in the backing on Nancy’s backing singers. Crucially, It’s My Party was Quincy Jones’ first pop hit single as producer, and it made #1 on both R&B and Pop charts … the first recording, pre-Lesley Gore, had been The Chiffons. Now Nancy could have sung it equally as effectively as Lesley Gore. The difference is quality of production and material. Quincy Jones had first worked with Frank Sinatra back in 1958 too.
One wonders what chance she had in covering Tammy, which had been a US #1 hit in 1958 for Debbie Reynolds. Major hits were kept on catalogue then, and hearing her on radio you might just buy the original. This was particularly true in Britain. We were used to covers, as BBC Radio’s Light Programme had to play mainly live music, so had dance bands covering current hits. Then you’d go out and buy the original, or if short of money, go to Woolworths and buy the Embassy Records cover version. The version she did has lashings of echo and the backing arrangement starts off just like Debbie Reynolds.
According to iTunes, her most popular song from the era is her bouncy cover of Tonight You Belong To Me, originally from 1926, but done by Patience and Prudence in 1956, which version appears in American Horror Story.
There Goes The Bride was a July 1964 B-side to This Love of Mine, which stands out with a male voice in front of hers (dum doo dooby dooby), with her voice ethereal and back in the mix. Ecco Espossa was the same song with the same male track. When they put on the Italian language vocal they brought her voice forward, and the male voice back, which makes it less unusual.
It’s Spring was her own composition. It’s not a pointer of things to come. It sounds like a mid-1950s film theme with orchestration from the same era.
A glimpse of possibility is on her cover of Fats Domino’s 1961 song I’m Walkin’. It comes from a 1961 TV show, but has walking acoustic bass, and finishes with just her voice and the bass. It’s the sort of R&B song that Brenda Lee or Helen Shapiro would have done, and she could easily have gone down that path with success. Mind you, while the white socks were suitably teen for the USA, they would have been regarded as weird in Britain.
VIDEO LINK: I’M WALKIN’ TV 1961
She had married teen pop singer Tommy Sands in 1960, and appeared on TV with him, duetting on the Ed Sullivan Show with Hey, Good Looking.
Bubblegum Girl Vol 2 – they’re chronologically divided
Nancy made a play for the burgeoning folk scene by recording the earnest folk club favourite, The Cruel War with guitar and harmonica (so right) then had the “Muzak in the Mall” male chorus doing the response line (so wrong). Her voice is excellent, avoiding the piercing sopranos the female folk singers used for this sort of material. The song may date from the American Civil War, but Peter, Paul and Mary had just had a US #35 hit with it as the superior B-side of Stewball. The thought process of the producers and label is revealed by putting the bubblegum One Way on the B-side. So you’re doing folk. They couldn’t find another folk song?
In 1963, the merger with Warner Bros took place, and Mo Ostin moved from being head of just Reprise to be head of the new Warner-Reprise combination. The new company was still not yet cool (that happened in 1967 after the Monterey Pop Festival).
FRED GOODMAN: Even after the merger, both Warner and Reprise remained indifferent to changing tastes, and rock signings were a rarity. At the height of the British Invasion, The Kinks, signed to Reprise via a licensing deal with their English distributor, Pye Records, was the only successful band the labels signed out of the UK.
Fred Goodman, The Mansion on The Hill, 1997
NANCY: When Reprise moved to Warner Brothers, Mo Ostin put me with producer Jimmy Bowen saying “This girl has had hit records all over the world. Let’s get her one here.” Jimmy’s roots were country and he didn’t quite know what to do with Sinatra’s daughter. We both tried hard to cut a commercial record. But though we did some interesting sides, like Cole Porter’s True Love with an ominous rhythm feel, we didn’t make magic.
True Love was recorded in 1965. It’s the Cole Porter song which Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly performed in High Society. Richard Chamberlain (Dr Kildare) had just had a hit with it in 1963. Another oldie played right off the sheet music? Not at all, the backing is huge Phil Spector style, thudding away at the bottom with violins on top.
NANCY: I love True Love because it was the first single that led me into another sound (and feel) and out of the bubblegum phase of my work, much more funk and a lot tougher sound. It was a perfect bridge to the work with Barton Lee Hazlewood.
She’s not singing high up either. It’s a splendid arrangement, produced by Jimmy Bowen, and as I’ll repeat so often, the very 1950s backing singers were the only mistake. She needed the funky girl group that she later found with The Blossoms. Jimmy Bowen had been a pop star himself, hitting US #14 with I’m Stickin’ With You in 1957 and selling a million. He moved into production with Reprise in the early 60s.
NANCY: For some reason (my producers) Tutti Camarata and Don Costa chose to keep me upstairs in the highest possible keys (on my early recordings) and I think I sound squeaky up there struggling to sound like a soprano when I was already an alto. It was Jimmy Bowen who recognized this and moved me down for In The Wee Small Hours and True Love.
Generally, she’d covered well-known songs and by 1965, none of it was going anywhere much any more. Jimmy Bowen had contemplated getting Andrew Loog Oldham to come over and produce her, but Oldham was too busy with The Rolling Stones and Marianne Faithfull. Allegedly, Mo Ostin, his position at Warner-Reprise consolidated, was looking to drop non-selling acts, including her.
It’s surprising that such an LP-oriented label had never put out an album by her. There’s enough material on Bubblegum Girl Volumes 1 & 2, and several tracks which only emerged later were not singles or B-sides, such as In The Wee Small Hours, Like A Girl Like Me and Personality. Both Like A Girl Like Me and Personality have that teeny-bop bounce that was missing elsewhere. Personality is a good version of the Lloyd Price 1958 hit, but too many people had done it.
A 1967 Japanese LP Golden Nancy Sinatra put her recent hits on Side one, and the early singles on side two for contrast (or shock, disappointment.)
She was doing better with movies as an actor, and on TV. She appeared in The Virginian TV series in 1963 with Doug McLure, in an episode called If You Have Tears.
Nancy sings in The Virginian – the song has never been released
VIDEO LINK: IF YOU HAVE TEARS from The Virginian
For Those Who Think Young was a teen movie in 1964, starring James Darren, who later became godfather to her daughter.
She appeared in Get Yourself A College Girl in 1964 (aka The Swinging Set), where she met The Animals – decades later she duetted with Eric Burdon. No songs in the film.
Marriage On The Rocks was in 1965, with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. It was being filmed as she was divorcing Tommy Sands.
The Ghost In The Invisible Bikini filmed in 1965 was part of the long “beach party” series. This one starred Boris Karloff. Nancy co-starred with Dean Martin’s daughter, Claudia Martin. They must both have had industry contacts somewhere. Nancy sang Geronimo in the movie.
Nancy Sinatra with the Bobby Fuller Four
VIDEO LINK: GERONIMO FROM THE FILM
She was backed by the Bobby Fuller Four, best known for I Fought The Law. That one, Geronimo, rocks, almost approaching Lulu territory with vigorous male backing vocal, and the sound is beat group, unusually for her, and it works. It’s not a great song, it’s not even a good song, but it is a great combination. The background dancing is awful in the movie.
In The Oscar (1966) she briefly plays herself, and Frank Sinatra and Merle Oberon play themselves also.
Film and music were competing for her attention. Lee Hazlewood was talking after These Boots Are Made For Walking was a hit:
LEE HAZLEWOOD: Well, the records are really only made to help along her film career. She’s completed several films recently, including one which is highly controversial – politically, socially and every way.
Melody Maker, 30 April 1966
Meanwhile… Enter Lee Hazlewood
Barton Lee Hazlewood was held by some to be the initial Svengali. After Korean War service he worked as a DJ in Phoenix, met Duane Eddy and Al Casey and started his own record label, VIV. In 1956 he wrote and produced his own song, The Fool, finding Sanford Clark to sing it. It took him three weeks to get the voice how he wanted it, but said as studio time was $8 an hour he could keep trying. The drum beat is a Campbells soup box on a drum stool. Al Casey played the guitar part which is a lift from Smokestack Lightnin’. Lee went on and produced Duane Eddy, scoring a major hit when a DJ flipped Stalkin’ and played the B-side Rebel Rouser. They went to Jamie Records and he became Duane Eddy’s co-writer and producer for a long string of hits.
Listen to Duane Eddy’s Because They’re Young with the full string section behind the twangy guitar. That’s Lee Hazlewood’s cinematic sound. Already he was showing expertise in getting a fine sound … something that runs all the way through his recordings with Nancy Sinatra. He said later that when he booked a string section, he never booked violas … he wanted the highs of the violins and the depth of cellos and basses without interference in the middle.
His first solo album was Trouble Is A Lonesome Town in 1963, though he said he conceived of it as a set of demos, but it also had a concept of Trouble, a make-believe town. The original sleeve notes described it as “Americana” and that was back in 1963.
When he was introduced to Nancy she was already twenty-five. He was eleven years older. He was comfortably off from Duane Eddy records and living in Hollywood in semi-retirement.
LEE: I was disgusted that everything you heard on the radio was Beatles. Not only that, but they were hailed as innovators when they were doing things that were done four years earlier by the Everly Brothers. I enjoyed my eight months off. I sat in my back yard watching the bugs swim across my pool.
Ace records Biodata on Lee Hazlewood
Nancy had been trying to get her singing career under way for several years. Lee Hazlewood was already working with Reprise, with great success on Dean Martin’s cover of Lee’s song Houston. Reprise had him do his own album, The NSVIPs (The Not So Very Important People). They liked him.
Lee Hazlewood’s first Reprise album
Lee Hazlewood had been producing Dean Martin and Desi Arnez’s’s kids as Dino, Desi & Billy in 1965.
LEE: I did Dino, Desi and Billy as a favour to [producer] Jimmy Bowen, knowing that working with two 12-year-olds and a 13-year-old is gonna make you want to slit your wrists. These kids made one appearance on The Dean Martin Show, and they got 30 tons of mail, and I said that I really don’t want to do three million albums on them in that year I had them, and I had a royalty that was better than theirs, and still after all that profit margin I quit at the end of the first year. They were hell to work with. (Interview with Keiron Tyler, The artsdesk.com)
His work on Dino, Desi & Billy’s The Rebel Kind was impressive with grungy guitar and basic drumming so it might even just about sound as if the kids had played it themselves if you were gullible. On TV they used (or rather mimed with) a Rickenbacker guitar and a Hofner violin bass, just like The Beatles.
The trouble was the lyric, They call us the rebel kind.
You react, Oh, no they don’t. Not even in your wildest dreams.
So in July 1965 when Lee was invited to meet Nancy, he expressed understandable reluctance. He said he wasn’t doing any more “second generation” artistes. He described the meeting in a 2012 interview:
LEE: Everybody knows I drink Chivas. When I walked in their house to meet with Nancy (she was living with her mom then), all along the walls, cleverly displayed, were all these bottles of Chivas lined up. And a bunch of my friends were there. It was Bobby Darin, a bunch more, and I’m thinking. Wait a minute, What is this? I haven’t seen these people in months.
Q: So they threw a little party for you!
LEE: In a way. We were getting along alright, cause Nancy and I, we never had any problems. Halfway through the evening her dad comes through the door and meets me. They go in the kitchen and they’re talking. He comes out, shakes my hand and says I’m glad you kids are going to be working together, and then walks out the door. I had only said that I’d come over and meet her!
(Loserslounge.com, 2012)
I guess with Frank, “No” was not an option. Nancy Sinatra said that Hazlewood played her the bass line of These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ on a guitar and sang it on that initial meeting in front of her and Frank Sinatra. Nancy thought it sounded aggressive and macho from a male singer, but realized how sexy it might be with a female singer.
NANCY: Lee auditioned songs for me. I particularly liked a song he played that only had two verses and I asked him if he could write a third verse. He said, “It’s not really a girl’s song. I sing it myself onstage.” I told him that coming from a guy it was harsh and abusive, but was perfect for a little girl to sing. He agreed. When he left, my father, who had been sitting in the living room reading the paper, said, “The song about the boots is best.” (Los Angeles Magazine, 2016)
When they decided to record it, they needed that third verse. Hazlewood said he composed it in the seven minute car ride from his house to hers.
Lee Hazlewood is credited with the full makeover. He told her to sing in a deeper voice, according to Nancy, six notes below her preferred register. (However see above – Jimmy Bowen had already done that on two songs).
LEE: “She’d been singing up here like this,” he says, approximating Nancy’s erstwhile high-pitched, girly keening, “but I wanted her down here where I could hear her right. We lowered her singing about two keys. I made her sound like a tough little broad. I wanted her to sing like a 16-year-old girl who screwed truck drivers. “She said, ‘I can do that.'”(Daily Telegraph, 2004)
The Telegraph interviewed both of them separately in 2004 (in other interviews, Lee had said that he actually said 14 year old, not 16). The tale dates back to the rear sleeve of Boots where it says:
How should I sing this?
Like a 16 year old girl that’s been dating a 40 year old man. But it’s all over now.
As with any anecdote told by two participants over decades, versions differ. I like Nancy’s version:
NANCY: We were ready to do the overdubbing at United Recorders Studio B. I asked Lee how I should sing the songs. He said, ‘Like a fourteen-year-old girl in love with a forty-year-old man.’ I didn’t know what he was talking about. Lee and [engineer] Eddie [Brackett] fattened my voice with a tape reverberation technique – in essence the same principle used in the slap-back echo effect on Elvis’s voice on ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ – only much less. It worked fine except I was still singing like Nancy Nice Lady. Lee hit the talk-back switch in the booth and his deep voice blew my ears off. ‘For chrissake, you were a married woman, Nasty, you’re not a virgin anymore. Let’s do one for the truck drivers.’ This was shocking to a somewhat sheltered girl like Sinatra’s daughter. ‘Say something tough at the end of this one,’ Lee ordered. ‘Bite the words.’ I did. I bit.”
Ian Geary, who interviewed them wrote:
IAN GEARY: Hazlewood recognised that there was too much Doris Day in Nancy and not enough Janis Joplin. Here was a girl, after all, who left college in the Sixties “to marry and have sex because I was raised Catholic and Italian”.
Listen back to The Cruel War. For the song, she is surprisingly deep, as she is on True Love, so maybe Lee Hazlewood wasn’t the only one who could imagine her singing lower.
Some say Lee also suggested the “English style” clothes. But …
LEE: She did it all herself, with those little mini skirts and those big boots, and you wouldn’t mind her walking all over you in them, cos she was so small. Each time I’d see her, she’d be a little more like that. Nancy knew what to do. She’s campy and all that stuff, but she’s always been smart.
The Observer, 13 June 1999, “The Return of Nancy’s Boy.” (Ouch!)
Nancy had been to Britain, met The Beatles, and has said ‘I was one of the first people to wear the Carnaby Street miniskirt in Hollywood.’
NANCY: Milton (Greene) shot some iconic photos and for one, Amy (Greene) put me in a black and white outfit and I had on one black boot and one white boot. With the hair, the look caught on like wild fire. In between Amy, Kenneth, Rosemary and Mary Quant, who I had discovered early on when I was on a promotional tour in London, we created a wonderful look, although I don’t think I was given any credit for it. A little bit later, Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy, the girls of the ‘British Invasion’, got the credit for that look, but I always grin and think, “Oh yeah, I was there first.”
The Ingenue, Issue 1, 2015
Hazlewood was always a brilliant producer, and working with Nancy on her Dad’s label (even though now part of Warner, Frank retained that third) was an opportunity. If he asked for six cellos, no one was going to tell him to make do with three.
The third part of the equation was Billy Strange, as arranger, orchestra conductor and guitarist. Billy Strange was at Lee and Nancy’s initial meeting, along with Frank’s producer, Jimmy Bowen. Strange had played guitar for Phil Spector’s classic girl group recordings, then on Beach Boys sessions and had arranged for Duane Eddy (with Hazlewood producing). He continued working with Nancy Sinatra both on record and conducting her live shows for decades.
The Hazlewood / Sinatra combination had instant magic, not that they were ever in a relationship, nor did he work exclusively with her. Some of the songs had been cut before or would be cut after her version, either solo or demo-ed with his girlfriend, Suzi Jane Hokum. She worked with him at his LHI label as singer, writer, producer and graphic designer. The versions with Suzi Jane Hokum were released as MGM singles under just his name in Germany and Scandinavia at the time. For his MGM singles, he used the same arranger (Billy Strange), the same engineer (Eddie Brackett) and the same studio (United) as with Nancy Sinatra. But less elaborate orchestration.
Suzi Jane Hokum has said that she co-wrote some of the major duet songs without credit.
SUZI JANE HOKUM: (The MGM singles) were his “expensive demos.” I’m sure MGM thought that they would be successful.
Later Lee recorded duets with Anne-Margaret and Anna Hanski. Although Lee was a prolific composer, Nancy was also too savvy to put all her eggs in one basket on her albums. The Lee Hazlewood songs tended to be the singles. In the 2004 interview she expanded on Lee as the Svengali:
TEXT: Hazlewood certainly deserves credit for Sinatra’s transformation but he is often given all the credit for Nancy’s hits.
NANCY: That’s a very interesting place to be. Lee’s songs had been recorded by Lee and someone else but they weren’t hits. I told him that a couple of years ago. I said, `Just face it, buddy, you didn’t have any hits before me and you didn’t have any hits after me so I must have brought something to the mix.‘
Tim Geary interview, Telegraph June 2004
and …
NANCY: Lee’s lyrics were the guiding light for us, because he wrote these wonderful fantasies. Billy (Strange) took them and put them to music. And what I did was follow along. The beauty of it was that I added enough to it to make it happen. Lee had done a lot of this stuff with other people, and he didn’t get anywhere with it. Lee’s muse in those days was Suzi Jane Hokom. Suzi Jane sang on all those duets. And he sang with Ann-Margret and several other ladies. But it just didn’t have the magic that Nancy and Lee had. So I told him in no uncertain terms over the years that he really owes me a lot, too. He wasn’t the Svengali that he thought he was. So it was a symbiotic relationship that turned out some pretty damned special music. I’m proud of all of it and proud of my contributions to it.
The Believer, 1st July 2014
BOOTS
The rear sleeve expanded the title:
Nancy Sinatra Sings The Facts of Love
THESE BOOTS ARE MADE FOR WALKING
And Other Lessons in Love
REVIEW, DISC WEEKLY
NANCY’S BOOTS ON A BEATLES KICK
Imagine As Tears Go By at an almost bossa nova tempo, and Run For Your Life with the big band backing. These are the sort of refreshing treatments Nancy gives to songs by Jagger-Richards and Lennon-McCartney. Coupled with her neat performances of other songs that have been done before – like the pretty In My Room and Bob Dylan’s It Ain’t Me Babe – she proves that is IS possible to take old songs and give them new leases of life. With this LP, Nancy disproves any worries that she might have been a one-hit wonder. A good collection, brightly sung.
Ray Coleman, Disc Weekly 19 March 1966
So Long Babe was the initial single in October 1965, which is puzzling because the subsequent album name suggested the title track. So Long Babe is a good record. It has her new voice and style, it has the bass guitar / acoustic bass sound, and inhabits a jangling Jackie de Shannon / Byrds / Searchers vibe. I’m guessing they knew that it was good enough to chart (it did, US #86) but that they needed to stir up interest before launching the big one.
NANCY: My first chart entry in the USA. A new sound, a new look. A new vocal approach. A little bit country and a lot of Hazlewood and Strange.
Then in December 1965 they brought out These Boots Are Made For Walkin’ as her second song with him. It became Reprise’s first credible major rock hit.
Nancy insisted that Lee Hazlewood and the label’s choice, The City Never Sleeps At Night, should be flipped to put Boots on the A side.
NANCY: Not to follow up ‘So Long, Babe’ with another entry that made the charts would have been suicidal in such a highly competitive business. I’d probably not get another shot as good. We recorded ‘The City Never Sleeps At Night.’ And the B-side was the song my dad liked, the one with two verses. Lee added a middle verse.
(Frank Sinatra, My Father by Nancy Sinatra, 1985)
They were right to avoid The City Never Sleeps At Night. While it has memorable horns and a kind of playground chant feel, it sounds early 60s. Lee Hazlewood thought it one of his best songs. Lee cut it again in 1966 in a semi-novelty version as The Shacklefords, with four vocalists including himself. This studio band was named after Lee’s first wife, Naomi Shackleford, and later included Glen Campbell. The expression The city that never sleeps at night was applied to New York. Coincidentally the words turned up in the 1977 lyric of New York New York by Liza Minelli, which Frank Sinatra covered in 1979.
BILLY STRANGE: She said I’m gonna record that song, and Lee fought her tooth and nail, and he said ‘You don’t really want to record that!’ and she said, ‘I am going to record that song!’ And we recorded Boots. It was done in one take, bad notes and all. And it was the one song on the session that was a monster hit. She’s always right.
These Boots Are Made ForWalkin’: original UK Reprise single
Hazlewood expressed surprise that These Boots Are Made For Walkin’ never got banned, as in Oklahoma, where he came from, “Messin’” meant simply and unequivocally “fucking.” (You been messin’ where you shouldn’t’ve been messin’). He told Esquire how the idea came to him in 1999:
LEE: I was sittin’ in this bar in southern Texas and there’s this fella in there who’s about 35, who had just married an 18-year-old girl. And they’re teasin’ him and tellin’ him his wife had called and he better get on home and all this kind of stuff. So we all had a few more drinks, and then he says I just wanna tell you guys somethin’. In my house, I’m boss, cause if I’m not the boss … and he threw his foot up on one of the barstools … these boots are gonna walk all over her! I just said God almighty!
That start, with the long bass guitar run, then tambourine and then Hal Blaine and Jim Gordon on drums was the signature. The horns on These Boots Are Made For Walkin’ are held back until the second verse, and then take the fade out ending. Hazlewood used two basses. On that slide, it was Chuck Berghofer on double bass. Then it was Carol Kaye on electric bass guitar playing in unison with Chuck Berghofer on acoustic double bass to get the sound. The same effect was used on The Beach Boys Pet Sounds also with Carole Kaye and Chuck Berghofer, but note that Boots was recorded in 1965, while Pet Sounds sessions were early 1966. The Wrecking Crew were on both, and Billy Strange played guitar on both as well as arranging. Billy Strange claims the sliding bass run was his idea, but that contrasts with the story of Nancy first hearing Lee play the bass line. A sliding bass run was popular on guitar instrumentals, Lee’s previous forte, plus he had this to say in London in 1966:
LEE: Really, I’m a record producer at heart. The idea for Boots” which was really written for a boy, came from an old jazz record of the ’20s. I can’t remember the title, and in fact the record was taken away by someone after I wrote “Boots.” A lot of people have said that the descension is a series of good notes, followed by bad, but this isn’t true. The bass part- it can only be played on a non-fretted instrument like the (double) bass – it uses quarter tones, and this has been used for a long time in jazz. To say that they are the wrong notes is just showing that the people don’t know what they are talking about.
Melody Maker, UK, 30 April 1966
Later he said:
There’s a guy called Chuck Berghofer, a bass player. I used Chuck all the time because Chuck worked at the jazz club that wasn’t too far from my house in Toluca Lake, LA. He’s a great jazz player, so I absolutely wanted him when it got to Boots. And it was no problem., Chuck wasn’t overworked.
As told to Wyndham Wallace, in Lee, Myself & I
It’s hard to believe anyone thought the bass part wrong, but … someone did …
STEVIE WINWOOD: It’s the record player. It sounds like a skiffle group. Good God! This has got to be a hit. I suppose it’s American – oh, dear. It’s terrible, it’s bad. I’ll remember that one. Hear that double bass run? Yeah, skiffle’s coming back. This is unbelievable. Either she’s bad or the band. I’m sure they’re all trying their best to make it bad. Who’s it by? Yeah? Must be (Frank) Sinatra on bass .
Melody Maker, 15 January 1966
In Stevie’s defence, this was the era of Juke Box Jury and music papers found it amusing to play the week’s new releases to a star without giving any information. He was still only seventeen. But he did think it would be a hit. During the May 1966 visit of Nancy, Lee and Billy Strange to London, Melody Maker did the same to Alan Price, playing him Strangers In The Night by Frank Sinatra. His response is telling on her new status:
ALAN PRICE: Frank Sinatra? It may do something on the strength of his daughter’s publicity. MelodyMaker, 14 May 1966
12 February 1966. #1 in the UK, Melody Maker
By early 1966, it was #1 in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Ireland, New Zealand as well as #3 in Italy. The LP sleeve introduced her “look” and she was stuck with one type of boots or another in photographs ever after. Nancy described the attitude in the song:
NANCY: With Lee’s backing, Nancy Nicelady (Lee’s nickname for her) did, I guess, the first white girl version of what the black girls had been doing: a rebel kind of music. People like Ruth Brown and LaVerne Baker singing stuff like ‘Don’t give me any shit, man. Get lost! …I grew up listening to all of that.
(Nancy Sinatra, The Guardian, 2008)
LEE: People always used to ask her about the content of the songs, but she played dumb, ‘Lee writes ’em and I sing ’em. That’s the agreement.’ She was a smart walnut. DJs used to ring me up in disbelief at some of the lyrics. “How can you get away with that. It’s unbelievable! All these double and triple meanings! I don’t know how you can make Nancy sing that stuff! Does she know what she’s doing?’ I’d reply, ‘She knows exactly what she’s doing.’ She’s one of the few women artists who took one song and made an image out of it.
Shindig, July-August 2010
Jon Savage in “1966” sums it up:
An extraordinary mixture of Las Vegas and Los Angeles, of S&M fantasy and feminine revenge.
Then David Hepworth in Nothing Is Real:
To hear musicians Carole Kaye and Al Casey talk about how they arrived at the backing sound … is to realize how much of a hit record’s emotional stickiness arises from the uniqueness of a particular performance. This in turn owes a huge amount to the idiosyncratic ear of a certain musician. Nancy Sinatra has performed that song thousands of times since that recording date but she hasn’t found anyone who can play the distinctive bass line like the combination of Chuck Berghofer on string bass and Carole Kaye on electric did on that day. “It’s very difficult to capture,” she says.
Or Wyndham Wallace in his biography Lee, Myself and I:
Like much great pop, it’s hard to know what separated it from the mass of music released every week to make it the success it became. It’s the kind of composition that often ends up slipping through the cracks – as had most of Nancy’s work until lee started working with her- but something about it captured the world’s imagination. Perhaps it was Nancy’s coquettish delivery and her easy-going feline charm. Possibly it was the lyrics which hinted at female emancipation in a manner blithe enough to disguise the song’s intent. Most likely it was the novelty of its bass line – performed on both upright and electric bass – which slid down a quarter tone at a time.
So Long Babe had sold 60,000. These Boots Are Made For Walkin’ sold six million. Those were the days before video promos, but Nancy filmed it for Color-Sonics, a then new video jukebox system.
VIDEO LINK: COLOR-SONICS PROMO FILM
Lee was getting his feet under the table at Reprise, bringing over his old friend Duane Eddy for an album produced by Lee, The Biggest Twang of Them All with a guitar cover of Strangers in The Night plus This Guitar Was Made For Twangin’ which is a retitled instrumental cover, strangely credited on the record as written by Duane Eddy.
Was the success appreciated?
LEE: When ‘Boots’ was #1 in half the countries in the world, Nancy came over to my house, and she was crying. She said, ‘They didn’t pick up on my option at Reprise and they said I owed them $12,000.’ I said, ‘You’re kidding, we’ve got the biggest record in the world.’ I rang my lawyer in New York and I rang Nancy the next day and said, ‘How would you like $1 million? I’ve got three labels that are offering that for you right now and I can get something pretty good for myself as well.’ She talked to her father and he said she could write her own contract with Reprise – after all she was selling more records than him at the time.” (From 1000 UK Number One Hits)
The Boots album was stuffed with cover versions … As Tears Go By, Day Tripper, It Ain’t Me Babe, Run For Your Life, Lies, Flowers On The Wall, and most of them were recent too. I guess they were short of originals, but covering stuff that was still so warm from the charts was odd. Nancy Sinatra’s distinctive voice (courtesy of Hazlewood’s makeover) adds interest to covers, as does Hazlewood’s production. Given that Boots was a #1 US LP the songwriters must have been delighted that she’d covered them.
In Britain, with most of us too skint to buy LPs, it was common practice to divvy up an album onto four track EPs. Two EPs were issued from Boots: Run For Your Life and I Move Around. The first, Run For Your Life, aimed at the success of Beatles covers in the charts with Run For Your Life and added Bob Dylan’s It Ain’t Me Babe to increase its chances.
UK EP: Run For Your Life, It Ain’t Me Babe, So Long Babe, Flowers On The Wall.
The second, I Move Around re-used the album sleeve picture and tried the other Beatles cover, Day Tripper with a touch of Jagger / Richard on As Tears Go By (plus I Move Around and In My Room).
UK EP: I Move Around
As Tears Go By was the first Jagger / Richards composition after Andrew Loog Oldham locked them in a room until they wrote a song. Marianne Faithfull recorded it, and it was UK #9, US #6. We won’t go into the long contradictory arguments over whether it was written for her. The Rolling Stones recorded it themselves in 1965. This version starts out so well with guitar and voice, and a touch of bow on a bass. As the second verse starts, the guitarist (Billy Strange, I assume) suddenly thinks he’s playing Girl from Ipanema, and the bass and tinkling piano and drum come in and suddenly we’re into a swinging, sophisticated Latin American rhythm … samba, bossa nova, I can never remember the difference. The playing is immaculate, the singing beautifully pitched but somehow it takes the song away from its origins and places it in the corner of the cocktail lounge with an ageing quartet in white tuxedos on guitar, bass and drums (and piano, but it isn’t mic’d) and a much younger and more attractive female singer in a black cocktail frock trying to sing over the conversation.
