Nancy & Lee, Part II: Noncommutativity

Nancy Sinatra’s and Lee Hazlewood’s successful duets can be understood by yet another analogy to filmmaking. Greta Garbo made twenty-four movies in Hollywood, with fourteen different directors. Of these two dozen films, William Daniels, her preferred cameraman, shot all of them but five. Proposal: William Daniels was to Greta Garbo what Lee Hazlewood was to Nancy Sinatra. As the producer of her albums from 1966 to 1968, Hazlewood was like an auteur, in control of the sonic equivalent of the mise-en-scène—the cinema’s elusive essence. Their best duets, including “Summer Wine,” “Sand,” “Lady Bird,” and most famously, “Some Velvet Morning,” were like haunting mysteries, drawn from the exotic lands of the imagination.

The special alchemy of Nancy and Lee’s collaboration was made possible by Nancy Sinatra’s vocal noncommutativity. In cinema studies, semioticians suggest that an actor’s most significant features become identifiable when audiences attempt to imagine another actor playing the same role, a practice referred to as the “commutation test,” or game of substitution. For an example, replace Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca (1943) with George Raft, Warner Brothers’ first choice to play the character of Rick Blaine. Had Raft played the role rather than Bogie, would Casablanca even be remembered? As another example, replace Johnny Depp in Edward Scissorhands (1990) with Fox’s preferred choice for the role, Tom Cruise.

A commutation test in pop music might consist of replacing Nancy Sinatra as Hazelwood’s duet partner with, say, Brenda Lee (the fourth highest charting pop artist of the 1960s behind The Beatles, Elvis Presley, and Ray Charles), or with another highly successful singer of the period, Dusty Springfield. Fortunately, such a commutation test was actually performed. Hazlewood had previously recorded duets with other female vocalists, with both Suzi Jane Hokum and Ann-Margret, without commercial success. These recordings were made at the same time he and Nancy Sinatra were recording their hit records and with some of the same songs. Hazlewood recorded “Summer Wine” and “Sand” as duets first with Suzi Jane Hokum, and these versions were released as MGM singles with no success. Likewise, in 1967 Hazlewood produced another single version of “Summer Wine,” using vocalists Virgil Warner and Suzi Jane Hokum. This version, too, failed to chart. And apparently, in August, 1966 Hazlewood recorded a version of “Sundown,” later included on Nancy & Lee, with Suzi Jane Hokum as well, but that recording is now lost. We can also turn the experiment around: in 1981, Nancy Sinatra recorded an album of country duets with Mel Tillis, titled Mel & Nancy, and while the album sold reasonably well, it has never achieved the legendary status of the recordings she made with Lee Hazlewood, and has not yet been issued on CD.

The soundscape on Nancy & Lee demonstrates the duo’s unique approach to the pop music duet form. At the time they began recording, the biggest recent hit by a duet in pop music had been Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” a #1 single in the summer of 1965. Marvin Gaye and Tammy Terrell’s successful string of duets began somewhat later, in April 1967 with the release of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” As a producer, however, Hazlewood took a more experimental approach to recording. Inspired by the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” (US release December 1965) but unable to get hold of a sitar, that instrument's sonic replacement became a guitar recorded normally and then played backwards (starting at 1:58 in “Sand”), yielding an unusual sound. Recorded March 8, 1966, “Sand,” was their debut as a vocal duo. About the song, Nancy Sinatra has said, “A running theme in his songs from that point was the young girl with the older guy. That was his fantasy and he captured it beautifully in song. But you have to remember that he had already done those songs. I was the second woman to sing them with him. Suzi Jane Hokum was the first. Suzi Jane’s interpretations were good, but different. With me, he took the little girl quality and put it with adult ideas and something very interesting happened.” (Nancy Sinatra to Al Quaglieri in an interview reprinted in the liner notes for Sundazed’s CD reissue of her 1966 LP, How Does That Grab You?)

While “Sand” was the duo’s debut, it remained unreleased as a single for over a year. “Summer Wine,” recorded at London’s Pye Studios for the the album Nancy in London (July 1966), became Nancy & Lee’s chart debut, but somewhat by accident. Reprise placed “Summer Wine” on the B-side of Nancy’s “Sugar Town” single released late in 1966, resulting in a double-sided hit record and an RIAA gold single certification. “Sand” was not released as a single until it was used as the B-side of “Lady Bird” in October 1967, several months after the chart success of “Summer Wine.” Prior to the release of the “Lady Bird” single, on April 16 1967, Nancy and Lee made their first appearance as a duo, on The Ed Sullivan Show, performing “Summer Wine” (Nancy Sinatra also performed her latest single, “Love Eyes,” solo). That summer, Reprise released the title song for “You Only Live Twice,” the latest James Bond film, recorded by Nancy Sinatra, with another popular tune by the duo as the B-side, “Jackson.” The latter, recorded in Nashville earlier that year and included on Nancy’s album Country, My Way (1967), the album also included yet another duet by the duo, Don Gibson’s “Oh Lonesome Me,” later to be issued as the B-side to “Some Velvet Morning.”

