Say it in broken English

On Marianne Faithfull, David Lynch, other losses and a few gains of early 2025

It’s been a difficult month. While darkness falls south of the border, up here the unwelcome Ontario election call and the looming federal vote weigh heavy. There’s been serious illness in my extended family, as well as my own inevitable midwinter productivity and mental-state crash. And culturally, a cruel course of losses of icons and exemplars.

Today I want to address some of those losses, and share some other things I’ve been saving for you. (A more focused post is coming soon.)

• First, I wrote an essay this week for Slate about Neko Case’s at once devastating and rollicking new memoir, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You. It reveals the animal figures in her songs as avatars of flight from and vengeance for the dehumanizing injuries of class and gender in America and also spills some tea about the Louvin Brothers. I put together a companion playlist of Neko songs from the past three decades that speak to the book: Here it is on Spotify, Apple, