I love to hear Bob talking about the blues and how we’re all linked to that music. That was very good for me to hear. And folk music. How you take that music and change it by running it through your own temperament.
Bob understands my voice because he’s got a funny voice too. I saw him backstage when I was about to start work on Vagabond Ways with Mark Howard and Daniel Lanois and he’d just worked with them. He said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s going to be fine with them. People like us with funny voices, they’ve only just now figured out how to record us, and the way is not to use digital. You have to use analogue recording equipment.’
I love the way Bob uses his voice to create a persona. On his radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, you have Ellen Barkin saying, ‘It’s night time, a cat howls, the high heels of a prostitute clicking down the street, the moon shows for a second and disappears behind the clouds. Here’s your host, Bob Dylan.’
What amazes me about the sixties, because, in my mind, of course, it’s only yesterday, is how historic it’s become. We’ll soon be lumped with the Battle of Culloden, the Peasants’ Revolt, the Armada, and the invention of the loo. Over forty years ago! Longer! The strangeness of the whole passing pop parade – from Mod to Hippie to Glitter to Punk – will soon be part of the Ancientness of Olde England. It’s odd, too, that the sixties, with its grand image of itself, ended not with a whimper but a bang – and woe betide any who got in the way of its thrashing apocalyptic tail.
Looking back, it wasn’t such a bad idea to go to the country like Paul and Linda and not see anybody after the sixties. It was rather a wise thing to do because there was this dark cloud looming. It’s like that song of Roger Waters that I sing in my show:
Do you remember me?
How we used to be Helpless and happy and blind?
Sunk without hope In a haze of good dope and cheap wine?
Laying on the living-room floor
On those Indian tapestry cushions you made
Thinking of calling our firstborn Jasmine or Jade.
And then that ominous chorus:
Don’t do it
Don’t do it
Don’t do it to me!
Don’t think about it!
Don’t think about it!
Don’t think about what it might be
Don’t get up to open the door,
Just stay with me here on the floor
It’s gonna get cold in the nineteen seventies.
And that was written in 1968! That was prescient, if not your actual prophetic vision. Whatever we thought of Linda, and she didn’t make that great an impression on me, I think it was a credit to Paul that he didn’t marry a model. A module. Because that’s what all the others have ended up doing, they’ve married these modules. And they have children who also become modules.
I heard a track from Paul McCartney’s album Ram the other day on the radio. And with an almighty whoosh it just took me right back to those times I spent living on the streets, and then I found myself thinking about dear old Mike Leander who had been my producer on the early albums. Mike talked me into making that record that was released in 2002, called Rich Kid Blues. Hysterical! In fact it was never finished, and I never really liked it because it was made during my heroin addiction. This was 1972, and I was very, very sick indeed. But listening to this album now, all these years later, I think it’s really rather lovely, even though my voice is very weak. What the record represents is a very important moment in my life, when I, as a junkie, was shooting up on the streets, and then suddenly this really nice man, Mike Leander, comes and finds me hanging out on some corner and makes a record with me. He somehow managed to scam some money and took me into a really cheap studio somewhere in Soho with just a guitar player. Mike played me some songs and then asked what I was listening to. I was really into Cat Stevens’s haunting Tea for the Tillerman album, which every woman in the world seemed to love back then.
I remember that Mike played me Paul McCartney’s Ram and I thought it was just brilliant. He said, ‘Let’s try and do something like this record.’ And then he gave me some money to get me off the street. I actually remember leaving the studio that day with a copy of Ram tucked under my arm and all this cash to get some digs. That very day I managed to find a little flat and I set up home listening to Macca’s wonderful record. Even now Ram brings a tear to my eye whenever I put it on. Rich Kid Blues is a sweet, folksy collection that is very redolent of the period – you know, James Taylor, Melanie and Janis Ian, that short-lived era of singer songwriters. I hoped it might fly, but then suddenly Glam Rock came along – which, as irony would have it, Mike was instrumental in because he was Gary Glitter’s producer – and my poor little record was consigned for nearly thirty years to the dustbin of oblivion deep in the vaults at Gem Records. Now it seems that the record is regarded as Marianne Faithfull’s ‘lost album’, and I guess in many ways that’s right, because this album is the missing link between my early work and Broken English.
Sometime late in 2000 I received the proofs of a book through the post called Turn Off Your Mind, Relax, and Float Downstream by a member of Blondie. It’s about the ‘mystic sixties’, and it really does capture the light and the dark side of the decade. And there was a lot of dark, creepy stuff in the sixties, I can tell you: The Process, Kenneth Anger, Mel Lyman, Manson, Anton LaVey, and L. Ron Hubbard. Those people were always trying to get hold of me. Somehow I managed to negotiate my way around them quite successfully. I didn’t get involved in any cults, apart from going up to Bangor for that regrettable weekend with the Maharishi and the Beatles, the weekend that Brian Epstein killed himself.
It’s so odd that few of my friends see anything negative about the sixties. Most of them from back in the day say, ‘Oh but, Marianne, I don’t remember the sixties like that at all … it was wonderful!’ When I hear things like that I question myself, wondering if I got it all wrong and am mad. But I think I have been completely sane all along. Back in the sixties I certainly did seem to attract the most dreadful people: fringe types, cranks, weirdos, people who were after power. It was all so creepy …
This reminds me about the time at the tail-end of the sixties when dear Henrietta Moraes – about whom much more anon – wrote an investigative article for the Daily Telegraph colour supplement about L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Scientology religion. She infiltrated meetings in order to write her piece, which went into great detail about what she saw as the dark rotten core of what Hubbard did. She wrote all this stuff about how his partner, Mary Sue Whipp, was a homunculus with three breasts, and how he planned world domination through the power of the spirit. Hen was sure he was all about mind domination, and about muscling in on you immediately and filling your head with all this nonsense, isolating you from family and friends and brainwashing you. So of course he was furious when the Telegraph published Hen’s article. She became convinced that people were following her around and waiting outside her house, and got so terrified that she eventually went to the police.
I wanted to leave the sixties in a blaze of glory – under a volcano. That would be the Vesuvio, Spanish Tony’s Million Dollar Bash, almost emblematic