For many fans, the pinnacle of Nancy and Lee’s collaboration is “Some Velvet Morning,” often (mis)labeled as “cowboy psychedelia.” Significantly, “Some Velvet Morning” was first introduced in Nancy Sinatra's TV special, Movin’ With Nancy, that aired on NBC December 11, 1967. A popular and critical success, the show was nominated for three Emmy Awards.

Co-Authored with Rebecca A. Umland

Nancy & Lee, Part I

Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood (1929-2007) are to pop music what Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg are to the cinema: two different artistic temperaments who needed each other to achieve greatness. Like the singular films made by Dietrich and von Sternberg, the iconic songs of Nancy and Lee, among them, “Summer Wine,” “Lady Bird,” “Sand” and “Some Velvet Morning,” draw power from the quality of strangeness mixed with beauty—richly evocative and mysterious, like a dream, set in the exotic lands of the imagination, and distinctive also for their melancholy, minor-key melodies enhanced by the arrangements of chamber pop master Billy Strange. Hazlewood’s deep baritone served as the perfect complement to Sinatra’s sweet mellow tone, but his role as producer was equally important for their success. It is important to acknowledge that by the time the two began recording together in the late summer of 1965, the figure of the record producer had become a distinctive part of the musical equation, distinguishing himself less by what he captured than by the performance he artfully created, or rather, one he staged in order to capture. When Lee Hazlewood produced Nancy Sinatra’s massive hits in the mid-60s, he was not only recording an artist, but a sonic concept as well.

To think of Hazlewood as a director and Sinatra as his star challenges one of pop music’s foundational myths: that performances are “captured,” not made. But with the introduction and rise of magnetic tape (mono, three-track and four-track), recording began increasingly to resemble cinematic acting. In the 1960s, for instance, Glenn Gould shocked the world of classical music when he openly acknowledged that the recordings on his LPs were spliced together from multiple “takes,” comprised of different recorded versions of the same material. The best of these takes were spliced together to create the final release. Gould compared the process of recording to that of filmmaking, in which scenes are frequently shot out of sequence and then pieced together in the editing room. (See Glenn Gould, “The Prospects of Recording.” High Fidelity Magazine 16.4 (1966), pp. 46–63) “In the vocabulary of film studies,” writes music critic Michael Jarrett, “the [record] producer’s purview is the mise-en-scéne, in all of that term’s mystery.” (See Michael Jarrett’s excellent book, Producing Country: The Inside Story of the Great Recordings. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2014, p. 37)

Others in the music industry concur that the record producer is, in key ways, analogous to a film director. Bobby Braddock, producer of Blake Shelton’s first five albums, elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame as a songwriter—and who wrote “Did You Ever,” a hit for Nancy and Lee in 1972—remarks: “I always tell people, if they want to know the job of a music producer, I say, ‘Think of it this way: a director is to film as a producer is to recording.” Pete Anderson, guitarist and producer for Dwight Yoakam, insists that a record producer wears “a multitude of hats, but basically, it’s two jobs. One, you’re very much like the director of a film. You work on the script or the songs. You choose the cinematographer or the engineer. You get the locations or the studio. You help cast the actors or the musicians. You work with their performances. Everything that a director would do in a film is very much what a record producer does.” Similarly, Craig Street, who has produced records for both k. d. Lang and Norah Jones, notes that while the artist is “always the boss,” it is to the producer that others on the project turn for answers, and individual producers, like film directors, have different styles. “Some producers lead with an iron fist, just like some film directors—Hitchcock. ‘This is how it goes. This is how it is storyboarded. This is exactly what we do.’”  Finally, songwriter, musician, and music archivist, Marshall Crenshaw, likens record producer Billy Sherrill’s production of Tammy Wynette’s hit songs to Alfred Hitchcock’s films. “The records rise and fall and have so much drama in them,” also “exploding at certain moments.” (Quotations from Braddock, Anderson, Street, and Crenshaw are taken from Michael Jarrett, Producing Country, pp. 33-36)

