Back in the day, when Marianne was Mick Jagger’s girlfriend and an inspiration to various songwriters (The Hollies’ Carrie Anne was about her, as was the Stones’ You Can’t Always Get What You Want), she was a budding pop star, recording hit albums and a chart-topping single with the Jagger/Richards composition As Tears Go By:
Look at her, the classic Sixties girl, with her long straight hair and bangs, looking towards a bright and exciting future. Then the wheels started to come off. First came the humiliation of being caught up in the infamous police raid that saw Keith and Mick arrested and almost sent to prison, before public backlash saved their bacon (see the famous William Rees‑Mogg Times editorial, Who Breaks a Butterfly on the Wheel?** ). The tabloid press was only too happy to inform the world that the cops discovered young Marianne stark naked save for a fur rug she’d wrapped around herself, which at the time was supposed to be as shocking as it was titillating, and doubtless caused her a great deal of emotional distress. Maybe by then she was already addicted to the drugs that soon took over her life, heroin mostly, and by 1970, having attempted suicide the previous year, she was well down the road to becoming strung out, anorexic, and homeless, just another casualty of the debauched Sixties rock & roll scene, forgotten, apparently never to be heard from again, an object lesson in the dangers of falling into orbit around the likes of the Rolling Stones. Various friends tried to get her help, and she at least made it off the street, albeit by squatting in an abandoned flat without water or power, and she even pulled herself together for long enough to release an album, but it wasn’t looking good. It’s a wonder she survived.
When she re-emerged in 1979, releasing the appropriately titled Broken English, the dewey-eyed Sixties girl was long gone, and so was her voice, all but ruined by years of smoking and drug abuse. Yet her raspy, uneven delivery worked well for the new material, songs like the scorchingly bitter Why D’Ya Do It? (whoo boy, that one practically strips paint), and today’s selection, The Ballad of Lucy Jordan, the story of a bored housewife who wakes up one morning, aged 37, to realize her life is empty, and her youthful dreams are now forever out of reach. Written by Shel Silverstein, it was originally released in 1974 by, of all groups, Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show (they of Cover of the Rolling Stone fame), but I first heard it in the oddball Swedish black comedy Montenegro, in which Faithfull’s version served as an apt soundtrack while bored housewife Susan Anspach stood at the end of a wharf taking stock of her life. Not everybody liked it, on first impression – I suppose the critics were hoping for the Marianne they remembered – but it charted well, and gradually won recognition as a classic, showing up repeatedly in film, most prominently in Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise. It’s an unusual and deceptively dark little number, really, pleasingly melodic and sounding almost upbeat with its staccato synthesizer accompaniment (played by Steve Winwood), yet portraying a woman in the throes of a mental breakdown leading, in the interpretation of many listeners, to suicide.
Faithfull didn’t think so. Her sense of the ambiguous closing lines was that the woman goes insane and is committed to a mental hospital, where she finally gets her ride through Paris in a sports car via drugged hallucination. Which, you know, may not strike you as all that happier an ending. Montenegro didn’t finish on a cheery note either. After an interlude in the company of a bunch of wacky Yugoslav ex-pats, Anspach’s character returns home, all smiles, to poison her family. Come to think of it, the girls end up driving off a cliff at the end of Thelma and Louise. All very grim, but fitting. You couldn’t use a song like this in a film about everything turning out just fine in the happy lives of contented women, could you?
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the needlefish 