From the first swell of the strings, there is something immediately different about this slice of psychedelic pop masterpiece. The swirling orchestration is like nothing else happening on pop radio at the time. This was the end of 1967, and the wave of the Summer of Love was just subsiding. This ethereal trip of a song employs elements of Greek mythology, hard-edged realism, hippie idealism, and a mixture of time signatures to take us on a cosmic ride lasting three minutes and 40 seconds. Let’s take a look at the story behind “Some Velvet Morning” by Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra.
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Some velvet mornin’ 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 mornin’ when I’m straight
The Orchestration
Longtime Hazlewood collaborator Billy Strange arranged and conducted the lush orchestra, which was comprised of members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Hazlewood told composer Joe McGinty in 1998, “I made them stand up. No string player likes to stand up to play ’cause he thinks he’s playing fiddle if he does that. I’d say, ‘This is a stand-up part.’ They’d be, ‘Oh, Lee, we don’t wanna stand.’ ‘This is a stand-up part. It’s out of sight. It’s for dogs and me. So guys, stand up and go through this a couple of times.’ And a lot of times, I’d have them stand up and go through it twice, and record, and not tell ’em. So I’d have two tracks of them put together. And they’d be just that much different, just an nth off. And I always thought that little nth made an interesting sound.”
Flowers growing on a hill, dragonflies and daffodils
Learn from us very much, look at us, but do not touch
Phaedra is my name
A Song Written Out of Spite
In 1999, Hazlewood told Record Collector magazine: “I had problems with people telling me, ‘I really like the song you wrote, Lee, you can really dance to it.’ I don’t like people dancing to my music. I was being very contrary. The next thing I sat down to write happened to be that song, and I go, ‘Dance to this, sons of bitches.”
They may not have danced to it, but they did buy it. The song peaked at No. 26 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Some velvet mornin’ 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 mornin’ when I’m straight
Beauty and the Beast
In Greek mythology, Phaedra was the daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë and the wife of Theseus. She fell in love with her stepson Hippolytus. After he rejected her advances, she accused him of attempted rape, causing Theseus to urge Poseidon to kill him. The tragic figure then killed herself.
In 1999, Sinatra told Mojo magazine: “Lee always had some kind of underlying message in his songs. I guess it’s partly what he used to call ‘beauty and the beast,’ the young girl and the older guy, that fantasy. We didn’t have an affair, we didn’t have a physical relationship, and yet we created something that indicated that we did, and I guess people thought that was interesting because we were so different in age.”
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
Different Time Signatures
The song was recorded in a three-hour session in December 1967 at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles. The male section is sung in 4/4 time, while the female part is in 3/4. As the song switches back and forth, it builds up to a mashup of alternating lines and time signatures. Hazlewood pushed the session musicians to perform it live rather than using studio trickery after the fact to splice the parts.
He told McGinty: “When I wrote it, I did it just for pure orneriness of the musicians, more than anything else. I said, ‘You see the ending here, it goes 4/4 into 3/4. Don’t worry about it because I can cut it together. We’ll do all the 4/4, then we’ll do the 3/4.’ Well, about half of them stood up very, very insulted. They really came down on me heavy—’Who do you think we are?’ and they were not happy. They just set up and played right through it. And I go, ‘OK, all right smart asses, then we’ll do it your way.’ Which I thought might happen. I got a lot of good music by pushing guys and doing stuff like that. I think some of them knew it, the ones that had been around me. Some of them really got a little bit insulted that I would suggest that I’d have to cut together something as simple as that. But I’d say, ‘Well, you never know.'”
Some velvet mornin’ when I’m straight
Flowers growing on a hill
I’m gonna open up your gate
dragonflies and daffodils
And maybe tell you ’bout Phaedra
Learn from us very much
And how she gave me life
look at us, but do not touch
And how she made it end
Nobody’s Figured It Out Yet
“Some Velvet Morning” would be the last Top 40 appearance for either artist on the Billboard Hot 100. The song earned the top spot on The Daily Telegraph‘s list of the 50 Best Duets Ever. In 2021, Sinatra told Uncut magazine: “Even though it was years and years later, it’s still nice to be appreciated. And for that record especially, nobody’s figured that song out yet. And I still don’t know what it means.”
Hazlewood told Mojo magazine, “Most of our duets are not double meaning. They’re kinda triple meaning. If you’re some Santa Monica doper sitting on the street, then it’s a dope song. If you’re just some little innocent girl sitting in Nebraska, it’s just a song. And then, if you’re really a Nancy and Lee fan, it means a lot of other things, too. It’s everything combined.”
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Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
