One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you...
Moldering in the attic somewhere, there's an old book on the first 20 or 25 years of "rock". I remember one entry very clearly, from the authors' magisterial survey of 1966. Under a picture of a kittenish blonde in mini-skirt and kinky boots was an entry for Nancy Sinatra, which I quote in full:
Boring but beautiful.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I suppose, rock'n'roll-wise, boredom is in the ear of the behearer. But nobody gets it wrong like a rock critic. Pick up any tome from the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, and you'll find the cutting-edge-of-the-zeitgeist-du-jour platters they're raving about are all but unlistened to today, whereas a lot of the things they were snottiest about have managed to stand the test of time. Nancy Sinatra turns eighty tomorrow, Monday June 8th, and many of her hits still sound great: Her Number One with her dad, "Somethin' Stupid", is a lovely record, and her insightful re-imagining of "Bang Bang" transformed the song, as Quentin Tarantino among others rightly discerned. Her forlorn version of "We Need a Little Christmas" is the only version I can stand, the traditional arrangements seeming to me utterly fake in their bullying cheeriness.
Nancy and I follow each other on Twitter, although I don't look in terribly often since she went full-scale #Resistance. I regret that because it doesn't seem the best use of her talents, as I think her father would have been the first to point out. But I set that aside in memory of less fractious times. Song-wise, Nancy's greatest contribution to the repertoire may be from seventy-six birthdays ago, when a four-year-old girl was given a most unusual present - a ballad in her honor by two of her dad's pals, a very great composer (Jimmy Van Heusen) and a killer comedian (Phil Silvers). Van Heusen remained a vital associate of Frank's right to the end, buried in the family plot indeed. For Nancy, two collaborators would be essential: Billy Strange, who's there on every one of her chart hits, as guitarist, conductor and/or arranger; and Lee Hazlewood, who as composer, lyricist and producer saved her career from the grim trajectory of your average showbiz progeny.
As for the beautiful boringness, Nancy's transatlantic Number One from 1966 can't be that boring. As reinterpreted by Jessica Simpson, it just about singlehandedly carried the Dukes Of Hazzard movie a few years back. Billy Ray Cyrus' insipid male version apparently sold fourteen million copies. And somewhere tonight in some karaoke bar somewhere on the planet some over-ambitious gal a little the worse for wear will be belting defiantly:
You keep saying
You got something for me
Something you call love
But confess...
It's a beloved song, and it's full of spirit, and there's nothing boring about Chuck Berghofer's opening bass line:
The man who wrote the song was Lee Hazlewood. The son of a Texas wildcatter, he had a peripatetic childhood, and an even more peripatetic career that took in a disk-jockey stint in Phoenix, then the discovery of Duane Eddy's twang's-the-thang guitar sound, a monster hit for Dean Martin and more modest success for Dino's son and Desi Arnaz's son, and Gram Parsons and the first country-rock album, and Golden Rose-winning Europop at Montreux, and on and on, all the way to the predictable "rediscovery" by Sonic Youth, Beck, Jarvis Cocker et al. Even in the final stages of cancer fifteen years back, he staggered on long enough to make, as his final bequest, an inevitable anti-Bush album full of songs like "Baghdad Knights". Hey, if Burt Bacharach can get a slice of the anti-war action, why not other icons of cool? "It's just the way I've always felt," he said. "There's nothing worse, I guess, than being black in an all-white church or being southern and being a liberal."
Being anti-Bush in showbiz is like being black in an all-black church surely. But being "black in an all-white church" or a liberal in the south does get close to his sense of himself in pop music. He thrived on being an outsider. I think that's why, aside from tax reasons, he liked to move - to Hollywood, to London, to Sweden, to Ireland. He worked best getting on the inside but seeing it from the outside. Even his so-called drug anthems - the goofy "Sugar Town" and the psychedelic "Some Velvet Morning" - feel vaguely like semi-parodic drug anthems: With the former, it's as if some savvy Tin Pan Alleyman sat down and figured, "How can I write the kind of cutesy-cutesy bouncy-bouncy pop novelty I'd be writing anyway but give it a bit of cachet with the LSD set?"
I got some troubles but they won't last
I'm going to lay right down here in the grass
Pretty soon all my troubles will pass
Cause I'm in Sh-sh-sh sh-sh-sh
Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-sh Sugar Town...
