8

An Interview With Marianne Faithfull

“I had this thing that I wasn’t good enough because I’m white.”

At her hotel on East Fifty-third Street in New York City, I met Marianne Faithfull. We walked one block east to 11 Nido, an Italian restaurant, where we were given a quiet corner table and served an exquisite meal, although I cannot remember what we ate. Within minutes of sitting down with Marianne, I was completely caught up in the rhythms of her being – her energy, pain, strength, anger; her edges.

A star in 1964 – when she recorded Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Andrew Oldham’s ‘As Tears Go By’ – Marianne saw her career crash at the end of that decade as a result of a lethal combination of drink, drugs, and being a woman in The Rolling Stones. She returned in 1979 with the brilliant album Broken English, and the years that followed culminated with her 1990 album Blazing Away, a moving and joyous testament of her life. She has just completed a year-long international tour for that album.

When we left the restaurant after this interview, appreciative waiters applauded Marianne, who went her own way outside. I had to sit down on a stoop for several minutes to collect myself before proceeding. Marianne Faithfull is a very intense person. She was right there all the time I was with her.

VICTOR BOCKRIS: Do audiences react differently to you now than in the past?

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: Yes, they do. I feel very much, especially in America, that they’ve been with me through everything. People have seen me through these things. Their love and acceptance has worked, and now I’m really able to give it back; I’m capable.

BOCKRIS: Small halls and clubs like the Bottom Line are such good places for you. There are so many people who get stuck in that bigger scene, and then they lose contact with the audience.

FAITHFULL: Well, I’m determined not to do that. I need a place where I can see the people and where they can really see me. It’s so important that I never try to compete in any way with the male rock thing – whatever that is. I hate it. I hate those concerts. I don’t go to them myself. I want to do things that I would like to see.

BOCKRIS: Changing the subject to songwriting, was ‘Why D’Ya Do It?’ written with Heathcote Williams?

FAITHFULL: It’s a poem, and he wrote it. I went to see him and asked him if he had anything for me. He brought this out and said, “I’ve got this, but I really would like Tina Turner to do it.” And I said, “Will you read it?” And he did. I just laughed. “Are you kidding? You think Tina Turner would do this? You’re out of your mind. I’ll do it. You won’t get anyone else to do this, so let me have it.” And he did.

BOCKRIS: You once said that ‘Sister Morphine’ was the most redeeming song you’d ever performed.

FAITHFULL: God.

BOCKRIS: How was ‘Sister Morphine’ actually written?

FAITHFULL: Mick Jagger had the tune and was playing it around the house we lived in in London, in Cheyne Walk, in the Sixties. I never would have imposed myself on the tune if he had done anything with it. But it never seemed to happen, and I got to like the tune. Then I got impatient, so I sat down and wrote the words.

BOCKRIS: Did Keith Richards write the music?

FAITHFULL: No. Keith Richards didn’t have anything to do with it, as such. What he did, which is good, was write to Allen Klein [ex-manager of The Rolling Stones] to tell him that I had written the words; otherwise, I would not have gotten any of the money. But what I want now is the credit.

BOCKRIS: Why didn’t you get the credit? Was that just the way things worked in those days? The Stones put only their names on the material?

FAITHFULL: You’d have to ask Mick Jagger that. It’s an odd thing. I wrote the words, I did the work; why didn’t I get the credit?

BOCKRIS: Did you make formal attempts to get it?

FAITHFULL: Well, I don’t know if I did, actually. It’s only slowly that I’ve come to realize that I deserved the credit. I know I wrote the song, but I was in such a lowly place that I was just pleased when I got the money. That pleased me for a long time. Then I realized, This is mad. I should also have the credit. On my record, of course, it says, ‘Jagger/Richards/Faithfull’. I don’t know what to do, because I don’t want to see Mick Jagger, and I don’t want to ask him for anything. I don’t think I should. I think I should just get the credit if I did the work. It’s crazy.

BOCKRIS: Why did Keith write the letter to Allen Klein? Why didn’t Mick Jagger write it?

FAITHFULL: Are you mad?

BOCKRIS: It’s interesting that Richards did that.

FAITHFULL: Yes, of course. Richards is … He didn’t go as far as he might have; if he’d done the right thing he’d have said, “Give her the money and the credit.” Of course he couldn’t do that.