During the making of the great Nancy and Lee records, Lee Hazlewood was not only frequently her fellow performing artist; he served as writer, too, and—in his role as producer (director)—chose the location (the particular studio) for Nancy Sinatra, his star. For these productions, the recording or sound engineer, analogous to the cinematographer, was Eddie Brackett, Jr. (a “brilliant” recording engineer, according to legendary music producer, Jimmy Bowen). (Jimmy Bowen and Jim Jerome, Rough Mix: An Unapologetic Look at the Music Business and How It Got That Way. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997, p. 89) The art/set director was arranger/conductor, Billy Strange. Since this was a period before bands commonly played on their own records, the supporting cast of performers consisted of top L.A. session musicians. All of these individuals were essential to the success of Nancy and Lee’s records.

Nancy Sinatra, however, enjoyed considerable control over the recording process, as well. It was she, for instance, who insisted on recording what would become her most famous hit of all time, a song composed by Hazlewood, “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’” (1965), despite Hazlewood’s initial protestations that the song was written to be sung by a man. Nancy Sinatra prevailed, and “Boots” became her first No. 1 pop hit—the song’s appeal, insists Richie Unterberger, deriving from the fact that it is “half-menace and half-camp.” (Richie Unterberger, Unknown Legends of Rock’n’Roll: Psychedelic Unknowns, Mad Geniuses, Punk Pioneers, Lo-Fi Mavericks & More. San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books, 1998, p. 132) It was this song that established Nancy and Lee's long, lucrative creative partnership.

Co-Authored with Rebecca A. Umland

Thirst

I have been reading Judith Freeman’s excellent book, The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (Pantheon, 2007). I was struck by her assertion about the cultural significance fast food took on in Los Angeles. She argues that the rise of fast food in L.A. was, in part, due to the idleness and loneliness of the (older) population. In the following passage, she is talking about Clifton’s Sliver Spoon, a once famous cafeteria (now closed) located not far from the Bank of Italy building on South Olive Street where Chandler worked in the offices of the Dabney Oil Syndicate from 1923-1932. She writes:

In cafeterias like Clifton’s, fast food, cheap food, food you selected yourself and put on a tray and pushed along a metal railing, became inextricably wed not to mere nourishment but to the possibility  of escaping a haunting emptiness for a while. The popularity of the cafeteria in L.A. was primarily due to the loneliness of the people. It was a friendlier type of eating place than a normal restaurant. . . . This was the true lure of fast food, and perhaps it helps explain why it has assumed such an important place in American culture. Fast food is about estrangement and existential ennui, about loneliness, and boredom, and absence, and an arresting of traditional patterns of family life and social context. Who cares if the meal is inferior? If it gets you out in the world. (80)

As I read this passage, I couldn’t help but think of Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1933), also a story of isolation, existential loneliness, and the nothingness or “nada” of contemporary existence. Hemingway, too, associates the café or cafeteria with a person’s need for companionship. Yet he pursues the issue in a different way. In Hemingway’s story, an old man likes to sit late into the night in a café—the clean, well-lighted place—and drink brandy, often leaving the place when he’s very drunk. Why does the old man find comfort in the café? Why does the old man drink to excess? The older waiter at the café seems to understand the old man’s despair (“Our nada who art in nada”). Of course, Hemingway’s story is set in Spain, not Los Angeles, and it draws on Hemingway’s memories of his life after he returned home from the war. Colloquially, to “drink” means to consume alcohol, but “drink” also implies “thirst.” In contrast, “hunger” implies something else. Hunger, or appetite, is to sexual fulfillment what thirst is to spiritual fulfillment; both terms are used as figurations of human longing and desire: “sexual appetite” and “spiritual thirst.” Hunger and appetite, drink and thirst are tropes that function in different ways, suggesting different desires. In The Little Sister (1949), Chandler associates fast food restaurants with restlessness: “They have to get the car out and go somewhere,” he writes. Is loneliness alleviated by being around other people? Restlessness leads to hunger, while thirst leads to solitary reflection. The old man in Hemingway’s story thirsts; he doesn’t hunger.