And that's all it took: One reference to laying down in the grass and a song that would have worked fine for Patti Page or the McGuire Sisters was assumed to be a coded paean to the LA drug scene. As for "Some Velvet Morning", it's hard to believe that's not pure pastiche psychedelia. A guy growling hazily about some chick called Phaedra -
Some Velvet Morning when I'm straight
I'm gonna open up your gate
And maybe tell you 'bout Phaedra...
- interspersed with flower-chick Phaedra's philosophizing:
Flowers are the things we knew
Secrets are the things we grew...
Heavy, man. A British survey a decade or so back rated it the all-time great rock duet - not bad for an assignment song Hazlewood wrote in a hurry for a Nancy Sinatra TV special when they told him they needed something for a scene with a girl in white on a white horse and a guy in black on a black horse. The show - Movin' With Nancy - is available on DVD, and, whenever I dust if off and stick it in the machine, my little kids are agog at the sheer grooviness of the thing: it's the Rat Pack and flower power all wrapped up in one wacky package, and it's just a wonderfully mesmerically entertaining hour. Hazlewood looks great in it, sporting one of the most impressive 1960s droopy mustaches in those distant days before the hirsute upper lip became more or less confined to Burt Reynolds wannabes and/or male porn stars. Lee was proud of that 'tache. "I walked into a club in Beverly Hills," he once recalled, "and this sounds terribly conceited, but I musta seen twenty Lee Hazlewoods in there. And it was me - it wasn't Sonny Bono, 'cos his was ratty."
The mustache, like Nancy, was there for the glory days. A little of Lee goes a long way with me, but the songs he did with the distaff Sinatra, both solos and duets, are full of grit and attitude: They're not hard and bitter, but you get the sense of life lived, of being, to quote their smash hit "Jackson", "hotter than a pepper sprout" ...and then come the grey ashes, "ever since the fire burned out". Here's one I always liked:
LEE: When I came home this morning
My clothes were on the floorNANCY: You'd had a drink or two or three
And maybe even moreLEE: Yeah, you had my old dog bite me
In a place that I can't mention
There's something that I want to ask you
Now that I have your attention
Is Making A Little Love Out Of The question?
Or is it just cause you're not in the mood?
If making a little love is out of the question
Then maybe you can fix me up some food...
That's really what Hazlewood did for Nancy: when he met her, he wasn't the black guy in the white church, but he was the black-hat guy on a black horse riding into her white-gloved world. Look at Nancy on her dad's TV show to welcome back Elvis: She looks like a coed auditioning for a sister act. When Frank launched Reprise Records, his daughter was one of the first acts signed to the label. Her debut single, "Cufflinks And A Tie Clip", was promoted in ads under headlines predicting "The Biggest DJ Tumult In Years Is About To Begin!" Alas, the DJs remained un-tumultuous, or de-tumescent, or whatever the opposite of a big DJ tumult is. In fact, as the Chairman of the Board, Frank had been very businesslike with the kid: He told her that, while nepotism may have got her inside the building, if her records didn't pay their own way, she'd be out again. But, whatever the business terms, image-wise Nancy was promoted very much as a professional daughter. She'd been married and divorced - to Tommy Sands - but as a showbiz proposition she was still Daddy's little girl.
Daddy's little girl's little boy - Jimmy Bowen, who produced the singles at Reprise ("Strangers In The Night", etc) and briefly dated Nancy - was mulling over the Daughter Problem at home one afternoon when he remembered the guy next door. Lee Hazlewood was enjoying one of many retirements from the music biz he'd take over the years, and certainly had no desire to try to salvage the career of somebody's daughter, least of all a daughter whose dad was the founder of the company. But he agreed to a casual no-promises exploratory meeting with Nancy, and about twenty minutes into it dad shows up, and not having been apprised of the ground rules says to Lee, "Hi, I'm Frank. Great to hear you two are gonna be working together."
Then he crosses the room to pour himself a Jack Daniel's, and Hazlewood was too polite to do other than say, "Hey, I'm looking forward to it, too."
