Just taking some time in the middle of my vacation to let you know I’m still alive. And of course nothing says ‘summer vacation funtimes’ like the irony of a girl still in her teens performing a plaintive ballad better suited for an embittered 45 year old. Marianne Faithfull would soon enough grow into the seen and done it all grande dame of decadence she is today, but she had already affected that particular persona as a 17 year old virgin. She just had to do all the things to fit the image she wanted, that’s all. She would be the last to deny that she was a little bit of a pretentious young thing in her day. It’s both radically inspiring and slightly idiotic of her to be so willing to make any sacrifice to become the tragic heroine she imagined herself to be. It was all well and good when Faithfull’s romantic interest in tragic heroines dovetailed with the public taste for beautiful pouty waifs, but as soon as she started doing unbeautiful controversial things, off the pedestal she went, with elegance. This is a very nice song we have here, but it’s definitely one of those works that gains its value in part from the understanding of its personal context. Faithfull’s work, most especially the early years, is best understood as the artistic record of an altogether radical act of identity creation.
What an appropriate coincidence, a Beatles song on the night of the big Paul McCartney show. Except for the fact that it’s a John Lennon song, that is. Not that I would put it past Sir Paul to whip this one out in tribute to John. Which would be magical. If any song has become a sort of de facto eulogy to all things Beatles, it’s this one. It’s almost been hammered into corny nostalgia oblivion, but for the saving grace of being genuinely brilliant. I’ve read that Lennon wrote the song with two people in mind – “Some are dead and some are living”. The dead one being founding Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe, who died tragically young and the living one John’s childhood friend Pete Shotton, author of the uproarious memoir John Lennon In My Life.
The Rolling Stones are today, after being in business for fifty years, basically their own corporation. You could say they’ve sold out, if that was still a valid idea, which it is not. You can praise them for their endless longevity or blame them for turning into a greedy, for-profit business outfit more than a real musical group. Either way, they’re here to stay, until every last one of them drops dead. With them being how they are, and us being used to them being that way, it’s easy to forget how much they shattered convention and changed society itself in just a few short years of being a thing. They pretty much germinated and perfected our collective image of what it means to be a rock’n'roll band. The looks, the attitude, the lifestyle, the licks, the drugs, the jets, the beautiful women, the bizarre deaths – every single band that has ever adopted any of those things took it from the Rolling Stones. From his hair to the tips of his boots, every guitarist wants to be Keith, and every frontman copies Mick from his eyeliner to his bulging pants. Yes, the Stones came to define many things in their time, and in 1967, with Their Satanic Majesties Request, they defined what it meant to fill an album with pure filler. At that time, with the three principles being very busy flouncing in and out of glamorous jails and courtrooms, The Stones had so little material prepared that they literally resorted to inserting found noises, such as prolonged snoring, in between tracks. Which was quite avant-garde of them, and would deserve praise if it hadn’t been so annoying. What could potentially have been a magnificent answer to Sgt Pepper sank under the weight of indifference. If every song had been a She’s A Rainbow or 200 Light Years, they would have shone those uppity Beatles what was what. As it were, those two songs were brilliant, a few others weirdly intersting, some where novelties, and one was written and performed by Bill Wyman. I happen to own a Bill Wyman solo album, which I have never listened to, purely for the collector’s satisfaction of it. I don’t know if aynone else who owns a Bill Wyman solo album has ever listened to it either. Wyman is, in his unassuming way, a quite weird and slightly creepy character, a compulsive womanizer who keeps files on his thousands of conquests and filled his autobiography with detailed accounts of the contents of his bank account. It’s a sign of the shambolic state of the Rolling Stones that the Glimmer Twins allowed him three minutes at the microphone. Which is not to bash Bill Wyman unduly; he still sends Christmas cards to all his old girlfriends. And his song isn’t bad either. It’s surreal and atmospheric, and fits entirely well into the mixed-up, tripped-out postcard from the dark side that is Satanic Majesties.
