Nancy Sinatra

Some pairings just work like that, with an instinctive chemistry that erases every difference. Take two figures as different as Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood. The blonde, coquettish daughter of ol' blue eyes Frank looked like the classic girl next door, with that carefree air of a transatlantic yé-yé chanteuse; the mustachioed Oklahoma singer-songwriter, on the other hand, seemed to have stepped straight out of a western or some Sixties Hollywood crime b-movie, with that scowling grin and that unsettling, ogre-like growl of a voice. Putting them together, though, was one of the most brilliant flashes of inspiration in the history of mainstream pop.

Sure, the differences were plain to see: "He pretended to be a hick, an uneducated guy, but he'd actually studied a lot," a deferential Nancy would explain years later. "He was an army veteran, a man of the world who knew exactly what he was doing." But Lee, too, had his reservations about his partner in crime, whom he found a bit too prim and proper for his taste, with her checkered outfits, her teased hair and that good-girl-from-New-Jersey air about her: "You can't keep singing like Nancy Nice Lady anymore, now you've got to sing for truck drivers," he's said to have told his protégée as he prepared to hand her the hit that would change her career. But eccentricity aside, Lee's instinct was spot on. And Nancy would seize it in a flash. Wearing, for the occasion, a pair of white boots: the very ones that would lead her straight through the gates of stardom.

The Girl with the Boots

Yes, because in the mid-swingin' Sixties, nobody seemed willing anymore to write songs worthy of the name for Frank Sinatra's daughter – a girl seemingly predestined since 1945, when she was just 5 and her father dedicated "Nancy (With The Laughing Face)" to her. So she got by scraping together covers (like Phil Spector's "To Know Him Is To Love Him", with his Teddy Bears) and sugary sentimental ballads like "June, July, And August". But nothing that could catch the public's attention, let alone make a dent in the US charts. Until the saving moustache of Barton Lee Hazlewood appeared on the horizon, brought in by Frank Sinatra himself to effectively take charge of his daughter's career. Mission accomplished right from that dazzling debut single, "These Boots Are Made For Walkin'", with its brazen lyrics in which the young, betrayed girl, instead of bursting into tears, plays cat-and-mouse with her unfortunate other half. A role Nancy plays with unmatched glacial poise, ruthless and relentless, riding a masterful arrangement built entirely on that descending bassline, steady drums, twangy guitar and a trumpet lurking in the background.

"These Boots Are Made For Walkin'" shoots to the top of the charts and is even adopted by American troops in Vietnam (where Sinatra herself will land to perform for the soldiers). Having nailed that formidable hit, Hazlewood and Sinatra decide to join their voices too, giving rise to a remarkable string of duets. Following an almost foolproof blueprint, well described by Antonio Vivaldi on TomTomRock: "What dominates is the woman-man/angel-devil/cowboy-city girl dialectic; with Nancy, those songs become dialogues-as-duels where he is romantic, disillusioned, dark of skin and voice, and she is sensual, elusive, secretly formidable and, mind you, almost always the winner. All of it set against a backdrop we might call gothic pop: beautiful melodies, murky sounds and a fair amount of almost cinematic epicness". This goes on until 1968, the year the two decide to draw a line under it by releasing the first (and unforgettable) collection of their duets: "Nancy & Lee".

The elixir of passion

Credited equally to both and adorned on the cover with a famous photo of the pair against an orange backdrop, "Nancy & Lee" seals the magical chemistry of the new golden couple of sixties pop, aided by Billy Strange's flawless arrangements, blending Hazlewood originals with a handful of well-chosen covers, starting with the opening, Spector-esque "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'", which in the Righteous Brothers' version stood as one of the highest expressions of the wall-of-sound technique, and which Lee artfully slows down into something subtly lysergic and sepulchral.

But it's the original episodes penned by the moustachioed Oklahoma playboy that really shine. First and foremost, the eternal "Summer Wine": originally performed by Hazlewood with Suzi Jane Hokom, the song finds in Nancy's voice the perfect counterpart to its author's brooding register, a sensual and formidable muse who lets the track's overflowing melodiousness fully bloom. The murky, vaguely country-inspired lyrics tell of a man, fixated on his silver spurs, who meets a woman who invites him to drink some wine together (a sangria, according to the lyrics, though some have read a sexual metaphor into the verses). After drinking, the man wakes up with a hangover, discovering that his spurs and money have been stolen by the mysterious girl, yet he still dreams of returning to that enchanted state of drinking again. The cinematic duel between the two plays out entirely on the contrast between Lee's deep, romantic baritone and Nancy's sensual, elusive, subtly wicked delivery, a confrontation that reaches epic heights in the "spiralling" construction of the musical phrase. A sumptuous, almost gothic orchestral backdrop makes everything even more aching, playing on the contradiction between the radiant summery imagery and the piercing melancholy suggested by the melodies and string arrangements. "Summer Wine" would become something like the archetype for a certain kind of duet, built on the conflict between a cavernous male voice and an angelic female one (from Serge Gainsbourg–Jane Birkin to Nick Cave–Kylie Minogue, all the way to Mark Lanegan–Isobel Campbell). In 2013, devoted fan Lana Del Rey, who had proclaimed herself the "gangster version of Nancy Sinatra", recorded a cover of it with her then-boyfriend Barrie-James O'Neill.

