Rock and Roll Book Club: 'Why Marianne Faithfull Matters'
by Jay Gabler
August 05, 2021
In her new book Why Marianne Faithfull Matters, Tanya Pearson has a couple of layers of mythology to cut through. The first is the one that's operative for casual music fans who know little about the artist who first sang "When Tears Go By."
Whenever people ask me who I'm writing about and I say Marianne Faithfull, the following conversation ensues:
"Sounds so familiar..."
"She's a singer."
"Didn't she date the Beatles or something?"
"One of the Rolling Stones."
"RIGHT!"
"But she's also released music for the last fifty years or so."
"So interesting. Mick Jagger..."
So, step one: Marianne Faithfull is more than Mick Jagger's ex. Step two, moving beyond the narratives imposed on Faithfull over the decades by critics who do know her music and would like to explain it to you.
Ninety percent of Marianne Faithfull's reviews were written by men and follow a pattern over time. First, she was pretty and polite, as evidenced in Peter Jones's feature, "Marianne Faithfull Is a 'Real' Nice Person," in the Record Mirror in 1964. New fans learned that the seventeen-year-old blonde, "a sweetie, a doll, a dish," had the ability to make men's heads swivel approvingly. A few years later, she was the slutty "Girl in the Rug," a Rolling Stones groupie, and a mediocre actress (but pretty). Then she was a pretty, drugged-out failure in the 1970s, who had released a flop; a phoenix rising from the ashes of the 1960s with Broken English; and finally, a legend, not immune to criticism or commercial flops, but safe from insult in her well-earned bubble of respect. [...] If you were, for instance, asked to read the existing collection of male-dominated reviews and write a summary of her musical career, it would be an unmoving portrait of a legendary sad woman who writes sad songs, forever teetering on the precipice of extinction.
Although Pearson wasn't able to interview Faithfull for this book — the 74-year-old artist was busy with activities including recovering from a case of COVID-19 — Pearson feels a personal connection with Faithfull. As a gen-Xer, the author didn't encounter Faithfull until she appeared on Saturday Night Live with Metallica in 1997, but instantly became fascinated with "the beautiful older woman in a black suit, stage left, who periodically 'la la'ed' into her microphone. She was enigmatic, seemed important, and had great hair."
Like Faithfull, Pearson is a musician. She's also experienced addiction, and continually pushes back against the trope that substance abuse is a yes/no, before/after proposition. "Marianne Faithfull gets labeled a 'survivor' a lot, and she hates it," writes Pearson. "Faithfull's recovery is difficult to pinpoint, and to define, because she's not a natural glutton — she's a practiced hedonist who had willingly committed herself to a Dionysian way of life."
She came to that life early, pegged as a music star before she even opened her mouth to the one doing the pegging. A 17-year-old Faithfull (yes, that's really her last name) was still a "naïve convent school student" attending a London party where the Rolling Stones were present when their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, "targeted her as his next project. Instead of introducing himself to Marianne, he asked her boyfriend if she could sing. [...] Oldham succeeded in sculpting a virginal pop icon out of Marianne Faithfull, and when that façade grew tired, he repackaged her as a sex kitten."
As it happened, Oldham's eyes had lighted upon a girl whose background embodied the contrasts of Swinging London. Though her mother was an aristocrat of Austrian descent (Faithfull's great-great-uncle Leopold von Sacher-Masoch authored Venus in Furs, the classic S&M novel that would later inspire the Velvet Underground), Eva von Sacher-Masoch married an intellectual who Pearson characterizes as "a self-involved asshole who ditched the family when his daughter was six." Raising Marianne as a single mother, Sacher-Masoch descended into alcoholism while Glynn Faithfull remarried and moved to a commune that his daughter would remember for its (as Pearson summarizes) "terrible food, high utopian thoughts, and randy sex."
Oldham enlisted Jagger and Keith Richards to write a song for his new protegé, one befitting her image as a moody schoolgirl. The Glimmer Twins over-delivered, writing the beautifully melancholy "As Tears Go By," and it became a top ten hit on both sides of the Atlantic in 1964, turning the teenager into an overnight sensation. She made the most of her newfound income (she got an £80 weekly allowance from Oldham, the equivalent of almost $20,000 today) and fame: traveling, partying, delving into drugs, and pursuing sexual relationships with both men and women. The schedule was grueling, but she became an undisputed It Girl during a thrilling time in British music.
Faithfull's status as an iconoclastic icon was set from the start: in 1965, she released two simultaneous debut albums. Come My Way was a folk album, while her self-titled LP was pop. With no initial aspirations to songwriting, she found success with covers including the Beatles' "Yesterday." She did want to act, and took a quirky series of roles including a charismatic (and, often, unclothed) character in 1967's film I'll Never Forget What'sisname; the eponymous Girl on a Motorcycle in a 1968 slice of sexy onscreen psychedelia (it was released in the United States as Naked Under Leather); and, in 1969, an onstage Ophelia whose late-play madness was enhanced by doses of heroin taken during intermission.
Having married in 1965 in an ill-advised attempt to reverse course from her licentious lifestyle, Faithfull entered the '70s a single mom herself, saddled with wildly exaggerated stories about her appearance during a 1967 drug bust at Keith Richards's house. (Yes, she was wearing only a carpet at the time the police arrived. No, she and Mick Jagger were not engaged in any kind of unmentionable act involving a Mars bar.) As Pearson puts it, "in a matter of four years, Marianne was transformed from virginal pop princess to defamed junkie whore." "Sister Morphine," a 1969 song co-written by Faithfull and Jagger, presaged an overdose and coma later that year. The following year she, Pearson is careful to note, dumped him.
Pearson argues that the punk explosion helped create a ready audience for Faithfull's 1979 "comeback" album, Broken English. The singer, now also a songwriter, emerged with a new, somewhat ravaged voice and a willingness to engage in elliptical autobiography as well as social commentary. The album firmly moved Faithfull from the artistic company of Petula Clark to the company of Patti Smith, and — Pearson notes — helped "pave the wave" for artists including "Debbie Harry [...] Annie Lennox, and Siouxsie Sioux" — not to mention "Shirley Manson, Liz Phair, and Courtney Love."
Hence Faithfull's latter-day cred, and her appeal as a collaborator for everyone from the aforementioned Metallica to PJ Harvey, Roger Waters, Garth Hudson, Dr. John, Blur, Beck, Billy Corgan, and Jarvis Cocker. Having long nursed a tendency toward torch song, she became a seasoned interpreter of Kurt Weill. She's continued to tour, and earlier this year she released an album of 19th century British poetry recited over music by artists including Brian Eno and Nick Cave.
And still, many people know her only as Mick Jagger's ex. In Pearson's account, Faithfull matters for her flaws as much as her triumphs; the book doesn't lionize Faithfull or inflate the influence of her catalog, but rather makes the case for Faithfull as an artist perpetually in the process of becoming. That's a virtue often celebrated in male artists (not least of all, the Rolling Stones), while pop culture likes to pigeonhole women. If Faithfull resists the label "survivor," it's because it defines her by her trauma rather than by her artistry.
A music-industry focus on youth, Pearson argues, elides the fascination of age. Rather than "another trendy twenty-something-year-old cog in the revolving door of streaming music garbage," writes the author, "I would rather listen to Marianne Faithfull at seventy-four, a woman who sleeps with an assortment of books (and if that's not a mutually beneficial relationship worth striving for, I don't know what is)."
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