It does allow a dramatic contrast to Day Tripper. Both Beatles songs, Day Tripper and Run For Your Life got strong arrangements and few bass players would dare add such a long bass run to a Paul McCartney part in the brass-heavy Day Tripper. The main riff is taken by trombones. The horns seem to comment on the words behind her. It’s in my playlist of best Beatles covers. She adds ‘One nighter’ at the end.
I Move Around is a Lee Hazlewood song with Nancy’s tough chick swagger. The central narrative voice works. I would have cut the backing vocalists, or rather changed them for soul chicks. The instrumental section is fabulous.
One I have heard most is It Ain’t Me Babe, because I have so many Dylan covers in playlists. It’s disconcerting hearing such a big arrangement, with stabbing horns, and cooing backing vocals compared to the sparse original, but it works. Her warm voiced delivery is mixed close up to the listener and is captivating.
Then comes These Boots Are Made For Walking.
In My Room is not the Brian Wilson song, but an English version of El Amor. Both Verdelle Smith and Connie Stevens released versions in January 1966. Nancy did it in February, quickly followed by Julie Rogers, then by The Walker Brothers who went along with Nancy’s epic treatment. Nice touch of Hammond organ to open it and throughout.
Lies had been a recent #20 hit for The Knickerbockers, who did such an extremely Beatlesque version that some thought it the Fab Four. Nancy stayed deep and added a treble girl group backing.
So Long Babe is placed next.
Flowers On The Wall is another with a long and gorgeous bass run … their signature on three tracks. It had been a #4 hit (country #2) for The Statler Brothers almost as they were recording Boots (though it had been released nine months earlier). It’s one of those songs that’s horribly catchy.
If He’d Love Me was written by Mirriam Eddy (aka Jessi Colter later), then married to Duane Eddy, so Lee’s old pals. A good song, more conventional mid-60s popular. It could have been a hit … the heavy background percussion is Spector-ish. Nice whispering from Nancy at the end.
Her version of Run For Your Life wasn’t a single, but was a radio hit on the US East Coast. Another notable Beatles cover. She uses the girl group backing with her.
CD REISSUE BONUS TRACKS:
The City Never Sleeps At Night is a bonus track on the CD reissue. See earlier.
In Our Time / Leave My Dog Alone was a single released in 1966. Both sides appear as bonus tracks on the Boots CD reissue. iTunes has the bonus tracks on downloads of the album. In Our Time has the jangly folk rock guitar of The Byrds coupled with the crunchiest reverberant bass guitar sound. Whenever you hear a 12 string guitar among the Wreckin’ Crew, it will be Glen Campbell. It has a protest song declamatory style of delivery too, though like Life’s A Trippy Thing it’s from the opposite viewpoint. Lee Hazlewood wrote it.
Here’s Lee thinking he can go shaggy head to shaggy head with the hippie rockers—and he’s right. This is a righteous Beatles homage/rip (note “Day Tripper” riff), replete with faux-psych-pop lyrical babble …
Dave Segal, The Stranger, Lee Hazlewood’s Ten Best Songs, 11 September 2015
Girls were once suffragettes
Now they’re out takin’ bets
Smokin’ filter cigarettes …Holdin’ hands in the Louvre
Used to be such a groove
Now some take trips and never move
Leave My Dog Alone is a concoction that approaches Bonzo Dog instrumentation, tuba, bells and distort guitar, which are much more interesting than the lyric.
The final bonus track is the mono 45 single mix of These BootsAre Made For Walkin’.
HOW DOES THAT GRAB YOU?
They went straight into a second album, How Does That Grab You with brown boots and a chunky short sweater dress on the cover. Hold on, that was on the rear of Boots, the album before. As an album, I find it more satisfying than its predecessor.
It opens so softly right away with just acoustic bass and voice on Not The Loving Kind. Then a touch of gentle guitar. I assume Chuck Berghofer and Billy Strange. It was a Lee Hazlewood song that he’d cut with Dino, Desi & Billy in 1965, then it was all chiming Rickenbacker, sounding like The Searchers and a US #25 hit. It couldn’t have been done more differently than the trio rethink with Nancy. To me that’s the way to do a cover version: it’s like changing a familiar Herman’s Hermits’ hit into a Peggy Lee torch song. Lee Hazlewood must surely have thought of the lyric as for a mature woman, not a boy band.
The album, as with Boots, was padded out with more cover versions … Call Me (Petula Clark), The Shadow Of Your Smile (from the 1965 filmThe Sandpiper), Let It Be Me (Everly Brothers), Crying Time (Buck Owens), Time (Pozo-Seco Singers). The covers show versatility … from Latin on Shadow of Your Smile, to country & western cover on Cryin’ Time. Lee was later asked about the number of cover versions and said Some were favours for friends.
Then we have a straight twelve bar blues with massed trombones on Baby Cried All Night Long … she ends with ‘the moral of this story is you just shouldn’t be caught messin’ where you shouldn’t be messin’ or you’ll end up cryin’ all night long …. Another Lee Hazlewood song. I’d assumed they’d added the ending because of the success of Boots, but it’s on Lee’s earlier solo version too which was recorded in December 1965.
Let it Be Me starts out with just voice with deep bowed double basses which impress and make a change, and gentle guitar. I enjoy the first verse so much, I’m annoyed when the snare rim (again) and chorus arrives. The bits in French are showing off but at least we’re back to bowed bass and acoustic guitar. The song is best-known from The Everly Brothers (US #7, UK #13, 1960). Wiki points out that the Betty Everett / Jerry Butler version in 1964 charted higher (US #5, R&B #1). OK, but 99% will identify it with The Everlys first, due to so many compilation LPs. So many people have covered it. It’s a French song by Gilbert Becaud (Je t’appartiens).
Call Me written by Tony Hatch has an understated European café sound. There had been two recent significant versions, Petula Clark on album and EP in 1965, then Chris Montez covered it (US Easy Listening #2). Then everyone covered it in 1965-1966 … Jackie de Shannon, Lulu, Nancy Wilson, Brenda Lee, Sarah Vaughan, Astrud Gilberto. It’s so familiar that I had to check – neither Petula Clark nor Chris Montez had a UK hit. Frank Sinatra covered the song as well on Strangers In The Night, the same year, with a quite different Nelson Riddle arrangement. Frank’s solo version was also the B-side of Somethin’ Stupid. Nancy’s version has the Latin sound, though for me Astrud Gilberto edges it and would be my chosen version.
They followed up the success of These Boots Are Made For Walkin’ with How Does That Grab You Darlin’ (US #7, UK #19) in April 1966. It had a similar bass and drum rhythm track to These Boots Are Made For Walkin’. It has a nice guitar figure, stellar horns. Most of all, it continued that tough girl image. She sings to her ‘Tom Cat’ boyfriend, saying that she’s on the prowl too. As Lee Hazlewood has expressed pride in getting away with “salty” lyrics, I wonder about:
I’m gonna go out and prowl
Don’t come lookin’ for your pussy cat …
As she addresses the boyfriend as Tom Cat, I wondered if Hazlewood had intended a comma after ‘pussy’ and a capital C for ‘cat.’ She finishes with a long Grrrr … before the horns take it away. Red Rhodes played the dobro part.
Disc & Music Echo, UK, 14 May 1966
Jim Reid of Jesus and Mary Chain said of How Does It Grab You, Darling?:
JIM REID: Lee Hazelwood produced this and wrote most of the songs and the little blurb-y parts like that (from back cover: “Grab us good says all the people. Lovely tunes and marvy melodies. All of them gravid with meaning. All of them like to mess your head forevermore”). It’s like something out of Clockwork Orange! The idea appeals to me that Nancy Sinatra was totally mainstream pop music, but the lyrics to some of these songs . . . I like the idea that they can be taken on loads of different levels. The very fact that this stuff could appeal to me and appeal to whoever must have put that record at Number 5 in the American charts or whatever is astonishing. It seems like there’s a revival of Nancy.
Q Interview, 1994. April Skies, The Jesus & Mary Chain fan site
Sorry ‘Bout That sounds even more like These Boots Are Made For Walkin’ with semi-spoken additions, and to my amazement was written by Baker Knight rather than Lee Hazelwood, and Baker Knight had recorded it himself in late 1966, produced by Jimmy Bowen, Frank’s producer. Knight also wrote Somewhere There’s A Someone, a major hit for Dean Martin (these guys all knew each other!) Sorry ‘Bout That was perhaps a too obvious follow up to Boots. I suspect it was composed as a deliberate attempt to flog it to Nancy as a follow-up, but Pye issued it as the title track of an EP in Britain, which also included Bang Bang. Listening to both side by side, it may have fared better in the charts, being so similar to Boots.
Sorry ‘Bout That, UK EP 1966. Reprise.
Time is credited to Michael Merchant and Lee Hazlewood, it’s a soft shuffling number, and the folk singer Michael Merchant was the sole source, given that it was a hit for the Pozo-Seco Singers in April 1966 (US #47, Easy Listening #3) with Susan Taylor as lead singer. They had recorded it in late 1964 and it had been a regional hit around San Antonio before Columbia took it for national release. The arrangement of Nancy’s version is very close to the Pozo-Seco record. It relies on guitar, simple bass and tapping on the snare rim. None of the orchestration though you do get a sizeable chorus behind her, but the Pozo-Seco record has the backing vocals too.
The Shadow of Your Smile has a similar arrangement.The same rhythm guitar, drum tap, the same cooing chorus, but horns are added.
In retrospect, the best known song on How Does That Grab You is Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) a cover of a then recent Cher hit, enlivened by Billy Strange’s stellar solo work on guitar. That’s all there is, her voice, his guitar.
NANCY: My recording of ‘Bang Bang,’ like so many of the others that really struck a chord with people, was a stick-on after an album session. Maybe Sonny Bono’s best song. My choice to change it from Cher’s version created a melancholy ballad. Billy Strange made it work with his haunting guitar.
BILLY STRANGE: I had a wah-wah pedal which was a vibrato thing. It’s got the deepest bass quality you ever heard … and it made just the right sound for the particular piece.
Nancy Sinatra’s sparse version was re-used by Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill Volume1 in 2003. The minimalism makes it colder as befits a Tarantino film. The precise vocal phrasing is perfectly complemented by the guitar. If I only wanted one version I’d probably go for Cher, but it’s a Sophie’s Choice, and the Nancy Sinatra unexpected stripped down version is intoxicating.
NANCY: Picking the cover versions for the album was a team effort with Lee Hazlewood and Billy Strange and myself. I was the one who came up with the reinterpretation of some of the rock things, like Cher’s ‘Bang Bang.’ That was me. I saw the lyrics differently, they just read like poetry.”
Following on from Bang Bang, she always did one song in live concerts with just her vocal and Billy Strange’s guitar.
Nancy Sinatra’s rendering is considerably more grim (than Cher), slipping into the storytelling with a relish, as she seems to lick each note with a sobering smirk. Ripped off her How Does That Grab You? album, “Bang Bang” is heaved into the ground, and Sinatra’s voice moves at a snail’s pace, intentionally making the listener’s skin crawl as a result. It comes in waves, as the story unravels, and while it could be perceived as a murderous, southern-gothic tale of revenge, it’s simply about heartbreak. (Sonny) Bono crafted a story that begins with two kids, who play cowboys and indians, and as they grow older, they fall for each other and get married. But the honeymoon phase wears off pretty abruptly, and the narrator’s lover runs away off into the sunset for a journey no one will ever know or fully understand. “Now he’s gone I don’t know why / Until this days sometimes I cry / He didn’t even say goodbye / He didn’t take the time to lie,” Sinatra sings, musician Billy Strange’s tremolo guitar quivering with angst and misery in much the same way a ghost haunts its former life.
Jason Scott, B-Sides and Badlands, August 2018
Sand. Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood on the label at last and it’s a B-side
My choice from the album is Sand, because we now have Lee Hazlewood joining Nancy to duet, creating their future very successful template. When you think of great male / female duet teams, Nancy and Lee are surely up there with the best: Bobbie Gentry & Glen Campbell, Otis Redding & Carla Thomas, Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell, Leonard Cohen and Jennifer Warnes.
Lee described the beginning of the duets:
‘I’d written some Boy / Girl songs,’ he checks I realize he’s being sarcastic before continuing, ‘I had a couple or three of them lying around. I just used to sing the songs to her. ‘I like that one. No not that one.’ OK, forget it. ‘No, I want to do that one too.’ Thats the way she was. So we hunted around for people to sing with her, and she just said, ‘Stop it. If anybody sings with me, it’s got to be you, because they won’t sound right. ‘Cos if I’m gonna do these songs, I do them with you. ‘Cos I’ll be unhappy if I don’t hear that old whisky voice.’
As told to Wyndham Wallace, in Lee, Myself & I
Sand wasn’t released as a single until later in 1967, and then was a B-side to Lady Bird which was also by Nancy and Lee. The jangling acoustic guitar introduces a Western movie theme. They’d discovered the contrast in their voices. Lee was fond of the image of a gnarled drifter and a younger woman, a recurring theme. Nancy Sinatra was the perfect foil for the theme.
The lyrics are full of thee and thy and the ‘young woman’ addresses the ‘wandering man’ as sir, as if they were Amish or if it were the 18thcentury.
Oh sir, my fire is very small
It will not warm thy heart at all
But thee may not take me by the hand
Hold me, and I’ll call thee Sand.
Sorry, years of English teaching … line 3 should be but thou may not … and Word’s grammar checker spots that too, but whatever her fire starts to burn hotter and hotter. The sexpot image was maintained.
LEE: Sand is my favourite. Nancy liked that song first time she heard it. Sand was very filthy and Biblical at the same time.
Shindig, July-August 2010
The guitar solo was outstanding, but weird, and was played by Glen Campbell. Sand holds the psychedelic distinction of being the first record to feature backwards recorded guitar, predating The Beatles’ Rain. Sand had been recorded on March 8, 1966; Rain was recorded on April 14 and 16, 1966.
NANCY: Sand,’ the very first Nancy & Lee recording, is my favourite of all my duets with Lee. Everybody likes the song ‘Sand.’ I think it’s a real fantasy/fairy tale kind of recording. A lot of that was Billy Strange’s arrangement. The combination of talents painted pictures that drew you in, absorbed you. You could bring your own experience to it, or you could take the song into your own relationship and act accordingly. ‘Sand’ was Lee’s ‘Norwegian Wood.’ That weird sound is a guitar that was recorded frontwards and then played backwards to try to copy a sitar which we couldn’t find at the time.
The cover on the Total Lee! tribute album was by Calvin Johnson and Mark Pickerel which loses the gender interplay, but adds interesting horns.
LEE: They wouldn’t sing it Biblical, would they? I used “thee” on purpose.
sleeve notes, Total Lee!, 2002
The CD reissue added Lightnin’s Girl, and The Last of The Secret Agents. This was the theme song for the comedy spy movie The Last of The Secret Agents in which Nancy played Micheline and sang the title track. That was written by Lee Hazlewood, and in keeping with the tone of the movie, it opens as pure pastiche dramatic James Bond, but references her biggest hit with the throbbing Boots-style bass part. She sings it with remarkable conviction given the humorous lyrics.
He’s never caught one spy, I’m told
He’s never even caught a cold
Got his degree from Disneyland
But he’s the last of the secret agents,
And he’s my man
Nancy described how Bacharach and David had written a song for her in the movie, Papa Leo’s Place, but the film was running over-budget and out of time, so they scrapped the idea. Then she was at #1 with Boots just as the film was about to come out, so Lee Hazlewood hastened to write a song, and Lee and Billy Strange deliberately did it as a James Bond spoof and put it over the titles.
Italian poster for “The Wild Angels” – her popularity in Italy meant a special Italian poster putting her in the centre.
In 1966 she also co-starred in the Roger Corman movie the Wild Angels with Peter Fonda, which was his inspiration to go on and do Easy Rider. Surprisingly, she’s not on the soundtrack. I found one the other day and was about to buy it until I turned it over and read the credits.
NANCY IN LONDON
UK LP
They were off to Britain in 1966 for Nancy in London, one of the batch of Reprise albums reissued properly on CD with bonus tracks and notes by Sundazed in 1995. The rear sleeve notes that Friday’s Child leads off an exciting new album … It leads from the position of track six on side two, which I would call “finishes off an exciting album …”
While Hazlewood produced, Billy Strange arranged at Pye Studios at Marble Arch. Due to British Musician’s Union rules, Strange wasn’t allowed to conduct, so Johnny Harris took over. Eddie Brackett was their long-time engineer. Lee Hazlewood wrote The Pope’s Daughter: His Fantasy Life With Nancy and Other Sinatras in 2002, and it’s written in a Spike Milligan / John Lennon absurd style and states ‘This is a work of fiction.’ Nevertheless the comic absurdity covers the same events as real life.
“This is a good recording studio?” repeating echoed Eddie B, sterling engineer.
“That sounded like a question.”|
“It Was.”
The Pope’s Daughter: His Fantasy Life With Nancy and Other Sinatras
I’ll take that as a comment. Pye distributed Reprise in Britain. Pye Studios was in the basement of its owners offices, ATV, in an ugly 50s building. There are iconic studios which draw artistes to record there, but Pye wasn’t one of them. The Kinks hits were done there, but in later years a lot of ultra-budget covers records were done there too. I’ve never seen Pye studios mentioned with affection. She’s pictured on a London red bus with her booted foot prominent.
So why were they in London? The 1995 sleeve notes by Nancy suggest they were there to record the James Bond theme You Only Live Twice with John Barry conducting the 80 piece London Philharmonic. That carried over to the album where she describes her youthful Wrecking Crew American backing musicians, and contrasts them:
NANCY: Recording in London was definitely a different experience
than recording in America. First of all, because the guys in America were my age and younger. On BOOTS you know, we had Jimmy Gordon on the drums, he was like a baby; and Chuck Berghofer on bass. Donnie Owens and Al Casey on acoustic guitars, and we had kind of a young trombone section, you know. It was just a youthful kind of a look. When you walked into the studio in London there were guys with grey beards and white hair and it was a little scary, a little intimidating to be recording in London with these wonderful, experienced London Philharmonic-type musicians. And me with my little bitty voice. (sleeve note to Nancy in London Sundazed reissue)
Recording in Britain had become a well-trodden route in the wake of The Beatles, led by The Everly Brothers Two Yanks in England. Brenda Lee did an album in 1964. Del Shannon did Home And Away with Andrew Loog Oldham in 1967 although it wasn’t released for decades. Tommy Roe recorded in the UK. Bobby Vee recorded The New Sound From England but did it with Snuff Garrett in America. Usually the point was using British producers and session men, and most often going for British songwriters – both Brenda Lee and Bobby Vee had a go at She Loves You. But Nancy was in London with Lee Hazlewood and Billy Strange and some of the songs such as Hutchinson Jail were country. There are no British songwriters on there either, though when it was issued on CD in 1996 John Barry’s You Only Live Twice was a bonus cut. You have to wonder what the point of doing it in London was.
For the third time, we have covers … On Broadway, Wishin’ and Hopin’, The More I See You. Lee Hazlewood was possibly restricting the flow of his own compositions (or was diffident) and she had not yet found another songwriter to provide her with new original material. It would be a long time before Mac Davis took on that role.
On Broadway was written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and in its best and most famous version recorded for The Drifters, adapted and produced by Leiber & Stoller. (US #9, R&B #7) in 1963. In my memory it was a major UK hit and I pride myself on spotting it and Up On The Roof on release, but not so according to the chart books. It’s such a marvellous song, that a cover four years on was a reasonable idea. A powerful vocal and instrumental backing. Who booked her backing singers? A perennial issue. These guys are not up to The Drifters.
The End is a cover of the 1958 Earl Grant song, not The Doors psychotic Oedipal drama. That would have been a fascinating combination. Nancy’s version has had a later life in adverts. It’s very late 50s pop, yet has such a huge orchestra and massive chorus over her semi-spoken early verses.
The next song Step Aside is country and western. It’s credited to Tommy Jennings, brother of Waylon Jennings. It was recorded by Lee Hazlewood’s first discovery, Sanford Clark in 1966 as the B-side to a re-recording of his first hit, The Fool written by Hazlewood. The guitarists on the Sanford Clark session were Al Casey, who played on the original 1956 version, and Waylon Jennings. If this hadn’t been recorded in London, no doubt Al Casey would have played on Nancy’s version too. Waylon went on to record the song himself, in a very Johnny Cash’ stripped down style. I assume Lee sourced the song, and he must have decided to push the song in two directions. Nancy’s version is more elaborate than either Sanford Clark or Waylon Jennings, and while the piano and country bass line sound country, the horns are not a country item.
I Can’t Grow Peaches On A Cherry Tree is folky. It had been a recent American hit by Just Us, a duo which consisted of Chip Taylor and Al Gorgioni. (US #34, Adult Contemporary #3 in 1966). It gave its title to their album. It’s credited to E. Levitt-C. Monde. Chip Taylor was a major songwriter himself. Good song. As expected, Nancy’s version has the orchestral arrangement, but retains its folky lilting melody.
She makes an excellent job of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s Wishin’ and Hopin’ and it suits her voice, but my first choice would be Ani di Franco and my second Dusty Springfield for this song. Dionne Warwick had been the first to record it in 1963. Nancy Sinatra has some of the clipped delivery which Ani di Franco used in her later bare, stripped back version for My Best Friend’s Wedding in 1995. This Nancy take on the song is big and dramatic and she goes for rapid after the solo. Dusty Springfield did it in 1964, and scored a US #6 hit, but it was held back in the UK because Dusty was already #3 with I Just Don’t Know What To With Myself. So The Merseybeats covered her version and went to #13. She remained identified with the song in the UK, performing it on TV with The Merseybeats at the time. A good cover of a well-known song is usually a good idea on an album, but what did they expect to gain from doing it?
The best track of all is Summer Wine … the last track on side one … which wasn’t released as a single until it became the B-side of Sugar Town. See below.
This Little Bird was a John D. Loudermilk song which had been covered in 1965 by The Nashville Teens (UK #38), then by Marianne Faithfull (UK #6 in May, US #32 in July), so there was a British hit connection, and her second Marianne Faithfull cover after As Tears Go By on Boots. Nancy’s version was issued as a single in Japan two years later and was a #15 Japanese hit in January 1969.
Shades is the first Lee Hazlewood to appear on the LP, and as soon as you hear the orchestra at the start and then the loping pace and the deep voice, you know it. Fabulous. Shades was also recorded by Lee Hazlewood solo (arranged by Billy Strange) in August 1966, and was slated to appear on his aborted 1967 album for MGM, Something Special. It was shifted to his LHI album in 1967, Lee Hazlewood Presents the 98% American Mom & Apple Pie 1929 Crash Band, and every track on that was a solo version of a Nancy Sinatra hit, except for Houston.
The More I See You was another major hit to be covered. It was an older song than I thought … 1945. Like many, I met it it with Chris Montez’s 1966 UK #3 hit. Montez had recorded Call Me which Nancy had covered on her previous album. It was on the same MoR album The More I See You. For me, Chris Montez is Let’s Dance and I never liked his shift to this sort of material. Nancy does it with vibes and horns and soars above it. I never liked the song though.
Hutchinson Jail is Lee Hazlewood, with the cowboy in the cold, cold, cold jail after being accused of shooting a man. Nancy sings “I got a man in Wichita and a man in Saginaw” and I thought she meant she’d shot some people there too, but then she adds “They both ain’t heard from me in some time.” Then I realised by “got a man” she meant “a male friend or partner.” It was transparent when Lee had sung “I got a wife in Wichita and a girl in Saginaw.” Lee had recorded it in 1966 solo with simpler backing. He’d told her Boots wasn’t a girls song. This definitely isn’t, but then folk tradition is to ignore the gender of a narrator within a song. Bows on the bass (es). There is a town of Hutchinson in Kansas, not too far from Wichita.
The first single from Nancy in Londonwas Lee Hazlewood’s Friday’s Child (US #36 . It had been the title track of Hazlewood’s solo LP for Reprise in 1965, before working with Nancy. It had not set the world on fire. There’s Nancy singing on her own, a 30 piece orchestra, nice crisp chanting chorus. Britain had some good backing vocalists and these sound like rock backing vocalists rather than the Anita Kerr-style choir used on her American recordings. The most memorable thing is the blues lead guitar solo running all over the song. So if it was recorded in London, it’s not Hazlewood’s regular studio team. So who is the lead guitarist? The blues obsession guitar sounds British to me (Answers on a postcard to …). I’d like to think it was a pimply young British ace, but Billy Strange was there arranging and conducting and is a guitarist with such a wide range that I suspect it’s him. The drums also sound great, just dragging the beat a tad. It doesn’t sound “British session man” to me, but it might be.
Lee Hazlewood again for 100 Years. It’s like he wanted a suite of three compositions together to end the second side. As expected, after a dramatic faux-classical piano opening, there’s a marvellous bass guitar sound on 100 Years and it’s not the usual Kaye / Berghofer sound either. So were they all British session players? If so, they do a brilliant job of sounding country. 100 Years was a subsequent single.
BONUS TRACKS
The CD reissue has both sides of the single, You Only Live Twice ad Tony Rome plus Life’s A Trippy Thing which has its own section below.
SUMMER WINE / SUGAR TOWN
Summer Wine- my original copy of my first choice of all. Note discrete Lee credit.
In January 1967, they released the advance single from the Sugar album, which was Sugar Town, coupled with her and Lee Hazlewood on Summer Wine from Nancy in London. I’m choosing both sides in my ten, not that Lee would approve:
The B-side of ‘Sugar Town’, a frisky duet with Hazlewood ‘Summer Wine’, started to pick up airplay in 1967, igniting a demand for further Nancy and Lee duets. “Then you know you want to slit your wrists because they played ‘Sugar Town’ for three months, it sold about a million and a half,” Hazlewood confessed. “Then they turned it over and it sold another half a million with that on the other side. So what I did is give them a $2 record for a dollar. That hurts your producer ‘s mind, and it hurts your publishing mind and it hurts your writer’s mind and your performer’s mind. No, the performance worked out fine, but all that other stuff you gave it awfully. You gave a two-sided hit. And I don’t believe in two-sided hits. So that’s how my wonderful singing career began.”
Ian Johnston Soundlab
Lee Hazlewood had just founded his own label, LHI Records, and signed The International Submarine Band with Gram Parsons, though that was at the prompting of Suzi Jane Hokum, who produced them. Their album Safe At Home pre-dates Sweetheart of The Rodeo’s claim as the first country rock album. So Hazlewood wasn’t unaware of the mood of the year on the West Coast. (And it was Hazlewood who took legal action and had Parsons voice removed from some tracks on Sweetheart of The Rodeo.)
Sugar Town is, on the surface at least, unusually pop for Hazlewood, both in tune and lyrics. It’s jaunty, laid back and cheerful. Nancy takes it on her own. It stands out as at odds with the Sugar album. It was a hit (US #5, UK #8). Lee Hazlewood later claimed it was full of double entendre which “the kids” would get. OK, but I never did. On the 1997 CD reissue, Nancy Sinatra was explicit:
NANCY: It was hard to put any other songs with Sugar Town. It was basically LSD, but it was not publicized as such. It was Lee’s Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. It went against my image, which made it tough to choose the other songs for the same collection.
(Sleeve notes to Sugar CD 1997).
So the laid back, whoozy gentle feel refers to sugar lumps with LSD, in the sense of Smoke’s My Friend Jack Eats Sugar Lumps.
LEE: Sugar Town was an LSD song if ever there was one. I was in a folk club one night and saw some kids with an eyedropper putting LSD on sugar cubes. That’s what I meant by ‘Just lay back and laugh at the sun’. One columnist called Walter Winchell, the New York critic who invented the gossip column, said it was the dumbest lyric he ever heard. Reprise didn’t believe in that record at all but it went Top Ten. But I never took LSD myself. I’ve never had much dope, period.
Shindig interview, July-August 2010
Summer Wine is a duet, and right into the favoured Western Movie scenario again … I’m sure that was the intention of his male original idea for These Boots Are Made For Walkin’. Hazlewood’s character walks into town:
I walked in town on silver spurs that jingled too
A song that I had only sung to just a few
She saw my silver spurs and said lets pass some time
And I will give to you summer wine
This is also leaning towards Some Velvet Morning stoned (whether alcohol or drugs) aspect:
My eyes grew heavy and my lips they could not speak
I tried to get up but I couldn’t find my feet
She reassured me with an unfamiliar line
And then she gave to me more summer wine
The story is an old one (compare New York Girls) for when he does wake, his silver spurs have gone, along with a dollar and a dime. The orchestration is extraordinary, sitting on a simple tap from Hal Baine, and a repetitive bass line. The urgent strings soar higher and ever stronger above her sultry siren voice. The horns towards the end are James Bond movie style. If you listen to her phrasing, the way tiny pauses, or stretched words are used, you can see that she inherited magic vocal timing from her dad.
NANCY (on Summer Wine): A running theme in his songs … was the young girl with the older guy.That was his fantasy and he captured it beautifully in song. … With me, he took the little girl quality and put it with adult ideas and something very interesting happened.
You have to wonder why such a strong song (it was my first choice of all) was a B side in the first place. However, Hazlewood had some contractual arguments with MGM over recording as an artist with Nancy in 1967, so may have held it back – and the B-side still earns the same money. The original Sugar LP says Lee Hazlewood sings on Summer Wine courtesy of MGM Records.
In 2002 the Lee Hazlewood tribute album Total Lee! covered several Lee and Nancy songs, including Summer Wine by Evan Dando and Sabrina Brooke. They had Lee listen through and comment for the sleeve notes.