And that's how Barton Lee Hazlewood came into Nancy Sinatra's life. "Barton" is what she liked to call him, and indeed does so on record in "Is Making A Little Love Out Of The Question?" It wasn't out of the question, but it was certainly out of the answer. Hazlewood was Nancy's mentor, but in the artistic rather than Clintonian sense. And by the time they started doing duets together they figured their sexual chemistry on vinyl was so palpable they didn't want to jeopardize it by attempting to transfer it to real life.
Hazlewood's first decision was a technical one. He listened to her "Cufflinks And A Tie Clip" material and said, "Your voice is too high." He made her sing a key-and-a-half down, where her warbling sounded more interesting, and then decided to write some material to fit. "These Boots Are Made For Walkin'" was a line from Four For Texas, a western Frank and Dino and the gang had done together. Hazlewood thought it was a good hook for a pop tune, but he'd conceived it as a guy's song. One day, waiting on some technical glitch, Hazlewood and his boys were killing time in the studio batting forth what he called "dirty old Texas songs". "Oh, I got one I been working on," he said. "Gimme the guitar." And he sang:
You keep saying
You got something for me
Something you call love
But confess
You've been a-messin'
Where you shouldn't've been a-messin'
And now someone else
Is getting all your best
Well, These Boots Are Made For Walkin'
And that's just what they'll do
One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you...
As soon as Nancy heard it, she wanted it. According to Hazlewood, everybody he grew up with knew what was meant by "You've been messin' where you shouldn't have been a-messin'". In other words, we're a long way from "Cufflinks And A Tie Clip". It was an unusual song for its time, an era when girl groups still sang of undying devotion to feckless young men ("Leader Of The Pack" et al). Lee told Nancy to sing it as if she were "a fourteen-year old girl who f***s truck drivers". He complained over the years that the line got bowdlerized in anecdotes into "a sixteen-year old girl who dates truck drivers". But the truth is more likely the opposite. At the end of his life, in interview after interview, Hazlewood would retail the line with the fourteen-year old f***er. At the time, he was more genteel. "Lee didn't use the word 'f***'," said Nancy. "He actually said 'goes out with'. I was an innocent back then, even though I'd been married."
Hazlewood didn't reckon she was that innocent. "You're not a sweet young thing. You're not the virgin next door," he told her. "You've been married and divorced. You're a grown woman. I know there's garbage in there somewhere." By "garbage", he meant "pain, heartbreak, worldliness". "So stop the act," he said. She did - and how:
You keep playing
Where you shouldn't be playing
And you keep thinking
That you'll never get burned
Well, I've just found me
A brand new box of matches
And what he knows
You ain't had time to learn
These Boots Are Made For Walkin'
And that's just what they'll do
One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you...
It was a good hook, and packed with what we now regard as "attitude". But Hazlewood's wrong. When you're fourteen or sixteen and "going out with" truck drivers, you're not that aware, never mind self-aware. You've got to have been walked over yourself a few times before you know that kind of thing. Indeed, for a lot of its fans, the song is aspirational: It's what they'd like to have said, if only they'd been quicker and sharper and had one fewer drink and hadn't been stuck in the doormat role.
But, as good as the hook is, there was nothing to suggest it would make such a great record. The song's arranger, Billy Strange, had assembled a band that included Carol Kaye on electric bass and Chuck Berghofer on double bass. "Billy Strange believed in using the two basses together," Carol Kaye remembered. "Lee asked Chuck to put a sliding run on the front of the tune. Chuck complied by playing notes about three tones apart - four-six frets apart. But Lee stopped the take. 'No Chuck, make your sliding notes closer together'." And that's what you hear in the song's memorably menacing bass line. "Oh, that's sneaky," as Frank Sinatra said admiringly on TV.
Having come up with a great opening, the boys then came up with one of the great pop endings. Most pop singles don't have endings at all, they just fade away, as does "Boots", but not before the most memorable line in the song. It's an unsung line, literally:
Are you ready, boots? Start walkin'
- and then the bass line again, and those little brass pecks, and a wild walk-out. Even Jessica Simpson, in an otherwise coarse and crassly descriptive near total rewrite of the lyric, knew enough to retain that line. And so, over the years, have many of the other versions. Everyone does the song, from Loretta Lynn to Megadeth, to Balsara and his Singing Sitars, to the Fembots in Austin Powers. Who could forget Caroline Verdi singing "Ces bottes sont faites pour marcher"? Or Tanja Berg's "Stiefeln sind zum wandern"? Or Ivonne Prenosilová "Boty proti lásce"? What, you've entirely forgotten them? Well, what about Gene Goza and "These Spurs Are Made For Ridin'"? Which reminds us that somehow "Boots" never ever did take off as the guy song it was planned as - with the notable exception of the countless versions bellowed out by US servicemen in the Mekong Delta fifty-plus years ago. They liked it even more once Nancy flew out to sing it to them.