Another triumph is "Some Velvet Morning", a simply perfect ballad, soft and velvety from the title onward, with its airy string intro, its country inflections tinged with psychedelia and its interlocking framework. It unwinds relentlessly like a music box, shifting keys according to the alternation between the two voices in a classic call and response structure: in 4/4, disorienting and reverb-drenched, Hazlewood's voice reckons with a heavy hangover and the memory of a lost love; in 3/4, Sinatra's voice, whispering flute-like mysterious lines like "Flowers are the things we know, secrets are the things we grow/ Learn from us very much, look at us but do not touch/ Phaedra is my name". And the whole text is mysterious, dusting off from mythology the enigmatic figure of Phaedra, "the saddest of all Greek goddesses". This too would be reinterpreted by legions of artists, including Vanilla Fudge, who steered it toward psych-gothic territory, and Thin White Rope, who turned it into a scorching desert-rock ride.

In full creative symbiosis, the odd couple also dusts off one of their earliest duets, the hypnotic "Sand" – an unsettling little story of a girl offering hospitality to a shady stranger, built entirely on layers of harpsichord and interweaving guitars – then dish out another lively nursery-rhyme of a song, "Lady Bird", and even follow in the cumbersome footsteps of another legendary American music duo, Johnny Cash & June Carter, trying their hand at a new cover of "Jackson" (the country standard written in 1963 by Billy Edd Wheeler and Jerry Leiber) that the pair had turned into a hit just a few months earlier.

Also striking are the dusty (and star-crossed) love story of "Sundown, Sundown" and the self-mocking "I've Been Down So Long (It Looks Like Up To Me)", with its orchestral country-pop built on irresistible vocal harmonies, playing on the contrast between Hazlewood's deep, baritone voice and Nancy's childlike, sensually lolita-esque timbre. But the chemistry between the two is at its peak throughout the record: you can feel the sheer fun with which Nancy and Lee ham it up and nudge each other while trading Tom T. Hall's lines in "Greenwich Village Folk Song Salesman", or bask in the syrupy sentiment of "Storybooky Children" and "My Elusive Dreams" (the number-one country hit by David Houston and Tammy Wynette).

Saccharine underground

As a kind of weird foreshadowing of the sophisticated dream-pop coined a few years later by the David Lynch–Angelo Badalamenti duo, Hazlewood paints for Sinatra multifaceted arrangements, in which pop's radiance is constantly undermined by hypnotic orchestrations, faint lysergic streaks, surreal music-hall tones and menacing country-western inflections. As if the sweetness of the melodies had been irreversibly altered by some psychedelic mushroom or flavouring. It's no coincidence that some would come to label the genre "saccharine underground" (or even "cowboy psychedelia").

Nancy & Lee remains one of the greatest achievements of sixties pop and one of the best duet albums ever made, the unique testament to the clash/encounter between counterculture and mainstream at the height of the psychedelic era. As Vivaldi puts it, "in Nancy's best songs it's impossible not to sense an oblique allure, a streak of darkness within the crystal-clear melodic light, a mismatch between what is said and what is suggested. With her dyed blonde hair, short dresses and that weighty surname, she belonged entirely to pop's mainstream. Yet at the same time she transfigured it from within, making it dazzling and hyperreal. Or perhaps it was mostly Lee Hazlewood who made sure things turned out that way". A formidable "standard" that many would try to imitate, in some cases successfully (the aforementioned examples of the duos Serge Gainsbourg–Jane Birkin, Nick Cave–Kylie Minogue, Mark Lanegan–Isobel Campbell) but rarely managing to renew its freshness.

Two further, wearier chapters of the partnership with Hazlewood would follow (1972, 2004), while Nancy Sinatra's career, effectively halted from the mid-70s onward, would undergo an unexpected reappraisal, sealed by the rediscovery of her sixties classics – the aching "You Only Live Twice" featured in "Mad Men", the irresistible version of "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)" in Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill: Volume 1" – and by the tribute paid by an unlikely squad of rockers who in 2004 took part in the tribute album "Nancy Sinatra" (U2, Steven Van Zandt, Morrissey, Jarvis Cocker, Thurston Moore, Calexico, Jon Spencer etc.). The icing on the cake was her reincarnation in "Hollywood sadcore" guise, through the enchanting persona of the sad princess Lana Del Rey, who would help relaunch her image and aesthetic all the way to the present day.

But Nancy would always remain devoted to her moustachioed mentor, even after his death in 2007: "I've always thought that Lee was a fairy-tale writer. He wrote children's stories, and then when he set them to music they took on a certain connotation. And between us it became a matter of chemistry: the sweet little fables turned into sexual fantasies. And the thing was, Lee and I never had a sexual relationship. I think our special chemistry came precisely from the fact that we never slept together. Everything was implied and inferred, but it never actually happened".

The greatest love story that never was, put to music.

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11/09/2022