BOCKRIS: Do you feel that when you perform songs by Lennon and ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’, by Dylan, that you are collaborating with the songwriter?

FAITHFULL: In a way, because I do change it. Just by doing it. I feel very close to the people who wrote these songs. I must admit I feel they wrote them for me. I do feel that they are mine.

BOCKRIS: Well, what about ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’?

FAITHFULL: That’s definitely mine.

BOCKRIS: Nico’s story, of course, is that Dylan wrote that song for her.

FAITHFULL: Well, I expect he did. I don’t care. But actually it’s mine. I once went to an Otis Redding concert in London. I went with Keith Richards, and it was a wonderful show. It was announced that Redding was going to sing a song that he had written, and he sang ‘Satisfaction’. Incredibly brilliant. We went backstage, me and Keith Richards – I don’t call these people Keith or Mick anymore, I give them their full names – and I said to Redding, “How could you say that you wrote ‘Satisfaction’?” And it was fascinating. Otis Redding insisted, and did not back down, that he wrote it. Now, that’s not similar to my situation with ‘Sister Morphine’, but it is a bit how I feel about all sorts of other things. And I believe that he was right; I understand what he meant.

BOCKRIS: You are compared with Edith Piaf and Lotte Lenya, but neither of them were English.

FAITHFULL: The reason, and it’s quite valid, is because of my mother. You see me and you see how my accent is – I’m very English. But actually my mother is Austro-Hungarian and straight from that tradition. My whole cultural background is Europe, not England. My mother danced in Berlin just before the war, saw Max Reinhardt; and my uncle, her brother, knew Brecht and Weill. As a young dancer my mother wasn’t great friends with them, but she knew them.

BOCKRIS: Would she tell you about them?

FAITHFULL: Oh, yes. But then I got completely caught up in America. Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Billie Holiday were my goddesses. And it caused me a lot of pain, because I had this thing that I wasn’t good enough because I’m white. I didn’t know what to do about that. It’s terrible, hating yourself for being you. And then I discovered country music, and that helped, because I realized there is white soul. There are white groups, and you can do it if you’re white. So I calmed down a bit. Then slowly I began including European things and realizing that they too were white blues and white soul. There is a lineage. And I fit in. And of the English singers, the one that I loved is Ruth Etting.

BOCKRIS. Who would you say are your greatest three or four influences as a vocalist?

FAITHFULL: Billie Holiday, John Lennon, Hank Williams, and Piaf.

BOCKRIS: Does the British culture of the Forties and Fifties explain the brilliant explosion of music that happened in Britain in the early Sixties?

FAITHFULL: It was so repressed; it wasn’t like that in America at all. Marilyn Monroe and Lenny Bruce. Charlie Parker. There were a lot of things going on. We didn’t have shit.

BOCKRIS: Do you think that the music of the Sixties was predominantly a working-class explosion.

FAITHFULL: It was wonderful. That was the best thing about it. I remember being on tour, my first tour. I was seventeen, a silly little middle-class girl, and so arrogant. I was just so grand you wouldn’t believe it, grand as only a beautiful seventeen-year-old can be. I thought I was too good for anything. And there I was in this bus with these guys [Faithfull performed alone but toured with three or four bands, including The Hollies]. They were charming, they were from Manchester – and now they’re all great geniuses, Graham Nash and all these people. But they were actually the first human beings I had met, apart from my mum, that is. And my brother was a human being.

BOCKRIS: I remember the grayness of that time, when one could burst into tears spontaneously, just walking around England, particularly on a Sunday.

FAITHFULL: Well, we all experienced that directly, in those times, on those tours. They were really hard work, and of course there were no days off. We worked on Sundays. And there were all these laws – you couldn’t do this and you couldn’t do that. We couldn’t get our work done because these stupid fucks were doing this stuff. [English licensing laws required halls and bars to close early on Sundays, and local police enforced them.] You’d hear the roadies and the band going on about it, in a very normal way, and it was incredible, really.

BOCKRIS: Jonathan Cott quotes you as saying that you are firmly resisting the “long tradition of female singers who immolated themselves on the altar of their art.”

