Life
is hard. Life is short. Life's not fair.
I saw Marianne Faithfull in concert recently. And
thanked my stars that I wasn't dead yet. That I got
to see her. Life keeps trying to kill me, trying to
kill all of us. But at least I got to see Marianne.
What if you're born rich and beautiful and smart?
Generally you are vapid and out-of-touch and more
than likely blind. Or you're MARIANNE FAITHFULL. Still,
life will try to kill you.
"Hey,
Carrie Anne, what's your game and can anybody play?"
The Hollies wrote their 1968 hit about Marianne's
legendary willingness to make the road a little more
comfortable for virtually every sixties star.
She was the most lacey whip-creamy angel-voiced tid-bit
the 60's produced. She fucked Mick. She fucked 'em
all. And by the seventies was adhering to a strict
diet of liquor, drugs and cigarettes. Eventually she
was literally living in the gutters, strung-out and
wrung out. Then she put it all down on 1979's breakthrough
Broken English. Considering her signature hit
was 1964's syrupy "As Tears Go By", the pain, jealousy
and despair on Broken English was like finding
shrapnel in your crème brûleé.
I first saw Marianne at the Aladdin, singing her broken
heart out for the most motley crew ever collected:
decrepit old hippies, punk rock kids and loads of
gay men. All come to revel in that instrument of hers,
cracked and weathered by years of naughty muse talk
and cigarettes and whiskey. Bob Dylan wrote songs
for that voice. So did Tom Waits. So did Beck. So
did Blur.
A few days later I saw her as a whispy youth, thirty
years young at a Lower Manhattan cocktail party--draping
herself gracefully, sluttily around anyone with a
light, a hit, a come-on. Both nights she clutched
a pack of Marlboro Lights like they were her mother,
her lover, her lifeline. Without those cigarettes
to hold on to, one got the feeling she'd evaporate
into the night.
We all get through somehow.
I had an epiphany then, for better or worse. We all
get through somehow. Whether you're getting by with
ignorance, nicotine, heroin, sex, food or religion,
you're an addict. Life is just too rough to tough
out alone. Off the record, I spent the last year zonked
out of my head on every anti-depressant ever invented.
And those fuckers are expensive. Watching Marianne,
I thought why not heroin? why not cigarettes? At least
they're more organic, natural remedies. I know they
RUIN LIVES, but life is ruination. Why not fuckin'
ride it?
People on Prozac are boring. They meet boring people,
they have boring lives, they write boring songs, screenplays,
stories. People who medicate sub-legally have much
more interesting things to say and do. And then they
write Broken English, Naked Lunch and A
Clockwork Orange.
Get addicted to Jesus. Get addicted to art. Get Addicted
to Love. But stay off those western meds, man!
Give me methadone before Prozac. Pretty soon half
the population (the rich half) will be medicated on
these anti-life drugs and telling us we can't smoke
cigarettes or pot or opium--nature's life preservers.
And we poor folk will have to get high off donuts
and candy bars til our serotonin is through the roof
and our bodies swell with fat and cancers but they
won't care. We're taking up two seats on the Greyhound,
not next to them on AirFrance.
And they'll keep wringing their hands, asking "Why
is rock dead? What happened to the theater? Is Jennifer
Lopez really the Best Actress?" Until they don't care
about that either.
Ah, hell. We all get through somehow. Who am I to
preach? Let them eat Prozac.
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