LEE: She (Sabrina Brooke) sings ‘strawberry’ just like Nancy says it. It’s scary. The original was cut in London. It was at the time when 007 was big. Billy Strange wrote that brass line in, and said ‘Please don’t take that out!’ so I never did.
SUGAR
Sugar was the February 1967 album, based around Sugar Town.
NANCY: (Sugar Town was) Barton Lee Hazlewood’s homage to LSD. I don’t like performing this song but it’s an audience favourite so I have them sing it! It was difficult to build an album around it so we went with some Dixieland Jazz. The best thing about the album was the cover.
The cover photo got it banned in some places, and making it fuzzier doesn’t help much.
That was four albums in a year and it shows in the track selection. Anyone for Sweet Georgia Brown? Oh, You Beautiful Doll, Let’s Fall in Love? Hard Hearted Hannah? On the cover there’s no sign of boots and she’s back to California in a pink bikini. The back sleeve added “sings Sugar Town and sweet soulful serenades from the old timey years.” Mostly it sounds 1920s and virtually all of it is. You could say “Songs of the 1920s plus a couple.”
The CD reissue adds two contemporary singles, Love Eyes and Something Stupid. On the rear sleeve, Lee writes “What Is Nancy Sinatra?” including:
She’s so square she can get high on a glass of water.
She’s so hip that she can make you believe she’s high on a glass of water.
On line this quote turns up again and again. I don’t know which songs she meant.
NANCY: I was successful with mediocre material because of a good recording voice that people really liked at that time.
It’s puzzling. It’s not so much mediocre material, they’re all classic melodies and lyrics, so much as material that was misguided just as her career was taking off so well. Nowadays we’d call some of it Great American Songbook, a category dominated by her father; some Dixieland (as she does). What possessed them to record this stuff at that time though? It’s a specific genre, and if I’d bought this album on release (my secondhand copy is much later) I’d have returned it to the shop as so far from what I expected. They do it very well and a few years ago I discovered The Beautiful Old with such retro songs which has helped me appreciate this better.
The LP sleeve lists the crew which was unusual for mainstream chart in those days … including Al Casey, Glen Campbell, Jimmy Helms & James Burton on guitars, Don Randi and Larry Knechtel on pianos, Carol Kaye and Chuck Berghofer on basses, Jeff Porcaro on percussion, Hal Blaine and Jim Gordon on drums. Five trumpets. Four trombones.
Full credits were unusual for the era
NANCY: I think we blew it on a couple of tracks, like What’ll I Do (I call that the duck song, Waddle I Do) and My Buddy should have stayed.in three quarter time.
Sleeve notes to reissue of Sugar on CD
I think they blew it on more than a couple of tracks. I think they blew it on the concept. In the early 60s, Britain had a great deal of trad jazz … Chris Barber, Kenny Ball, Acker Bilk. Then we had novelty English bands like The Temperance Seven and the New Vaudeville Band, or Clinton Ford solo, or later, The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, playing in an old fashioned way. Maybe the style was a novelty in America, It was a perplexing choice for Britain. What you have here is often very much like trad jazz / New Orleans jazz, or 1920s dance hall, but instead of being played sloppily by cheerful beery British blokes, or by authentic New Orleans jazzmen, it’s being played by the cream of LA session guys, who don’t usually play this stuff, but play it with far greater precision. Instead of the normal trumpet, trombone and clarinet of the trad line up, you have five trumpets and four trombones.
Sweet Georgia Brown dates back to 1925. You can’t knock the choice really, as The Beatles did it with Tony Sheridan in 1962. It features almost a rap over rich bass, but with a massive trad instrumental at the middle and end. Nancy veers unusually somewhat towards a black accent. It’s more convincing than The Beatles effort.
Vagabond Shoes was a hit (US #17) for Vic Damone in 1950. The band drowns her.
Oh, You Beautiful Doll goes back to 1911 and countless recordings, most famously Al Jolson. She continues pairing her voice with the bass player and keeping the horns separate.
Hard Hearted Hannah was written in 1924, and would be fine in a 30s or 40s or 50s movie about a night club singer. Both Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald had a go at it, as did Britain’s Temperance Seven. Nancy lost the subtitle ‘The Vamp of Savannah.’ Cher in Burlesque was doing this sort of thing more recently.
All By Myself keeps us in the 1920s. Irving Berlin wrote it in 1921. Another with so many covers from Bing Crosby to Nat King Cole, Bobby Darin, Ella Fitzgerald, Connie Francis, Kay Starr, Brenda Lee. Trad band style with muted trumpet. Billy Strange gets special sleeve credit for the guitar solo on All By Myself.
The only other Hazlewood composition on the album is Coastin’. Another James Bond start, and bass guitar rather than acoustic bass (or both in unison). The trumpet solo is very fine. It was used as a B-side. The lyrics are gentle by Lee Hazlewood standards:
When I kissed your angel face
My whole world fell into place
Mama Goes Where Papa Goes … guess what? 1923. Kay Starr sang it in 1948. A feature of the album is mixing Nancy’s voice up front and dropping instrumental sections back, except for lead horns. She speaks a lot of the lyric, most effectively. The song is semi-novelty. People seek the origins of rap, citing songs like Shopping For Clothes by The Coasters. If the 1923 original was anything like Nancy’s take on the song, you can go further back.
Let’s Fall In Love starts out gently, a touch like Sugar Town. The CD album has this wrong, attributing it to Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler. That’s the 1933 song that Frank Sinatra later recorded in 1961. He also recorded a completely different song with Shirley Maclaine in 1960 for Can-Can, and that’s the song here which is correctly entitled Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love) or Let’s Do It and was written by Cole Porter in 1928. The 1967 British LP has the wrong title too, and the wrong attribution on the inner label. i.e. They’ve been paying the royalties to the wrong composers and publisher for fifty years. However Wikipedia wins … it lists Nancy’s version under the Cole Porter song (correctly) but not under the Arlen / Koehler song. I’m glad we’ve cleared that up. Thank you notes from the Cole Porter Estate gratefully received. Electric bass is the loudest instrument on the track … the rest retreat. They go for a touch of comic dialogue with the chorus. It’s deceptively difficult, an extremely hard song to sing well (she does) – I remember abandoning it for a pantomime years ago in rehearsals, which may be why I remembered it was by Cole Porter.
What’ll I Do is Irving Berlin. 1923. It’s another one that her dad had recorded, twice in 1947, and in 1962. In interviews, she continually stresses Frank’s wise advice to distance herself from his material. Not on this album. A couple of chords on guitar, then it’s Nancy’s voice; intimate, mixed at the front with gentle guitar behind for a verse. (Too) predictably percussion and bass arrive on the first chorus. A meandering horn in the background. It’s sparse, bare, subtle. As a version of What’ll I Do it’s brilliant, but looking at my computer as I type, I shake my head at iTunes definition of every song here as “rock.”
Limehouse Blues starts with a bit of Fu Manchu tinkling (China has been mentioned) before lurching into a burlesque show swing. As the title shows, it’s Chinatown London, or where it used to be pre-World War Two, and is British in origin from 1921. At the end she says:
Confucius he say
People who live in lime houses
Should maybe
paint them a different colour?
Sugar Town comes next. The plinkety plunk surprisingly fits in with the album, though this is so far and away the best song on there as well as the best performance.
Button Up Your Overcoat. 1929. Around the same time as Sugar, Connie Francis recorded Connie & Clyde – Sings Songs of The 30s with this song on it. Maybe 20s / 30s song tributes was an Italian-American thing! In the same sort of pastiche style the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band had done it as a B-side in 1966. Nancy was not alone. You might think the Bonzo Dog was an old version – you can tell hers is later.
My Buddy is 1922. Everyone did it in the 30s and 40s. In her sleeve notes Nancy cites My Buddy as the personally important track, which she sang after returning from a three week singing tour to US troops in Vietnam, which she remembered for life and she has worked for vets ever since. It’s just that for me the tune and treatment might work in a World War II situation … I think of far tougher stuff for Vietnam. However, there are photos of her with injured GIs, so it’s clearly a sincere choice.
The CD reissue bonus tracks are Love Eyes, which had been a single in May 1967 (see below under Late 60s Singles), and the mega-selling Somethin’ Stupid.
YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE
I’m not a fan of James Bond films, nor do I share the wide enthusiasm for the over dramatic film theme songs, but taking the lot of them, You Only Live Twice and McCartney’s Live and Let Die are my favourites. You Only Live Twice was, like the other early themes, a John Barry and Leslie Bricusse composition. Barry tried it twice before deciding on Nancy Sinatra. First up was Julie Rogers with tinkling Chinese bits over the orchestra and sounding serious and operatic (available on Bond CD retrospectives). Then they cut it with Lorraine Chandler (in full Shirley Bassey mode). No one was happy, and John Barry wanted Aretha Franklin to try it. Bond producer Cubby Broccoli wanted Frank Sinatra to do it.
JOHN BARRY: Cubby Broccoli was a friend of Frank Sinatra’s. So he phoned him up and said we’d love you to sing the song in the movie. But Frank said no, he didn’t want to do it, but my daughter is really good! Have Nancy do it.
It’s now available as a bonus track on the CD release of Nancy in London. It was recorded at CTS Studios in Bayswater with a 60-piece orchestra on 2nd May 1967. In the sleeve notes she says she was terrified singing in front of the huge orchestra.
NANCY: You Only Live Twice was difficult in a lot of ways. The fact that is was quite rangey, and I wasn’t used to that, I was used to my little octave and a half. I even asked John, are you sure you want me to do this because maybe you need Shirley Bassey? But they said no, we want you, we want your sound.
John Barry calmed her nerves by saying they would track the vocal separately.
JOHN BARRY: We took about maybe twelve takes and then when she had gone, we literally took pieces from all these takes that we had done and we stuck them all together and made the one tape that finally went out with the movie. As we say, it was a hatchet job. But she loved it and when she heard it she called me up and said you made it sound wonderful.
On the DVD commentary track John Barry ups the number and says the final version is 25 takes, while Nancy says that she sounded like Minnie Mouse. Nancy:
NANCY: There were bad notes, they just edited it together. They didn’t want to embarrass me. I tried my best – I was 26 years old and really scared
Soundtrack LP, US version
The CD reissue sleeve notes that the bonus track is ‘the rarer double-voiced single version which was actually recorded in LA, not London.’ The single version is not the same as the soundtrack version. The single was re-recorded and produced by Billy Strange because Lee Hazlewood felt the full instrumental version was too lush for a 45 single. It’s still pretty lush, but a guitar replaces what remained of the Oriental bit, and the orchestra has more treble and a more prominent bass part. Her voice is mellower on the soundtrack version, harder-edged on the Billy Strange version.
Nancy adds that she could sing it better now (1995). For me, Shirley Bassey fell (way) over the top in the over-dramatic stakes and would have bellowed and wept where Nancy sings. The single did well (US #44, UK #11).
A different version on the 45 single. UK copy
ELVIS & NANCY
1967 was a busy year … she was Elvis Presley’s co-star in Speedway (released to screen in 1968). She had been assigned to greet Elvis on his return from the army in 1960, bearing gifts from her dad. She got equal billing on the Speedway poster. She danced with Elvis and sang a few lines in the last part of There Ain’t Nothing Like A Song. She is wearing a white mini-dress and those long white boots, which is probably one reason she was cast.
VIDEO LINK: THERE AIN’T NOTHING LIKE A SONG
On his 17thfilm soundtrack, she became the first co-star to get a full solo song: Your Groovy Self, written by Lee Hazlewood naturally. Elvis’s problem in the film era was material. The great songwriting teams, Leiber & Stoller and Pomus & Schuman were no longer prepared to go along with Colonel Parker’s demands for a major cut of the publishing. So Elvis generally ended up with workday songwriters who would, notably Ben Weisman and Sid Wayne. A selection can be found on Glen Campbell Sings For The King (2018) a selection of demos of Weisman material which Glen Campbell did between 1964 and 1968 for Elvis to follow faithfully, probably with the same Wrecking Crew musicians that Nancy used. Nancy Sinatra must have pressed for a Lee Hazlewood song rather than more of Elvis’s low-grade film songs.
Your Groovy Self was recorded quite separately to Elvis’s songs, with her usual backing musicians, not the ones who backed Elvis on the rest. In the film, she mimes with Elvis’s supposed band, some of whom are dancers posing as musicians. It’s the best song in the movie. It is also available on her 1999 compilation You Go Go Girl.
VIDEO LINK: YOUR GROOVY SELF from SPEEDWAY
Elvis Presley: Speedway LP. With Elvis, the worse the film, the rarer (and more valuable) the soundtrack album is.
The choreography on Your Groovy Self is clichéd, but she sings in a laconic, almost sleazy way, and the band sounds burlesque with a powerful drum part, as if about to break into a striptease. We won’t investigate how Lee Hazlewood came to rhyme ‘bus’ with ‘dangerous.’
The film wasn’t well received, but …
Speedway has a script that ran out of gas before Elvis Presley was born. Presley pictures can be unpretentious fun, but this one is both uninspired and too much of an imitation of too many of his previous movies … There aren’t even very many songs to break up developments too predictable to outline here … Nancy Sinatra’s one song was the high point of the picture.
Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times, 22 May 1968
THE INCEST SONG
My original copy, bought new
Somethin’ Stupid was a duet between Nancy Sinatra and her dad. It was written by Carson C. Parkes for his male / female duo, Carson & Gaile, and recorded in November 1966. Gaile Foote was Carson’s wife. It appeared on their album San Antonio Rose. Carson Parkes was the older brother of Van Dyke Parkes. Call Me by Frank alone was the B-side.
CARSON C. PARKES: My manager Wally Brady knew Mo Ostin (head of Reprise) and he got a tape of the song to Mo and asked him to put it on the top of the pile. Frank used to fly up every Friday from Palm Springs to Burbank to do the business things. Well, it seems that Frank called Nancy and said “We gotta do this.” Mo thought it was a dog, but Frank thought it was Top Ten. The song was in the right place at the right time. Nancy was on the teen market stations, a market Frank hadn’t cracked, and at that stage Nancy hadn’t cracked the MoR stations.”
Richard Havers “Sinatra”
Nancy had another version of the story:
NANCY: Him (her dad) influence me? You’re joking. Do you think it was an easy job getting him to record commercial songs? It’s like pulling teeth. I had to drag him bodily into the studio.
Richard Havers “Sinatra”
It was known by those around at the time as ‘the incest song’ though perhaps not in Frank Sinatra’s hearing. Havers also says it was called “The dumb dumb song around Reprise.” Ah, well, it just proves who had the right ears for a hit. The session was recorded on 1st February 1967.
Lee Hazlewood said:
LEE: Frank played it for me, and says “You’ve been wanting me to do something with the kid.” He wanted me to produce it but I said I can’t. Jimmy Bowen produces you, so we’ll both have to do it. I didn’t pay attention to Jimmy and he didn’t pay attention to me. We brought in our rhythm section – Hal Blaine, Don Randi, Al Casey, Donnie Owens– and got rid of Frank’s. Nobody mentioned a follow-up.’
(Sleeve notes to “Califia”, Ace)
Somethin’ Stupid: South African Reprise. South African #1 single. “Nancy & Frank Sinatra” sounds more incestuous than the “Nancy Sinatra & Frank Sinatra” elsewhere
LEE: (Frank) was an iron-fisted father making sure he got the best out of his daughter with the best musicians. The director of the film we were shooting of the sessions was so afraid of Sinatra, he’d ask me if I’d ask them if they’d mind doing one more take. So I’d tell Frank we needed another and he’d say “You got it.” It was nothing but easy. We went right through it. My concern was for her, but she was perfect, as he was in the end.
Shindig, July-August 2010
It was a #1 hit in Britain and the USA, and in South Africa, Australia, Austria, Canada, Ireland, Norway. Frank’s smooth delivery and unique sense of timing makes it special.
It went onto Frank’s album The World We Knew. Al Casey and Glen Campbell were the guitarists. Carole Kaye on bass guitar as usual, paired with Ralph Pena on acoustic bass. Hal Blaine on drums. The song is mentioned in The Wrecking Crew film. Al Casey had played the original guitar part for Carson & Gaile. Frank Sinatra asked for an exact duplicate of the original guitar part. Glen Campbell made several attempts, but Frank wasn’t happy with the results, so Al Casey put his hand up, and pointed out that he had played the original, so it might be best if he just did it again, which is what happened.
VIDEO LINK: SOMETHIN’ STUPID on YOUTUBE. Note this is out ofsync – audio and video from different sources but it gives the idea.
Perhaps concerned about the record label’s disquiet about a father and daughter singing a love song as a duet, they decided to correct it for the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour TV Show in April 1967. Nancy sang it with her brother, Frank Sinatra Jnr. instead.
A 1982 live version from Las Vegas is on the Frank Sinatra 2006 box set Sinatra Vegas. She joined him just for the one song.
NANCY: In 1967, Sarge Weiss brought a duet to the attention of FS (Frank Sinatra), who said: ‘Let’s tack it onto the end of the Antonio Carlos Jobim date.’ So, the A-team stepped aside and I came in with my little B-team and we recorded it with my father. We did the song in two takes (we would have done it in one except that my dad got silly, endlessly sounding his S’s for fun, like Daffy Duck.) Mo Ostin, President of Reprise, bet him $2 that the song would fail. During the playback in the booth. FS said, ‘That’s going to be Number One’. It became number one, sold several million– and it still sells. Disc jockeys loved to call it ‘the incest song.’”
British EP release. Adds Winchester Cathedral which is just Frank. “Frank & Nancy” this time.
Original American sheet music
British sheet music was more flattering by reverting to the photo
Robbie Williams and Nicole Kidman covered it in 2001 (UK #1).
COUNTRY MY WAY
Yet another album in little more than a year was Country, My Way incorporating Jackson. It was recorded at RCA in Nashville in April 1967 with a new crew as well … Wayne Moss on guitar, Buddy Harmons on drums, Charlie McCoy on harmonica and vibes, Buddy Emmons on steel guitar, David Briggs on piano. The bikini has gone and she’s wearing blue leather trousers and blue boots … sorry, her sleeve photos are important! They look like the blue boots from Speedway too. The band scream out Nashville and it includes C&W classics … Oh, Lonesome Me and The End of The World.
Eight of the songs were recent country hits … the point was that she was re-doing them her way.
When you had long hair in 1967, country music emanating from a pub, especially Jim Reeves, meant Irish bar and No Hippies. Country was definitely not my thing in 1967. I liked Johnny Cash, and some Americana novelty country, but I loathed the main thing. Sweetheart of The Rodeo and Nashville Skyline is where country comes in for me. Much of this music here is too C&W for my taste. To put it into perspective, I can’t stand anything by Jim Reeves. I don’t even like George Jones. I’m better with women. The nearest I got in that era was Bobbie Gentry, not totally country, and Jeannie C. Riley, who reviews called “The Nancy Sinatra of country” after Harper Valley PTA was a hit. And Jackson may be the second “country” single I ever bought.
These were mainly major hits in the country chart.
It’s A Pretty World Today was a #1 country hit for Wynne Stewart in 1967. Nancy’s version appears in one episode of Breakin’ Bad. What can I say? Wynne Stewart’s original on YouTube pretty much defines why I never liked that kind of country. Nancy Sinatra’s version has much more bite in the instrumental, she’s a better singer and sings it in an unaffected way. But my goodness, I loathe the song.
Get While The Gettin’s Good is far livelier. 1967 song again, this time by Bill Anderson. His backing’s pretty fine as is Nancy’s. There’s a major “but” for me. Bill Anderson wrote Still and Happiness covered by Ken Dodd, both UK hits. I worked on the Ken Dodd show and had to listen to them twice every night for weeks. I liked Ken Dodd very much, who used to send me over the road to the newsagent to buy “girlie” magazines for him, but I truly hated those songs. Anderson wrote Saginaw Michigan for Lefty Frizell, and I like that. But I’m not ever going to like this song, even with Nancy singing it.
Walk Through This World With Me was a country #1 for George Jones in 1967. George thought it too Middle of The Road, and too sappily optimistic and romantic and never wanted to record it, and only did so after constant producer pressure, and was astonished when it was a #1 hit. George Jones was right. I don’t like the song either.
Jackson is what this album is all about …
British EP of Jackson: Jackson, Sand, Summer Wine + Nancy solo on Cryin’ Time (from How Does That Grab You)
LEE: Since I didn’t write much for this album, I brought Nancy what I considered to be songs by the best country writers, probably about one hundred songs. She picked out as many as I did. She cared. So did I, and it worked. We did ‘Jackson’ live, in three takes. It took about fifteen minutes altogether.
Then we jumped in her dad’s Lear jet, and went to Miami to see him perform.
It wasn’t until about three or four weeks later that we listened to it,
and we both thought it was good enough to release as a single.”
Jackson was another prominent B-side, released on the reverse of You Only Live Twice, but then listed as a Double A side in the UK in July 1967 (UK #11). I thought her version was the original for years. It is a duet, and sounds pure Lee Hazlewood. Not so. In fact, the song was written in 1963 by Billy Ed Wheeler and Jerry Leiber. The Johnny Cash & June Carter version came out in February 1967 and was a #2 country hit. Nancy and Lee were yet again covering a still warm hit, but they were also taking it out of the country music ghetto into the mainstream.
NANCY: Lee and I had heard Johnny Cash and June Carter, and loved it. So we tried to cover it and got lucky. It was one song that was NOT Lee’s that really took off.
BILLY STRANGE: The record company said “Let’s pump the hell out of this!” Nancy and Lee were a hot duet act, it was a good record, and the country market accepted the song because it was already a hit. Country radio loved it, and that certainly helped.
Sleeve notes to Sundazed CD reissue.
The married couple are going to Jackson, to indulge in tit for tat messing around. We presume ‘mess around’ meant the same in Billy Ed Wheeler’s West Virginia as in Hazlewood’s Oklahoma. The speculation is which Jackson? The writer didn’t care. He said he just liked the sound of the word. There are twenty-one cities called Jackson in the USA. Anywhere that’s livelier than the place you live would fit the bill. Johnny Cash was sure it was Jackson, Tennessee (he lived in Tennessee) because that’s where Carl Perkins lived, and no doubt Johnny could imagine a night on the town with Carl Perkins. Jackson Mississippi was what I thought, being the state capital and largest.
VIDEO LINK: JACKSON, from MOVIN’ WITH NANCY
In 2011, the Cash / Carter version opened the film The Help set in Jackson, Mississippi. As a songwriter once told me, your back catalogue is like a bunch of lottery tickets, and you hope one day that one might be chosen for a major movie. Well, Cash & Carter’s ticket won in 2011, but then Nancy’s ticket had come up earlier with Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down). I’d have chosen Nancy’s version of Jackson in 2011 too. While Johnny sounds as tough and as world-worn as Lee, June sounds a lot more smiley Southern. Nancy sounds tougher with her interspersed comments, ‘Yeah?’ and The Helpis a film centred on women. Then you have the Charlie McCoy harmonica, and the backing vocals, mainly a continuous Ooh … Ooh … until they break into a chanted frantic hissy ‘Jackson … Jackson.’ Then sit back and focus on the guitar playing around everything at low volume. Listening to Nancy’s semi-spoken lines (Goodbye is all she wrote) I’m struck by how often in songs she acts the lines as well as performing them and uses vocal interpolation …… laughter, huh! Or whatever. She had film acting history of course.
Check out the “video” (actually TV show clip) of Jackson from Movin’ With Nancy. Its funny, simple and well-acted by both. The comic ending, where Frank Sinatra Junior turns up in a car to whisk her away shows its origin on the TV show, and you have to say it would have had more impact had it not been her brother.
On her website she says that Hank Cochran’s When It’s Over was her favourite song on the album. It was a very recent country hit for Jeannie Seely in 1967 again, though only #39 country. It’s too much in the Jim Reeves area of country for me. I admire the way Nancy Sinatra sings the notes, and switches to the conversational section. At this point in the album, I’m beginning to appreciate how right Nancy was to eschew a cracker country accent or that so fake little country tremble in the voice. She sings it way better than the original. Not for me though.
Lay Some Happiness On Me. High kicks and hoe down again. An Eddy Arnold song from 1966, but the link here is that Dean Martin had recorded it in 1967 (US #55, US Easy Listening #6). Nice choppy rhythm guitar on Dean’s version. Nancy takes it faster. You’d enjoy it at a line dance, but definitely not my kind of country.
Lonely Again sticks with Eddy Arnold for two tracks in a row. #1 Country in 1967. Oh, dear. Another song I deeply dislike.
By The Way (I Still Love You) is mainstream country too, in spite of being a Lee Hazlewood song. Because Lee wrote it, the song makes full use of Nancy’s ability to slip into conversational dialogue style mid song, which is what makes it appealing. Lee certainly knew how to create a song to fit with the previous tracks. It contains the semi-spoken lines:
Every breath I take … Every smile I fake … Every hour I’m awake
Ah, where is thy Sting? Not that he’s likely to have known it. The delivery and melody’s very similar though!
Oh, Lonesome Me is done as a duet with Lee, though not credited as such. Don Gibson’s original is simpler and hokier – relying on guitar and bass. It was a massive country hit in 1958 (US #7, US Country #1 for eight weeks). Johnny Cash later improved it and had a #13 hit with it. I listened to all three side by side, and I find Nancy & Lee the best version, with their usual male-female back and forth adding to the song. Very cute guitar solo too.
The End of The World was one of the country songs that I DID like. It was a major hit for Skeeter Davis in 1962 (US #2, US country #2, US Easy Listening #1, UK #18). Nancy’s version sits on the pedal steel guitar. The original was more orchestral and arranged … Nancy’s taken it more country in fact. Both versions have beautiful vocal clarity and delivery. It’s a question of which backing you prefer. She did a remix of a different version for the 2012 charity project Music That Changes The World.
Help Stamp Out Loneliness. There are a lot of songs here with happy and happiness in the lyrics. This was by Stonewall Jackson (US #36) who has fiddle and prominent tambourine on his version. If this is the Civil War general he was born in 1824, so 143 years old at the time of the recording. I guess it must be the one born in 1932 then. He was named after the general at birth.
Overall, I feel Nancy improves virtually all the material here. I listened through all the originals on YouTube – I wasn’t familiar with most of them.
Nashville Nancy was a British EP featuring two songs from Country My Way: Get While The Getting’s Good and Help Stamp Out Loneliness. The EP added Step Aside from Nancy in London and Lies (Are Breaking My Heart) from Boots. EPs were important in the British market, where LPs were still an expensive purchase, though 1967 was the tilting point and this is one of the last Pye Group EP releases, hence the cheapo sleeve, re-using the photo from the Jackson EP.
The Sundazed CD release from 1995 adds singles Highway Song, Hello LA, Bye Bye Birmingham (both discussed elsewhere) and Are You Growing Tired of My Love? the B-side of Highway Song.
Nashville Nancy EP, 1967 UK release
Lee always made a point of mentioning commercial success or lack of it. It’s almost his knee-jerk reaction to questions, but I suspect it was self-deprecating / taking the piss out of himself:
LEE: The album more than met my expectations. In those days country albums only sold 50 to 80 thousand copies. We were selling on the “pop” side so we did much better.
Sleeve notes to Sundazed CD reissue.
This is a point to consider how Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra are categorized. They were Initially mainstream chart, not country chart, then ‘Adult Contemporary’ in The USA. Nowadays, I’d put Lee Hazlewood simply as Americana, but Alt. country fits. The CD sleeve to Lee Hazlewood’s These Boots Are Made For Walkin: The Complete MGM Recordings has this:
It’s not quite rock. It’s not quite country, not quite lounge. It’s unique. It’s Lee Hazlewood. Ace 2 CD set, 2002
For me their secret was the combination of Lee Hazlewood’s gruff and tough Americana songs, combined with the resources of a full orchestra, the style of which was very much Nancy’s family background, with the stunning and innovative arrangements of Billy Strange. Lee’s versions on his own or with Suzi Jane Hokum lack that orchestration.
Nancy is an articulate singer with crystal diction, a trait she shares with Paul Simon. Lee Hazlewood’s voice fits with two notable peers … as indicated when the two cover versions on his solo album Pet, Fool or Bum are from Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits.
Lady Bird was a US #20 hit, and their next British hit in November 1967 (UK #47), and it was the track from Nancy & Lee chosen for Califia, the Ace Songwriter Series compilation on Lee Hazlewood, and it’s a huge production. They put Sand on the B-side. I prefer Sand. Lady Bird was what everyone called Lyndon B. Johnson’s wife. Lee and Nancy denied the song referenced her.
MOVIN’ WITH NANCY
LP original UK issue of soundtrack
1995 CD reissue rear with bonus tracks (Tracks 13-15)
At this point, in December 1967 they did a TV special and album, Movin’ With Nancy. The new thing was that they filmed on location for the songs. A grainy crackly version is on YouTube, but a DVD was done in 2000 and reissued in 2014. It’s 4:3 and while it’s not current DVD sharpness or depth, it’s still very watchable. The remastered soundtrack is very good indeed. I’ve used iPhone screenshots at lo-res.
UK DVD release 2014. The earlier American DVD is like the album cover
The show was sponsored by Royal Crown Cola (didn’t they do well compared to Coke and Pepsi) and Nancy had to sing their advert. Later in the show, Dino, Desi and Billy sing it. Luckily, the 2000 DVD cut the ads except for Nancy’s mid-film.
In the mid-90s we were filming one of our ELT/ ESL comedies in New York. We had a long minibus drive with the cast to Southampton on Long Island and I sat up front with the driver. We were talking about his work. He was a recent film school graduate, and 90% of his crew work was on rock videos. We discussed MTV and how David Bowie and Michael Jackson both put out “Video EPs” on VHS tape, and how Asia’s Heat of the Moment had been one of the first major MTV promoted hits. Then the guy said, ‘But you know it all starts with Nancy Sinatra, don’t you?’ He was the first person to explain the importance of Movin’ With Nancy – he added the Color-Sonics juke box film for Boots.
The film broke into upside down pictures, split screens, changing colours. I’d say it was Exhibit A in a lecture on the history of rock video. It also won an Emmy for director Jack Haley Jnr. The use of these multiple screens is usually noted in the Thomas Crowne Affair and in Woodstock. This is earlier. It is highly innovative and original for its day.
When I met with NBC executives, we decided to shoot everything on location as opposed to in-studio, which everyone was doing at the time. There was a new, fast 16mm color film out that was infinitely less expensive than 35mm, and had a great quality to it. We agreed that if Nancy was going to do a commercial project like this, it should be different. And the technology happened to be at hand, which was a big help.”
Jack Haley, Jr., producer and director of Movin’ With Nancy
I nearly described those location films as “videos” but rock video and MTV lay fifteen years in the future.
There was very little dialogue. For my part, the writing was concentrated on
setting the songs to their proper backgrounds and locations, telling the story. Jack (Haley) and I would stay up nights plotting out the sequences. He had a deep love for and encyclopedic knowledge of movie musicals, plus a genuine knack for shooting inventive visuals to tell the story. He richly deserved his Emmy.”
Tom Mankiewicz, scriptwriter Movin’ With Nancy, from “My Life As A Mankiewicz: An Insider’s Journey Through Hollywood.
Check out the stories of each segment on Nancy Sinatra’s website.
Michael Shore’s The Rolling Stone Book of Rock Video purports to start with Al Jolson, and gets through without mentioning Movin’ With Nancy at all. Not that it mentions Anthony Newley either. It is typical of the rock snob ability not to see her work. Wikipedia is considerably better!
The TV special was unlike most musical programs of its time, with the numbers performed outdoors on locations instead of the usual stage-bound production filmed before a live audience. Sinatra sang while driving down the highway, strolling in the California countryside, and aloft in a hot-air balloon. She performed duets with the guest stars she encountered along the way, with no introductions or interstitial dialog. The general effect was of a dream-like fantasy that flows from one location to the next, with segments resembling the later format of music videos.
Wikipedia
In the late 60s, female singers often got a TV show series on their second hit record, but this show was planned as a one-off, though she later filmed two more specials, one with The Osmonds, then one with The Muppets. The duet with guests was the obligatory major feature of such TV shows. This was a different approach.
Track list from German DVD copy
The early locations are predictable in hindsight. She sings We Gotta Get Out Of This Town (written by Lee Hazlewood) to open the show in a car on a freeway, and Up Up And Away sees her in a hot air balloon. That song hit the collective in 1967 – I was doing limelights on a variety show dance troupe version twice nightly six days a week that summer.
Sugar Town
Then it gets more unusual. Sugar Town is white boots, white mini skirt and trees and waterfalls, filmed at Big Sur.
Sugar Town and Friday’s Child are both included in the TV show, but Sugar Town is not on the album.
This Town has her wandering by a foggy Golden Gate Bridge. That’s odd as the theme seems to fit with a Hollywood story, but then she moves on a set with smartly-dressed mannequins. The interiors were LA. It’s a Lee Hazlewood original but sounds more standard meets James Bond – that London session definitely influenced Mr Hazlewood. I’ve listened to his sol versions of songs that he did with Nancy and almost always greatly prefer the duet with Nancy. However, his 1968 solo version of This Town in Mose Allison style with a four piece band is delightfully simple, has superb piano playing and some highly unusual scat singings or perhaps grunting, courtesy of Billy Strange. Perhaps the only one where I’d choose Lee solo.
This Town. Nancy with mannequin sailors, San Francisco
There were two duets with Lee Hazlewood, Jackson (with the very funny video linked in the previous section) and Some Velvet Morning.
Jackson – two great comic actors
The Rat Pack were out in force. She has said that Dean Martin was like a brother to Frank, so like an uncle to her. Dean Martin did Just Bummin’ Around (not on the LP) in black tie and a tuxedo with cane on the same mannequin set as This Town. He can tap a mannequin with his stick (wand) and bring it to life.
VIDEO LINK: THINGS FROM MOVIN” WITH NANCY
Nancy appears and Dean becomes her fairy god-uncle. Nancy takes his walking cane, uses it as a wand and is transformed into evening gown. Yes, it’s corny dialogue, but also funny. She sang Bobby Darin’s 1962 hit Things with Dean Martin which was filmed close up, played for comedy on her reactions and deadpan interjections. The duet on Things was eventually released as a single, but has too much kidding around and chatting between lines for radio, with Nancy acting so bored, and doing a deliberately ironic ‘Ha ha ha.’ It would not replace Darin’s original. It has a point as a comedy skit, rather than a song to re-listen to. You really need her facial expressions.
NANCY: That duet was not really sung as a duet. It was Dean’s record of Things with a vocal group singing the parts that I later sang. I just asked him if I could please take it into a studio and remove the vocal group and put my own voice on it so we could use it on the show, and he said ok.
prcom, interview by Allison Kugel, 28 April 2011
A pastiche of “Blow Up!” Nancy Sinatra & Sammy Davis Jnr.
What’d I Say has her as a model on a photo shoot who ‘just doesn’t feel it today.’ It’s a deliberate Blow Up! pastiche. Sammy Davis Jnr plays an effete (1960s for gay) photo director with an English accent, who then goes into jive talk accent to say he knows HOW to make her feel it … cue the song. Sammy can then talk over the shoot with camera in hand channeling his inner David Hemmings as David Bailey … Yeah! That’s It! One more time! Sammy is mainly shaking his ass. A band that size is great for a Ray Charles classic. The LP audio track has no sign of Sammy, and at 4 minutes 30 seconds is unusually long for Nancy. It’s unusual to see her taking on an R&B shouter too (she is not a shouter). The saxophone player is outstanding.
What’d I Say: Split screen, multiple images
She kissed Uncle Sammy on the cheek which was still controversial between races in the USA. (She had kissed old Uncle Dean on the lips which wasn’t controversial between generations.)
NANCY: The kiss [was] one of the first interracial kisses seen on television and it caused some controversy then, and now. [But] contrary to some inaccurate online reports, the kiss was unplanned and spontaneous.
prcom, interview by Allison Kugel, 28 April 2011
That kiss … Nancy Sinatra & Sammy Davis Jnr. What’d I Say.
As Nancy points out, most TV histories put the first inter-racial TV kisses as Star Trek (Captain Kirk and Lt. Uhura) but Movin’ With Nancy was a full year earlier.
Wait Till You See Him is a homage to Frank Sinatra, with Nancy singing in front of archive photos. The song is Rodgers & Hart from 1942, and Frank recorded it in 1956 as Wait Till You See Her. The Mary Quant style frock’s nice. The song segues into archive footage to Frank singing Night & Day to the first bobby-soxers, then back to Nancy, and dad and daughter pics from the family album.
Wait Till You See Him. Op Art Dress and Ol’ Blue eyes
Frank Sinatra cruises effortlessly through Younger Than Springtime on his own, billed on the album sleeve as ‘a very close relative.’ Frank gets billed on the opening credits as ‘Daddy’. He’s filmed in the studio with a large orchestra, conducted by Billy Strange with Lee Hazlewood in the control room. That cuts to a TV performance of Nancy With The Laughing Face.
Nancy does the RC Cola Spot and they break it into Somethin’ Stupid to clips from elsewhere in the programme.
Friday’s Child. Industrial wasteland. short hair, jeans, barbed wire. Grunge?
Friday’s Child is a different version from Nancy in London. It was re-done without background singers, and the instrumental section was truncated. it was filmed on industrial wasteland and I think she sings it fiercer too. Her neat short hair confirms my suspicion that elsewhere (like Cher and P.P. Arnold that same year) she was wearing wigs.
See The Little Children is most uncharacteristic Lee Hazlewood song writing. She sings a pleasant ditty sweetly with flowers and kids.
Who Will Buy is filmed on a deserted fairground. She does the first part solo vocal until the dancers explode into view (led by David Winters). The two minute dancing sequence is the point. She finishes the song solo, and fast. It’s by Lionel Bart from Oliver. Honestly, I don’t think the Movin’ With Nancy version has anything spectacularly new to offer apart from the richness and accuracy of her voice. They lose the Ripe strawberries ripe … counter melody altogether, and for me the joy of the song is the interchanging voices, and it doesn’t work solo. We used it in a pantomime as the opening villagers song with a cast of twelve singing, and I spent so much time watching choreography and rehearsals that it’s fixed in my mind with multiple singers. In the context of the whole, let’s say “it’s the dance number” and the instrumental backing to the dance is fine, and they needed a bit of vocal to top and tail it. Brilliant dance, nice song, but seek stage theatrical versions if you want to get the full Lionel Bart experience. Putting the LP on, you realize why young producers want to sample these 60s arrangements – the drum sound is marvellous.
The album does not follow the sequence of the programme. Most (all?) of the show is miming to pre-recorded tracks, so the versions on the album aren’t live. Like any 60s TV programme it creaks a tad. However, the video sequences were … at the time … different and new, and they play for comedy, albeit highly-scripted comedy. So why is it essential? Read on …
Some Velvet Morning was the song from the TV special that has gained in reputation as the years roll by.
Probably the pinnacle of Hazlewood’s career … a strong candidate for the strangest song ever to enter the Top 40. The Hazlewood-Sinatra collaborations of the late 60s are Lee’s most accessible, and justly famous work.
Richie Unterberger : Unknown Legends of Rock ‘n; Roll
Sheet Music. The still photo is from the video of Jackson, NOT Some Velvet Morning.
The genre for Some Velvet Morning has been described as ‘cowboy psychedelia.’ The single did nothing in the UK, but reached #26 in America in January 1968. In 2003, critics at the Daily Telegraph placed it #1 in a list of the 50 Best Duets Ever.
Billy Strange said that the whole song was recorded at Capitol Studios, Hollywood with Nancy and Lee rehearsing, then singing live with the full thirty to forty piece orchestra.
LEE: It was never finished. I wrote it for the TV Special, Movin’ With Nancy. The director wanted a scene where I’d be riding my horse across a ridge with the ocean in the background, and Nancy would be riding along on hers. I’d be all in black on a black horse. Nancy would be in white on a white horse. The idea was that I was good, and she was bad. So I wrote two verses of Some Velvet Morning and took the demo to the producers. They thought it was perfect, and when I told them it wasn’t finished, they said it was fine as it was.
Shindig, July-August 2010
The second horse got dropped. The film shows Lee on a horse riding through the surf on a gloomy beach, while Nancy wafts about in white picking flowers. Lee starts out:
Some velvet morning when I’m straight
I’m gonna open up your gate
And maybe tell you about Phaedra
And how she gave me life
And how she made it end …
Velvet collocations … the Velvet Underground, Velvet Fogg, Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera. Then ‘opening up your gate’ – the Doors of Perception perhaps? Or is sexual? Then we have Nancy sweetly singing about flowers growing on a hill … be sure to wear flowers in your hair? Are the flowers the siren invitation to drugs as the straight-backed cowboy boasts of being straight?
VIDEO LINK: SOME VELVET MORNING FILM
And where does Phaedra come from?
LEE: I thought (Greek myths) were a lot better than all those fairy tales that came from Germany that had killings and knifings. There was only about seven lines about Phaedra. She had a sad middle, a sad end and by the time she was 17, she was gone. She was a sad-assed broad, the saddest of all Greek goddesses. So bless her heart, she deserves some notoriety, so I’ll put her in a song.
(Califia, Ace Songwriter Series, sleeve notes)
American critic Nathan Rabin said:
Hazlewood and Sinatra sound like they don’t inhabit the same universe, let alone the same song. Over loping spaghetti-Western guitar, Hazlewood sings of Greek mythology and “some velvet morning when I’m straight,” while Sinatra coos about flowers and daffodils in a stoned haze against a backdrop of bubblegum psychedelia. “Some Velvet Morning” sounds like two songs spliced together by a madman, or an avant-garde short film in song form. (Nathan Rabin)
It wasn’t two songs spliced together, but the male part is in 4:4 time, while the female part is in 3:4 time. Hazlewood says he told the studio musicians that they’d record them separately because of the tempo shifts, and said the musicians were outraged and insulted at the suggestion that they couldn’t handle the tempo changes, so they did it in one. Back to Lee again. He was fed up of people asking him to write songs they could dance to, so discussing Some Velvet Morning he commented ‘Dance to this, sons-of-bitches!’
LEE: The only song that got me into trouble was Some Velvet Morning. The NBC censor asked to talk to me about it. They were worried about the fourth line, because they thought it said ‘how she made it in’ but I took one look at the paper and said, no, that’s ‘end’ not ‘in’ and they were fine with it.
Shindig, July-August 2010
In that 2004 Telegraph article, (Barton) Lee Hazlewood said:
LEE: I never was much of a doper. We made hit records, and she went home and I went home. She’d say, ‘Barton writes ’em, I sing ’em. I don’t know what I’m singing about, nor do I want to know!'”
This is from 2017 …
There’s a glissando of strings, like waves breaking on a shore, then a man’s voice, rich and dark, intones the most enigmatic opening lines in pop history … The year is 1967, the setting is Hollywood. The bass voice belongs to writer/producer Lee Hazlewood, the soprano to his protégée, Nancy Sinatra. The legend they have just spun in vinyl, part rugged country, part fey folk, cloaked in psychedelia by Billy Strange’s haunting orchestration, will echo down the years, the puzzle of its lyrics and otherworldly beauty of its sound offering seemingly endless interpretations … It crystallises a moment between the optimism of the Summer of Love and the darkness on the desert horizon, manifested in rogue hippy Charles Manson. Not for nothing was it voted the best duet of all time by British music critics in 2003.
Cathi Unsworth, Financial Times, 31 January 2017
Some Velvet Morning / Things. French Reprise single. Avec Lee Hazlewood.
There’s a cover version by The Webb Brothers on Total Lee! the tribute album from 2002.
Some Velvet Morning / Tony Rome, UK promo copy
In Britain, This Velvet Morning was coupled on a single with Tony Rome, the title song from Frank Sinatra’s 1967 film noir homage, which was also written by Lee Hazlewood. Tony Rome was released on 5th January 1968, coupled with This Town in the UK (Reprise R20636). This Town went particularly well with Tony Rome.
Then just three weeks later on 22 January, Tony Rome was reissued as the B-side of Some Velvet Morning. It was a similar story in the USA where Tony Rome / This Town was a single in November 1967, and reached #83 in the chart. Then a few weeks later, Some Velvet Morning was released as a single with Oh, Lonesome Me on the B-side.
It’s surprising that the then current film theme ended on the B-side in the UK. It sounds like Lee was writing a song to deliberately sound Swingin’ Frank Sinatra in style, and although it’s either a brilliant pastiche of the style, or a homage to the style, I never liked it. It was not on the album. A snippet was sampled and used by BBC Radio One between records … where Nancy sings Watch out! and there’s a very quick blast of brass.
LEE: Frank (Sinatra) said, ‘I’ve done a pretty good film, but I don’t like the song. Can you write me something better?’ I didn’t have a demo, so I took my guitar over to Paramount Pictures and sat in front of the producer and Frank and sang this dumb song. Frank said, ‘Do you think we could get Nancy to do it? It’s not the kind of movie where the guy playing Tony Rome can do it.
Ace Records biodata
In Japan, the local label thought that Some Velvet Morning might work with Things on the B-side. A bizarre combination.
The CD reissue has bonus tracks: Drummer Man, I Love Them All (The Boys In The Band) and Good Time Girl.
A TRIPPY THING?
American copy of Life’s A Trippy Thing
Nor do I want to know… so in total contrast, we have Life’s A Trippy Thing, a duet between Frank Sinatra and Nancy Sinatra.
YOU TUBE LINK (AUDIO ONLY): LIFE’S A TRIPPY THING
The single was released in 1971, right after Feelin’ Kinda Sunday, another duet with Frank. The compilers of the Nancy in London CD placed it on there as a bonus track. They were accurate on the date of the other bonus tracks, Tony Rome and You Only Live Twice. However, in the meticulously researched Frank Sinatra: An Extraordinary Life the session is dated as October 1970, produced by Don Costa. The anti-hippy theme was such old hat by 1971, that I suspect a 1967 or 1968 date and that the CD compilers had other information. Maybe they never talked to Lee about a follow-up to Something Stupid, but that doesn’t mean they never contemplated it. It was produced and arranged by Don Costa, and paired with Frank Sinatra alone on the B-side with I’m Not Afraid. It was never released in the UK, but was paired with a reissue of Something Stupid in Germany.
It was an unfortunate stab at the Summer of Love. The forced lyrics are neither’s best moment. They include:
Nancy: Getting stoned on sunshine, getting high on air
Frank: Getting to it naturally, really getting there
Nancy: Getting such a high on, loving what I do
Frank: And I’m so full of happiness, I’m hooked on something new
Yes, that’s Frank Sinatra. Swinging away. Cigarette in one hand, whisky in the other preaching about substance abuse. Frank Sinatra had strong feelings about drugs, since filming The Man With The Golden Arm in 1955, where he had researched his role by watching heroin addicts go cold turkey in clinics. Like most of his generation, he never saw alcohol in the same light.
It gets more forced even:
Nancy: My pot is filled with flowers, my grass is bright and
green
Frank: My tea is brewing in my cup, and still I make the scene.
That was written by Linda Laurie and Howard Greenfield too. So what was Nancy thinking? The Sinatras had always explored lyrics in getting interpretation, and it’s impossible to think she never realised Lee Hazlewood’s subtexts (Nor do I want to know …), nor that she was totally immune from awareness of the Hollywood scene in 1967 and 1968. She was clear that she knew what Sugar Town was about. Did Frank ever listen to the last three tracks on side one of Movin’ With Nancy in sequence …himself on Younger Than Springtime followed by Dean Martin on Things … Then on comes Some Velvet Morning. Surely he must have thought What the fuck’s that about?
Life’s A Trippy Thing irritates in so many ways, with the forced giggling and singing about ‘I’m glad to be a ding a ling’ … ‘a ding a ling. You’re silly!’ I can’t believe that this song was late enough for them to have heard Chuck Berry singing about his ding-a-ling. However, that sort of ding-a-ling would work for me very well. It also has that swingin’ style. If you’re reading this far, it’s one you should hear, and what with writing an article about “Anti songs”, I have heard it enough to be word perfect, and at times it has been an irritating earworm for me. Therefore it deserves mention on the basis of ‘So bad that it’s good.’
Feelin’ Kinda Sunday is another duet which also refers to feelin’ high on life.’
There is consistency. In the New Musical Express 13 May 1967 she was interviewed about working with Elvis. She added that she hoped her new film company, Boots Limited, could begin production of The Flower Children (It never happened).
NANCY: This is all about the LSD problem, and I feel it will say things that have to be said. I may appear it in with Sal Mimeo.
Looking at her 2004 Telegraph interview, it seems she meant it:
It’s a shock to hear that Nancy didn’t do drugs. “I swear to God,” she continues. “They were passing cocaine around at meetings and I just didn’t want it. When I was doing Fallen Angels, Peter Fonda was talking about LSD and said, ‘Come on, Nancy, you should try it, it’s great – I just woke up on the shelf of the linen closet.’ “And I said, ‘What? Are you crazy? No thanks. I was the square peg in the round hole, I guess. I was at a party three weeks prior to the murders at Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate’s house and everyone was in the bedroom doing drugs except me. I was square. I’m still that way.”
It is fair to argue that Nancy had too much respect for both the reputation and the musical style of her father to be a drug-taking, rabble-rousing wild child of the 1970s.
Ian Geary, Telegraph, June 2004
NANCY & LEE
UK album
In 1968, Nancy & Lee, subtitled The Hits of Nancy & Lee became the first of three collaborative albums, and it was the first of her albums I bought … my previous acquisitions were singles. It was a hit … US #13, UK #17. It sold a million. They list engineers in Hollywood, London and Nashville.
Because of the five previously issued songs, it was her best album so far. 1968 was an outstanding year for music, especially Americana, and this should appear in the lists of the significant albums of that year. It rarely does. That’s the list compiler’s loss. Pitchfork compiled their list of the 200 greatest 60s albums, and placed it at #87:
When the pair met up for the duet album Nancy & Lee, the tongue-in-cheek quality of their previous chart-toppers was all but eclipsed by a more robust, intense incarnation of country-tinged psychedelia. On each of the album’s 11 tracks, Hazlewood and Sinatra’s voices intertwine in a sort of intoxicated tango, their harmonies almost out of sync and yet perfectly tempered… Though certainly a collection of pitch-perfect country-pop tunes, Nancy & Lee is first and foremost a document of a flawless collaboration, two musicians marrying their bespoke styles for an album that would be the apex of both their careers. –Cameron Cook
In 2007, it just missed npr music’s Best 150 Albums of All Time:
Sinatra’s legacy undeniably involves sharpshooters, go-go boots, doing the frug and, yes, happening to be the daughter of a very famous singer. Yet her work on Nancy & Lee not only is some of the best that she’s ever recorded, but it proved that she would hardly allow herself to be pigeonholed into one-hit wonder territory. Here, she made it clear that she was capable of so much more. The range of her character’s presence on Nancy & Lee, at times overwhelmed with love and, at other turns, defiantly alone, is why this continues to be a go-to for confused lovers everywhere and a cult favorite whose influence has touched the likes of Slowdive, Lana del Rey, Sonic Youth, Beck, The Jesus & Mary Chain and countless other pop innovators. … Its sly, sultry movements both are a gem of traditional ’60s pop and an inversion of traditional conceptions of romance.
Paula Meija, npr music, 2007
It reprised previous duets … Summer Wine, Jackson, Sand, Some Velvet Morning (which is where I first heard it), and Lady Bird. They added a few covers … You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling, Billy Vera’s Storybook Children, and Tom T. Hall’s novelty Greenwich Village Folk Song Salesman.
It takes courage to do You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling, and no, no one will ever do it better than The Righteous Brothers. However, the lyric interchange between male and female voices make more sense of the lyric. Lee was asked why they recorded it:
LEE: Nancy wanted to do that. I was less sure about it and Nancy, to make me very happy, she brought [Righteous Brother] Bill Medley down to the session when I’m doing the overdubbing. Oh, is that the most lousy fucking idea you ever heard in your life? Bill goes, “I kinda like it Lee, its kinda different.” I said, “It really is Bill.” After they left I redid it.
Interview with Keiron Tyler, artsdesk.com
Elusive Dreams was a cover of a David Houston / Tammy Wynette #1 country hit duet from late 1967. It was also a hit for Curly Puttnam who co-wrote it, then Johnny Darrell, Bobby Vinton, Charlie Rich and then George Jones with Tammy Wynette again all charted. The drifters storyline fits Nancy and Lee’s perceived duo personas perfectly. For me, the best the song’s been done, they succeed in focussing on the narrative.
Greenwich Village Folk Song Salesman had been covered recently by Jim & Jesse. It’s a distance from her style, though she as ever excels on conversational bits, like how to pronounce ‘Greenwich.’
NANCY: I hated GVFSS but I agreed to do it if Lee would do You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling. I always had to bargain with him where songs were concerned.
Summer Wine follows.
Storybook Children was by Chip Taylor and Billy Vera (1968), and Billy Vera recorded it in a soulful version with Judy Clay. Billy Vera and Judy Clay performed Country Girl -City Man together in 1968, and it’s such a shame that Lee and Nancy didn’t do that one instead. It’s a better song and one of my all time favourite soul tracks. I guess they might not have convinced with Nancy as a country girl from Georgia and Lee a city boy from NewYork City, but they could have done a minor rewrite and reversed it. Storybook Children is definitely second best, as the inter-racial bit veers to obvious. The Atlantic recording on the original wins for me too … Billy Vera on electric guitar, Chip Taylor on acoustic. It’s a duo song, and we get the Nancy / Lee vocal contrast, but not Judy Clay’s full on soul voice. So it’s gentler and the intrinsic sentimentality of the song is accentuated.
Sundown Sundown was another of their spaghetti-Western sounding themes. He’s the loner (there’s no one in this world for me), but sometimes in my dreams I hear … and her soft crooning voice expressing her need for him is his dream echoing in his head: I miss you Sundown, I want you Sundown, come on come on back to me.
Nevertheless he strides or rides on alone into the sunset … or sundown.
This is the one Calexico covered on the Total Lee! tribute album in 2002.
LEE: Well, they picked a non-hit, cause we didn’t put it out and try and make a hit with it. It was just on an album and it was never completed. I never got round to a third verse. I couldn’t tie it all together. It just didn’t work. And the only thing is, I fell in love with my own arrangement, da da, da da, dad da, you know. And everybody else liked it, “Well, that’s enough,” and I said, “Yeah, it’s enough for me,” but I’m sorry I didn’t get to complete the song ever, because it just doesn’t sound complete to me. But I like the song. I think a guy named Sundown is like a guy named Sand. You wouldn’t think he’d walk into your house on his toes, a guy named Sundown … If I had to do it over, I’d do it the way they (Calexico) did it with the little Mexican trumpet in there.
sleeve notes, Total Lee! 2002
Jackson is next, then Some Velvet Morning, then Sand then Lady Bird. That’s a truly awesome run of five Lee Hazlewood songs in a row, but then there’s a sixth:
Nancy & Lee added a significant new song, I’ve Been Down So Long (It Looks Like Up To Me). The title comes from Richard Farina’s novel in 1966. Was it a well-known phrase or saying? The first example comes in a lyric by Furry Lewis I been down so long ’cause it looks like up to me in a 1928 recording, J.B. Lenoir also did a different song with the title in 1968. The Doors did a further different song with the same title on LA Woman. The loner in Lee’s song keeps going:
He walks these tracks and never looks around
He bums what he can get in any town
He’s grown content to live on charity
NANCY- TWELVE WAYS
There’s an extensive description of the album on Nancy Sinatra’s website.
New Musical Express, UK. Note how they tie the releases together.
1969 brought Nancy- Twelve Ways with no songs from Lee and a set of covers … Light My Fire (and this time it IS the Doors song), Son of A Preacher Man, For Once In My Life, plus My Dad, My Mother’s Eyes.
Lee Hazlewood had departed for Sweden without even saying goodbye (there’s a song idea there).
NANCY: It was crazy, And he really left me in the lurch. He kept shooting himself in the foot all the time, and I never knew why. He was always his own worst enemy.
NY Times interview
None of his work at LHI had made the charts, and money was running out. There were some bizarre decisions in there. He had early access to Chip Taylor’s Angel of The Morning, after Cameo-Parkway folded just after releasing the first version by Evie Sands. The first thought is ‘What a fantastic song for Nancy Sinatra!’ with its risque setting. A guaranteed hit. But no, Lee cut a feeble male version with Danny Michaels.
His girlfriend (who sang with him) Suzi Jane Hokum said:
SUZI JANE HOKUM: Lee’s a writer, he’s an artist. Not a businessman. He could have kept on going – he’d already been through several of the different phases of music. But he … pissed off a lot of people. Also having to deal with young bands that had ideas of their own- who were less malleable than Nancy Sinatra – wasn’t conducive to the way Lee worked.
Interviewed by Barney Hoskyns, Mojo magazine
She said of the move to Sweden:
SUZI JANE HOKUM: I think he knew he’d burned his bridges in LA and here was a brand new world where he had a built-in fanclub. You have to make friends with people in this town. Instead of maintaining his friendships he kind of abandoned them. He could detach himself from things that weren’t going his way. I think he left a lot of these little broken bits around. He really needed a new start.
Guardian, 28 November 2013
Urban myths circulated that he’d somehow fallen out with Frank and had to flee. Lee said not:
LEE: We got along great. Frank thought I was about two-thirds funny, and I thought he was about 90 percent clever. He had names for everyone. He called me Country. But I could never get used to hearing someone call Frank Sinatra Daddy.
On those urban myths, variously applied to Lee Hazlewood, Bobby Fuller and anyone else conspiracy thinkers could think of, Lee was interviewed by The Guardian, and asked about his advice to Nancy to sing like a girl who screwed truck drivers:
Frank, fortunately, was amused rather than outraged, and Hazlewood received no visits from burly gentlemen of Italian extraction. (Lee said) “Frank treated his children like adults. He was protective, but not that kind of protective. We never had problem one.”
Dorian Lynskey, 9 May 2002, The Guardian
In Lee, Myself & I (a marvellous book about Lee Hazlewood) by Wyndham Wallace, the author asked Lee directly about the stories that he’d had to flee from Frank. The story had come from someone who had claimed Lee had become a monk, perhaps confusing him with Leonard Cohen. Lee had just been expounding on the lies that journalists tell.
WYNDHAM WALLACE: ‘Oh, they say that,’ he groans, ‘I’ve heard that before. But honestly, look at Nancy. Why would a girl like that get caught up with a guy like me? If there was anything going on, I didn’t know about it, and nor did Nancy … I couldn’t handle that. And she couldn’t have either. God! Who wants to sleep with a record producer? I know a lot of artists have. But no … we had a lot of fun. That was all.’
It seems likely that it was all too complex for Lee. In the prologue to The Pope’s Daughter: My Fantasy Life with Nancy and Other Sinatras, Lee wrote:
It’s a Las Vegas stage, sitting on a two-dollar stool in front of a fifty-two piece orchestra, next to a lady in a five thousand dollar gown: youre singing a little flat and wondering whether the fly is open on your eight dollar ‘jeans.’ It’s Beauty and The Beast selling a fix to the Mickey Mouse people.