One of the highlights of the first years of Marianne Faithfull’s career. Even the most loving fans have to admit that in those years she made better contributions sartorially than she did musically. But although a lot of Faithfull’s early work is hopelessly twee, she did record enough outstanding songs to fill out at least one full album. Her eponymous debut album was almost completely. She quickly cemented an image, quite typical of the early sixties, as the virginal yet poised beyond her years convent girl who trilled slightly masochistic odes to chaste devotion. Such was the ideal image for young girls back then, I suppose. The wistful, dewy-eyed blonde pining for a presumably much older man who barely notices her. She woos him with vows of self-abnegation in return for just – please! – letting her hang around. Not exactly an empowering role model, then. Faithfull herself was never than person and she quickly grew frustrated with her romantic English-rose image. At the time she understandably didn’t view herself as an artist with a vision to share or a message to impart. She fell into a singing career quite by accident and she was happy enough to fall right back out of it. At the same time, being a particularly intelligent and highly educated person, she saw the need to undermine the phony and harmful pretty-picture image of herself. Which she undertook doing via her personal life, becoming overnight a reviled and controversial figure for her sinful lifestyle and later, drug addiction. It wasn’t until years later that she embraced herself as an artist and realized that she did have an avenue of expression besides making herself ugly. In a way, her journey into darkness was almost an act of performance art. She used her body as the means to express her disgust with the roles that were thrust upon her. As a young singer who had been groomed and dressed to appear a certain way – a patriarchy-pleasing submissive waif in lace peter pan collars – she didn’t feel she had a voice to express her real self, and resorted to expressing herself through self-destruction, culminating in a highly publicized suicide attempt. As a heroin addict with no money, no record contract and no more fame, she came back to singing, but on entirely her own terms. It was a dramatic and unique evolution, and a continual inspiration. Nonetheless, even knowing how manufactured and phony the image of Marianne Faithfull was in the early sixties, the music should still be judged by its own merits. Corny and sugary it could be, yes, but who could deny she had a beautiful voice that even then was touchingly emotive.
It’s a rare enough occasion when a cover song outshines the original, and when it comes to The Beatles, it hardly ever happens. It takes some superhuman abilities to outshine The Beatles. But sometimes they outshine themselves, and that’s where this song comes in. There’s nothing wrong with the original of If I Fell. It’s pretty great by almost any standard. Except by Beatles standards. It just always sounded a little bit forgettable and mediocre compared to all the even greater greatness it was placed next to. A Hard Day’s Night. And I Love Her. Can’t Buy Me Love. Those songs are so above and beyond in greatness that they make material any other band would’ve sold their souls to have written fade into oblivion. So this one was always a merely pretty good Beatles song that I never paid much mind to because Can’t Buy Me Love was about to come on. I never even realized how tender and beautiful it was, until Across the Universe came along and set it in an entirely new context. That movie is to the idea of jukebox musicals what a wedding cake is to twinkies, or what Maus is to Garfield, or any other good vs. terrible simile you’s like to insert here. Besides making us see the hits in a new light, what it did was make the non-hits into hits. It took a dimly remembered song that made such perfect sense for the plot and characters that it suddenly became greater than it had been before. Have you noticed how moving those lyrics are? I never did, until Julie Taymor showed me.
Because, like, Oh-Em-Gees! Black Eyed Peas are da bomb! Diggity and whatnot. Yeah, no. Will.i.am and his crew can get eaten alive by weasels for all I care. In fact, I rather hope they do. But I’m sure I’m not the only one who immediately thinks of BYP when they see or hear the words I’ve Got a Feeling. That song you’re thinking of is forever embedded in your head, whether through non-consensual brain-rape or because you just naturally have extremely shitty taste in music. But this is not that song. Go ahead, breathe a sigh of relief. This is The Beatles with a coincidentally titled, somewhat obscure, deep album track from Let It Be. Possibly maybe not one of their all-time greatest greats, but still pretty damn great compared to 99% of the rest of the universe.
