Marianne Faithfull Showed That It Wasn’t All Over, Baby Blue
Unfair as it may be to judge people on looks, it’s the reason certain things have happened in human history.
It definitely accounted for Marianne Faithfull recording “As Tears Go By” in 1964.
Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham spotted Faithfull at a Stones party that year, correctly noted that the 18-year-old was attractive and asked if she could sing.
She said yes, at which point Oldham could have handed her a Gershwin song to see how she might interpret it. Instead, a few days later he summoned her to a recording studio and handed her “As Tears Go By,” the first song collaboration between Rolling Stones Keith Richards and Mick Jagger.
She sang it in a wistful voice that suited its wistful tone. It’s a durable pop song with a great line (“I sit and watch the children play / Doing things I used to do / They think are new”), and it didn’t hurt that when all those teenage boys in the exploding 1960s rock ’n’ roll world saw Marianne Faithfull, a whole lot of them skipped the sensitivity and respect part and went right to wow, she’s a knockout.
The late Maggie Smith drolly termed it “the babe factor,” meaning anything you do from then on in your life is interwoven with how you looked at your youthful peak.
In the short term, Faithfull scored a couple more modest hits after “As Tears Go By” and scored even better in rock ’n’ roll celebrity. She was famously among the party at Richards’ house in February 1967 when the cops conducted a drug bust, an event that enhanced the bad-boy aura of the Stones and left Faithfull branded as a kinky sex object. That’s the point at which being beautiful does not help.
Faithfull, who died Thursday in London at the age of 78, long lamented that frustrating double standard while successfully battling over the next half century to overcome it.
That she was able to date Mick Jagger and not be forever swallowed or defined by Mick Jagger was and still would be a remarkable feat. See Suze Rotolo and Bob Dylan.
When Faithfull came along, women around the rock ’n’ roll world were “birds,” a cheerful British term popular with, among others, the Beatles (“And Your Bird Can Sing,” “Norwegian Wood,” “Blackbird”).
It was intended by guys as a compliment, a nod of approval, except it sort of positioned women as accessories. The early Liverpool-based female rock ’n’ roll band the Liverbirds recalled being introduced to the Beatles and John Lennon saying, “Girls don’t play guitar.”
That remark has sometimes been taken as one more manifestation of John’s male superiority complex, though he was just as likely noting that it was unusual. He didn’t say a girl couldn’t play a guitar, just that you didn’t see it very often.
It’s true, however, that female artists were often seen as a lesser life form. Arlene Smith of the Chantels said she always disliked the term “girl group,” because it made the artists sound like frivolous novelty acts when in fact they had worked as hard on their music as any of the guys.
When the Crystals, Ronettes and Darlene Love started shaking up the charts, their producer Phil Spector made it clear he wanted to be seen as the maestro, with the artists serving only as his instruments. When the Beach Boys hit it big, their record company tried to create shadow female groups like the Honeys with a similar sound. The Supremes began as the Primettes, a sister group to the male Primes, who would later become part of the Temptations.
Still, without Connie Francis and Brenda Lee, the Rosie and the Originals, the Chantels, Bobbettes and Shirelles, or Kathy Young, Barbara George, Jan Bradley, Lesley Gore, Mary Wells and dozens more, the first decade of rock ’n’ roll would have been different and less than it was.
That’s the world into which Faithfull wandered, and when it got tangled up with her own demons, she spent much of the next 15 years sparring with problems like heroin addiction. She did a bit of singing here and there in the 1970s before her unlikely acclaimed comeback album Broken English in 1979, but even then she was still several years away from escaping addiction.
She did that with no Oldham or Jagger to escort her to the head of the line. No babe factor. Just music.
Broken English tells raw stories in a raw voice, a kind of flip side to the melodic Carole King ballads that had dominated much of the ’70s. She recorded in rock styles, country styles, blues styles, jazz styles, pop styles and cabaret styles, picking and writing songs that collectively filled in her story.
On her 1965 debut album she recorded Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” in a pleasant voice that suggested little connection to the song’s dark imagery. When she returned to the song in 2018 on Negative Capability, her bird-like tone long gone, she found a lot more in it. She also found more in several re-recordings of “As Tears Go By” — which, as she told Jim Farber of the New York Daily News in 1987, had a kind of prematurity when she sung it at 18.
Her 1996 live album, 20th Century Blues, had her singing the likes of “Pirate Jenny,” “Mack the Knife” and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” As time went by, she followed other cabaret singers like Mabel Mercer in sometimes reciting rather than singing certain passages.
The 1985 release of Rich Kids, a country-ish album she recorded in 1971, showed that even back in her younger days — she still hadn’t turned 25 — she could shed the “As Tears Go By” voice and fill out songs like Crystal Gayle’s “Wrong Road Again” or Kitty Wells’s “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” which was an answer record to “The Wild Side of Life,” a famous country song about seductive women luring good men into doing bad things.
Marianne Faithfull got into the game partly through a combination of genetics and circumstance. She embedded herself in it by living the life and knowing the players. By the end she was still there because she had proven she could deliver the music.
