As Years Go By, Mark Hodkinson’s definitive biography of
Marianne Faithfull, was republished as an updated and revised edition by Omnibus Press last year. When it was
first published in 1991 Marianne was a bit sniffy about it but the author and
myself both felt she’d used it as a reference point for her own book Faithful that was published a few years later.
In this extract it is February 1980 and
Marianne, married to her guitarist Ben Brierley, is visiting New York to
promote her then new album Broken English. It would be an eventful trip…
Marianne was booked to appear on the
prestigious television show, Saturday Night Live, the principal
influence on American mainstream culture with a weekly audience of 30 million
viewers. “After years of poverty and struggle it was a magical trip for Ben and
me,” she said. “For the first time in my life I was on the verge of being
accepted for who I was, and it made me extremely apprehensive.” [Island boss] Chris
Blackwell realised the importance of the appearance and contacted an old
friend, Mim Scala, and asked him to effectively chaperone Marianne. Scala, the grandson of an Italian immigrant, had
been an agent in the early 1960s, representing both actors and musicians, among
them Cat Stevens and Richard Harris. He had hit the hippy trail for several
years, painting and recording ethnic music in Morocco, Spain and Sri Lanka,
before becoming, in 1972, Island’s head of promotions. “At this time, Marianne was, by her own admission, a
naughty girl,” said Scala. “Her capacity for abuse was well-known. My first job
was to see that rehearsals happened and that Marianne was healthy. This meant
no drink or drugs. She was a wonderful mix of lady and tramp. My main task was
to spoil her fun and freeze out any bad company.”
A limousine was waiting for Marianne at
JFK Airport driven by a chauffeur who routinely
worked for the comedian and heavy drugs user, John Belushi. The driver offered
Marianne ‘supplies’ but Mim told him his services were not required. Booked into New York’s prestigious Berkshire Place Hotel in
Midtown Manhattan, Marianne was in the lobby when the elevator doors opened to reveal Anita
Pallenberg. According to Scala, the pair ‘fell into each other’s arms screaming
and shrieking like Macbeth’s witches on Prozac’. They went up to the penthouse
suite but were interrupted by Scala ‘before too much damage was done’. The rehearsals
went well at the NBC studio and Scala phoned Blackwell in Jamaica to tell him
Marianne was on good form.
The next day, Marianne
went missing three hours before she was due to appear live on the programme.
Scala tracked her down to a toilet where she was sitting at a stall with a
bottle of brandy between her knees. She had also taken procaine, an anaesthetic
used at the time by dentists. “Apparently it freezes the top of your head,
leaving you feeling blissed out like you’re suspended in a great block of ice,”
said Scala. Marianne revealed later that one of her backing singers ‘who
loathed me on sight’ had sourced the drug for her, supplying it as a substitute
for cocaine. While she was sleeping it off, Mick Jagger called at the hotel to
wish her well. Scala refused to let him see her. “I couldn’t tell him that she
was unconscious on a bed from too much brandy and procaine,” he said. “I know
she would not want her first meeting with him in ages to be like this. So I
stuck to my guns."
[Marianne’s manager] Mark
Miller Mundy had also travelled to New York, to oversee the sound and liaise
with Warner’s staff. He was peeved to hear Scala informing
everyone that he was Marianne’s ‘manager’ and in this assumed role had agreed
that she would appear at the Mudd Club in downtown Manhattan, a punk venue
renowned for its ‘sheer kinkiness’ and boasting gender-neutral toilets. “Scala
came along against my will,” said Miller Mundy. “He had somehow managed to
persuade Chris to pay for his ticket. He’s an old hippy. He thought when we
were in America it was the Sixties all over again – you had to get fucked if
you possibly could and you had to take as many drugs as possible. To Marianne
it was an excuse to party. She was having a high old time.” Scala had agreed
that Marianne would appear at the Mudd Club directly after Saturday Night
Live but the band had only rehearsed three songs, the number required by
the television company. When Miller Mundy said they should pull the concert,
Scala said he had already received the fee. Marianne had taken exception to
Miller Mundy’s manner throughout the trip. “He had taken on the role of
personal tormentor and papal representative of snotty, authoritarian
patriarchy. I had been told what a complete piece of shit I was and I was
beginning to believe it,” she said.
The procaine affected Marianne’s voice and she struggled to
talk, let alone sing. A masseuse was summoned to the dressing room to help her
relax. Meanwhile, outside the studios a line of stretch limousines belonging to
directors of Warner’s ringed the entrance like a circle of wagon trains. The
red light went on and the cameras were set. Chevy Chase, a Saturday Night
Live regular, introduced Marianne. Her hair tousled and wearing a tight top
and jeans, she took hold of the microphone ready to perform ‘Broken English’.
“When I opened my mouth to sing, a strange strangled whisper came out. I had
lost my voice. It was a moment of true horror,” she said. Miller Mundy reached
for the dials on the mixing desk. “I turned the echo up but it was still a
complete disaster,” he said. “It was really important but her voice had gone
because she had been up all fucking night, the day before. She blew it. There
was not a single car outside before she finished. Her voice was like a gargle,
a kind of croak.” The singing became even more fractured by ‘Guilt’, especially
during the opening section where almost every other word failed to leave
Marianne’s lips.
The performance was the subject of great legend but since it
pre-dated universal home recording, it was, for many years, heard about but largely
unseen. In December 2010, however, a Marianne Faithfull fan, Melissa Jimenez,
posted the footage on YouTube with the caveat: ‘I’m not doing Marianne any favours by uploading this in bad quality. But
if you were curious as I was to see this infamous performance and what all the
fuss was about…here it is.’ Most viewers posting comments on the site were
surprised it had been remembered so negatively. Indeed, while her voice did break
up, the performance was strong and confident and the musicianship first-rate.
