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: ‘Some velvet morning when I’m straight/I’m gonna open up your gate/And maybe tell you ’bout Phaedra/And how she gave me life/And how she made it end/Some velvet morning when I’m straight.’ In response, a woman’s voice, light as a summer’s breeze, chants an invocation: ‘Flowers growing on a hill, dragonflies and daffodils/Learn from us very much, look at us but do not touch/Phaedra is my name …’
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 first appeared on the album of Nancy Sinatra’s TV special Movin’ With Nancy, was then released as a single and finally placed in its most majestic setting, the 1968 Reprise LP Nancy & Lee. It crystallizes 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.
Barton Lee Hazlewood was born in Oklahoma in 1929, the son of an itinerant oilman, whose wanderings across the south imbued his son with a taste for the cowboy lifestyle and its music. Having served his country in Korea, Lee began working as a songwriter and producer for rockabillies Sanford Clark and Duane Eddy in 1956, hitting upon the novel idea of recording the latter’s twanging guitar inside a grain silo.
In 1965, after bonding with Dean Martin over the song ‘Houston’ and a mutual love of whiskey, Lee was asked by Frank Sinatra to come to the rescue of his daughter’s career. Hazlewood duly delivered the smash ‘These Boots Are Made For Walkin’’, having issued his ingénue with the instructions: ‘You can’t sing like Nancy Nice Lady any more. You have to sing for the truckers.’ Thus recast, Nancy staked her claim to pop immortality and would record another album with the man she described as ‘part Henry Higgins and part Sigmund Freud’, Nancy & Lee Again in 1971.
Her singing on ‘Some Velvet Morning’, however, is more the voice of an elemental, heightened by the name Phaedra – in mythology, the treacherous wife of Theseus, whose unrequited love for Hippolytus results in his watery death at the hands of Poseidon. Many of Hazlewood’s songs, including Nancy & Lee’s ‘Summer Wine’, involve sprite-like beings casting spells on cowboys that result in the loss of senses and spurs, and he based the logo of his record company LHI (Lee Hazlewood Industries) on a classical Greek profile.
But, like the contrast between his vocals and hers, there is another, more carnal interpretation of what those lyrics might mean. Hazlewood’s sudden move to Sweden in 1971, at the height of his popularity, added to his mystery – had Frank Sinatra really put out a hit on Lee because Lee and Nancy had grown too close, or was Hazlewood just avoiding the taxman?
This ambiguity has drawn many subsequent artists to their retellings of the myth. Lydia Lunch and Rowland S Howard made the perfect Gothic coupling on their 1982 single. Bobby Gillespie teamed up with Kate Moss to record a version for Primal Scream’s 2002 album Evil Heat, recently re-released on Ace Records’ Hazlewood covers compilation, Son-of-a-Gun. Shoegazers Slowdive and proto-grungers Thin White Rope have also taken cracks at the enigma.
But most poignant is the final version Lee recorded before his death from cancer in 2007. On his 2005 swansong LP Cake or Death, he duets it with his grand-daughter … Phaedra is her name.
Cathi Unsworth