Some Velvet Obit

Oh, Lee Hazlewood! Rest in peace!

Nancy and Lee: Summer Wine, 1967

Lee Hazlewood, who died on Saturday aged 78, was one of the most influential figures in 20th-century pop; most famous as Svengali to Nancy Sinatra, for whom he wrote These Boots Are Made for Walkin’, he was also an important influence on Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound” recording techniques, and his songs have been covered by stars from Elvis Presley and Dusty Springfield to Nick Cave and Courtney Love.

Nancy Sinatra had been signed up to her father’s label, Reprise Records, in the early 1960s, but by 1965 had not had a hit and was on the verge of being dropped.

Jimmy Bowen, a neighbour of Hazlewood’s who worked for Reprise and was dating Nancy, asked the 36-year-old record producer to do for Nancy what nepotism had failed to achieve. Hazlewood was reluctant, but after Sinatra himself lured him to the family home for a drink and thanked him for agreeing to help, he felt it would be unwise to demur.

Hazlewood set about reinventing Nancy as a “tough little broad”, dyeing her brown hair blonde, swapping her ballgowns for Carnaby Street fashions and persuading her to wear boot-polish black eye make-up and frosted lipstick. He also persuaded her to lower her vocal pitch.

In 1966 she had a huge hit in America and Britain with These Boots Are Made for Walkin’, its title inspired by a line in Robert Aldrich’s 1963 western 4 for Texas starring her father and Dean Martin.

Hazlewood told her to sing it “like a 14-year-old girl who screws truck drivers” (”14″ was later sanitised to “16″ and “screws” to “dates”), and it sold five million copies to an audience blissfully unaware that, as Hazlewood put it, “anyone in my part of Texas knows that messin’ [as in "You've been messin' where you shouldn't have been a messin"] means f*****’.”

Initially, Nancy Sinatra sang alone. But when Reprise suggested she move on to duets, she insisted that only Hazlewood would do. They went on to record several hits together, fusions of country, pop and psychedelia, including the darkly ambiguous Some Velvet Morning, and Sugar Town.

The songs’ scurrilous lyrics, with their thinly-veiled references to drugs and sex (”Some velvet morning when I’m straight/ I’m going to open up your gate”) were part of the attraction.

So too was the implication that theirs was more than a singing partnership, though Hazlewood maintained that they were just good friends and, in any case, Nancy, as a nice Catholic girl, never understood what she was singing about, having sensibly decided not to ask.

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