The Pope’s Daughter: My Fantasy Life with Nancy and Other Sinatras
Back to Nancy:
NANCY: I didn’t see him to be able to speak with him (Lee) for many years. He wanted out and he just got out—thoroughly. He just disappeared. It wasn’t that crushing to me, because we weren’t getting anywhere anymore musically. Where he made his mistake right off is that he didn’t include other composers; he didn’t try to bring in writers who would have kept our string of hits going. He wanted to do everything himself. Even the best burn out. And he burned out. Maybe he thought he was doing me a favor by leaving, and he didn’t know the best way to say goodbye. But it was typical of his behavior toward me. When we got together years later to do Nancy and Lee 3, everything was much more difficult because we were so much older. I had much more musical knowledge, and it was hard for him to accept that. It was hard for him to tolerate.
The Believer, 1st July 2014
Her arranger throughout her career, Billy Strange, took over as producer, and Mac Davis was to write seven songs for her over a couple of years. The album concept was based on her live shows at the time.
The three way team turned out well for the principals (Nancy, Billy Strange, Mac Davis) as they had gone into music publishing together and their roster included the major Elvis hits In The Ghetto and Don’t Cry Daddy as well as Nancy’s releases.
Nancy- Twelve Ways was recorded at United Western in Hollywood as usual, with the wrecking crew – Hal Blaine on drums, Carol Kaye and Jerry Scheff on bass guitar, Chuck Berghofer on double bass, Don Rani on piano, Al Casey and Jerry McGee on guitars, Red Rhodes on steel guitar, Roy Caton on trumpet, Jim Horn on flute. The Blossoms and B.J. Baker Singers on backing vocal.
God Knows I Love You was another Delaney Bramlett / Mac Davis song. Unusually for 1969, it has video (though a very simple, mimed one), and it preceded the album’s release on 45 in February 1969. It had been a B-side on Reprise for Casey Anderson six months earlier, and Buddy Knox covered it at the same time as Nancy. She got the hit (US #97, Easy Listening #40).
Memories was a Mac Davis and Billy Strange. Mac Davis was Billy’s house guest and had started working on the song. Billy Strange was asked for a big ballad by Elvis for his 1968 Comeback TV Special, called Mac to finish it and it went on the show. The Elvis version is said to be a popular funeral choice. Nancy’s version goes much larger than the Elvis version, with Hal Blaine on good form on drums. I miss the more prominent guitar on the Elvis version.
Just Being Plain Old Me contrasts with Billy Strange’s jazzy guitar at the forefront, acoustic bass and drums. The contrast with the heavily orchestrated material is welcome – the voice is prominent. It sounds a song Maria Muldaur might have recorded. Nancy certainly pins that style.
NANCY: Just Bein’ Plain Old Me’ was one of the songs that Billy and I used to do together – just voice and guitar. We’d keep a few songs like ‘Nice ‘n’ Easy’ and ‘Old Devil Moon’ in the wings, to use as encores, if we had an especially nice audience. They were my favourite moments because they were so intimate, and quiet
Still in 1969, Here We Go Again drips with pedal steel (Red Rhodes), violins and choir. This is right in the Englebert Humperdink MoR meets country area, and was indeed a country classic. The most famous version was by Ray Charles in 1967 from Ray Charles Invites You To Listen. It gave its title to the Ray Charles tribute duets album in 2011. The song was a duet with Norah Jones … who also duetted with Ray Charles on Cryin’ Time, another Nancy has covered.
My Dad (My Pa). It was from the 1965 musical, The Yearling. She was fond of paternal-directed songs, and they came in handy for family TV shows. It’s mainly Nancy plus Billy Strange, and much as I fail to get the song, I love what Billy’s doing in the background with it.
Light My Fire starts with Billy Strange’s … er, strange … orchestration, then congas or timpani. I’m not a Doors fan, but it is one of the few Doors songs I like. As Nancy points out, it’s sexier when a woman sings it suggestively rather than as a demand from the Lizard King. She takes it with a female chorus, and narrates in the middle. Jim Horn’s flute snakes through the instrumental section. It was a major production number on her stage shows. She later did a TV duet with Bobby Darin. Frank Sinatra particularly disliked The Doors original, calling it “ugly and degenerate.” I wonder if he ever heard their The End?
Big Boss Man was a cover of Elvis, who was covering Jimmy Reed’s 1960 original, but she has said it was inspired by Elvis’s version in Clambake (1967). Elvis was on her mind around then. First, R&B is not her usual area, second, this is one of her best cover versions, and it’s a version of the song that shines in every area … drums round the kit, farting brass, harmonica, tinkling ivories, a surprising and deep choral response. She semi-talks part. The guitar solo soars. Has anyone ever done basic R&B this elaborately? Though it was the trend for the big blues guitarists named King (both) to go out with a big band in the 70s. The main thing is the way she transforms the sense of the lyric simply with her sultry voice. Having played the song ineptly many times in teen bands I always thought it was about picking cotton, possibly in a leather foot sack, watched by a sunburned burly overseer with a whip, probably wearing striped overalls, down on Parchman Farm. Not at all when Nancy sings:
You’ve got me working, boss man,
Working round the clock,
I need me a drink of water
But you just won’t let me stop …
She’s flown the song all the way from the cotton fields right into a bedroom in the house of the Rising Sun, something even Elvis couldn’t do. And that dirty chuckle on:
You ain’t big … just tall (chuckle) that’s all …
She’s not equating ‘big’ with overall physical height, that’s for sure, another male song given raunchy gender reversal by Nancy Sinatra. Best track on the album. That’s the way to do a cover.
My Mother’s Eyes is as far in contrast as you can get. She did it as a tribute to Nancy Snr. The song comes from 1928 and Lucky Boy one of the first talkies with synchronized music. Huge string arrangement.
I’m Just In Love is a languid (here) Mac Davis song. It made me think of the country meets soul genre- I could imagine a soul singer making this one fly. She goes well in that direction, and has male backing singers along the line of The Pips (as in Gladys Knight and …) but lacks the Muscles Shoals or Memphis style that would make it rock harder. Mac Davis’s own more urgent version (produced by Rick Hall) has the burbling soul bass line and takes it into the 70s soul category firmly. His 1976 version is rightfully a Northern Soul classic.
Son of A Preacher Man – ah, the bass sound. The brass. The Dusty Springfield from Dusty in Memphis is too heavily imprinted on my brain for this to replace it. The song was written specifically for Aretha Franklin in 1967, but it didn’t fit the album and they passed it over to Dusty. Aretha’s version stayed on the shelf until 1970. Nancy did it because she liked Dusty’s songs … she had done Wishin’ and Hopin’ earlier.
Long Time Woman was written by Bob “Elusive Butterfly” Lind. Nancy Sinatra’s version is subtle with gentle backing and her voice well to the fore.
BOB LIND: She presents my song with a simple, unadorned honesty that compels one to listen and feel… When I wrote ‘Long Time Woman,’ I never thought it would ever be covered – much less by a woman. But she sings it with a powerful restraint, never giving it more than it needs. I love it.
2007 interview
For Once In My Life. There’s a funny thing about Stevie Wonder, in that I love his versions but covers reveal something surprisingly MoR about them. He didn’t write this one anyway (Ron Miller and Orlando Burden) and they’d tried out slower versions first. She does it well, but the song has become too talent TV show / karaoke in recent years and while I used to like it, now I’m fed up with the intrinsic song.
NANCY: I chose songs like‘For Once In My Life’ because it’s my favourite kind of singing. My dad had always said to me,‘Stay away from what I do, and you’ll be better off,’and then he covered this song, because he liked the way we did it. He was really saying,‘Don’t try to do what I do, because you’ll be held up for too much criticism.’And he was right –he was always right.”
The 1996 Sundazed CD has four bonus tracks: Nice ‘n’ Easy, Old Devil Moon, Happy and Home.
Nice ‘n’ Easy was the title track of Frank Sinatra’s 1960 album. See below.
The Old Devil Moon was her, Billy Strange and acoustic bass. B-side of Good Time Girl. It’s from Finian’s Rainbow (1947 on stage, 1968 on film). It was another her dad had recorded, on Songs For Swingin’ Lovers in 1956.
Two of Dad’s songs in a row, so it looks like she was ignoring his advice!
Happy and Home are mentioned below.
THE LATE 60s and EARLY 70s SINGLES
There was a run of US hit singles which failed to make any impact on UK charts and not all were released in the UK.
Things, 100 Years, Happy, Good Time Girl, God Knows I Love You, Here We Go Again, Drummer Man, Hook and Ladder, It’s Such A Lonely Time of Year, I Love Them All (Boys In The Band). A pattern was emerging … bottom third of the US Top 100 for singles, some action in Canada … Happy was Top Twenty, but nothing in the UK.
In Our Time / Leave My Dog Alone was a single released in 1966. Both sides written by Lee Hazlewood. It was released in October 1966 and was #46 on the US chart.
Love Eyes / Coastin’ in May 1967 had both sides written by Lee Hazlewood, and after that “Double A-side” financial experience, the single was a non-album track. As with The Beatles you had to buy the album AND the singles. The single was released between Somethin’ Stupid and Jackson and was a US #15 hit in the main Billboard chart. Love Eyes is a bluesy number, with the piano and guitar going along with the feel. It’s soulful, and thats accentuated by the backing singers. Big rock drumming. Teasing bits of soul band brass. I can imagine Etta James or Janis Joplin doing it, and her strength is that she avoids the temptation to imitate their style, but does it her way.
New Musical Express advert, 13 May 1967 – one of two
NANCY: I thought Lee wrote a great, great lyric for ‘Love Eyes.’Real simple and direct. Some of Lee’s best writing and one of my better vocals. We used to call it ‘Levi’s.’ The studio session for ‘Love Eyes’ was when I met the singers who would be doing the background parts for the song: The Blossoms: Jeannie King, Fanita James, and the one and only Darlene Love. I was so thrilled and also intimidated because they sang so far superior to me! But Darlene and the girls put me right at ease and made the session so special. The Blossoms were then on every record I ever made that required background singers in those early days.
The Blossoms went on to perform in Nancy Sinatra’s Las Vegas shows.
New Musical Express reviewed it as the lead single of the week:
NANCY SWITCHES TO PUNCHY BLUES
Love Eyes / Coastin’ (Reprise)
Another Lee Hazlewood composition, but something quite different from anything Nancy Sinatra has attempted. It’s slow and bluesy with a punchy backing – in fact it reminded me a bit of Frank Sinatra’s That’s Life. A quiet opening with growling brass and sweeping strings entering as the backing slowly builds. Probably not so commercial as Sugar Town, but her current popularity should carry it.
FLIP: A happy go-lucky number with a jog-trotting rhythm, plus a lyric that reflects a couldn’t care less attitude.
Derek Johnson, NME, 13 May 1967
Lightning’s Girl. US single in appropriate sleeve. September 1967
The single of You Only Live Twice was followed into the US charts by Lightning’s Girl, written by Lee Hazelwood. Released in September 1967
Lightning’s Girl is thematically linked to her film with Peter Fonda, The Wild Angels, she sings ‘Stay away from Lightning’s Girl … ’ It later gave its title to one of her many compilation CDs. Apparently, Lightning was a fellow given to violence who would “put you down … about six feet” if you even looked at her. The sort of ex-boyfriend you found lingering in the shadows at bus stops when you saw a girl home from a dance in the 60s. On the 1999 CD reissue of How Does That Grab You it’s a bonus track together with its B-side, Until Its Time For You To Go, and her duet with her dad, Feelin’ Kinda Sunday.
Until It’s Time For You To Go was written by Buffy Ste. Marie from 1965, and is on her album Many A Mile. In 1965 The Four Pennies had a #19 British hit with a cover. 1966 was an early cover of this well-known song. After Nancy did it as a B-side, Neil Diamond had a#11 Easy Listening hit in 1970. Elvis got a #9 Easy Listening hit in 1972, and New Birth had a soul #21 in 1973. Elvis is the definitive version, but if Nancy had made this the A-side in 1966, I think it would have been a major hit. She does the full sincerity spoken bit too.
100 Years in March 1968 is from Nancy In London. It’s Lee Hazlewood song, with another Lee song, See The Little Children on the B-side.That’s from Movin’ With Nancy. Billboard chart #69. 100 Years is Morrisey’s favourite of her recordings.
In August 1968, Lee Hazlewood’s song, Happy sounds as if it has a soul rhythm section and features outrageous Hammond organ. I’m not enamoured with the old fashioned stereo mix. You notice it more with headphones but left has all the burbling bass and horns and right has the organ. Not subtle.
New Musical Express review
Nancy Sinatra: Happy (Reprise) I had to look twice at the label to make sure I hadn’t put the Sandie Shaw disc on the turntable by mistake! Because particularly at the outset this sounds like a Chris Andrews song! It’s a bubbly effervescent number with a peppy beat that savours strongly of calypso. Bounds along at a lively pace, with Nancy Sinatra in festive mood, backed by a swinging organ sound. Apart from a few passages in dual-track, there are none of the purring come-hither gimmicks which Nancy usually inserts into her discs – and quite honestly, although it has an exhilarating and blues chasing effect, I don’t regard it as one of Lee Hazlewood’s most outstanding compositions. But it’s easy listening.
Derek Johnson, NME, 10th August 1968
B-side was Nice ‘n’ Easy on which Nancy purrs the lyric to gently strummed guitar and acoustic bass. It was the title track of Frank Sinatra’s 1960 album. She does it justice. Billboard chart #74. Adult Contemporary #18.
Good Time Girl. French single in picture sleeve
Good Time Girl was written by Mac Davis (under the name Scott Davis) and was released in the UK in November 1968. I guess it’s the first of several Mac Davis songs she recorded, all produced by Billy Strange. The B-side Old Devil Moon (from Finian’s Rainbow) was produced by Lee Hazlewood. Billboard chart #65.
I can see you need some cheering
Call on me, I’m volunteering
All you gotta do is pick up the phone
Tell me you’re alone and baby I’ll come running
I’ll be your good time girl …
I wondered about Mac Davis’s definition. The official dictionaries are staid: fun-loving, interested in pleasure, not work. Wiktionary gets closer : A young woman who engages regularly in partying and romantic or sexual liasons. It also adds that it’s a euphemism for ‘prostitute.’ A further search finds agreement that ‘goodtime girl’ is usually ‘disapproving.’ OK, makes the song more interesting!
God Knows I Love You by Delaney Bramlett and Mac Davis was released in February 1969 with Just Being Plain Old Me on the B-side. You cried when my puppy died … . Billboard chart #97. Adult Contemporary #40. It’s on her selection for Essential Nancy Sinatra.
Here We Go Again was released in May 1969, and was a US #98 hit, though made #19 on Adult Contemporary, #30 on the Easy Listening chart. The B-side to Nancy’s version of Here We Go Again was Memories, written by Billy Strange and Mac Davis.
Drummer Man. German single in picture sleeve
From that run of singles, check out especially Drummer Man with the late great Hal Blaine dominating the entire song. Hal Blaine was recorded drumming on 4000 songs, including 39 American number one records. It came out in September 1969 in the UK … written by Murray Wecht, produced by Billy Strange. (US #98). Hers was the first of several versions. Mac Davis’s Home was on the B-side.
HAL BLAINE: I played drums for Nancy over 30 years, before my retirement.We never did a bad record with this sweetheart of sweethearts, Billy Strange conducting, Don Randi and the Crew, backing up, I go all the way back to 1959 with Nancy before she ever became an entertainer.Just a baby. But what a baby. She’s just the greatest person a man could know and I’m so happy to have been her drummer for over 30 beautiful years…
NANCY: I promised Hal that I wouldn’t perform this one without him but the song became so popular I had to break that promise (I’m sorry, Hal). I’ve had the great pleasure of performing this live with Elvis Costello’s Pete Thomas and Blondie’s Clem Burke.
Nancy & Mickie Most at Heathrow. The Highway Song
Her November 1969 UK chart entry was The Highway Song (UK #21) written by Kenny Young. Nancy flew to London in October 1969 to work with Mickie Most, Lulu’s producer.
NANCY: (The Highway Song) was recorded first in Los Angeles with the Wrecking Crew at United Recorders, producer Mickie Most wasn’t happy with the sound so he asked me to fly to London to re-record it (and three other songs) in his studio there. When I got off the plane, looking like a frump – in my sweats – after the L-O-N-G flight, he was there with this motorcycle and a photographer thinking I would have worn a mini-skirt and boots on the trip! Can you imagine? All the way from Los Angeles? Hilarious. His wife, Chris saved the day. She was there at Heathrow with her car to rescue me!
It appeared as a bonus track on reissues of Country My Way. Burbling bass, excellent horns, but the tune has something irrevocably jauntily Eurovision about it.
Are You Growing Tired Of My Love? UK B-side, 1969, produced by Mickie Most
The B-side was Are You Growing Tired of My Love? and has the same Mickie Most sound. There’s something British about it and the way the soundstage and backing vocals are used. Good song. It was written by Anthony King and the reason it sounds British is that it was originally by Status Quo, sung sweetly by Rick Parfitt, and a very minor UK hit (#46) in 1969. So the Quo DID know more than three chords. The surprise is how Nancy Sinatra found it, but perhaps Mickie Most did. I would have put it on the A-side. They cut Zodiac Blues at the same sessions, but it remained unreleased till You GoGo Girl in 1998. A 30 second part of an unreleased Kenny Young song from the session Colors Are Changing can be heard on Nancy Sinatra’s website.
LP for Christmas 1969
It’s Such A Lonely Time of Year was written by Chip Taylor and was from The Sinatra Family Wish You A Merry Christmas LP in December 1969. It was arranged by Nelson Riddle. Mac Davis wrote Kids for the album, also sung by Nancy. That was the B-side of the single which was not released in the UK. They all (Frank, Frank Jnr, Nancy, Tina) sang on some tracks. Frank’s vocal was recorded separately.
I Love Them All (Boys in The Band) was March 1970, coupled with Home by Mac Davis & Larry Collins in the UK (again). It was written by Sandy Linzer, and produced by Bob Gaudio, producer of The 4 Seasons and arranger Charles Callelo, briefly the 4 Seasons bassist. This was around the time when Bob Gaudio and Charles Callelo were producing Frank Sinatra’s album Watertown. The eerie sounds onI Love Them All are phasing applied to the strings. When she did it on TV for the Ed Sullivan Show, it featured The Rutgers University Marching Band.
Home is hard to get (a bonus track on Nancy – 12 Ways), but was on the B-side again as well as on the reverse of Drummer Man. Home is not so much an anti-war song, as it is a ‘pro-vets’ song, on the YouTube link she calls it a Memorial Day song, which is right. While the backing is quite complex, it’s taken gently and slowly. The song should have had more prominence,
In some countries, Son of A Preacher Man was put on the B-side.
I Love Them All (The Boys In The Band). Promo copy, UK 1970. Produced by Bob Gaudio
Hello LA, Bye Bye Birmingham was released on 45 in July 1970 with White Tattoo on the B-side. It was written by Delaney Bramlett and Mac Davis. Yet again, I find myself drawn by the extraordinary bass guitar and drums, produced by Billy Strange rather than Lee Hazlewood. Backing vocals are The Blossoms. The pace and lyrics inhabit that Bobbie Gentry / Lucinda Williams area, and might be improved by a touch of Southern accent. She doesn’t sound quite country enough (or rough enough) but she phrases it so well. There had been earlier releases from Alex Harvey and by Mac Davis himself. Her version was an American single, but unreleased in the UK. I hadn’t heard it until it appeared as a bonus track on the Country My Way CD reissue.
How Are Things in California? November 1970. Adult Contemporary #17. The arrangement of the backing singers sounds very much like the Mamas and Papas. Probably deliberately. How Are Things in California? was written by Ceil Batista and Madeleine Levine, and had been previously recorded by Coleen six months earlier, produced by Jim Messina. The B-side is I’m Not A Girl Anymore, by Shelby Flint. Both sides were produced by Billy Strange.
Feelin’ Kinda Sunday with Frank Sinatra was coupled with Kids making its second appearance as a B-side. Adult Contemporary #30.
Another to seek is Hook and Ladder, written by Norman ‘Spirit in the Sky’ Greenbaum, with Ry Cooder on guitar and mandolin, from 1971. Produced by Andy Wickham and Lenny Waronker. Ry Cooder was a Reprise artiste, as it happens. He’s also played on Lee’s Califia and Lee’s LHI productions for Honey Ltd, including Louie Louie. There’s no sign of there having been a UK release of Hook and Ladder.
B-side Is Anybody Going to San Antone? also Ry Cooder. Both sides are essential. I want to know more about those sessions … Is Anybody Going to San Antone? starts off with just her and Ry Cooder and the arrival of a string section is such a surprise behind that signature guitar work. She sings it low, and without over-dramatizing the lyric. I might question why they needed the strings, and wish there was an album with just Ry Cooder, or Ry Cooder and a small band. The song appears on Cherry Smiles with the note 2009 Remix of the 1971 master. I prefer it to Charley Pride’s original, or Doug Sahm’s more famous cover, which was recorded after her version.
Neil Diamond’s Glory Road reprised Is Anybody Going to San Antone? as a B-side. They sit well together, being more or less the same story about setting off into the unknown. Glory Road also features Ry Cooder with intricate, insistent mandolin and the strings. For a Nancy Sinatra record, the first line is perfect … Wearin’ my high boots.
Life’s A Trippy Thing in 1971 was coupled with Frank Sinatra on his own for I’m Not Afraid.
UK promo copy of Flowers In The Rain, released 3 December 1971.
In the UK and Germany, the sides were flipped and the single was Flowers In The Rain coupled with Glory Road on the B-side Released in December 1971, written by Roy Wood, produced by Wickham and Waronker. Arranged by Nick De Caro. Nancy’s version appeared on CD on How Does It Feel? in 1999. Flowers In The Rain by The Move was a UK #2 in 1967, and was the very first record played on the then new Radio One. Due to a misguided publicity stunt by the band’s manager, Tony Secunda, all the royalties ended up with the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson (who donated them to charity). Secunda had sent out cartoons of a naked Wilson in embrace with his secretary.
Flowers in The Rain was an odd choice of cover, and it brings up a point made again both above and below. Nancy was always fond of covering hit songs she liked, often very recent hit songs. Perhaps it’s a learned thing from her father’s generation. The Great American Songbook writers were not usually performers. They created a song and sought as many people to record it as possible. It happened too … there would be a dozen versions in a year by the usual suspects … Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Ella Fitzgerald, Andy Williams, Bobby Darin etc. So if you liked a recent hit, you had a go at doing it. The Brill Building songwriters were younger, but carried on the tradition.
Sheet music 1955 (not a song she ever recorded). This is how traditional songwriters and music publishers saw a song- get lots of people to record it. The six illustrated were only half the number who recorded it in 1955-56.
Then the Merseybeat and early R&B boom did similar with songs by black artistes from a a few years earlier. Many bands recorded Smokestack Lightning,I Got My Mojo Working, Bo Diddley or Johnny B. Goode.
It changed when bands started writing their own material, or rather bands with one or two songwriters among them. On the whole, no one covered those songs. They were too closely identified with the originators. Flowers In The Rain is an excellent example. It wasn’t just Roy Wood’s song, it was the unusual instrumentation that marked it. Producer Tony Visconti had oboe, cor anglais, French horn and clarinet on there (setting the path for both Roy Wood’s Wizzard and The Electric Light Orchestra).
As a long time observer of the chart, I can’t believe that anyone thought that a cover of such a huge and distinctive hit had any sales potential. She sings higher than normal. If you’d heard this in a live show you’d be thrilled. Excellent song, well sung, but would you be moved to buy the record? I don’t ever remember hearing it on radio. If the DJ had decided to spin the song, they’d have played The Move.
Did You Ever had Back On The Road on the other side. UK #2. Australia #20.
Down From Dover was with Paris Summer. US #120
NANCY & LEE AGAIN (US)
Nancy & Lee Again was more sophisticated, with anti-war tracks like Congratulations bumping up against Norman-Rockwell-on-acid slices of American life like Tippy-Toes. And fans of sexual tension will surely appreciate Lee’s subtly sardonic ad-libs and Nancy’s girlish giggles.
ROLLING STONE: Twenty Greatest Duos of All Time, #9
1971 saw the return of Lee Hazlewood for Nancy & Lee Again which was retitled Did You Ever? in several countries, including the UK, where it reached #31 in the album chart. The LHI label was coming to an end, and they recorded in Hollywood. It was released by RCA, and has never been issued on CD.
LEE: We hadn’t recorded, Nancy and I, for quite a few years, and I was living in Sweden, so she said “Let’s do it!” So we went around a few record companies to ask them if they wanted us to record again, and they said ‘no.’ So I said, ‘Let’s just go in the studio. I’ll put up half the money, and you put up half the money.’ She said, ‘Fine, let’s do it that way, we did some good songs that I wrote and that I found, I think Nancy might have found a couple of them.
Total Lee! Sleeve notes, 2002
You’d think she was in tight enough in with Warner-Reprise, but it was by now a different company. Seven Arts bought control of Warner Bros, in 1967, changing the company name to Warner-Seven Arts. In turn that was bought by Kinney in 1969, and Kinney appears at the foot of LP sleeves. Kinney were a parking company and in 1972 sold off its non-entertainment sections, and became Warner Communications.
The first release from the Nancy & Lee sessions was Did You Ever? which was her final Reprise single, and which then appeared on the album.
My original single
Did You Ever didn’t chart at all in America, but was her last British hit, entering the chart in August 1971, and it made UK #2 by the end of September. I bought a 45 rpm copy as soon as I heard it. I’m not sure why I liked it so instantly, but perhaps it was a photocopied grammar note we were supposed to teach English from which stated that ‘ever’ only appeared with the present perfect tense in questions (Have you ever …?). It was plainly wrong. It’s back to their messin’ theme again:
Well, could you estimate how many?
Eight or nine.
Will you do it anymore?
As soon as you walk out the door …
The lines that were funniest were:
Does your father know? I’ll bet …
Mmm. I haven’t told him yet.
Lee didn’t write it. Bobby Braddock did, and it had been a single by Charlie Louvin and Melba Montgomery, but that was only a few weeks earlier.
LEE: I remember I heard this DJ one day. He was playing some funny little country song, but halfway through he interrupts it and says he was playing the wrong side of the 45, takes it off and doesn’t say what the song is. So I pull the car over onto the side of the road and call the guy, ‘What was that song?’ I ask, and the DJ says, ‘Hey, Lee, nice to hear from you.’ ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘But what was that song you just played?’ ‘Oh, that. That was a mistake. I meant to play the other side.’ ‘Yeah, I heard you, but what was it?’ And the DJ tells me, and I tell him to send me a copy of the single, and that was Did You Ever? Soon as I heard it, I knew it was a hit. Od course, we changed it a bit for Nancy. Added some flutes and stuff, but it was the same song.
As told to Wyndham Wallace, in Lee Myself and I.
Now most sites (e.g. Discogs) list the Charlie Louvin duet as the A-side, but that would be wisdom after the event. Matrix numbers tell the tale, and the lower number is assigned to the A-side. Don’t Believe Me is S45-80313 and Did You Ever? is S45-80314, which backs up Lee’s tale. It happens. I once did a one hour radio interview interspersed by records, way back in the days when on local stations DJ’s actually did put on the records, and the DJ put on two B-sides in a row. I mentioned it, and she realized she had the little stack supplied by the producer upside down. She said that she couldn’t stand rock music and had no interest. Good interviewer though, and she went on to far greater things.
BOBBY BRADDOCK: It was inspired by a TV commercial that showed a filling station customer trying to tell the attendant what he wanted, but every time he got out half a sentence, the filling station guy finished it
Braddock said how strange it was having a major European hit that no one in Nashville had heard of.
In a highly unusual move, after the Reprise hit single, the album containing it came out on RCA. They signed to RCA at the end of 1971. That indicates that they owned their Hollywood recording sessions, an unusual but extremely wise situation.
Did You Ever? is on there, and the title Nancy & Lee Again was used in the USA, Japan and Australia, but the initial release was entitled Did You Ever? in the UK, Germany, Canada and Sweden where the single had been a hit. Reissues reverted to the US title and running order … the first British copies moved Did You Ever? to the opening track, and the album charted in the UK (#31). The B-side was Back On The Road.
The album is almost as good as Nancy & Lee. The most ambitious song was the (normal) opening Arkansas Coal (Suite). The lyrics are lengthy, and Nancy has two singing voices. She sings as ‘the mother’ and also does the 8 year old girl bits that echo Come Away Melinda (Mama, why is the Earth shaking, Mama is the world coming to an end … my daddy’s in that mountain) …, while Lee seems to channel Big Bad John (My god the rocks are falling … so this is how it feels to be dead). It predates all those Appalachian farmers who took cash to allow fracking under their land then found the water table was poisoned. It’s strangely magnificent. An epic. It’s also on Fairy Tales and Fantasies: The Best of Nancy & Lee which has the same cover photo as Nancy & Lee.
Nancy & Lee toured in 1972 to support the album, and a live version of Arkansas Coal is on Nancy’s website and on YouTube.
German single in picture sleeve on RCA, referencing the UK / German album title ‘Did You ever?’
The other track from Nancy & Lee Again released as a US and German single was a cover of Dolly Parton’s Down From Dover, sung with Lee. This release came out on RCA.
It’s intrinsically a tremendous song, never conceived by Dolly as a duet, and the nervy guitar line and deep horns make the version. Lee seems to have dropped his voice even lower and moving the male account from third to first person moves the story up a notch. Down From Dover is an old favourite in the Dolly Parton original version. Marianne Faithful topped it with the definitive version years later in 2008 and Lee would have loved her acoustic bass part. The online videos for that show the white cliffs of Dover, but Dolly Parton (only 18 when she wrote it) must have meant Dover, Delaware.