FAITHFULL: Well, that’s very important; I’m very conscious of that. I’ve found that when you are in a real state like I was, the question is, can therapy damage your art? It’s been a problem ever since therapy began. Mary-Louise von Franz, who was Jung’s student, talks about this fear that the artist has of therapy and immature work. Her thing is that the great healing force for this kind of immaturity is work. And this is what people like me, like anyone else in that state, can’t take. They can’t bear the thought of a disciplined work regime. And yet this is the one thing that will really help you. And then she says that it is very common for neurotics to be writing about their own problems. They get an opportunity to work them out. But what happens is that they never do. There it is, you fuck it up again, and you have to go back to the beginning. Then you keep writing about the same thing again and again, and you never get past that. This is where therapy can help. She says the most interesting thing is that there are enough pseudo-artists in the world. If therapy is going to destroy somebody’s art it may not have been such great art anyway. And good therapy will not affect it at all. It won’t make it better and it won’t make it worse. The artist will work past therapy and go on. I accept that. If what I do could be crushed by therapy, then it wasn’t worth doing.

BOCKRIS: There are so many young girls these days who aspire to be pop stars. What advice would you give to a young girl thinking she might go for this?

FAITHFULL: Don’t count on fame – that’s not the point. It’s not important. The celebrity and the glamour come naturally. That part is simple: you just get a make-up artist and a stylist and a publicist. The really important bit is the commitment to life, the commitment to people. And to the work involved. Madonna is a highly disciplined, serious artist. Trust on a very deep level that everything will be O.K. And don’t despair. The great tragedies, the big self-destructive tragedies, happen in a split second, when the human being gives up and thinks, I can’t do it. It’s too much for me, I’m gonna cop, I’m gonna check out. That is an illusion. It’s actually a hallucination. It’s not true; it’s gonna be O.K. Just hang on.

BOCKRIS: The Blazing Away album was described as “a form of autobiography as resonant as any literary equivalent.”

FAITHFULL: [Laughs] It was?

BOCKRIS: That was the press release. Were you consciously putting together a set of songs to make an autobiography?

FAITHFULL: This is hard to talk about without getting very pretentious. The questions for me were, ‘Why did all this happen?’ ‘What is all this about?’ ‘What have I got here?’ ‘What is it?’ Then suddenly came the question, ‘What have I got to give?’ And people had been writing to me, asking me to write my autobiography. And I said no. But I knew that there is something in my story – people have told me that it is such a transcendent thing, although I wouldn’t call it that myself. I wanted to turn all that into something life-enhancing, because I have quite a bit of offstage guilt about being such a negative role model. I’m forty-four now, my son is twenty-four, and I’ve had continual criticism from old-guard addicts who feel I’ve let their side down and all that shit. And I’ve had to question my responsibility to others and the example I’ve set.

BOCKRIS: One could say the album is an autobiography of your image, perhaps, more than an autobiography of you, yourself.

FAITHFULL: Yes. And that is what I’d be much more comfortable with, because I’m very aware of that; I remember doing it. I remember making a decision to project a persona for people to have. I’m not saying this was wrong and this was right. I’m not going to judge it myself. That’s why I don’t want to say that it’s transcendent, it’s degraded, blah-blah-blah. I am very cautious about saying there is any kind of message. I know, because I’ve heard it, that there is something in that record. I call it a vibration. In my actual life, personally, there is a lot of grace. There really is. I know that, and that must have spilled over into the work.

BOCKRIS: The way you deliver your material has an edge of joy to it that gives it a positive blast.

FAITHFULL: But you see, that grace has nothing to do with me. I think that as human beings we are just different aspects of God at play. We all have it. All we need to do, really, is clear the channel, that passage, and it shines right through. It’s a radiance that all human beings have. All I’ve done is just clear the channel. And I reflect it back. I’m just giving it back. That’s the job.

Susan Sontag revealed a characteristic openness to new experiences and generations by granting me this interview to High Times. In going after unexpected subjects for the magazine I was often surprised by how many of them said they had agreed to do the interview because it was for High Times. They wanted to reach that generation. Luckily when the piece came out, although the magazine did blow up any quote she made about drugs, making her look like a major user when she hardly ever used them at all, Castro was on the cover. That went some way toward cooling the vibe when I delivered the magazine to her doorman.