A Few Songs To Drink To Late At Night in a Sad Café:

John Anderson – Straight Tequila Night

Jimmy Buffett – Margaritaville

Johnny Cash – Sunday Morning Coming Down

Kenny Chesney – Hemingway’s Whiskey

Neil Diamond – Red Red Wine

The Eagles – Tequila Sunrise

Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians - Raymond Chandler Evening

Rupert Holmes – Escape (The Piña Colada Song)

Tommy James – Sweet Cherry Wine

George Jones – Tennessee Whiskey

Don McLean – American Pie

Willie Nelson – Drinking Champagne

Jimmie Rodgers – Kisses Sweeter Than Wine

Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood – Summer Wine

Steely Dan – Deacon Blues

George Strait – Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind

Tom Waits - Warm Beer Cold Women

Bob Wills – Bubbles in my Beer

You Can’t Always Get What You Need

Imagine a time long ago, before Crawdaddy or Creem or Rolling Stone or Pitchfork, when nobody needed critics, when there were no Beatles scholars or Elvis specialists or authorities on krautrock or punk rock or post-punk or electro-funk, when everything you needed to know was written on the charts that were dutifully listed and updated in Billboard and New Musical Express, when there was no such thing a rock canon or that there was such a thing even conceivable as a rock canon, a long time ago when rock, or rock ‘n’ roll, had no past, when everything existed in the present moment.

What has happened since is that we have developed an historical consciousness. That time seems so distant because there was still breaking news. Now, there are mausoleums such as the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Record stores serve as museums, where the artifacts of the past are nicely alphabetized and organized into a daunting number of genres, devised by and for musical archaeologists. Events such as Record Store Day (RSD) serve the collective dream in which all recordings from the past, no matter how famous or obscure, are always available. It is perhaps important to remember that events such as RSD are premised on Rule #1 of niche marketing:

• There are approximately 3,000 people who are willing to buy anything

Corollary: There is a market for everything. And yet, our mass collective desire of plenitude is threatened by the possibility of shortages: the stark realization that while we can always get what we want (we scoff at the very notion of “out-of-print”), we can’t always get what we need. Case in point: I recently came across a collection edited by Bruno MacDonald, The Greatest Albums You’ll Never Hear: Unreleased Records by the World’s Greatest Musicians (2012). The jacket blurb says it all: “A Pink Floyd album with no instruments. A Sex Pistols record more incendiary than Never Mind The Bollocks. A sci-fi rock opera by Weezer.” (I take it the  self-parody is intentional.) Other such “You’ll Never Hear” lists can be found by doing a web search. If “Classic” album lists are premised on plenitude and the possibility of collection and acquisition, then “You’ll Never Hear” lists are perversely motivated, denying this possibility.

“You'll Never Hear” lists do tell us something, though perhaps that meaning is unintended:

• Greatness cannot be attributed to music we have never heard
• Distrust any critic presumptive enough to tell you we can

Echo/Reverb

Premise: Echo is to exteriority as reverberation is to interiority. As Michael Jarrett observes: “Reverb sonically implies the size and shape of imaginary places that hold music” (Sound Tracks, 72). Echo implies the immensity of a large cave or cathedral (a single sound wave reflecting off a distance surface), while reverberation collapses this immensity into the claustrophobic space inhabited by the cell of a cenobitic monk (sound waves reflecting off a nearby surface). Because an echo can be heard by humans only when the distance between the sound source and the reflecting surface is greater than 50 feet, an echo is typically clear and can be easily comprehended because of the distance and time the sound wave travels. Reverberations, on the other hand, do not have enough distance or time to travel, which means the sound waves pile up on each other, challenging our auditory comprehension. Echo implies distance; reverberation implies propinquity.

In his discussion of Martin Hannett’s recording of Joy Division’s music, Simon Reynolds takes up a discussion of musical spaces. He writes, “Hannent dedicated himself to capturing and intensifying Joy Division’s eerie spatiality” (Rip It Up and Start Again, 112). He goes on to say:

“Digital,” Hannett’s first Joy Division production [in 1978], derived its name from his favorite sonic toy, the AMS digital-delay line. Hannett used the AMS and other digital effects coming onto the market in the late seventies to achieve “ambience control”....His most distinctive use of the AMS digital delay...was pretty subtle. He applied a microsecond delay to the drums that was barely audible yet created a sense of enclosed space, a vaulted sound as if the music were recorded in a mausoleum.” (113)

On Unknown Pleasures (1979), Joy Division’s first LP, Hannent used another effects unit, the Marshall Time Modulator, a device that, in the words of band member Stephen Morris, “just made things sound smaller” (114). That is not a positive assessment. What were the aesthetic benefits of making the band’s sound spatially “smaller”? For Reynolds, it gives the band’s music a desolate, alienated feel (113). Or, one could also say, that the music has the uncomfortably claustrophobic feel of acute hermetic isolation, like being enclosed within the bare walls of a monastic cell.