NANCY:I think the most difficult task I ever had was “Down from Dover,” the Dolly Parton song. Lee and I did a really fabulous duet of that song. That was the most difficult song for me vocally. It’s highly emotional. It’s one of Dolly’s best songs. And I wanted to do justice to it. I had to play the role of this girl who’s waiting for this guy who’s impregnated her to come down from Dover and give this child a name. It was a very dramatic story, and it moved me to tears. When I was crying at the very end of the take, Lee was celebrating in the booth. And he kept that take. But that’s what happens when you’re acting a part. You get wrapped up in it.
The Believer, 1st July 2014
In the UK, RCA chose to put Lee Hazlewood’s Big Red Balloon on the A side with Down From Dover on the B-side. They also mis-referenced the album as Nancy & Lee rather than Nancy & Lee Again (or Did You Ever?) Dolly Parton was an RCA artist, which may have influenced them to downgrade it. More likely is the “finishing lines” aspect of Big Red Balloon (here done by the chorus) which is similar to the recent success of Did You Ever? then there’s the ‘breaking up’ aspect with the arguing couple (You’re nothing but an old fool!) which echoes Jackson. I can see a label manager thinking the brisker, jauntier song more typical of them and more commercial than Dolly’s song about a stillborn baby.
Friendship Train is Lee Hazlewood. Good solid anthemic singalong stuff. The woodwind winding through Friendship Train is memorable.
Paris Summer was the B-side of Down From Dover and is a strong romantic one. Lee does the first verse, Nancy doesn’t come in at all until the second verse (removing the wedding ring from “off of her finger” before their embrace), then they swop lines on the third. I always like their alternate verses narrative style.
NANCY: Paris Summer’ is one of the sexiest fantasies Barton wrote. Gotta love it. I felt sexy singing it. Don’t know if he did or not.
Congratulations was not a Hazlewood song. It is a powerful Vietnam war song by Ira Gasman, Cary Hoffman and Jim Barr:
He was gone two years, two years that I thought would never end
Now P.F.C. Williams is just plain old Jimmy again
But he doesn’t make faces to cheer up the children
The way that he used to before
He doesn’t feed pigeons or sing in the shower
I don’t hear his laugh anymore
His face has grown old and his touch has grown cold
And his eyes tell of where he has been
Congratulations, you sure made a man out of him
Nancy had done a tour of Vietnam doing concerts for the troops on the ground, an encounter that has never left her. Lee had had his time in Sweden, and around 1970 in Sweden the Americans you were likely to run into were escaping the draft or deserters. Then Lee had served in the military in the Korean War. The song is pointedly ironic, (You sure made a man of him) and 1971 was early for songs on post-traumatic stress. Listening to it, as it suddenly bursts into symphonic strings, I can see the basis of their past “rock snob problem.” If they’d done it simpler, it might have been acclaimed much more. The orchestration, magnificent as it might be, is pushing the narrative emotion for you, instead of letting the voices and lyrics do the work which they’re both capable of doing. I can’t help comparing it with Simone Felice’s Iraq veteran in One More American Song:
John was a quiet boy in school,
Johnny had the fiery red hair,
Well he went in the army like a lot of them do,
And he got fucked up over there
Same sentiment. Felice has changed “them” to “us” in recent live shows too. But I’ve seen him do it live several times, and the sparser he’s done the song, the stronger the impact is. I think Nancy & Lee swamped their post-traumatic stress song with strings. Yes, orchestration is their signature, but wrong song to put it on, a pity as she sings it beautifully and with feeling.
Some tracks on the album are contrastingly bright and cheerful … Back On The Road with its pedal steel backing, or sentimental about little girls keeping quiet on Sunday mornings so as not to disturb Mom and Dad on Tippy Toes.
Got It Together has Nancy putting in her laughter again, and the start has Lee intoning ‘Oh … suffer along Jerry Reed ‘cos Hazlewood’s picking tonight.’ Simple guitar accompaniment, light-hearted, very conversational, long spoken dialogue at the end, which sounds completely improvised chatter to the guitar strum, (Nancy: I’ve been doing what my daddy told me to … Lee: You’d better!) Then at the end there’s sudden flourish of brass and:
LEE: Nancy are we through?
NANCY: Mm hmm.
LEE: Can I go back to Sweden?
NANCY: Oh, alright, Barton. Bye.
Then running feet and a door slamming. An enjoyable novelty end to the album even if novelties pall on repeated listening.
It was a surprise choice by Saint Etienne feat. Nathan Bennett for the Total Lee! tribute in 2002 and they call it Got It Together Again. Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne has become a superb curator of compilation albums since. Sarah Cracknell sings Nancy’s part. They do a new improvised chatter bit and the backing makes it sound like an instant hit song, too. Lee commented:
LEE: Aw, that’s cute. It’s another unfinished song … This thing was at the end, because the musicians had cleared out and everything else, and she said, ‘There’s got to be some kind of ending, or something to it.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I got an ending, and I was just sitting there with a guitar, pounding on it, ’cause I’m the world’s worst guitar player, and sang her that and she liked it. So when we did it, they’re cleaning up and doing everything else. We’re doing this song, just the two of us having fun. We stuck it on there … and it wasn’t meant to be … it’s not finished. But it’s fun. It’s silliness. I used to sing it to people just for the fun of it … I like this (Saint Etienne’s version) It’s much better than what we did. It gets your attention more than ours does. Ours is just open studio sound. you can tell. The door closing at the end. I was going back to Sweden.
Sleeve notes to Total Lee! 2002
WOMAN
The 70s had brought the label switch to RCA. Interpretative singers tend to lose out over singer-songwriters in that the signature voice remains, but the musical style dissipates. She didn’t follow the well-trodden path to Memphis or Muscle Shoals (Cher, Lulu, Dusty, Petula Clark) which is a pity.
Since Nancy & Lee there have been nine proper solo albums up to 2013, two more albums with Lee Hazlewood, and another duet album with Mel Tillis. The reliance on cover versions is consistent. As you listen more you get curious about the ones you didn’t know, like Woman and Mel and Nancy and iTunes makes it easy to find out.
Woman (1972 on RCA) was produced by Jimmy Bowen and Duane Eddy with Larry Muhoberac as arranger. It’s rare, as so many RCA albums from the era are. RCA were remiss about putting albums on CD, and some classic early 70s RCA albums never made it to CD, such as this and Nancy & Lee Again. Maybe RCA were careless about allowing for other formats in contracts, but the list of unavailable RCA albums beats the other major labels.
Four tracks are on the Sheet Music compilation CD album from 1998 … Kind Of A Woman, We Can Make It, Fell in Love With A Poet and Flowers. I had to download the rest. No Lee Hazlewood, no Mac Davis, and inspiration comes partly from recent country albums by female singers … two from a 1972 Jody Miller album, two from a late 1971 Kim Carnes album. There are also less-known songwriters, the Boerma sisters and Pat St. Clare, and Googling them only throws up this album.
It led with the track Kind Of A Woman, by Jimmy George and Melody Perry, again sitting on a great bass line and congas and not much else. It’s a very deliberate extension of the tough girl image and the rapid lyrics are a major singing task:
I’m a hard-busted, long-lusted, maladjusted kind of a woman
looking for a good lookin’, slow cookin, powerful kind of a man
Said I’m a big eyed, soft eyed, qualified kind of a woman
Looking for a hard riding, time binding, animal kind of a man
NANCY: Found and co-produced by Duane Eddy, with Jimmy Bowen. I felt the lyrics were almost biographical. they were so right for me. We were excited about this one because it was the first new record of mine to be played on the radio in a long time. The DJs loved it.
We Can Make It is not the George Jones hit of the same year, but written by Don Dunn and Jim Stanley. It’s a polar opposite to Kind of A Woman:
You are my baby, I am your lady
I needed to say that
I am your woman, I am your home
And I want you to know that
The contrast must have been a positive choice, and this is gentle string-drenched, heavenly chorus. It sounds like something The Carpenters might have recorded it if they’d wanted something less raunchy and controversial than their normal output.
One More Time by Michael Fennelly rocks out with honky tonk piano and guitar, then with a bit of rocking country fiddle, and she sings in a stern country voice. Fennelly had recorded it with his band Crabby Appleton in 1971, with Byron Berline on fiddle and Crabby Appleton’s version is both much simpler and more raucous. I researched this one and instantly downloaded the original. Good choice of a song to cover – brilliant song, but it hadn’t been a hit. As well as the fiddle on Nancy’s version, the guitar interplay is noteworthy as are the drums. She must have loved the song because she re-recorded it as the opening title track for her One More Time album in 1995. I much prefer this earlier version.
Fell in Love With A Poet was by Kim Carnes, who worked extensively with Jimmy Bowen, initially doing demos for him. Kim Carnes only become a major star several years after her two songs covered on Woman. Carnes had released her version on Rest On Me in December 1971, then as a B-side. She was channelling her inner Joni Mitchell, except that Joni wouldn’t have gone for such an obvious hook. Nancy’s version has a big chorus, like the original.
The most significant performance is Flowers. It’s a dramatic dark ballad, and it is right in the Scott Walker or Jaques Brel territory- hardly pop, doesn’t fit with the chart hits, but is a powerful singing performance. It was written by Bobby Cole, who was Judy Garland’s arranger and described by Frank Sinatra as “my favourite saloon entertainer.” This is a road she had the voice and arranger to explore further, though it’s a road that gets glowing five star reviews but poor sales for those who follow it. File with Scott Walker or Blue Nile.
I Call It Love was written by the Boersma sisters. Another in Carpenters style.
There’s A Party Goin’ On by Jody Miller was the title track of her own 1972 album, and a #4 country hit (#1 Canadian country) in May 1972. It was a Billy Sherrill / Glenn Sutton song. Not to be confused with the Wanda Jackson song. Good lyric, and I like the way the song drops out the backing altogether to sing alone then gradually brings the orchestra back in, but that’s exactly what Jody Miller does too.
I Used To Think It Was Easy was written by Pat St. Clare. It’s another with a bouncy chorus. The lyric is part of the appeal and fits with the album title…
When the sun’s too hot
And my old man’s not …
then
Well the night’s far along, my old man’s out somewhere gone
And I’m thinking it’s time for me to go
I never loved him like he wanted me to
That’s something he must already know
Look the night is cold, my shoes are old
And I don’t much like the rain
And his bed’s much softer, and the road is long
So I might stay on it then
The Happiest Girl In The Whole USA was written by Donna Fargo (and appears on the same Jody Miller album as There’s A Party Goin’ On). Country #1, main chart #11 in Spring 1972. Tammy Wynette had covered it too. Maybe it’s country 1972 with a verse and a soaring or bouncy chorus wherever possible. This song’s much more positive than the one before, and it’s as if the album bounces contrasting lyrics deliberately:
Skippedee-dooda, thank you Lord
For making him for me.
And thank you for letting life
Turn out the way that I always thought it could be!
American Promo 45 (from eBay) of It’s The Love (That Keeps Us Together)
It’s The Love (That Keeps Us Altogether) the second song on the album by Kim Carnes was the B-side of Kind of A Woman. We’re in much the same mood.
As an album it maintains a mood and style though Flowers comes from somewhere else altogether. Mainly “commercial popular country” sums it up and I think The Carpenters analogy is fair. I like The Carpenters.
Sugar Me / Ain’t No More Sunshine was the RCA 1973 single.
THIS IS NANCY SINATRA
A double album compilation, released in the UK in 1972 by RCA. It shows she owned her masters, because it puts four sides of previous Reprise releases together. There are many compilations, but this one is significant in showing the continuity of ownership, as a Reprise specialty.
Reprise was founded on two principles. One was that the artists would have full control over their record. The second was that at some points they would also be guaranteed full ownership of the rights of their own works, which explains why its early records were then re-issued by many other labels.
Matt Micucci, Jazziz, December 2015
PRIVATE STOCK
Private Stock was a New York label, run by Larry Uttal, formerly head of Bell Records. Frankie Valli was the label’s biggest selling artist, for a New Jersey connection with Frank and Nancy’s birth state.
The Private Stock label ran to four Nancy Sinatra 45 rpm releases in the USA starting with Annabell of Mobile in April 1975, and running to It’s For My Dad in 1977.
A friend was praising Nancy’s Private Stock era (both A sides and B sides) a few years ago, and I saw a single second-hand and bought it. Unfortunately it was It’s For My Dad. Wrong one for me, Three of the singles are significant: Annabell of Mobile, plus Kinky Love and Indian Summer, both in 1976.
Annabell of Mobile was written by Bobby Russell (Little Green Apples, Honey), and it was written by someone who rightly admired and loved Bobbie Gentry’s Fancy, and decided to tell an extremely similar dramatic tale, accentuated by the arrangement, with a twist: the daughter is telling the tale of her hooker mom. The piano is massively amplified when it charges in dramatically. (I’ve got it on a Playlist next to Fancy). Production by Snuff Garrett. Snuff Garrett produced her at Private Stock, and she got him working with her dad too.
The B-side was She Played Piano and He Beat The Drum: It’s the narrative of the piano / drums duo who play …
At Holiday Inns for short two week runs
The production is odd, very loud piano, two huge drum beats when appropriate but then a huge male / female chorus coming in behind her. And lots of strings. Eventually …
They’re down to doing weekends for tips in any bar …
OK, it’s the direct opposite experience of showbiz to her own, but she sings it with feeling. It’s a grower- I disliked it when I first heard it, but it became an earworm.
Kinky Love might have done way better, as it deserved to, but the lyrics (take me inside and let the honey slide …) were too much for radio play. Odd, in that Donna Summer’s Love to Love You Baby was a year earlier. Patrick Macnee and Honor Blackman had released Kinky Boots in 1964 and got away with it (it was a hit on reissue in 1990), and while kinky boots sound like a fun fashion accessory, whether made for walking or not, kinky love sounds simply deviant. Hers was the original version, though fifteen years on Pale Saints covered it.
As far as I can see Kinky Love wasn’t ever released in the UK until it appeared on Sheet Music in 1998. Most of the Private Stock masters were lost after Uttal closed down the label in 1978. Uttal’s son who owns the rights has no idea where any masters or vinyl stampers ended up. Most Private Stock re-issues have been sourced from vinyl. Nancy’s website says that the Sheet Music Kinky Love is taken from a cassette. In my opinion, you’d get more from a 45 single … it’s easier to clean off surface noise than it is to replace the missing high and low frequencies on cassette tape … but it sounds fine whatever.
Back to Private Stock: Indian Summer reunites her voice with Lee Hazlewood, with Lee taking a lead narrative voice while Nancy ‘na na na’ sings behind him then takes the chorus then takes over. It’s a Joe Dassin song, and he did it himself in both French and then in English in 1975, and as L’Ete indien’ it was a French #1 hit and sold two million worldwide. So Nancy & Lee were again covering a very recent hit. I prefer their version, but only by a little bit, and they follow Dassin pretty closely. I didn’t realize the Dassin existed when I originally heard Lee and Nancy doing it.
A strange single, sounds like it’s taken from a grade C French movie. Hazlewood speaks the lyrics, Sinatra hums and sings in a sexy pillow-talk style.”
– Cash Box: November 6, 1976
The B-side, Dolly & Hawkeye is an extraordinary Roald Dahl style story lyric, a subtle twist on the murder ballad, as well as a very good song. An article called it “Faukneresque Gothic.” They should have gone for originality and put it on the A side. Listen and shiver at the story. The credits read Lena Edling on the original release (Lee’s girlfriend) but when Lee recorded a solo version just a year later, it reverted to “L. Hazlewood.” Nancy says she doesn’t remember recording it:
NANCY: I just can’t believe I slept through that session. I love the song so much but I must have been drinking or smoking something when we did it because I wasn’t there.I wish we had pictures of the sessions so I could check my eyes and see if they are stoned or not. This will always remain a mystery to me. Spooky to think I lost an entire song! I swear I didn’t do those kinds of drugs and I’m not, never have been a boozer, so WHAT HAPPENED?”
Who knows? After all, Life’s A Trippy Thing. Her performance is brilliant.
It’s For My Dad: Final Private Stock single. Old centre design, later sleeve design.
It’s For My Dad was written by Lana Chapel, and recorded in New York City in May 1977. Lana Chapal had written it as a Father’s Day gift for her own stepdad. Check it on YouTube … 1.1 million hits. Nancy’s version touched a chord with so many people, it’s just not my kind of thing and was a surprise when I bought it.
The B-side, A Gentle Man Like You was by Danny and Ruby Hice. It’s over the top sentimental C&W for me:
Kiss away my teardrops like you touched away my fear …
Darling I’m so happy that you’re here
I’ve never felt so beautiful, you’re too good to be true
I have never been loved, by a gentle man like you
As other material has surfaced from the era, you have to wonder why Private Stock never did an album of originals. Two songs from the May 1977 sessions emerged later on How Does It Feel? in 1999, Unconditional Love and You’re Gonna Make Love To Me. Then Southern Lady on the Cherry Smiles compilation is noted as Snuff Garrett and October 1975 which makes another strong song for a Private Stock album.
They may have run out of time before Uttal folded Private Stock, or there may not have been quite enough material, though there was a recording of the Phil Spector girl group classic Uptown which has never been released. The label had the rights to her Reprise recordings somehow. They issued an EP (or “Maxi-Single” in the 70s terminology) in Britain, as well as a compilation of Reprise singles as Nancy Sinatra’s Greatest Hits.
Private Stock Maxi-Single in the UK with her four biggest hits, at a budget price. They did the same with Frankie Valli’s hits. 1977
NANCY: I had the contract at Reprise for a long time and a short deal at RCA, and then another shorter deal at Elektra. Some of my most important recordings, to me, were on Private Stock. And with that label, the owner Larry Uttal died, and his wife had an attorney contact me to ask if I would be interested in buying my masters, and I said, “Yes!” I got most of them, except for one session that I would really love to have, which was produced by Charlie Calello, and another one by Snuff Garrett, two great producers. And those masters, I don’t know where they are. It’s just sad that these things get lost over time.
prcom. 28 April 2011
1978 SESSION
The articles by Andrew on Nancy Sinatra’s website (LINKED) trace details of a 1978 session with Lee Hazlewood producing (but neither singing nor composing) at The Record Plant in LA. They cut covers of classics including House Of The Rising Sun, Tobacco Road, I Just Can’t Help Believing, Baby What You Want Me To Do, Too Far Gone, I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry., Baby Put The Light Out Only one song from the session has been issued, Speedball Tucker on Kid Stuff see below.
Lee Hazlewood had produced Duane Eddy’s version of House of The Rising Sun in 1965. Having tried the song in 1978, Nancy did a further demo in 1987, and that has an extract on the page linked above. Great guitar. Hopefully one for the next compilation.
MEL & NANCY
There’s an album-free gap between Woman and Mel and Nancy in 1981 on Elektra, then another gap.
Mel and Nancy was produced and arranged by Billy Strange. Jimmy Bowen co-produced two tracks. Mel Tillis has a cowboy hat on the Mel and Nancy sleeve, and two songs have ‘cowboy’ in the title (Texas Cowboy Night and Cowboy Carry Me Home). I mentioned great duets earlier, and the soul ones, but for sheer quantity the male / female duet is a country thing. Mel Tillis was a massive country star in America in the 1970s. I’ll venture that outside the dedicated country & western scene, few British people have heard of him. Yet this is a guy with thirty-six US Top Ten Country singles, many more in the Top 100 and six country number one hits.
The album wasn’t released in the UK. The Elektra press release is quoted on Nancy’s website:
ELEKTRA PRESS RELEASE: The Mel & Nancy album by Tillis and Nancy Sinatra
(released by Elektra/Asylum in late October ’81) and their hit duet single ‘Texas Cowboy Night’ (released in mid-June ’81) resulted, quite simply, from his desire to record with her. ‘When he heard she was available,’ says E/A Nashville Vice President Jimmy Bowen, co-producer of the single and ‘After The Lovin’,’ the single’s flip side, ‘he asked that they get together right away.’ Characteristically, Tillis then co-composed ‘Texas Cowboy Night’ especially for himself and his new duet partner, and went into the the studio to record it and ‘After The Lovin’.
It’s a ten track album, clocking in at under 33 minutes, which was very short for 1981. Track length is in a narrow band too. The shortest is 2 minutes 50 seconds, the longest 3 minutes 31 seconds. I noticed because I put my LP copy on CDR and listened and was pressing “Track increment” on the CD burner. It was never issued on CD, surprising given Mel Tillis’s huge catalogue and popularity. You can find several tracks on YouTube. There are some Mel Tillis albums on iTunes, but not this one. I finally tracked down an original American LP copy.
Mel Tillis was a prominent and successful songwriter, but gets just one co-writing credit on this album. In 1981 Nashville was full to the brim with aspiring country songwriters and the albums were selling. The album was recorded in Nashville with a large session crew (notably David Briggs on piano). They employed the Shelley Kurland Strings as well as the Lea Jane Singers (Billy Strange really did like traditional chorus singers).
Mel & Nancy produced two country chart hits, Texas Cowboy Night (US country #23, 1981) and Play Me Or Trade Me (country #43, 1982).
I Would Fly (Tracy Newman). Originally by Tracy Newman & The Reinforcements. Classic C&W harmonising on the chorus. Prominent pedal steel.
Where Would I Be (Judy Mehaffy) A big romantic ballad with lots of Mantovani strings and lines like You are the star that silently guides me. The purity of her voice and the neutrality of her accent (mainly) are plus points. Nancy was never going to get away with posing as a Sharecropper or Coalminer’s daughter and wisely avoids trying. Where Would I Be was released as a single.
Underground River (Jay Stevens). This choogles away at the start.
Nancy: Too shy to share my fantasies of love with other men …
Nancy: Then you pressed that button that blew my world apart …
Mel: Then you cracked the dam with the power of a kiss …
I think there’s a raunchy subtext flowing through this underground river. Good song.
After The Lovin’ (Alan Bernstein, Richie Adams) This is the one Nancy chose to re-cord with Lee Hazlewood on Nancy / Lee – 3. Mel Tillis is a more conventional singer and the backing is elaborate. I think it works better in this version, though it’s even further into MoR.
Where in Heaven On Earth (Lee Greenwood) This is much livelier, with the rhythm of something like Six Days On The Road. Good guitar solo too.
Play Me or Trade Me (Mike Huffman, Owen Davis). The hit single. A fun song. It’s humorous… she’s wearing her see-through gown but he’s not interested because he’s watching the game on TV. She’s going for a more country voice too:
Nancy: I came into the livin’ room in my new see-through gown.
Mel: And I got all excited …
Nancy: Yeah, cos they made a big first down!
It very much plays to her strengths … conversational banter between woman and man. It ends:
Nancy: There’ll be no instant replay ‘cos I’m walking out the door … Bye bye.
Mel: Shucks!
I’ll Never Be Free (Bennie Benjamin, George Daivid Weiss) Big violins, but a bluesy song in Hank Williams or Ray Charles in Modern Sounds in Country & Western mood. A lovely intricate uitar part weaves through.
Texas Cowboy Night. Elektra 1981. US release only
Texas Cowboy Night (Buddy Cannon, Mel Tillis, Raleigh Squires). The other single hit. Classic country – that bass line fits a thousand songs. The theme – girl chatting up a cowboy and vice versa, is one Lee Hazlewood would have liked. But he wouldn’t have been talking shuffling across the dance floor to Western Swing. Good country fiddle solo by Buck Buchanan.
It’s A Far Cry From Over (Carl Jackson, Ethan Reilly). Another predictable big romantic ballad. Awful song.
Cowboy Carry Me Home (Roger Howell, Sid Wayne). More cheerful hoe-down about playing guitar in a West Texas bar. Anyway he picks her up successfully as she sings Cowboy, carry me home … but it was a one off. Then he saw her again and fortunately she repeated the title and added It’s a long night and I’m all alone …
OTHER ELEKTRA WORK
Mel Tillis and Nancy teamed up for Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer for a Christmas 1981 compilation, Christmas Country.
Let’s Keep It That Way and One Jump Ahead of The Storm are 1980 /81 songs which were recorded as her Elektra debut. Let’s Keep It That Way finally appeared on CD on the Cherry Smiles compilation. One Jump Ahead of The Storm appeared on How Does It Feel in 1999. On One Jump Ahead of The Storm she goes for Stevie Nicks stadium rock, does it well, but it’s not her thing.
FAIRY TALES AND FANTASIES: THE BEST OF NANCY & LEE
This was a 1989 release on CD and cassette only by Rhino, and consisted of the whole Nancy & Lee album plus three bonus tracks: Down From Dover, Paris Summer and Arkansas Coal, all from Nancy & Lee Again. They re-used the Nancy & Lee sleeve. It’s hard to see why they hadn’t simply released both albums as a 2-for-1.
ONE MORE TIME
In April 1995 One More Time was a comeback solo album after a long gap, or semi-retirement to bring up her kids. It was reviewed as country too because of the image on the sleeve in cowboy boots. That’s not accurate over all of it. She said:
NANCY: My close friend and long time road buddy Don Randi introduced me to veteran producer Ray Ruff.Ray was about to launch a record labeland needed just the right artist to start out with. Bingo! Ray chose a dozen or so songs from various songwriters that were consistent withthe kind of material I had recorded with Lee Hazlewood on my Sixties albums: tough and gentle, nasty and sweet, experienced yet innocent.
Ray Ruff was known as a Nashville producer, but generally this as at the rockier end. He may have selected the songs, but sorry, none of them really grab me, darling. Two songs are by his wife. There are two songs by Jerry Cole, who worked with Don Randi on the arrangements. Two more are co-written by Al Kasha, and Judy Mehaffey appears as composer twice too. She wrote Where Would I Be on the Mel & Nancy album. The band is basic compared to past arrangements. Chet McCracken was drummer on the sessions.
It didn’t do well, because the label, Cougar, was collapsing as it was released. In Europe, the label was ‘Nancy’s.’ It’s long out of print, but available digitally.
NANCY: For me it was an event because I hadn’t been in the studio for so long. And I had a LABEL! At least I thought I did. It wasn’t until much later I found out how bogus it was. That’s why I ended up having to do the Playboy pictorial … It was financed by a group of Ray’s friends in Texas and they just couldn’t handle it in the long run. We really didn’t have the money to press the CDs and do the booklet until Playboy came into the scenario.
One More Time revives the song she did on Woman in 1972. The first time she smoothed out the Crabby Appleton original and here she smooths it out even more. I miss the fiddle running through. Odd snatches of fiddle don’t compensate. The production is more conventional rock, and denser than in the Billy Strange days.
Crocodile Tears is again 90s rock, big drums. At times her elaborate and sophisticated arrangements threatened to overwhelm in the past, but a basic rock band is disappointing. The song’s generic, in a way that many Stevie Nicks album fillers are.
Now I Have Everything. Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn. This is standard big romantic ballad, and was the B-side of the CD single from the record.
Right Track, Wrong Train is a popular song title. There are several, but this one’s by Jerry Cole. The train metaphor gets stretched in all of them. Nice guitar, probably Jerry Cole himself. Jerry Cole was in The Champs with Glen Campbell, then joined him working in the Wrecking Crew, and was one of the guitarists on These Boots Are Made For Walkin’. He was co-owner of Happy Tiger records with Ray Ruff, and a noted bandleader on hundreds of recordings.
Roadblock phew, pub rock! Nice bass playing. Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn again, but very different rock revival style.
I Didn’t Wear White is in the Down From Dover territory (I didn’t wear white on my wedding day) though somewhat milder, and for me is the best track. Narrative song suits her. Those drums are really (too) 1990s. It was written by someone called Ruffin. But not David or Jimmy (soul) or Bruce (reggae). This is country and white. It was written by Carlette Ruffin, Ray Ruff’s wife and Carl Top Ruffin. Ray Ruff’s real name was Ruffin.
One For My Baby Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer. 1943. Best known by Frank Sinatra, and she does it quite differently to his narrative world-weary version. Frank Sinatra recorded the song six times … 1947, 1954, 1958, 1962, 1966, and 1993. Hers is faster, beatier.
Are You On The Road To Loving Me Again? was a country #1 for Debbie Boone (Pat Boone’s daughter) in 1980. Ray Ruff produced Debbie Boone too. It sounds like … well, a female vocalist plaintive country #1.
Devil in Disguise is not the Elvis song. Nor is it the J.J. Cale song. That’s a pity. It starts out with a Fleetwood Mac beat. “Ruffin” or rather Carlette Ruffin again. Explicit …
Well he walked over to me, and he asked me straight out,
hey baby do you wanna dance
So I held on really tight,
hoping this would be the night for a little romance
When the song was over,
he took me by the hand and he swept me right off of my feet
Then he loved me in the night, spun me out of control and I couldn’t let it be
For Me It’s You takes the first verse with just bass that reminds you of past times, but then the band comes in. I’d have left it as just bass right through. Rocking sax solo.
White Water is Jerry Cole again, slightly spacey arrangement. I assume the strings effect is synthesized.
Bone Dry was the CD single with banjo and mandolin, but still a heavy drum beat. Almost a novelty vocal. The other track to note on the album.
Nights In White Satin was written by Justin Hayward and was a hit for The Moody Blues in 1967. The album Days of Future Passed featured it and would have sold more than the single. I still resent the song because of the tale of how Lonnie Donegan signed up a very young Justin Hayward on the publishing and took the lion’s share of the huge royalties. It stands out as odd – it’s very much like the original right down to the drums, and there doesn’t seem much point in covering something that well-known unless you do something different. The guitar at the start reminds of Billy Strange. It doesn’t sound as if it comes from the same sessions , but the backing synths are reproducing the Mellotron on the original.