She was a different gal by then. "Boots" gave Nancy not just a hit but an identity. After all, if you're going to sing about "these boots", it kinda presumes you're wearing some. So she dyed her hair from brunette to blonde and got a mini-skirt from Carnaby Street. "And, of course, the boots were just perfect for that look," said Nancy. "You didn't feel quite so uncovered if you had shoes on that went up to your knee." Long boots, short skirt, shorter fuse: she looked the song.
"She did that herself," Hazlewood recalled, "with those little mini skirts and those big boots which you wouldn't mind her walking all over you in 'cos she was so small." And over the years the boots just kept on walkin', through a thousand newspaper headlines - "The Boots Are Back" - and even as the lone fashion accessory in Nancy's otherwise nude Playboy spread. Not just a song but a way of life.
Few celebrity kids ever make it out of the shadow of their famous parents. "For most of my life," she said, "I was Frank Sinatra's daughter" - and famously so, ever since that fourth birthday and "Nancy (With The Laughing Face)". With "Boots", she stepped out in her own right. And Frank, a beloved father to all his children, was pleased as punch. "My daughter the pop singer!" he said on TV. "How long you been in the business?" "Oh, this is my third day," she replied. It took many years to get to that third day, but she was smart enough to know when she'd got there. On that TV special, she and Dad duetted on a goofy version of "Downtown" - but you know those "Boots" are gonna walk in and some point:
As Frank says, "Yes, sir! That's my baby." There's a proud father.
Lee Hazlewood wandered off to Sweden and, by the time he came back, Nick Cave and Sonic Youth and a whole bunch of other hep cats were claiming him as pop's forgotten genius. He hadn't realized he was that forgotten, and once everyone hopped on the bandwagon he sometimes gave the impression he wished the all-star tribute albums would attract some bigger stars. But he chugged along, content to be the resuscitated Sixties pop-guru for those who thought the Bacharach revival was too mainstream. When the doctors told him his cancer was incurable and he knew he'd be hanging up his boots for good, he picked out an epitaph for his gravestone: "Didn't he ramble?" And mostly he did, rambling and ambling from one thing to another. But for a few moments in 1966 he propelled himself and his star far more purposefully:
Are you ready, boots? Start walkin'.
Walk on, Nancy.
~If you enjoy our Sunday Song of the Week, we have a mini-audio companion, a bonus Song of the Week Extra, midweek on our Coronacopia edition of The Mark Steyn Show - and sometimes with special guests from Mark's archive, including Eurovision's Dana, Ted Nugent, Peter Noone from Herman's Hermits, Paul Simon, Lulu, Tim Rice and Randy Bachman.
Our Netflix-style tile-format archives for Tales for Our Time and Steyn's Sunday Poems have proved so popular with listeners and viewers that we've done the same for our musical features merely to provide some mellifluous diversions in this age of lockdown and looting. Just click here, and you'll find easy-to-access live performances by everyone from Liza Minnelli to Loudon Wainwright III; Mark's interviews with Chuck Berry, Leonard Bernstein and Bananarama (just to riffle through the Bs); and audio documentaries on P G Wodehouse's lyrics, John Barry's Bond themes, sunshine songs from the Sunshine State, and much more. We'll be adding to the archive in the months ahead, but, even as it is, we hope you'll find the new SteynOnline music home page a welcome respite from house arrest without end.
If you're a Mark Steyn Club member and you disagree with any or all of the above, feel free to walk your boots all over him in our comments section. As we always say, membership in The Mark Steyn Club isn't for everybody, and it doesn't affect access to Song of the Week and our other regular content, but one thing it does give you is commenter's privileges. Please stay on topic and don't include URLs, as the longer ones can wreak havoc with the formatting of the page.