An interesting connection, since the cover image on the original Sordide Sentimental release of Joy Division’s single, “Atmosphere” (titled “Licht and Blindheit” on the Sordide release), features a solitary, hooded monk, his back turned to the viewer, standing on a rocky hillside gazing out on a landscape consisting of a thick layer of fog filling the valley below the mountains far off in the distance. As Reynolds observes, the cover image “captures the moment when a certain religiosity began to gather around Joy Division” (115). Perhaps so, since the contemplative figure of the monk stands enthralled by the fog and distant mountains, as if it were a moment of spiritual or religious insight.

The cover image seems to be modeled, perhaps unintentionally, on the painting by German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (ca. 1818).

By inviting the viewer to share the point-of-view of the wanderer or hiker, Friedrich is inviting us to share the same subjective experience as the figure in the painting. This applies to the single’s cover art as well, depicting a similar moment of reflection, the fog and far-off, hazy mountains suggesting an unknown future. However, the monk implies the cloister, the contemplative life, while the outdoor setting implies the active life.

Or, the cover picture of Joy Division's single metonymically implies two spaces capable of producing two distinct sonic possibilities: immensity (echo) or monastic cell (reverberation). The unusual spatiality of Joy Division’s music is captured by the contradictions of this single’s cover image. I prefer the trope of the monastic cell, but the suffocating space of the tomb is an unavoidable association, given the photograph by Bernard Pierre Wolff used on the cover of Joy Division’s LP Closer (1980), an image of the Appiani family tomb in Genoa’s Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno.

Restless Wind

“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husband’s necks. Anything can happen.” A famous, oft-quoted passage from Raymond Chandler’s short story “Red Wind” (Dime Detective Magazine January, 1938), the Santa Ana winds typically portend the arrival of autumn in southern California. By describing the winds as “red,” Chandler invokes blood (as in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, 1929), violence, and, inevitably I suppose, passion. But “red” can also refer to the atmosphere: the ambient temperature, in this case, hot. In her essay, “The Santa Ana,” published in August, 1967, Joan Didion cites the above passage by Chandler, choosing to elaborate on wind as “atmosphere,” or “mood,” rather than just air in motion:

The Santa Ana, which is named for one of the canyons it rushes through, is a foehn wind, like the foehn of Austria and Switzerland and the hamsin of Israel. There are a number of persistent malevolent winds, perhaps the best known of which are the mistral of France and the Mediterranean sirocco, but a foehn wind has distinct characteristics: it occurs on the leeward slope of a mountain range and, although the air begins as a cold mass, it is warmed as it comes down the mountain and appears finally as a hot dry wind. Whenever and wherever foehn blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about “nervousness,” about “depression.”

The Santa Ana wind is an inexorable force, unstoppable, merciless, disturbing the atmosphere and consequently the environment, impacting human behavior as well as health and well-being. Both Chandler and Didion resort to mythological thinking (“folk wisdom”) to understand the Santa Ana wind. It is an evil wind, a wind-spirit sent by an illness-causing demon, one of those ancient, malevolent winds that were believed to bring sickness and death. We humans are at its mercy. “[T]he violence and unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.” Wind is at the root of all illness and misfortune, capable even of precipitating existential dread. Of the Anemoi, the four wind gods of Greek mythology, Notus (South Wind) would send a wind that rose after midsummer, a scorching wind that would burn the crops and choke men with dust. (Other of the Anemoi were a bit more congenial.)

The wind of song is seldom if ever just air in motion, but Romantically conceived, Romantic in its Coleridgian form: “we receive but what we give,/And in our life alone does Nature live” (Dejection: An Ode). The wind is a positive or negative force based on what we attribute to it. And, alas, when asked a question, the restless wind never answers:

And would we aught behold, of higher worth,

Than that inanimate cold world allowed

To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,

Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth

A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud

Enveloping the Earth—

And from the soul itself must there be sent

A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,

Of all sweet sounds the life and element!

A Few Songs About the Ever-Changing Wind:

John Anderson – Seminole Wind

The Association – Windy

Billy Bragg & Wilco – Black Wind Blowing

Patsy Cline – The Wayward Wind

King Crimson – I Talk to the Wind

Christopher Cross – Ride Like the Wind

Donovan – Catch the Wind

Steve Goodman – Santa Ana Winds

Jimi Hendrix – The Wind Cries Mary

Elton John – Candle in the Wind

Kansas – Dust in the Wind

The Kingston Trio – They Call the Wind Maria

McCoy Tyner – Fly With the Wind

Peter, Paul & Mary – Blowin’ in the Wind

Chris Rea – Windy Town

Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band – Against the Wind

Rod Stewart – Mandolin Wind

Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention – Any Way the Wind Blows

Warren Zevon – Hasten Down the Wind