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Tears go by as time goes by — 18 Comments

1. Ah, this English she is Broken.

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_English_(album)

2. you blame heroin and cocaine and not the social changes of anything you can do i can do better, even if i am equal to you? ha! if it weren’t for the zeitgeist she would not have had a career despite those things that others would copy so we would have no heroes… (not heroines… heh)

   Except that, instead of overdosing in some motel room, she returned in 1979 with Broken English, an angry, haunted, desperate album from an artist who, with good reason, was seen as being genuinely every bit as angry, haunted, and desperate as her persona. With a perfectly fitted voice cracked from cigarettes and booze and more, Faithfull was old before her time. So old that, on that album and since then, she’s sounded timeless, as ancient and ageless and, yes, feminist as the Earth Mother evoked on Broken English‘s “Witches’ Song”.

   And “Why’d Ya Do It” was the culmination of her artistic persona, her life, and the rising feminism of the times. Though the written song transcribes a philanderer’s obscenely clever retorts to his shrewish interrogator (“When I stole a twig from our little nest / And gave it to a bird with nothing in her beak / I had my balls in my brains put into a vice / And twisted around for a whole fucking week”. And that’s just literally the start), Faithfull pits her bravura performance against the cool, cold wit of the chauvinist narrator and, by tearing through his wit and spitting out his rejoinders, makes his one-liners seem as tasteless as they are. Through sheer force of will, Faithless hijacks the song and transforms it into a feminist rant. At her best and in her defining historic moment, Faithfull was a woman of her own times responding to eternal situations and passions. Or vice versa: an Earth Mother, yes, but an Earth Mother who could understand the desperation and fury of suburban housewives and leftist terrorists. A high goddess who could understand how it felt to be betrayed by, not Zeus, but a mere lowlife lothario.

   and

   “Feminism is the best thing to come out of the ’60’s.”— Marianne Faithfull

   and

   Faithfull’s star was born in the 60s as the girlfriend of Mick Jagger, and her checkered journey from virginal songstress to homeless junkie to feminist powerhouse has only added to her mystique. – Marianne Faithfull: Life Force The Rock Survivor and Fashion Icon Celebrates On New Album Horses and High Heels

   and

   She is a magical pixie-girl whose very attention to you could fix all the world’s ills and make you feel, for a brief moment, as though you might be special, too. She was adored and coveted but she was not dominated by that objectification. Marianne Faithfull transcended the shackles of masculine appreciation and carved a place at the table for herself. She refused to abide the meekness of Paris and instead stole his sword to wade into the battle of Troy.

   So, last night I happened upon a mention of “Sister Morphine” and realized I had started to forget about this one-time fetishist fulcrum and feminist frenemy.

   Furthermore, perhaps against the clamor and rattling of phallic rulership, the emergence of a woman as a comet of cool should be admired with even greater awe.

   and for fun…

   Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_von_Sacher-Masoch

   familiar to you? doubt it…

   was an Austrian writer and journalist, who gained renown for his romantic stories of Galician life. The term masochism is derived from his name.

   Sacher-Masoch is the great-great-uncle to the British singer and actress Marianne Faithfull on her mother’s side, the Viennese Baroness Eva Erisso.

   and a bit of a MASOChist herself… no?

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Erisso her mother had ballet in her… 🙂

   At the outbreak of World War II, Erisso returned to her parents’ home in Vienna and lived there for the duration of the war. Despite their Jewish ancestry, Erisso and her mother were afforded a degree of protection from the Nazis due to Artur’s World War I military record and his status as a well-regarded Austrian writer (under the pseudonym Michael Zorn). Having opposed Hitler since the Anschluss, and witnessing atrocities against Jews in the streets of Vienna, Erisso and her parents used their home to conceal Socialist pamphlets, narrowly evading detection by the Gestapo

   so another socialist makes it to the top in an era of selecting people for the media and others to follow…

   funny how that keeps happening if you take the time to trace families… and history

3. oh, Major Robert Glynn Faithfull was also a spy, and whose father invented a frigidity device…
   \
   Marianne’s father, Major Dr. Robert Glynn Faithfull, was a British spy whose own father had invented a sexual device called the Frigidity Machine. Marianne’s first exposure to unconventional lifestyles was at her father’s literary commune at Braziers Park, Oxfordshire, until he abandoned the family when she was 6. Her mother then raised the girl like “one of her cats”, until young Marianne was sent off as a border to St. Joseph’s Convent. There, she became a member of the Progress Theatre’s student group, and by 13, she was acting Shakespeare in a local rep.