I guess I don’t have to tell you what man Lou is waiting for and why. I can only comment that $26 went a much longer way ’67. You couldn’t buy very much heroin for $26 today, and also I’m afraid that all the shady characters have been swept away from Lexington Avenue long ago. Nevertheless, the general intent hasn’t changed much over the years. I’m sure what Lou Reed put to paper in 1967 remains a universal experience, amirite? I mean, who hasn’t trekked to the bad side of town to buy drugs before? Whaddya mean not all of you have bought heroin!? In any case, if the jangle and feedback of the Velvets isn’t alienating and culty enough for ya, check out the cover Nico cut. She, more than anyone else, understood the true meaning of the song – most likely a lot better than Lou Reed himself ever did. Nico was neck deep in heroin by the time she recorded her 1981 album Drama of Exile, and her attitude was very much in keeping with the material:
[Aura label head Aaron] Sixx admitted that Nico “didn’t give a shit what happened to the LP, she just wanted the money for drugs.” Yet despite these unconventional circumstances, Drama of Exile would see Nico receive some of the best reviews of her career.
— Dave Thompson, Better to Burn Out: The Cult of Death in Rock ‘N’ Roll
Waiting for the Man was certainly a brilliant choice for her. She didn’t have very much contribution in the recording of The Velvet Underground & Nico, having been roped in by Andy Warhol for glamour purposes, but she lived that album for the rest of her life. Lou Reed never did as many degenarate things as his songs lead us to imagine and in no time at all he was living the high life with David Bowie. Speaking of whom, there he is with Lou, still having a real good time together. It’s great to see those two jamming together on a particularly rockin’ mid-90s David Bowie song – oh wait, that’s a cover of Waiting for the Man that mysteriously just sounds exactly like a mid-90′s David Bowie song.
I bet a lot of you didn’t even realize that The Velvet Underground had a girl drummer. At least not at first. Once you started learning a little bit you found out that Maureen Tucker was really a trailblazer, one of the very first women to play an instrument in a band without becoming a hyper-sexualized focal point. She went by the name Moe, kept her hair short, dressed plainly and studiously avoided whatever small amount of spotlight was afforded by being a Velvet Underground member. She looked like one of the guys and was accepted as one. Her approach to drumming was one of radical simplicity. She used a stripped down kit and eschewed cymbals as too show-offy. The minimalism of her style was an integral part of the Velvets’ sound, which took them absolutely nowhere at the time, but has since been celebrated as one of rock’s biggest influences. Tucker didn’t gain much glory from her pivotal years with the Velvet Underground, nor did she do anything glamorous with the rest of her life. She made a couple of low-key solo albums and played sporadically with old friends like John Cale, but mostly she just lived an anonymous life. She married, had five children, settled down in Georgia and spent years working at Walmart. All par for the course for someone who had no interest in being a superstar. Her handful of vocal contributions with the Velvets will never be radio hits, but they have gained an increased following, thanks to being featured prominently in the film Juno. That movie besides being, like, the cutest, made a hit of its eccentric soundtrack of quirky and twee music by the likes of Kimya Dawson, Cat Power and this long-forgotten gem of a Moe Tucker vocal.
See, I told you there’s a Beatles song for everything. Like those days when you’re mooching around wondering if fixing yourself a drink is worth the effort. I myself am rather tired, coming to a hard week’s night. So, my sentiments exactly, as it occurs. I think it probably extends to more than just lying on the couch, though. I think it’s about the general tiresomeness of life, a thing that weighs on everybody from time to time.
This must be the most mournful song about freedom ever written. There’s depths of meaninful deepness to be delved into here. “What is the nature of freedom?” we could ask “is it even a real thing?” Then we’d have real in-depth philosophical discourse about how freedom is itself an illusion because man cannot exist without something, someone, somewhere to be beholden to. Maybe you don’t think of Lou Reed as a philosopher king, but he really hit the mainline this time. What sort of freedom he meant only he knows, but I infer that it’s the spiritual and/or emotional kind. If you want to be pedestrian in your interpretation, it kind of sounds like a breakup song. Which totally works, because that’s exactly how it goes in relationships – you breathe a sigh of relief to escape from one and immediately hop off to find the next one. I suppose that could just as easily apply to belief systems. You become disillusioned with whatever faith or creed you’ve been living with all your life, and vow to think for yourself from now on, but before you know it you’ve joined a cult or something. Because most of us don’t have the intellectual wherewithall to think for ourselves and form our own opinions. We all need some guidelines for living, someone to teach or tell us who to be. So life is an ongoing cycle of falling in and out of a series of illusions, be it the romantic sort or the philosophical. Dwell on that if you will, while I go eat a cup of Ramen.
Recent Comments