Song of the Day 1/31: Marianne Faithfull, “As Tears Go By”
Some people – old ones – will remember Marianne Faithfull as Mick Jagger’s girlfriend from London’s Swinging ’60s. She was 17 and just starting out as a folk singer when Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham “discovered” her at a party. Oldham, who fashioned himself the British Phil Spector, launched her career by giving her one of Jagger and Keith Richards’ earliest compositions, “As Tears Goes By.” (He also earned a writing credit by changing the title’s noun from “time” to “tears.”) The resulting single reached the Top 10 in England and No. 22 in Billboard.
Faithfull had a string of singles that made the UK charts, but by 1967 she had moved into acting while playing muse to Jagger – she inspired “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and “Wild Horses,” and helped write “Sister Morphine,” though she had to go to court years later to get credit. She had never tried heroin at that point, but after she broke up with Jagger in 1970 she fell apart. In the early ’70s she was addicted to the drug and living on the streets, a cautionary tale about the price of fame.
Yet by the end of the decade she made a remarkable comeback, riding the punk-inspired New Wave with the critically acclaimed 1979 album “Broken English.” The years took a heavy toll on her voice, but its raspiness conveyed raw emotion better than ever. The bluntness of the title track, an anti-war song, set the tone for the rest of her career, but the album’s hit – her last single to reach the British chart – was her cover of a song by poet/author/composer Shel Silverstein. Originally recorded by Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan,” a tale of a housewife’s nervous breakdown, famously played at the conclusion of “Thelma and Louise.”
As years went by Faithfull recorded with everybody from John Prine to Damon Albarn to Metallica, and recorded albums everything from jazz to Kurt Weill in addition to rock. She’s been hailed as an inspiration by scores of younger artists, and as someone noted, she did a lot more with the last 40 years of her career than the Rolling Stones did. She re-recorded her first hit twice, first in 1987 for “Strange Weather,” then again in a similar arrangement for her penultimate LP, “Negative Capability” in 2018.