   At 17, she fell in love with John Dunbar, a gallery owner, whose, gallery was a popular venue of the music scene. Attending the Rolling Stones’ launch party there, she first met Mick Jagger and was ‘discovered’ by the Stones’ Rasputin-like manager, Andrew Oldham, who described her as “a pale, blonde, retiring, chaste teenager looking like the Mona Lisa, except with a great body”.

   She told the Musical Express “My first move was to get a Rolling Stone as a boyfriend. I slept with three and decided the lead singer was the best bet”.

   [read about the life of Georgia O’Keeffe not unsimilar in that they end up famous after having sex with the connected, and sharing a socialist mentality]

   but do we remember the ‘the Mars Bar Girl’?

4. Marianne Faithfull, like Angela Davis, always puts me in mind of one of my late father’s pithy characterizations: “going through life pushing on doors marked ‘pull.'”

5. Artfldgr: fascinating information about Marianne Faithfull.

   I have a memory from a high school dance of dancing with my then-girlfriend to “As Tears Go By” while she sang along.

6. Pretty girl.

7. Goodness, hearing the mature Marianne Faithful voice was shocking …like she’s morphed into a singing Kathleen Turner.

8. She sums it up (from the Wiki link): ‘The 60-year-old said: “I’m not prepared to be 70 and absolutely broke. I realised last year that I have no safety net at all and I’m going to have to get one. So I need to change my attitude to life, which means I have to put away 10 per cent every year of my old age. I want to be in a position where I don’t have to work. I should have thought about this a long time ago but I didn’t.” ‘

   Ahh, yes, figuring it out when you’re all used up and out of gas. The Baby Boomers are a few yrs behind her in the realization of lives squandered, opportunities discarded and unretrievable.

9. Many years ago I thought the Stones’ version was far superior to MF’s. Her only claim to fame was mucking fike jagger. Too bad you wasted your life Marianne, but I shed no tears over your foolish decisions and daily I watch the children play.

10. not fike but fick…. getting a bit old me self.

11. Faithful is one of the first born of the Baby Boom (1945-1964-ish). Fortunately, many of us still have time to prepare and have lived reasonable, productive lives. Unbelievable as it seems, a lot of us never used drugs or appeared naked in public.

    I was only a girl in 1965 and the singer a young adult. I adored her for being so beautiful, poised, and hip. Now you couldn’t pay me to have lived her life, but I respect this survivor (and her voice) of the “all boys together” chauvinism of the liberal 60s. Ironic, isn’t it.

12. Unbelievable as it seems, a lot of us never used drugs or appeared naked in public.

    Of course, we’re not done yet …

13. Just another jerk who wasted their life and now feels the need to blame others for all her mistakes.

14. Gee, what I learn here. I knew such people were out there, but this is the first time I’ve heard the name as far as I know. Guess my life has been rather sheltered. But then I have had no reason to know such a life story. There’s too much sadness, sham and failure anyway. Too bad, she’s all used up and has no retirement funds, but I’m not about to worry about it.

15. A beautiful song.

    At least she was too preoccupied with sex and drugs to try to destroy the capitalistic system in the way many of her contemporaries did.

16. Ah, yes, 1965: It Was a Very Good Year.

    (I tried to find the Kingston Trio’s original 1961 version, but failed to find it available on the web, so we will just have to get by with Frankie’s more famous 1965 rendition.)

17. I would like to recommend the album on which she first recorded this, uh, down-tuned version of “As Tears Go By”: 1987’s Strange Weather. It’s a great album (info here. I haven’t heard all her work, but this is my favorite. I’m tempted to use the word “masterpiece.” Broken English was a little much for me.

    I don’t have a source for this, but a friend told me that Mick Jagger once complained about everybody blamed him for leading MF into bad ways, when it was more like the other way around. I was willing to believe that after reading her autobiography, Faithfull ten years or so ago. She was crazy. I don’t know why I read it, and was a little sorry that I did–a sad, sad record of destructive folly.

18. I shed a tear watching and I am a military officer.

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