As an artist caught at the vanguard of punk and new wave, she was setting a
precedent for a raw and edgy style of delivery that soon became routine. “She got through it fantastically,” said Mim Scala. “But we
all knew she was a bit shaky. On the other hand she always looked vulnerable
when she performed.”
Anita Pallenberg was in the dressing room at the television
studio, exhilarated by Marianne’s performance. She insisted she go through with
the concert at the Mudd Club to fulfil her destiny as a ‘punk diva’. “What you
must do now is go all the way,” she told Marianne. “Forget about those fucking
record company idiots with their fucking golf carts and their hot tubs.” She
promised Marianne that when she sang ‘Sister Morphine’ she would shoot up in
the toilets and become her ‘angel from hell’. On the drive to the club the streets
were clogged with traffic and Marianne had to take an elevator to the top of a
building and make her way across the Manhattan skyline to gain access to the
venue. Word had travelled through New York’s underworld about her appearance
and the city’s hardcore alternative set made the pilgrimage. “There’s no good
going on about old troupers and all that. That’s all very well, but it’s a load
of shit,” Marianne told Rolling Stone. “The point is that you’ve given
your word. You’ve got to do it, even if you can’t sing a fucking note. And lo
and behold, I couldn’t.”
As she took the stage a member of the audience passed her a
bottle and she gulped down most of the unknown contents before starting.
Marianne kept upright by holding on to one of the pillars on the stage. Her
voice was frail and barely audible. Miller Mundy was so angry that he left
after the first song ‘in a fury like a splenetic rat’ – according to Marianne.
Mim Scala considered the concert one of the most thrilling rock ‘n’ roll events
of his life but Miller Mundy referred to it later as a ‘total disaster’. The
reviewer from Rolling Stone wrote that it was ‘bare and scary, like
nails scraping across a floor.’
Ben Brierley was in contact with Marianne by telephone
throughout the fateful day. “It is just not true that she was out of her head.
She was scared,” he said. “It was psychosomatic and she lost her voice and
that’s not bullshit. If it were, I’d say so, because she was out of her head on
a number of occasions. Miller Mundy had a lot to do with it. He’d say things to
her like: ‘Either you do this gig really well, or your whole career is blown’.
It used to freak her out.”
Miller Mundy was exasperated because, as he saw it, she had
used the New York trip as a chance to party and hang out with old friends
rather than regenerate her career. He disagreed wholeheartedly with Scala that
it formed a perverse but significant rock ‘n’ roll episode (a view he felt
Scala was bound to hold as he had orchestrated, or at least sanctioned, most of
the chaos). “She has always blamed Jagger, the fact that he arrived just as she
was about to go on. I don’t think it is true exactly. She should never have
been allowed to go on the trip in the first place,” said Miller Mundy.
On the flight home Miller Mundy chatted with Marianne.
Appropriately, Scala was positioned between them, asleep in his seat. “I have a
theory about Marianne,” said Miller Mundy. “And that is that in a way she is
terrified of succeeding. With Broken English she had an opportunity to
really make something of what she had always promised. There is something deep
inside Marianne. She has a fear of success. She can cope with failure far more
easily.” He asked her repeatedly why she had not applied herself. She shrugged
her shoulders and said she did not have an answer. Just two days before the Saturday
Night Live appearance, Marianne had told a reporter from a New York
magazine: “I want commercial success and I want recognition from my peers. I
have a great need for that. I’ve just been mocked for years, and it gets to
you.”
I remember watching that performance, live on TV, and being utterly mystified. Then again, I was only 12.
ReplyDeleteThe Mudd Club show was the following night Sunday...not the same night.
ReplyDeleteThanks for that.
DeleteThis is true , kIt was Sunday night . the Mud club was jammed The crowd on the street forced us (the band and Marianne’s people ) to drive around the block and enter the club over rooftops. As a foot note the only person who thought that the SNL performance was fucked was Mark Miller Mundy He had been obsessed with trying to replicate the exact sound on the Album , this was not going to happen. . He just could not comprehend that this was a live adventure . The rolling Stone review for the mud club tells the story first hand . Mom Scala
ReplyDeleteI know this is a fairly old blog but all that stuff by or about Mim Scalia is mostly untrue. He certainly wasn’t being Mum Scala. Mim was a small time hustler normally scratching a living from the crumbs that fell from the tables of rich playboys living in London at that time. For some reason he was employed by Chris Blackwell to keep Marianne away from any distractions until she had finished the SNL gig. Instead, Mim used it as an opportunity to indulge himself getting blowjobs from hookers to come to his room rather than looking after MF with the result that the dear girl went awol almost instantly on arrival in NY, missing the key rehearsals with her musicians, and only reappearing an hour or so before the SNL gig was due to start to disappear immediately into the toilet to be sick. The Mudd Club gig was booked by Mim (passing himself off as MF’s manager which he wasn’t) without letting the record company or anyone else know. Marianne by that time didn’t care as she was too stoned. The Mudd Club gig could have been legendary for a brilliant performance by MF not for her drug fuelled croaking.
ReplyDeleteMarianne let herself and everyone else down those few days, not least some really decent people who worked at Island New York, her own musicians, and myself, all of whom had worked tirelessly to ensure the trip was a success for her. Her behaviour might seem to be really cool to some people as we look back on those events. it wasn’t. It was selfish and displayed an extraordinary lack of thought for her band who were working really hard for her. They didn’t respect her (or Mim Scala) for it and it’s hardly surprising that from that moment on she was known by them as Marianne Ungrateful.
Mark Miller Mundy (her producer).