* Lee Hazelwood & Ann Margret

THE COWBOY & THE LADY

(Smells Like)

Make no mistake, this 1969 collaboration between Lee Hazlewood and Ann Margret is terrible. But it's also an amusing example of Hazlewood's talent for hooking up with interesting co-conspirators and for dreaming up equally, uh, interesting novelty concepts -- in this case tackling an unlikely collection of country and folky standards like J.D. Loudermilk's "Break My Mind" and Tom Rush's "No Regrets." There's a kitsch value to such oddities -- that's the reason I've never gotten rid of my Nichelle Nichols (a/k/a Star Trek's Uhura) album, even though I rarely if ever listen to it.

Here the deadly combination of Hazlewood's twangy Leonard Cohen croak, Ann Margret's enthusiastic showboating, and the string-laden, big-budget LA studio production does prove once again that the late '60s produced its share of self-consciously sucky music. So maybe now that Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, the entrepreneur behind the Smells Like label, has gone well beyond the call of record-geek duty by including this oddity in his Hazlewood re-release program, he can move on and find something better to do with his Geffen allowance than embarrass counterculturalists -- like maybe reissuing Jerry Lee Lewis & Linda Gail Lewis's Together. That one is corny and funny, with at least two songs recorded elsewhere by Hazlewood, including The Cowboy & the Lady's "Sweet Thing." And it gets perversity points for its sexy brother/sister duets.

-- Kevin John