— David Hepworth
Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" was written in the spring of 1965 following a trip to England. Obviously there is much more to it but on the surface it's about a young woman who has everything only to squander it all and have to crawl her way out of the hole she dug for herself. Amongst all the acclaim that it garnered and all its myriad themes, it also looked ahead to the wastelands of the sixties rock 'n' roll casualty — and at a time when pop was still relatively banal, with John Lennon's "Help!" being virtually the only other number that looked for some deeper meaning. All those rock stars who would one day crash and burn were still wide-eyed, milk-fed youngsters with nothing but dreams and aspirations.
Marianne Faithfull has to date never recorded "Like a Rolling Stone", perhaps because it's a little too on the nose (and for multiple reasons at that). Nevertheless, this Dylan classic could have easily been written about her. Her mother came from Austro-Hungarian nobility stock and her father was a noted scholar and intelligence operative so she should have had a life of privilege ahead of her. Though her childhood was marred by illness and less comfortable living conditions, she still had the connections to move in exclusive circles. By the time she was nineteen she had already married, signed a recording contract, had a baby, become a pop star and had separated from her husband. Such activity at a tender age would be too much for most of us to handle but the remainder of the sixties only saw the whirlwind life continue. Just the fact that she was dating Mick Jagger alone could have caused her to spiral out of control. In retrospect, it shouldn't be much of a surprise that everything would soon go wrong. Her career petered out, she got hooked on smack, lost custody of her little boy, developed anorexia nervosa and was homeless for two years. Yeah, it's probably understandable that she attempted suicide.
Faithfull's late-seventies comeback was hardly storybook. Her masterpiece Broken English was met with positive reviews but it didn't return her to the the Top 40 and she still had years of personal problems ahead of her. Yet, her artistry begins here. Confessional and raw like nothing else since Lennon's Plastic Ono Band album from 1970, it's no wonder she chose "Working Class Hero" as one of two cover versions for it. Neither one of them was ever working class but that's precisely what makes their respective interpretations interesting. Lennon's original is soaked in bitterness while Faithfull's is all about desperation. A blue blood having to scrounge for everything, her only hope is to be a working class hero: it's something to be and there was little else for her.
"The Ballad of Lucy Jordan" was the other cover from Broken English and it was selected as its maiden single. It's no more commercial than any of the album's seven other tracks but it was fortunate enough to have been sourced from Dr Hook, who were just days away from having a number one single in the UK with "When You're in Love with a Beautiful Woman". Composer and poet Shel Silverstein wrote a lot of songs for the Medicine Show so he may have figured it would work sung from a man's perspective. Ray Sawyer's quivering vocal isn't ideal but I suppose putting all the sympathy on oneself at the expense of Lucy Jordan's story is one way to go; he did all he could for her and now he's more broken than she ever was.
Faithfull's reading is, appropriately enough, much more faithful to who the song is about and who it would have been aimed at. Though not quite thirty-seven (she was almost thirty-three, arguably no longer an advanced age for women in pop: Debbie Harry and Anni-Frid from ABBA were both just a year older and Fleetwood Mac's Christine McVie was thirty-six; that said, none of them ever sounded as old and world-weary as she did), she feels as if she's at an age in which youthful dreams have vanished and all that is left is to make do with the lonely existence of a bored housewife ("she could clean the house for hours or rearrange the flowers / Or run naked through the shady street screaming all the way"). Only a final descent into madness and suicide allows for a glimmer of joy to come through as the protagonist finally gets to ride "along through Paris with the warm wind in her hair".
Refusing to play the victim of everything that befell her over the past decade, Faithfull is a much stronger woman than she is typically credited. Yet, the troubled life continued and she admitted to David Hepworth in the following issue of Smash Hits that "using herself as the main attraction of a freak show" was part of an emotional game she was playing. This may ruin Broken English as a work of searing honesty and pain but it only revs up just what a complex and fascinating character she's always been. She was a casualty of sixties excess yet refused to point fingers. She was a poor little rich girl who played folk songs in chic bars in 1964 yet pulled off a post-punk/new wave sound with far more conviction than Jagger and the Stones managed on something like "Shattered" from their Some Girls album. She was the girl described in "Like a Rolling Stone" — and, damn it, she was going to tell everyone exactly how it feels.
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Also Reviewed This Fortnight
The Manhattan Transfer: "Birdland"
Much as I have tired of the comments section below YouTube music videos from the seventies and eighties filled with "I'm building a time machine: who's with me?", I must say that I don't fault the sentiment. It's a shame there isn't room in mainstream pop for a vocal jazz quartet like there used to be. Having said that, "Birdland" isn't great. Weather Report's original is extraordinary: beautifully played by all concerned and catchy as all hell. The Manhattan Transfer clearly love this Joe Zwainul composition but it becomes far too much of a celebration of their impeccable taste in jazz to take it seriously as a song. The lyrics of Jon Hendricks are like Stevie Wonder's "Sir Duke" dialed up to eleven. To be fair, I haven't been able to think up a lyrical theme that's any better so maybe they should have just scatted over the whole thing. "Birdland" is such a brilliant and sturdy number that they didn't manage to ruin it but neither did they do it any favours.
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