She appeared on the cover of Playboy (widely regarded as a brave move in favour of 55 year old women), then on the Conan O’Brien show in a Playboy sweatshirt. It financed the album. A tour followed, and to her surprise, people turning up were younger, into indie music, and she had a following she had never realized existed.
SONGS FROM THE VAULT: SHEET MUSIC
Then we get Sheet Music which was compiled by Nancy Sinatra in 1998, and has tracks from various later albums, plus nine unreleased items. Judging by the 21stcentury retrospective compilations, they were continually recording quite a bit that they never released at the time. We begin her “from the vaults” era. She explains on her website in 2013:
NANCY: What happened with a lot of the ‘Vault’ tracks is that it was an extremely expensive session and we had to hurry so we could dismiss the musicians as soon as possible, all 46 (I think) of them. (We had no deal to release these at that time and we still don’t.) The charts had been written and the copyist had done his job so we had to lay down the tracks or lose all that money. There was no time for listening to playbacks and fixing clams so that’s what we’re doing now. The sad part of doing this after the fact is it can be only one instrument in a section that hits a bad note but we have to delete the whole section. It’s a shame but it has to be done before we can release any of these amazing tracks – and they are amazing – especially MacArthur Park.
By ‘no deal’ she means no record deal with a label when they were recorded, which probably places many of the recordings twixt Reprise (1971) and Private Stock (1975), then twixt Private Stock and Elektra (1980). She must have been financing her own recordings, thus retaining all the rights to the masters, which gradually emerge over the next fifteen years. The title Sheet Music must refer to taking the songs back to their basics (the sheet music) and re-imagining them. Or maybe the title was the old joke about a Mexican describing an (e.g.) Barry Manilow record. Or music for between the sheets.
NANCY: All the composers herein obviously knew what it was like to turn the lights low and make love while listening to romantic music. I hope this album will inspire that kind of activity.
I’m not sure that her cover note follows through, or whether a succession of varied two and a half minute vocal tracks compete with an LP side of Ravi Shankar, or (for Sting) the full 70 minutes of Beethoven’s 9 th.
However, it’s a good CD overall, though I skip some.
Light My Fire is from Nancy 12 Ways in 1969.
Something by George Harrison was on Abbey Road. Unreleased recording from 1972, produced and arranged by Billy Strange.I’m not sure what the cover’s supposed to do, because they follow The Beatles guitar part and arrangement too faithfully, and in doing so you’re into the Woolworth’s Embassy label cover versions of the early 60s that aimed to get as close as possible to the original. Her voice is lovely, but the only real innovation is the flourish of strings at the end.
Fell in Love With A Poet from Woman in 1972, produced by Jimmy Bowen and Duane Eddy.
In The Wee Small Hours: Frank Sinatra, EP, 1955. Not so much relevant as that I love those illustrated Capitol LP and EP sleeves for Frank. This one is on a display of 25 EP sleeves in my office.
In The Wee Small Hours of The Morning by Bob Hilliard and David Mann. Previously unreleased. Produced by Jimmie Bowen and Ernie Freeman. This was the title track of Frank Sinatra’s In The Wee Small Hours album in 1955 and was written for it, and arranged by Nelson Riddle. Nancy’s version starts in a similar way, but at 30 seconds in, the percussion comes in strongly together with vibes, and the heavenly chorus comes in the background. A fine version, but I continue to have issues with the love of choral singers in the background. It’s undated on the sleeve, but on her website she traces it to pre-Hazlewood. She credits Jimmy Bowen with having her sing deeper BEFORE she met Lee Hazlewood, and notes the songs on which he did as True Love and In The Wee Small Hours, so same session. Same date, early in 1965.
Kind Of A Woman and Kinky Love (the Private Stock singles) come next but …
NANCY: Kind of a Woman was the last single of mine I actually heard on the radio … Years later I was working with Don Randi and his band QUEST, a five-piece band with a reed player named Chuck Camper. I wanted to perform Kind of a Woman live and also to add it to Sheet Music, so I augmented it with Chuck on flute and Don on piano. I don’t like this version as much as the original which has only bass, drums and percussion
Easy Evil is dated as a 1972 track, so from when Sarah Vaughan first did the song … before Dusty Springfield, Nancy Wilson, Lulu, Marlena Shaw, Peggy Lee. Maybe there were just too many covers. Even Gary Glitter did it! The song was written by Alan O’Day who shared his simple voice and electric piano demo on YouTube. It did very well to attract so many covers. Nancy’s version was produced by Billy Strange and labelled a demo, but it was a very elaborate orchestrated demo then. Sarah Vaughan was the best known version and had more of a soul-jazz orchestra sound. Peggy Lee, two years later went mid 70s funkier still. Marlena Shaw is the most soul vocal. A terrific song. Nancy sings low and sultry and interprets the lyric so well with a voice change on I’m a sucker for you baby … While it’s a fascinating arrangement it sounds much more conventional and less soulful than the three women just mentioned. That may be why they left it on the shelf.
Imaginary Lover is an unreleased demo from 1980, arranged by Don Randi and Billy Strange. 1980 is at a barren point in her career … just before Mel & Nancy. If it’s only a demo it’s pretty good … flute and electric piano dominate. The original version was by The Atlanta Rhythm Section in 1978 and a US #7 hit from Champagne Jam. She shifts the lyric from second person (you) to first person (me). I prefer her version.
California Dreamin’ was produced by Billy Strange in 1970 and is from the aborted California songs project which was finally completed and issued in 2002 as California Girl. I’d guess the fine acoustic guitar is Billy Strange. You miss four voices intertwining. The humming section is pleasant.
Tired of Waiting For You was the third hit single by The Kinks in 1965. In the sleeve notes this is listed as ‘Unreleased. 1965, produced by … no one can remember.’ Eddie Brackett as the engineer doesn’t help date it. This is a radical rethink of the song, as radical in its way as Cat Power’s weird version of Satisfaction. It’s so far away from the heavy riff of The Kinks version. It’s a duet with a male voice and it doesn’t sound deep enough to be Lee Hazlewood. She does a whispered echoey I was a lonely soul … I had nobody till I met you. The more I listen, the more brilliant it is. If they’d released it at the time, I think people would have thought it weird and spacey. The spaceyness makes me intrigued to discover where and when and why they did it. The Kinks were distributed by Reprise in the USA at that time.
Call Me is from How Does That Grab You album.
Nice ‘n’ Easy is the 1968 single B-side of Happy.
Until It’s Time For You To Go is the 1966 B-side of Lightning’s Girl. See above.
Here In The Palm Of Your Hand is from 1980, like Imaginary Lover, a demo, and produced by Billy Strange. They must have been planning something back then. Apart from a composer credit to “B. Sanders” I can’t find any further information. Cool flute and piano as on Imaginary Lover and the same engineers, so I’d think the same session and line-up. The demo status is questionable because of the chorus behind her … would you bother for a demo? It’s a nice song, but the middle bit doesn’t fit well. She certainly hits all the big ballad notes.
True Love is the pre-Hazlewood single from 1964 with the Spectorish arrangement (and her voice doesn’t sound very different to me). See above.
The Shadow Of Your Smile is from How DoesThat Grab You, 1965.
When I Look In Your Eyes is previously unreleased. Produced by Jimmy Bowen, Arranged by Don Costa. This version isn’t dated. The song is from Dr Doolittle in 1967 and written by Leslie Bricusse. The film version was Rex Harrison, then they all lined up to sing it in 1967 to 1968 … Tony Bennett, Jack Jones, Bobby Darin, Johnny Mathis, Sammy Davis Jnr, Andy Williams, Nancy Wilson … that’s only the start. This version isn’t dated, but Don Costa arranged others circa 1970. The overdub vocal is credited as Michael Lloyd, which I assume is production and 1990s. Michael Lloyd was involved in her Vault reissues. Good version. Never liked the song, and loathed the movie.
I’m Just In Love is the Mac Davis song from Nancy -Twelve Ways, 1969.
Maybe I’m Amazed is by Paul McCartney, 1970 from the album McCartney. This previously unreleased version is dated 1972 and apparently from the same sessions as Something. Unlike Something, this has significant difference by having a large string section throughout. As Paul had not issued it as a single in 1972, and it’s a terrific song, it might have had a chance if it had been released as a single.
Flowers is the strange song from Woman.
We Can Make It is also from Woman.
1998 brought a three track EP, For My Dad (with Something Stupid and Feelin’ Kinda Sunday plus the title track It’s For My Dad).
HOW DOES IT FEEL? MORE FROM THE VAULT
How Does It Feel? is just a year later, a 1999 assembly with a couple of the very best old singles … Drummer Man and Happy at the core, but adds covers of Like A Rolling Stone, from which it takes its title, Walk On The Wild Side, Flowers In The Rain, Sugar Me, Get Ready (The Temptations). Eclectic is the word. She was still thinking of standard album length … by Kid’s Stuffthe compilations were way longer. She was also playing live gigs again, which explains a rockier album compilation.
The album opens with her version of Sugar Me (Lynsey de Paul & Barry Green) which was a 1973 RCA single, and only issued in the USA. Lynsey de Paul had a #5 hit in the UK and a #1 in several other countries in 1972. The bass is loud, pushing into distort which propels the song and also gives it a Glam Rock era sound.
Sweet Talking Candy Man is a song from Beyond The Valley of The Dolls, sung by Lynn Carey in 1970. It was written by Stu Phillips and Bob Stone, and credited to Stu Phillips, Lynne Carey and Barbara Robinson. Not a clue as to when she recorded it. The tempo stays up, and the band go for a fashionable funk beat and guitar sound. The lyrics are good too, very much in the Bobbie Gentry territory.
I left home when I was only 17
Met a guy, he and I drove down to New Orleans
He seemed to know his way around, I thought that I could land
That sweet talking candy man
Her version of Like A Rolling Stone is very different, it has that semi-reggae lurch of Dylan’s At Budokan era. It dates from the mid-70s and was produced by Bones Howe (5thDimension, Association producer). Dylan’s Street Legal band tour started in 1978, culminating in the live album. I wonder who first gave Dylan that rhythmic feel? Or was this a couple of years later than “mid-70s”? She tries too hard to switch the gender … Mister Lonely has one more syllable than Miss Lonely and I feel it. In this lyric, it wouldn’t matter. It’s a significant Dylan cover, of one of the hardest songs to cover. As a collector of Dylan covers, I rate this one very highly.
Dylan likes her too. When he released Shadows In The Nightwith Frank Sinatra covers, he said:
BOB DYLAN: I think Nancy is head and shoulders above most of these girl singers today. She’s so soulful also in a conversational way. And where’d she get that? Well, she’s Frank’s daughter, right? Just naturally.
Drummer Man comes next.
Unconditional Love was written by Larry Brown (Russell Brown) and Bob Crewe. So it’s neither the Donna Summer song nor the Glen Campbell one, nor the one from Disney’s Aladdin. This is a left-over track from the May 1977 sessions for Private Stock in New York City.
Flowers In The Rain was her final Reprise single, issued in the UK and Germany but not the USA (she was about to leave the label) coupled with Glory Road (which is on Cherry Smiles). There’s some dispute about the sound effect of thunder and rain which was on the single, and missing from this version.
NANCY: When I sent the How Does it Feel CD to producer Andy Wickham, (Flowers in the Rain, Glory Road, Hook and Ladder etc,) he reminded me that the single of Flowers In the Rain had the thunder and rain so when we remixed for Kid Stuff, we put it back. Keith Barrows did the remix for How Does it Feel and he didn’t know to look for the thunder track. My fault.”
You’re Gonna Make Love To Me is another May 1977 track from Private Stock sessions. This was co-written by Larry Brown and Irwin Levine. Lou Christie released a version as a single in February 1977. Lynn Nilles (aka Lane Brody) had a minor country hit with it the same year (US#93). The singer is a hypnotist:
Look into my eyes deeper, deeper
Can’t you feel yourself getting drowsier, drowsier
Sleep, when you wake up
You will make to love to the very first person you see
When I snap my fingers, you will wake up
And the first one you see will be me
I love the backing, I love the main verses, but the chorus errs on the too jaunty side.
Fancy Dan was produced by Bones Howe. Written by Milo Adamo (a noted drummer) and Mike Melvoin (a noted pianist). A couple of different reviews suggest it references Steely Dan, and the feel and sound support that.
One Jump Ahead Of The Storm. Dramatic 80s rock in style. It’s from her 1981 Elektra era when it was a single.
Walk On The Wild Side, produced by Jimmy Bowen. This is the 1962 Elmer Bernstein and Mack David tune, NOT the 1972 Lou Reed. The original was the film soundtrack, though many soul-jazz fans of it by Jimmy Smith first. Brook Benton did the vocal version which Nancy is covering. Nancy’s version is dramatically different, slipping in the I’m A Man / Hoochie Coochie Man riff.
Get Ready written by Smokey Robinson for The Temptations, is taken at breakneck speed with female backing singers. The guitar part sounds 80s or 90s. I’d have thought Fancy Dan was the same period.
Happy is the single.
YOU GO-GO GIRL
You Go Go Girl is another 1999 compilation which mixes mainly early hit singles with unreleased tracks. It has a few that are hard to get too, or are bonus tracks on CD reissues. Varese Sarabande label.
TRACKS
How Does That Grab You Darlin’ single, How Does That Grab You
Day Tripper from Boots
The Last of The Secret Agents bonus track on How Does That Grab You CD
Your Groovy Self from Elvis Presley, Speedway, album 1968. It saves buying the Speedway album, which being a rare Elvis, is expensive.
In Our Time, single 1966, bonus track on Boots CD
Love Is Strange Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood. Written by Ethel Smith & Mickey Baker. By Mickey & Sylvia in 1956. US #11, Most Played US, #1. “Ethel Smith” was Bo Diddley’s wife, and Bo Diddley was the co-composer. For me the best-known version is by The Everly Brothers from 1965 (UK #11). This was a demo version by Nancy and Lee Hazlewood, cut in 1969. Billy Strange conducting. This album is its first release. Taken at speed. It has to be Hal Blaine doing the terrific drum part, then the organ relates to the keyboard player on Happy. The electric bass is astonishingly good. Nice spoken voice sections. Among their best covers. It’s not in iTunes, but is on YouTube. It was part of a concept of “funked up cover tunes” and was Billy Strange’s idea. Others (which have never emerged) were Stand By Your Man and If I Were A Rich Man. Some later rarities covers probably date from the same incomplete album.
Call Me from How Does That Grab You
Good Time Girl, 1968 single, Mac Davis, bonus track on Movin’ With Nancy CD
Sorry ‘Bout That How Does That Grab You
Zodiac Blues (1969) is an outstanding song with high speed recitation. It was the third Mickie Most production from October 1969. You Go Go Girl saw its first release then it appeared on Kid Stuff. It was written by Lincoln Chase who wrote Jim Dandy for LaVern Baker, then The Nitty Gritty for Shirley Ellis.
NANCY: There were many black female singers who kicked ass before I came along. They were the ones I admired when I was a teeny-bopper. Girls like LaVern Baker, Etta James and Ruth Brown paved the rock road for women like me. And they did it with some of the funkiest and best R&B songs ever written. Zodiac Blues was a riot. It’s really hard to sing because you can’t breathe in it. There are a lot of words that have to come out fast.
On her website, she added Darlene Love and Ronnie Spector in a reply to a question.
You Only Live Twice single, bonus track on Nancy in London CD
The City Never Sleeps At Night, B-side, Boots album
So Long Babe. single, Boots album
Happy single, bonus track on Nancy- Twelve Ways CD
Geronimo was from the film she did in 1965, The Ghost In The Invisible Bikini. Backed by The Bobby Fuller Four.
These Boots Are Made For Walkin’ single, Boots album
CALIFORNIA GIRL
California Girl in 2002 is a concept covers album, tied together because every song has a California reference. It was released by Disney’s Buena Vista Records, initially on sale in Disneyland, California. Only two songs had been released before … Hello LA, Bye Bye, Birmingham and How Are Things in California? The concept dates back to the late 60s, but was unfinished when she quit the Reprise label in 1971. Copyright and ownership of the masters eventually reverted to her. The recordings were done between 1967 and 2001. Pity she missed out Moon Zappa’s Valley Girl.
Clearly there are later additions to the original concept … Hotel California wasn’t written until 1976.
How Are Things in California? was the November 1970 Mamas and Papas meet The Fifth Dimension. single. See above.
She covers San Fernando Valley, a 1944 song recorded by Bing Crosby, Roy Rogers, Gene Autrey and Frank Sinatra too, describing it as ‘cow country’ long before LA’s urban sprawl incorporated the area. She rocks it up in a radical rethink, and you’d never guess its origins.
99 Miles From LA was written by Albert Hammond and Hal David. Albert Hammond had a US #1 Easy Listening hit with it in 1975. In Britain it is better known from Art Garfunkel’s Breakaway album (UK#7, US #9) later the same year. The very long guitar solo on 99 Miles to LA comes middle and end, sounding very LA session guitar of the 80s. It drowns the song for me.
Brian Wilson duetted with her on California Girls … Nancy’s vocal was 1969 or 1970, Brian’s vocal was added in 2001 along with Jeffrey Foskett, Brian’s MD. When we saw The Beach Boys in the late 1980s (without Brian Wilson), they had several bikini clad girls come on stage and dance … just for the one number. Nancy sings it well, though the lyrics make less sense. A female singer hardly fits, but she shifts it to ‘we’ girls get so tanned, changing perspective as she used to do with Lee on duet covers. Brian Wilson’s and Jeffrey Foskett’s multi-tracked voices sound like The Beach Boys. I sorely miss the original Wrecking Crew backing, and a saxophone solo is no substitute.
Hello L.A., Bye Bye Birmingham was a single.
California Dreaming is the other obvious title, slower and sounding more serious and less of an anthem than The Mamas & Papas. It had been on Sheet Music.
I really love her gently swinging Route 66, which takes it back to its origins with Nat King Cole rather than Chuck Berry or the Rolling Stones. The Hammond organ part and vibes and acoustic bass are keynotes. The best song on the album for me. In my teen days I spent hours with a US map trying to work out the words from the Rolling Stones version, which I provided to my teen front room band (too cold for garage bands in England) and to all my friends’ bands, which meant we all got the words ludicrously wrong, I can understand Nancy’s lyric perfectly. It makes me want to play it again and get it right. Route 66 ends on Santa Monica Pier. I have photos.
San Francisco. You might prefer SOUTH California Girl, with just the one song about San Francisco, and no, it’s not any of the psychedelic ones … San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair), Let’s Go To San Francisco or San Franciscan Nights. Her San Francisco is a swinging showbizzy song with intertwining trad jazzy horn section.
I guess San Jose gets a mention, but only in the sense of Do you know the way to San Jose? and seen from the setting of LA’s great big freeway too. It doesn’t add anything to what Dionne Warwick did. The song is great for the hopeful newcomer trying to make it in LA as so many were. She wasn’t but it showcases the precision and clarity of her delivery.
Hooray for Hollywood Is another showbiz stage musical song dating from 1937. The dance chorus is in your mind’s eye with their fixed smiles and kicks and leaps from the first note.
Chicago’s song Saturday In The Park is a surprise … with faithfully reproduced Chicago style horn section too. It reminds me of my Chicago album era. Long gone, but it makes me want to dig the albums out.
The Move’s California Man is prototype Top of the Pops British glam rock from 1971 and hardly has that laidback West Coast feel. They capture the British rock revival pounding piano and drums sound perfectly. It was The Move’s final single in 1972, written by Roy Wood, and a pastiche of the Jerry Lee Lewis / Little Richard piano style. She had previously covered Flowers In The Rain.
Hotel California, well, is it necessary? She reproduces Don Henley’s word-clipped delivery and as ever ‘her you can hear every word’ ability shines. Strings are nice, the Spanish guitar playing is absolutely marvellous. I might have preferred more innovation on such an incredibly well-known song, such as Don Henley showed on his live DVD with his excellent but hilarious trombones version.
The Spanish guitar is back for the next track, Cuando Caliente el Sol sung in Spanish, as at least one song on a California album should be, and it’s a stand out track.
No Place Like Home becomes a Latin shuffle rhythm with clarinet or alto sax and insistent acoustic guitar. She transforms the song.
LIGHTNING’S GIRL
2002 compilation, 25 tracks, long out of print. A very good selection too.
NANCY / LEE 3
Together with the albums “Nancy & Lee” (1968) and “Nancy & Lee – Again” (1971) “Nancy / Lee 3” forms a trilogy of timeless music by two great singers. Their music is a wonderful hybrid of Pop, Country, Folk, Novelty, Rhythm And Blues, and Rock. It’s hard to categorize – it’s unique.
Lost & Sound website
In 2004, Nancy and Lee reunited for Nancy / Lee 3 with Billy Strange co-producing and arranging in Nashville. It was only released in Australia. I’ve never seen a copy and I had to download it (something I hate doing). It’s a very strong collection. It’s also puzzling. Production credits are “Lee Hazlewood & Nancy Sinatra, with Billy Strange” and it was recorded at Chelsea Studios, Nashville, then remixed in LA.
NANCY: The original recordings were digital which I hate. After we finished with the mastering and mixing in Nashville, I took the tracks to Sonora and re-mixed them the old-fashioned way – analog. We went back to digital (Pro Tools) before remastering. Interesting how it turned out sounding vintage. I had to practically beat Billy and Lee upside the head to get them to let me remix the whole CD with Keith here in California. The mix they did in Nashville just didn’t sound right.
Some tracks are small group, as if designed for use on the following tour. Others had horns, some are elaborate productions with strings and horns. It’s hard to see how the big production stuff was economically viable given the limited release. Listening to the small rock band on Barricades and Brickwalls then the solo version of The Hungry Years and it’s difficult to believe they were from the same set of sessions. However, elsewhere Nancy has described how the time-consuming work was Billy Strange writing the parts, so with highly-professional session guys, you would expect to get it down fast from his charts. It’s not like The Beatles having an orchestra sit around for a day.
LEE: Nancy suggested it. I said, ‘We’ll just do it like we did in the old days.’ So, she submitted a lot of things I didn’t like, and I submitted a whole lotta things she didn’t like. Then eventually we submitted some things we both liked. She calls it our love/hate relationship.
(Daily Telegraph 2004)
The 2004 album opens with Goin’ Down Rockin’ which proves they can combine and sound just like a J.J. Cale record with different vocalists, and Lee sounding very like late Leonard Cohen … it is a Waylon Jennings / Tony Joe White song. Outlaw country. A rock band backing with organ plus horns.
The virtual single was Barricades and Brickwalls by Australian country artist Kasey Chambers, the title track from her Australian #1 album. The album had been a US country hit in 2002 (US Country #13). The choice of song figures with the Australian release. It’s a small rock band, and the guitar hero playing throughout that track irritates me. This one doesn’t sound vintage. For me, it was the last track I’d have chosen to promote the album.
After The Lovin’ was written by Alan Bernstein and Richard Zeigler and appeared on Ray Pillow’s Hilltop Country in 1978. Old style country too. String-drenched MoR country at that. Nancy had recorded it with Mel Tillis on Mel and Nancy so must be the one who suggested it here.
The track that leaps out is Gypsies and Indians, which was also the title track of a 1993 album by Anna Hanski and Lee Hazlewood, which is also the source of Is Making Love Out of The Question. That album with Anna Hanski has new versions of four earlier Nancy & Lee duets.
LEE: Anna was the best-selling girl artist in Finland and she had done some of the old things on her albums. I was at the office in LA and noticed all this money coming from Finland? I wrote a couple of things for that album.
Ace Records biodata
Neither word … gypsies or Indians … is politically correct, but having said that you can still buy Gypsy Cold Cure herbal tea in the USA, which you would not see in Britain, and the British are casual about (Red) Indian where most Americans would avoid describing Native Americans with the term. Lee Hazelwood’s drifter identifies with both nomadic peoples … No place to go, no place to be. At various times he referred to Indian … Native American … heritage. Lee’s makes no bones about going for the sexually successful drifter either (though at his age, three times in a row is pushing his luck), as Nancy sings:
I felt the fire in his red skin
As we lay down in the sand
And we made love by the blood moon
Again, again and again
In a reversal of Summer Wine, this time, when she awakes, he has gone:
When I awoke he had left me
His arrows lay in the sand
I’ll pray he’ll come back and take me
Again, again and again
I wonder if that word “Indian” was a hindrance to (e.g.) radio play? Natives prefer the tribal name (Cherokee, Comanche etc), but for the theme, it has to be all, or any, gypsies and Indians.
The Hungry Years appears in both duet and solo Nancy versions. It’s a Greenfield-Sedaka song from Neil Sedaka’s 1975 album of the same title, but to me it sounded like a 1980s or 90s Disney film song. I actively disliked it initially, then one afternoon I was listening on headphones, half asleep, and suddenly found her solo version very moving … the lovely long ago, we didn’t have a dime. It works far better solo, with its reflective lyrics, and that version closes the album and reappears on Shifting Gears. The duo version, with Lee echoing her breaks the concentration of the listener and puts the focus on break up rather than misty reflection.
Don’t Let Go is old R&B song by Jesse Stone from 1958 when Roy Hamilton had #2 R&B hit, #13 popular hit. It has been covered by many artists including Mel Tillis -which may well have given her the idea – and by The Four Seasons and The Jerry Garcia Band. The original was faster and lighter. Nancy sings Roy Hamilton’s part while Lee’s baritone replaces the girl chorus on the original, so reversing the genders. They improved it, and the backing eschews the orchestra. It would have been a major hit if they had released it in the late 60s or early 70s. It should have been the virtual single from this.
Strangers, Lovers and Friends is a Lee Hazlewood song from For Every Solution There’s A Problem which he recorded in 2002.
Save The Last Dance For Me is the Pomus/ Shuman Drifters classic hit from 1960, enlivened by changing ‘me’ to ‘Lee’ near the end. In two other places on the album he’s ‘Barton.’ It switches easily to a duet and the Latin orchestration is a major bonus.
Texas Blue Moon was a cover of a recent country song by Shelley King from her album The Highway in 2002. The strength of the song … lyric and melody stand out. Lee Hazlewood heard it on the radio whilst driving through Texas … it starts off with riding shotgun (passenger) listening to the radio which appealed. King met them in 2004:
SHELLEY KING: That experience was worth more than you could put any kind of a price tag on. There’s no way to quantify the opportunity to sit on the floor between Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra while Lee tells her stories about her dad.
The song was successfully reworked as a duet. Shelley King sang loving sweet strawberry wine which she probably intended to reference the Robbie Robertson-Levon Helm song Strawberry Wine from Stage Fright (she worked with Levon Helm and Amy Helm later, and like Levon was born in Arkansas). But strawberries, cherries, and an angel’s kiss in Spring also reminds us of the ingredients for Summer Wine and so Nancy interjects ‘Summer wine!’ after sweet strawberry wine.
Loving You, Loving Me it starts right out:
Standin’ on some muddy roadside
With my back turned toward the rain
I think I’m twenty miles from somewhere
I know I’m thirty years insane
Lee did like to personify himself as the lonely hitchhiker, so you know who wrote it. It was the second song here which had appeared on his For Every Solution There’s A Problem album.
Is Making A Little Love Out of The Question was written by Lee Hazlewood and his old pal, Tommy Parsons. It is the marital / couple argument retold again. The lyrics are fun. If it is it out of the question for her because he’s been out drinking all week, but if she’s not in the mood, could she fix up some food? She addresses him as Barton, and she’s got her feisty sexy mode. She’s not disinclined, just furious because he’s lying through his teeth. He claims he got stuck in the snow- in July. The shock is Nancy singing you can make your own fBLEEPing food!
Listen to the measured guitar on She Won’t … which is written by Duane Eddy and Billy Falcon, and the guitar is played by Duane Eddy in classic twang style. Duane Eddy’s connection began with Lee Hazlewood, and persists right throughout her career. The song almost continues the story of the bickering couple though now Lee is stumbling out and fumbling for his clothes singing in self-pity; Will she miss me? No, she won’t.
Pack Saddle Saloon is right into novelty Dr Hook territory (there ain’t no virgins in the Pack Saddle Saloon). Lee told his manager and biographer, Wyndham Wallace, that he had met Jeane, his partner and wife at the Pack Saddle saloon in Glendale, Arizona. So apparently, the name is from a real place. There’s no trace of it online, and Lee may have been taking the piss, but there is a Saddle Chop House, and I found a Packsaddle bar in his home state, Oklahoma.
The online lyric is hilariously wrong and the transcriber thought it was ‘burdens.’ Convincing Fiddle-driven country bar band hoe down taken at high speed. High kicks, yer-hi’s and hand clapping. It’s full of picaresque characters like Texas Tracy, who claims to be 32, but drives a ’57 Ford she bought brand-new. Written by Lee Hazlewood and Tommy Parsons.
The album finishes with The Hungry Years (Nancy Solo Mix), but I would have guessed the earlier version with Lee was the actual remix.
The album’s low profile and poor availability surprised me, but then I only came to it recently. Wyndham Wallace is Lee’s biographer (Lee, Myself & I) as well as his manager, close friend and compiler of the tribute Total Lee! album and responsible for reissues. He compiled For Every Solution There’s A Problem from twenty one demos in 2002, which was the source of two songs on this set. In the back of Lee, Myself and I he describes each album briefly, and dismisses this one:
WYNDHAM WALLACE: Nancy & Lee 3: Better overlooked, which it was easy to do until recently, since it was only released in Australia.
He must have known more about the circumstances of making it.
