Skip to main content

Hear Marianne Faithfull’s Three Versions of “As Tears Go By,” Each Recorded at a Different Stage of Life (1965, 1987 & 2018)

When a 17-year-old Marianne Faithfull finished the final take of her 1965 hit “As Tears Go By” — penned by a young duo of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards as one of their first original songs — Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham “came and gave me a big hug,” she recalled “‘Congratulations darling. You’ve got yourself a number six,’ he said.”

Richards remembered the song in his autobiography as “a terrible piece of tripe” and “money for old rope,” but it actually peaked at number 22 on the Billboard Hot 100, where it stayed for nine weeks, no small thing. So popular was “As Tears Go By” that the Stones themselves recorded a version the following year. Their take also entered the Hot 100, where it peaked at number six.

The story of the song represents in brief the evolution of its original singer. Fated in her early years to be known as little more than Jagger’s muse, an image she grew to hate, Faithfull went from hanger-on in the sixties, “an essential component of the Swinging London scene,” writes reviewer alrockchick; to a homeless heroin addict; to a legend revived, her “whiskey-soaked” croak of a voice the perfect vehicle for delivering smoke-filled tales of weariness and betrayal.

Along the way, there was “As Tears Go By,” a song Faithfull came to embody, though she didn’t think much of it as a teenager. (See Brian Epstein introduce her on Hulabaloo, above, in 1965.)

She was “never that crazy” about it, she said. “God knows how Mick and Keith wrote it or where it came from…. In any case, it’s an absolutely astonishing thing for a boy of 20 to have written a song about a woman looking back nostalgically on her life.”

The “boys” had help — at first they cribbed the title “As Time Goes By” from the famous tearjerker in Casablanca. According to Loog Oldham, he locked the two Stones in a room together and said, “I want a song with brick walls all around it, high windows and no sex.” How that became a Marianne Faithfull signature is something of a mystery. At times she claimed Jagger wrote the song for her; at others, she emphatically denied it. But as the contrast between her voice and the song’s saccharine, maudlin nature changed, so too did the power of her delivery, which is not to say her first recording didn’t warrant the attention.

“The voice on ‘As Tears Go By’ and ‘Summer Nights,’” altrockchick writes, “has an airy, surreal quality; the voice on Broken English,” her 1979 comeback (which does not include “As Tears Go By”), “is as real as it gets” and only got more real with time. In a Nico-esque monotone drone, she revisited the song she made famous in the mid-sixties in the 1987 take above for the album Strange Weather. She had just recently gotten clean and lost a lover to suicide.

The weathered vulnerability she projects is worlds away from the dreamy melancholy of the past, her voice “a far cry from the 60s sweetness,” The Music Aficionado blog notes. “Years of substance abuse and constant smoking dropped her pitch and made it raspy.” These qualities are even more pronounced in a 2018 version of the song from the album Negative Capability. It functions almost as a coda for a career as an interpreter of the songs of others, though she’s written no few of her own (and may yet release another version of “As Time Goes By.”)

She is remembered for much more than her first hit, but Faithfull’s revisitation of “As Tears Go By” over the years seems to speak to an ambivalent acceptance of Mick Jagger’s constant presence in her story — and a graceful, if not exactly uplifting, acceptance of the inevitable ravages of age and fame.

You can hear her very recent interview on the Broken Record podcast below:

Related Content: 

Jean-Luc Godard Shoots Marianne Faithfull Singing “As Tears Go By” (1966)

David Bowie Sings ‘I Got You Babe’ with Marianne Faithfull in His Very Last Performance As Ziggy Stardust (1973)

Watch the Rolling Stones Write “Sympathy for the Devil”: Scenes from Jean-Luc Godard’s ’68 Film One Plus One

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Hear Marianne Faithfull’s Three Versions of “As Tears Go By,” Each Recorded at a Different Stage of Life (1965, 1987 & 2018) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3u0TH1J
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music: An Interactive, Encyclopedic Data Visualization of 120 Years of Electronic Music

In a very short span of time, the descriptor “electronic music” has come to sound as overly broad as “classical.” But where what we (often incorrectly) call classical developed over hundreds of years, electronic music proliferated into hundreds of fractal forms in only decades. A far steeper quality curve may have to do with the ease of its creation, but it’s also a factor of this accelerated evolution. Music made by machines has transformed since its early 20th-century beginnings from obscure avant-garde experiments to massively popular genres of global dance and pop. This proliferation, notes Ishkur—designer of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music —hasn't always been to the good. Take what he calls “trendwhoring,” a phenomenon that spawns dozens of new works and subgenera in short order, though it’s arguable whether many of them should exist. Ishkur, describes this process below in an excerpt from his erudite, sardonic “Frequently Unasked Questions”: If fart noises were sudde...
Post a Comment
Read more

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

We admire Johannes Vermeer’s  Girl with a Pearl Earring   for many reasons , not least that it looks exactly like a girl with a pearl earring. Or at least it does from a distance, as the master of light himself no doubt stepped back to confirm countless times during the painting process, at any moment of which he would have been more concerned with the brushstrokes constituting only a small part of the image. But even Vermeer himself could have perceived only so much detail of the painting that would become his masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaZYTwmjwU Now, more than 350 years after its completion, we can get a closer view of Girl with a Pearl Earring  than anyone has before through a newly released  10 billion-pixel panorama . At this resolution, writes Petapixel’s Jason Schneider , we can “see the painting down to the level of 4.4-microns per pixel.” Undertaken by Emilien Leonhardt and Vincent Sabatier of 3D microscope maker Hirox Europe ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Drunk History Takes on the Father of Prohibition: The Ban on Alcohol in the U.S. Started 100 Years Ago This Month

There may be plenty of good reasons to restrict sales and limit promotion of alcohol. You can search the stats on traffic fatalities, liver disease, alcohol-related violence, etc. and you’ll find the term “epidemic” come up more than once. Yet even with all the dangers alcohol poses to public health and safety, its total prohibition has seemed “so hostile to Americans’ contemporary sensibilities of personal freedom,” writes Mark Lawrence Schrad at The New York Times , “that we struggle to comprehend how our ancestors could have possibly supported it.” Prohibition in the United States began 1oo years ago-- on January 17, 1920--and lasted through 1933. How did this happen? Demand, of course, persisted, but public support seemed widespread. Despite stories of thousands rushing bars and liquor stores on the evening of January 16, 1920 before the 18th Amendment banning alcohol nationwide went into effect, “the final triumph of prohibition was met with shrugs…. The United States had...
Post a Comment
Read more