As Years Go By

 

 

I know this makes me a true geezer, but I still remain on an ancient Yahoo account for a lot of my e-mails. I check the box a few times a day, partially due to a ton of political junk that now arrives in my box hourly that I just go and clean out, but also for the rare stuff of interest I occasionally discover in this mail box.  On a recent trip to the Yahoo box, I was surprised that a news feed popped up a banner story on Marianne Faithfull commenting on her old Rolling Stones liaisons this time with Keith Richards. I thought those Wild Horses had been ridden and beaten to death over the decades, but I guess not if the participants remain as the high profile marks for our media of current click bait fate.This story came out just a week or two before a sad reminder of what the years ultimately reduce us to when it was reported that Marianne Faithfull checked in to a London retirement/assisted living facility this past month.

One of the true iconic characters of the 1960s, Ms. Faithfull got me thinking on how she has managed to not just survive all these years but how she thrived through them to this day.

If you want to make something you need a spark. Art, architecture, literature, music, war and widgets of all makes and sizes arrive through some form of inspiration. When I think of major inspirations throughout recorded history I think of all the gods & goddesses invoked from Isis, Shiva, Zeus, Allah and Jehovah with all their varieties of flavors first and foremost for inspirational assistance in getting tasks done. All those texts, exhortations, all those various scribblings and paint strokes on whatever-surface-would-do, all those notes played or sung and all those confrontations of conflict around the world going back thousands of years owe a great deal to the “Devotional” category of inspiration for moving our lazy butts to do something.

 

A subset of the Devine inspiration going back a long ways has been the elusive and ethereal Muse. Possibly, at least in the western world, Homer’s entreaty to Calliope for creative genius to guide his hand for both The Iliad and The Odyssey remains the most famous. Virgil, many years later, called on this same muse for The Aeneid.  Calliope for many historians remains as the chosen muse of these giants of literary achievement, although John Milton chose a different muse, Urania(muse of Astronomy and one of Calliope’s eight other sisters), for his epic Paradise Lost in the 17^th Century. And yet for Homer, Virgil and Milton the motivation of the main characters centered on the actions driven by the central woman in each poem. Helen, Dido and Eve truly set the tables for the poetic feasts of these epics.

We’ve come a long way from the days of epic poetry to today’s humble little world of pop music filled with poetic smatterings of love and hate, or the various takes on the current states of recent events. However, one constant for so many years in the pop/rock arena as the creative inspiration in so many songs and public commentary has been the varied nod to muses which motivated the artists.  Over my time on the planet Marianne Faithfull has been The Muse of choice for so many of the musicians I’ve followed. But as the years wore on her own voice began to match in quality the many great songs she inspired.

 

I think back to some obscure weekday night some 57 years ago being transfixed by a young blonde on NBC’s Hullabaloo Show singing As Tears Go By. This was a Rolling Stones’ penned tune they would not record until months later on the album December’s Children that this sweet and breathtakingly beautiful girl named Marianne Faithfull sang to perfection.  She became the It Girl of my young teen dreams and fancies and a big driver to get better on my new electric guitar.  G-Am-C-D and so on……

In the ensuing four years Marianne was married to Nicholas Dunbar, had a child and then divorced the man. She, also, had several minor pop hits, appeared in a few pop culture films of the day and began a tumultuous relationship with all things Rolling Stones, befriending Keith Richards’ girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, and becoming Mick Jagger’s lover. Then the drug bust happened for marijuana possession that was highly publicized with Marianne wrapped only in a bearskin throw when police and papers arrived. She seemed everywhere with Jagger through  the late 1960s appearing by his side in Morocco on a vacation and then with the Mahareshi Yogi and The Beatles during their India sabbatical in 1968, all the while contributing in “spirit” to a number Stones classics along the way to the end of the decade. 

The songs about or attributed to her influence during this period range from Sympathy For The Devil, No Expectations, Live With Me, You Can't Always Get What You Want, Wild Horses, Let It Bleed, You've Got The Blues, Bitch and Sway. She embodied the spirit of, what many argue, are the 3 best albums in the Rollings Stones illustrious canon of recorded music, Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers.  

By the start of the 1970s Marianne Faithfull had said a bitter goodbye to Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and the Rolling Stones circus. A long and protracted dispute took place over a songwriting credit for the song, Sister Morphine, which Faithfull wrote with Jagger. It took years to resolve the royalties and credit issue and for much of the 1970s she faded into a life of addiction and withdrawal. It seemed The Muse was dead, certainly for the Stones that glimmer had been lost. And yet, as the 1970s decade ended who popped up with a new voice and attitude but Marianne Faithfull. 

Her late 1979 released album, Broken English, launched a successful rebirth to her career and remains to this day an important and profound record to hear. Shel Silverstein's The Ballad of Lucy Jordan with John Lennon's Working Class Hero composition stand out for me along with the title track for piercing and provocative interpretations by Faithfull of brilliant and distinct songwriting. The scorching and X-rated song, Why'd Ya Do It remains a harrowing 6 minute opus on infidelity. The song, although many interpreted it being about her time with Mick Jagger, was actually written for Tina Turner regarding her relationship with Ike Turner. Turner declined  to record and release it. 

 

Since the debut of Broken English, Marianne Faithfull has released 16 albums, which makes a career total of 22 since Andrew Loog Oldham "discovered" the young lady. I remain especially fond of a Child's Adventure, Kissin Time and Vagabond Ways as adjuncts to Broken English. Marianne Faithfull at 75 years old still remains a social force.What a life.

As a closing little paragraph or two here, I offer up another Muse of those days and a bit beyond with the mention of Pamela Des Barres, the inspiration for Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous screenplay and movie. I just finished reading her incredible memoir, I'm With The Band: Confessions Of A Groupie, which is now 35 years old and still rocking the book business.Here is the story of a driven woman searching for ways to standout, achieve success, attain status and in love with the culture and stars of her day. 

 

I am no fan of the term groupie, but I understand how the word was coined. Pamela Miller in those 1960s & 1970s days was the supreme groupie, who astounded me over the pages of this book with the cast of characters she knew (and most biblically) in the world's entertainment scene. This book and story is a treasure trove of places and people populating Southern California during the 1960s and 1970s. Great portraits of people leaving their large or small impressions on the City of Angels and beyond fill the pages. From Frank Zappa and his wife Gail to Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page the book is a who's who of the music and movie world of those days and the places they frequented. 

San Francisco and London have always been the typical locales that get all the press for the cool and crazy or sad and violent pop culture days of hippiedom and rock excess. I loved this book because Los Angeles finally gets its due as the main driver for so much of what really went down back 40 to 60 years ago and remains in the consciousness of so many to this day. If you want a fun and informative reminder or historical reference of the counter culture of those long ago days I'm With The Band: Confessions Of A Groupie truly delivers the goods. It's a little salacious, which I love.

Thanks for stopping by, this past month was a busy one. Hope we catch up again soon.