“NANCY SINATRA” (2004)
Blee
I sympathize with artists when everyone focuses on their main hit era. OK, it’s a personal thing. I write text books, and my best selling series was 1978 to 1984. I know the late 80s and 90s stuff I wrote was better, and the very best was early 2000s, but any time I go to educational conferences, people only ask about the early books. I’m sure many artists feel the same pride in their later, lower-profile material. Which is why I decided right before I started to include one song from her last full new studio set, Nancy Sinatra from 2004.
There’s more wit, atmosphere and incontestable (if elegantly understated) star power in this sleek, chic, foxy record than in the rest of the month’s albums combined.
David Peschek, The Guardian, 1 October 2004
Nancy Sinatra exploits her new-found fan base among indie bands and writers, and is loaded with material from good songwriters … Jarvis Cocker, Morrissey, Steve Van Zandt, Bono, Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth, Joey Burns from Calexico. Nancy Sinatra said (Boston Globe, 20004):
NANCY: The self-titled album was a revelation to me. My daughter A. J. pulled that together. I used to always complain that musicians hate me. I was talking about my peers. I would meet someone like Stevie Nicks, and she wouldn’t give me the cold shoulder, exactly, but she wasn’t friendly. With people like Stevie Nicks — the in crowd, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame crowd — I’m like Rodney Dangerfield: I got no respect from them. A. J. said, “Mom, you don’t get it. You’re talking to the wrong musicians.” And she pulled in Sonic Youth, Jon Spencer, Pete Yorn, Calexico. Morrissey I already knew.
Her daughter, AJ, co-produced the album. It’s consistently good throughout in a way the 60s albums, with their reliance on covers, weren’t. It also has innovative and interesting stuff, no way re-treading past glories. In that it reminds me of later Marianne Faithful’s eclectic albums, except that Nancy has retained her full vocal power (though Marianne’s cracked voice is part of her charm). We get full musician credits on the sleeve. I approve.
NANCY: We’ve been lucky to find some wonderful, hip musicians who say that my music has somehow influenced them. And these artists also mean something to me; I wouldn’t be doing their songs if I didn’t appreciate their work. I can’t think of anything more flattering than to have a young person say, ‘Your music really influenced me and my life.
Rolling Stone, 9 March 2004, ‘Sinatra Walks With Morrissey.”
The album opens with Burnin’ Down The Spark by Joey Burns of Calexico (also released as a single). Joey Burns wrote it specifically with her in mind.
JOEY BURNS: I met an individual who was tour-managing in the UK and knew Nancy Sinatra and had done some work with her. I think he was a local promoter in Leeds or something. We got talking and we mentioned Lee Hazlewood, whom we’d just met in the year 2000. In that year we had done a song called Ballad of Cable Hogue, which is a song that has a tip of the hat to Nancy and Lee. And shortly after that we got to meet him. Of course he liked that song because it sounds very similar to Summer Wine. We got to hang out a little bit, which was great. And then some years later we met this guy – I forget his name – and we had a contact. He said, “Oh yeah, there’s a tribute or an album going out for Nancy. You should submit a song.” So we just wrote it.
Burns said he tried to get her mindset, looking down on New York City on the 4th July 2003, the city who father influenced so much.
JOEY BURNS: It’s about chasing down that love you have for someone. The only thing Nancy said was, ‘Can you re-record it and I’ll sing on top of it? Can you transpose it to a different key?’ And I said, ‘No problem.’ So it was so easy to work with her. And then a couple of years later we were performing at The Getty Museum in Los Angeles and she came to the show. She loved it and we breakfasted together – she bought the whole band breakfast. It was with her daughter A.J. It was really cool.
Calexico did the backing track for her with punchy mariachi horns. Calexico had earlier covered Sundown Sundown for the tribute CD Total Lee! in 2002.
Musicians: Joey Burns – acoustic & electric guitars / John Convertino – drums / Paul Niehaus – pedal steel / Volker Zander- electric bass / Jacob Valenzuela and Martin Wenk – trumpets / Sam Bardfield & Joey Burns – string arrangements
Ain’t No Easy Way was an unreleased track with her vocal already in place. The writing and publishing credit reads “ascertain” which must have meant “Find out before you print the sleeve” but no one did, and it went to press as it was. Jon Spencer of Blues Explosion added two guitar tracks, vocal and percussion. It’s a standard blues riff, well played. Especially good duet vocals from Jon Spencer, plus female backing vocalists. As with Lee Hazlewood, she works so well contrasting with a male vocalist to form a dialogue. Jon Spencer slips in on backing then takes over his verse. He sounds powerful (“makin’ LURVE“) , but different in every way to Lee.
Musicians: Miles Robinson – drums / Frank Fabio- bass / Randy Strom – guitar / Linda Fabio, Patti Erikson – vocals / Jon Spencer- co-lead vocal, guitar, percussion
Don’t Let Him Waste Your Time by Jarvis Cocker was written for her. Her version of Don’t Let Him Waste Your Time appeared two years before Cocker recorded it himself in 2006. It was produced by Jarvis Cocker and Richard Hawley of Pulp.
Musicians: Jarvis Cocker – percussion / Dennis Diken – drums, percussion / Richard Hawley- 6 and 12 string guitars, baritone guitar, vibraphone, enchanted lyre, percussion.
GREG GARRY: The current single, Don’t Let Him Waste Your Time, which you wrote for Nancy Sinatra, is sort of a feminist anthem. Where the hell did that come from?
JARVIS COCKER: : Well, I’m very in touch with my female side. So it kinda came out, written for her, and the reason why I felt I could sing it was that I too have wasted women’s time. I think men will avoid commitment at all costs and want to play the field as long as they can.
Acrylic Afternoons website
She performed it live in 2004 with Jarvis Cocker on acoustic guitar, Richard Hawley on electric guitar, Don Randi on keys, Trent Stroh on bass, Pete Thomas on drums
VIDEO LINK: DON’T LET HIM WASTE YOUR TIME, LIVE JONATHAN ROSS SHOW, BBC 2004
Don’t Mean Nothing was written by Pete Yorn, who played on the track. The tune sounds extremely Dylanesque to me, so do the lyrics. Piano lead played by Don Randi, nice fiddle from Claudia Chapele. Backing vocal by her daughter, AJ Azzarto. Nancy sings in a nicely laid-back style.
Momma’s Boy was written by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth who plays drums, bass and guitar. Thurston Moore has said that Nancy deliberately sang in the style of his wife and Sonic Youth bandmate, Kim Gordon. She wanted a change of style, and Sonic Youth is extreme change of style.
NANCY: I’ve never asked Thurston Moore about what the lyrics mean to him. I didn’t want to. I think it’s better to form your own opinion based on the feelings you have while listening to the song. I do believe Thurston was doing two things: firstly, he saw me that way. The purpose of the CD was to have contributors who said they were influenced by my music. Thurston chose the tough side. Secondly the song fits exactly in his “bag” to use the old term. He writes and performs songs that ARE disturbing, dissonant and make people think.
Perhaps best not to enquire what So gather your vicious friends and come and service me means, nor to whom it is addressed. Nancy sings higher and breathy over grungy backing. Steve Shelley, the drummer of Sonic Youth, had been responsible for reissuing Lee Hazlewood’s solo albums.
Morrissey’s Let Me Kiss You was released in versions by Morrissey and by Nancy Sinatra simultaneously. Morrissey sang backing vocals on Nancy’s version, and both were released on one of Morrissey’s “replica” labels, this time a replica of the old soul specialist, Attack. Morrissey went to UK #8, and Nancy scored a UK #46 hit. She’d met him when he called her at her London hotel, and asked her to autograph his collection of her albums and singles.
NANCY: A couple years later he sent me a rough version of ”Let Me Kiss You” with a note that said, ”If you do this song, you’ll be back on the charts for the first time since 1972.”
The lines are very Morrissey, and listening to either versions makes me think of those 45 sleeves by The Smiths with male and female icons:
So, close your eyes
And think of someone you physically admire
And let me kiss you, ohBut then you open your eyes
And you see someone that you physically despise
OK, the second bit was something Nancy might have been the subject of, but could never have been the object of. She does it so smoothly, but it doesn’t seem to reflect her. She said:
NANCY: I’ve had two mentors in my life. One is Lee, the other is Morrissey. I’ve told him: now he’s responsible for saving my life he has to take care of me forever. I have no idea why, but my peers in your age group – and that’s not a contradiction – are not only accepting of me but they appreciate what I’ve done and they tell me so. Morrissey wrote a really gorgeous song for me. I’m crazy for that man … and he thinks I’m hip!
Telegraph, June 2004
On the two versions:
NANCY: I like mine better. So does he!
Baby Please Don’t Go was written by Steve Van Zandt. He’d done it with Ronnie Spector backed by the E-Street Band in 1977 as the B-side of Good Bye To Hollywood. So it’s not the R&B classic. It also doesn’t quite fit the “younger artists and new songs” motif of the album, the song being 27 years old. See Bossman below. Nancy has expressed admiration for Ronnie Spector. Me too, I did the Toppermost article on Ronnie Spector. Musically, this is a family affair … Fran Azzarto – drums, Matt Azzarto- bass, guitars, AJ Azzarto- percussion, backing vocals. Ronnie Spector had Roy Bittan on piano and Max Weinberg on drums and was a slower and more dramatic take. Nancy’s version is much more frantic.
About A Fire was by Tom Lilly and Lanny Cordolla. Splendid opening drumming by Pete Thomas of The Attractions. Slightly pysch guitars and keyboards. There’s an aspect of the song that makes me imagine David Bowie doing it. There’s stuff about melting away your mind and a Wonderland picture show. It sounds like late 60s psych in a way too.
Musicians: Pete Thomas- drums /Tom Lilly – bass, keyboards, backing vocal / Lanny Cordolla- guitars, backing vocals / AJ Azzarto- backing vocals
Bossman Written by Andy Holt, Phil Burns, AJ Lambert, Matt Azzarto. This was the first song recorded for the project. Though it contains the words Big Boss Man it’s not the Jimmy Reed song that she previously covered so brilliantly.
Musicians: Instrumental track by Andy Holt & Phil Burns / Reno- bass, guitars, keyboards, drum program / Richard Hawley- harmonica
A LONG ASIDE:
The notable thing about this one is that in appears in The Sopranos sung by Nancy Sinatra as “herself.” Episode 81 Chasing It in 2007. The link is Steve Van Zandt who played Silvio Dante in the series and was a good friend. Nancy’s website has pictures of Steve Van Zandt “coaching the band” which featured another New Jersey legend, Southside Johnny, on harmonica, as well as her daughter AJ as a backing singer. In the episode, the New York and New Jersey families have assembled to celebrate Phil Leotardo becoming boss. Nancy sings Bossman directly to him, and is announced as “Nancy Sinatra!’ They made a sensible decision to go in AFTER the first verse. She then makes it obvious that the fictional Phil is an old friend – staying as Nancy Sinatra.’ She was born in New Jersey, as was Frank Sinatra, and the point in the episode is these guys worship Frank, as the ultimate Jersey-born Italian-American, and that it’s a great coup to have Nancy sing for them at a private party. And she knows them, and kisses Phil on the lips. And it is fictional. In previous episodes, Frank Sinatra Jnr had a brief appearance in Season Two, and Frankie Valli had a dramatic role as Rusty Millio, plus is referred to elsewhere by name as a local hero.
VIDEO LINK: THE SOPRANOS EXTRACT, BOSSMAN
The WhatCulture website expresses surprise that given the allegations and rumours of Sinatra Mafia connections going back years, that both Sinatra kids would perpetuate the myth / the legend / the allegations / the connection (multiple choice there) by appearing in the series. Mafia and entertainment have always had, er, connections. The character of Hesh Rabkin in The Sopranos is based on Morris Levy of Roulette Records. Tommy James and Robbie Robertson have been explicit in their autobiographies on Mafia involvement in Roulette. The Valli biopic Jersey Boys is also clear. Capitol, MCA and Warner all had rumours circulating about them. Nancy interviewed her dad on TV and asked the questions outright, and he firmly says he was NOT the character of the singer, Johnny Fontaine portrayed by Al Martino in The Godfather. Francis Ford Coppola mentions Frank in the DVD commentary: “Obviously Johnny Fontaine was inspired by a kind of Frank Sinatra character”, and whatever the reality, Mario Puzo in writing the story wanted readers to think that, and Frank was incensed. In the interview he says that entertainers invariably ended up running into people in clubs who came up and shook hands. Musicians have recounted that on US concert tours, when you got to Philadelphia or New York, a “plugger” (who ensured radio play for a large fee) would turn up backstage with bodyguards to “shake hands with da boys”. Rumours abound, and President Trump owned hotel / casinos in Atlantic City and Las Vegas, as well as involvement in New York City construction, all of which used to be considered a sure sign of connection.
I would say that Nancy Sinatra and Frankie Valli were well aware of the rumours, and they enjoyed a great TV series, and also enjoyed the irony / in-joke of appearing in it. When your grandfather (Frank’s dad) was born near Palermo, it’s hard to avoid chatter about Sicilian links. Let’s just end this aside with another connection: Vincenzo Sinatra (1720-1765) was the great baroque and neo-classical church architect of Sicily.
Baby’s Coming Back To Me was written by Jarvis Cocker. It’s a strong song, and though it was specifically written for Nancy, it’s no surprise that Jarvis later recorded it himself for Jarvis, his solo album two years later. Jarvis Cocker and Richard Hawley were others who contributed to the Total Lee tribute album.
NANCY: For me it’s about someone (a soldier, sailor, marine or national guardsman or coast guardsman) who is in harm’s way and may be coming home in a coffin. For me it’s an anti-war song and that’s why I love it so much. I have done a few of those in my career: Cruel War, Home, It’s Such A Lonely Time if Year and Congratulations. Baby’s Coming Back To Me fits right in.
Musicians: Richard Hawley- bass / Jarvis Cocker – guitar / Dennis Diken – drums
Two Shots of Happy,One Shot of Sad was written by Bono and The Edge of U2. They wrote it for Frank Sinatra in 1992, but he didn’t get to record it. In 1995 U2 recorded it for Frank Sinatra’s 80th Birthday Tribute. U2 then used it as the B-side of If God Will Send His Angels in December 1997. Nancy Sinatra asked permission to record it in 2003. Larry Mullen and Adam Clayton of U2 played on her version, which was recorded in London and LA. Don Randi, her ever reliable piano player, is on his usual great form.
NANCY: It’s a little difficult emotionally because this is about Dad, but it’s a bang-on description of him.
The website U2Songs lists the personnel:
Larry Mullen – drums / Adam Clayton – bass / Don Randi- piano / John de Patie – guitar / Lanny Cordola – guitar
U2SONGS: On Nancy Sinatra’s versions, she changes some of the pronouns in the song to a third person point of view, so that the song intended to be sung by her father in the first person, now became a song about her father. Nancy posted about the experience recording the song and admitted to getting more than a few of the lines incorrect: “You wanna know something funny? After singing this song for about a year, I finally saw the sheet music and realized I’ve been singing it wrong. So the other day, I went BACK to the studio and redid some of the lines so that it will be correct in the new album. BOY! Did I feel stupid…”
It was used as the B-side of Burnin’ Down The Spark.
In 2006, she recorded Another Gay Sunshine Day and Another Ray of Sunshine for the comedy film Another Gay Movie.
THE ESSENTIAL NANCY SINATRA
CD back insert
The best all round “best of” issued in 2006 with every one of the generous 26 tracks digitally remastered. It charted in the UK (#73) and in Europe. It goes right up to Let Me Kiss You from Nancy Sinatra and adds the previously unreleased Machine Gun Kelly, and Audio Bully’s 2003 hit (#3) Shot You Down with sampled Nancy Sinatra from Bang Bang. I like the fact that sidemen Hal Blaine and Ry Cooder are credited in equal font size with Nancy on the appropriate songs. Nancy adds a note for each song, some of which appear in the appropriate places above. To repeat the track list:
KID STUFF
There’s more. So many compilations, and each one seems to include something rare or obscure, because so many of her singles and B-sides were never on the original albums, and there appear to have been many outtakes. She is unusual in that she has gone back through those non-album singles, B-sides and outtakes and put them into a series of digital albums. For me, I’d have preferred a multi-CD box set with a fancy case, detailed notes and pictures, but reluctantly I was forced to download.
As she explains on her website, though there is duplication of tracks on these compilations, iTunes mean that you only have to download what you haven’t already got. On the other hand, Kid Stuff is so generous in number of tracks, you profit by buying the lot on iTunes if you want more than nine of them.
In 2008 she released the digital only Kid Stuff with long lost material, including the sublime Hook and Ladder with Ry Cooder, and Happy with the wild organ part, as well as her first ever recording, Cuff Links and A Tie Clip from 1961, and that 1962 Italian hit, Like I Do. The album title refers to it being stuff she did as a kid, not to it being a children’s record. It seems that people looking on line failed to work that out.
Happy single, see above
Leave My Dog Alone B-side
Choo Choo Train first appearance here. This is a Box Tops song from May 1968 (US #26). It came right after Cry Like A Baby with Alex Chilton’s gruff vocal (I have a 45), and no, it isn’t a kids’ song. It’s a good choogling song with a big production. She does it proud. No idea of when it was recorded.
Flowers In The Rain single
Sugar Town single
Feelin’ Kinda Sunday – with Frank Sinatra, single
The City Never Sleeps At Night single, B-side
Rockin’ Rock & Roll another undated one. A solid rocker with echo girl chorus. No online trace.
White Tattoo, the B-side of Hello LA, Bye Bye Birmingham in 1970 has an explicit lyric:
If I was a black girl in this State
I’d turn my head
I’d learn how to hate
There is a video for White Tattoo on her website, which was done at the time of Kid Stuff’s release.
These Boots Are Made For Walkin’ single
Zodiac Blues production credit to Mickie Most.
Goodtime Girl single
Speedball Tucker. An unexpected cover of Jim Croce’s tongue-twisting Speedball Tucker which was recorded at a Record Plant Session in 1978 along with several other covers. This is the only issued survivor from the session and was remixed. It comes from Croce’s Life And Times album (1973). Produced by Don Randi.
NANCY: A lot of words have to come out fast. My favourite phrase to sing in Speedball Tucker is “allthemothertruckers” … Think about it.
Kicks with The Ventures. (Paul Revere and The Raiders) which also featured in the same article on “Anti Songs” as Life’s A Trippy Thing. This version of Kicks was recorded with The Ventures backing her, and is much later than most of the tracks. I was surprised how beefy The Ventures sound that far into their very long careers. It comes from a 1999 Paul Revere tribute and also appears on The Ventures Walk Don’t Run 2000. Nancy has been a consistent supporter of ‘Ride to The Wall’ for Vietnam War vets, and has ridden to it on Paul Revere’s Harley.
Can I Stay Produced by Don Randi. I can’t find anything about this song, and usually a line or two of lyrics finds something. Very memorable t.
You’re Gonna Make Love To Me
I Love Them All (The Boys In The Band) single
Hook & Ladder single
Lady Bird single
Then there are three pre-Hazlewood tracks:
Like I Do 1962 single. Produced by Tutti Camarata on Bubblegum Girl Vol 1
I See The Moon Produced by Tutti Camarata on Bubblegum Girl Vol 1. It was the A-side single in 1963. The song was by Meredith Wilson, and was a US hit for The Mariners (US #14 in 1952) and a UK hit for The Stargazers (UK #1 in 1954). Lots of choral work, an incredibly catchy song, and one of my mum’s favourites for singing in the kitchen, but it’s hard to imagine why they thought this a chart possibility for a girl of 22 or 23 to record in 1963.
Cuff Links and A Tie Clip 1961 single, on Bubblegum Girl Vol 1 Produced by Tutti Camarata
CHERRY SMILES
It was followed in by 2009 Cherry Smiles: The Rare Singles which focusses on 1970-1980. The title comes from Southern Lady … ‘cherry smiles and fluttering eyes.’
The annoying thing with so many fascinating digital only releases is the lack of information. She said on the PopMatters website:
NANCY: The singles were very eclectic. I put them together with an emphasis on the quality of the individual songs themselves rather than how they fit together as they came from different times, appeared on different labels, and had different players. One thing they share is that many tell a story. I am a perfectionist. Many of the older songs had too much echo on them, which was the style back then, but doesn’t sound right now. We had to re-engineer some of them, like “Southern Lady,” to get rid of the layers and let the vocals breathe. It took years to get some of these songs to sound right.
The album is digital only too. There are seven B-sides from vinyl singles.
Machine Gun Kelly was written by Danny Kortchmar, and was recorded on 3 June 1972. Her version had not appeared before, except on a British Best of Nancy Sinatra. The original version was on Mud Slide Slim & The Blue Horizon by James Taylor in 1971. Kortchmar played guitar throughout that album.
Dolly and Hawkeye Private Stock B-side of Indian Summer 1976
Indian Summer Private Stock single 1976. Indian Summer is a minute longer than the incredibly rare 45 rpm single too.
Ain’t No Sunshine, There’s a faithful cover of Bill Withers’ 1971 hit Ain’t No Sunshine, dating from 1973. dating from 1973. It was the B-side of Sugar Me on RCA. Produced by Jimmy Bowen, Arranged by Billy Strange. It’s a remix of the original, done by engineer Daniel Hoal.
Let’s Keep It That Way, from the Elektra label in 1980
There Ain’t No Way is a country rock number from 1973, produced by Jimmy Bowen and previously unreleased. The tune has a definite Neil Diamond feel. Written by Roland Kent LaVoie (aka Lobo), best known for Me and You and A Dog Named Boo. His own version was also early 1973 (US #68, Adult Contemporary US #29)
I’m Not A Girl Anymore B-side of How Are Things in California? Prduced by Billy Strange.
She Played Piano and He Beat The Drums was the B-side of Annabelle of Mobile in 1975, and also a Snuff Garrett production.
Southern Lady was produced by Snuff Garrett. Previously unreleased. Recorded on 4 / 10 / 1975. The credits would be “Hazlewood”, but that’s Michael E. Hazlewood, the British songwriter who worked with Albert Hammond, ad who co-wrote It Never Rains In Southern California and The Free Electric Band. It was recorded by Timi Yuro in September 1975 as a comeback record on the short-lived Playboy label, and it’s said she hated the song. It scraped the bottom of the US chart (#108). Rita Coolidge recorded it in 1977. The attribution of Nancy Sinatra’s sassy version to October 1975 suggests she had the song at the same time as Timi Yuro. The Snuff Garrett production places it in the Private Stock era with Annabell of Mobile. Comparing the versions, I prefer Nancy’s. Rita Coolidge rocks it too hard for the lyric. We need a bit of gardenias and magnolias in the feel.
A Gentle Man Like You was the Private Stock B-side of It’s For My Dad. Produced by Charlie Callelo and L. Russell Brown. Written by Danny & Ruby Hice.
Annabell of Mobile from Private Stock in 1975
Is Anybody Going to San Antone? The B-side of Hook and Ladder, also featuring Ry Cooder. It’s quintessential Ry Cooder. Produced by Andy Wickham & Lenny Waronker.
Neil Diamond’s song Glory Road was a 1971 single. Also with Ry Cooder. Produced by Andy Wickham & Lenny Waronker.
SHIFTING GEARS
There’s a later 2013 set, Shifting Gears which is a set of ballads dating from the 1920s to the 1970s, which Nancy says she sequenced to tell the story of a love affair. It’s wide ranging. On one hand you have film and musical: As Time Goes By (Casablanca), I’ll Build A Stairway To Paradise (An American in Paris), two versions of A Cockeyed Optimist (South Pacific), When I Look In Your Eyes (Dr Doolittle) and I Don’t Know How To Love Him (Jesus Christ Superstar), We Need A Little Christmas (Mame). On the other you get I Can See Clearly Now from Johnny Nash, George Harrison’s Something, Jimmy Webb’s MacArthur Park, Killing Me Softly With His Song and two by Neil Diamond, Holly Holy and Play Me. A lot is from the vaults.
As Time Goes By … Play it again, Don Randi. Yes, from Casablanca. It dates back to 1931, so fittingly was a known song when Dooley Wilson started playing it in a Casablanca night club in 1942. It was part of Nancy’s 1970 act in Las Vegas. The shows were recorded. This sounds too lush to be live.
When I Look In Your Eyes Leslie Bricusse from Dr Doolittle. Rex Harrison sang it to a seal. It appeared on Sheet Music. Produced by Don Costa.
Holly Holly by Neil Diamond from 1969 (US #6). She selects Holly Holy as a favourite, and iTunes downloads backs this up: it’s the most popular track. From Neil Diamond’s Touching Me, Touching You.
NANCY: Holly Holy is one of the most important recordings of my career. Billy Strange did this huge chart. It was written for my show at Caesar’s Place in the late 60s when we had a 45 piece (I think) orchestra, but we didn’t record it on tape until many years after that. We overdubbed the vocal even later than that. The original live version of Holly Holy was on the TV Movie “Movin’ With Nancy On Stage” that was presented by Ed Sullivan in his regular Sunday slot.
This is HUGE, orchestra and chorus. HUGE befits Neil Diamond songs as on Hot August Night. This is one of three she covered (Play Me is on this album, then there’s Glory Road.)
I’ll Build A Stairway To Paradise – An American in Paris (1951)… George & Ira Gershwin. The song is older, dating from 1922.
A Cockeyed Optimist (guitar version featuring Billy Strange) Rogers and Hammerstein from South Pacific (stage 1949, film 1958). Mary Martin did the stage version, Mitzi Gaynor did the film version.
I Can See Clearly Now by Johnny Nash. 1972 (US #1, UK #5). On her website, Nancy notes that Johnny Nash had covered As Time Goes By in 1959, produced by Don Costa.
Killing Softly With His Song Charles Fox, Norman Gimbel. Best known (by a mile) in the Roberta Flack version (US #1, UK #6) in 1973, though the earlier version was by Lori Liebermann.
Play Me Neil Diamond (US #11) from Moods. A female voice adds a great deal to Neil Diamond’s song. Much less dramatic than the original.
Something by George Harrison was on Sheet Music
MacArthur Park … by Jimmy Webb. It’s surprising that MacArthur Park (which is in LA) didn’t get placed on California Girl. She had recorded Up, Up & Away on Movin’ With Nancy. She said it’s the most vocally challenging song she has ever recorded. Her version was used for the movie soundtrack of Absolutely Fabulous.
The soundtrack is a homage to great female singers. Nancy Sinatra is on there along with Jane Birkin, Françoise Hardy, Eartha Kitt, Paloma Faith and Kylie Minogue.
JIMMY WEBB: They think it’s a psychedelic trip. But everything in the song is real. There is a MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, near where my girlfriend worked selling life insurance. We’d meet there for lunch, and there would be old men playing checkers by the trees, like in the lyrics. I’ve been asked a million times: “What is the cake left out in the rain?” It’s something I saw – we would eat cake and leave it in the rain. But as a metaphor for a losing a chapter of your life, it seemed too good to be true. When she broke up with me, I poured the hurt into the song. It was always around seven minutes long – not 22 as has been written. Bones Howe, a fellow producer, had asked me to create a pop song with classical elements, different movements and changing time signatures. MacArthur Park, more of a suite than a song, was everything he wanted, but when we presented it to his new act, the Association, they refused to record it … I recorded the basic track back in Hollywood, with myself on harpsichord accompanied by session musicians the Wrecking Crew … we rehearsed it a few times, then played it right through, using the first take and adding the orchestra painstakingly later. When Richard (Harris) did the vocals at a London studio, he had a pitcher of Pimm’s by the microphone. We knew the session was over when the Pimm’s was gone.
The Guardian Culture, 11 November 2013
Think how many versions of the song the producers of Absolutely Fabulous had to choose from. They chose Nancy Sinatra with her 46 piece orchestral accompaniment.
The Hungry Years from Nancy / Lee 3. This is my preferred solo version.
A Cockeyed Optimist (Orchestral version)
Why Did I Choose You? by Michael Leonard and Hubert Edward Martin, from the musical The Yearling (1965). Best known by Barbra Streisand.
I Don’t Know How To Love Him by Tim Rice & Andrew Lloyd Webber from Jesus Christ Superstar (1970). Best known by Helen Reddy (US #13) or Yvonne Elliman (US #28 in 1973). Nancy describes remixing and restoring her original multitrack tape one track, or one instrument, at a time.
We Need A Little Christmas by Jerry Herman from Mame. This was also part of her 1970 stage act.
SUMMARY
She keeps on keeping on.
In 2014 she appeared in Morrisey’s spoken voice video World Peace Is None of Your Business.
In 2015 she appeared with Wilco on stage and sang These Boots and Bang Bang. She maintains her own website with comments on material, and answers questions and interacts with her fans. She also runs the Sinatra Family Forum. Read it and you can see why every musician she ever worked with seems to have liked her.
She has her own show on Sirius radio on the Simply Sinatra channel and often plays one of her songs.
Part of the revival in interest is the burgeoning interest in Lee Hazlewood among rock enthusiasts, but there is much more to her than that. As she has said, some of her best material was mid-70s Private Stock, plus a run of very fine singles just after Lee split for Sweden.
While I was writing this I created an “Americana Nancy” playlist that sounds consistent and runs to twenty-three songs and just fits on a CD. I’m convinced that it would work as a compilation. Here you go …
Sand
Summer Wine
Hello LA, Bye Bye Birmingham
Jackson
Some Velvet Morning
Elusive Dreams
Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone?
Hook and Ladder
Drummer Man
Kind of A Woman
Annabell of Mobile
Dolly & Hawkeye
I Didn’t Wear White
Down From Dover
Arkansas Coal
White Tattoo
Sweet Talkin’ Candy Man
Machine Gun Kelly
Speedball Tucker
Pack Saddle Saloon
Texas Blue Moon
Southern Lady
Route 66
2021 REMASTERS
Start Walkin’ 1965 – 1976, CD and 2 LP set
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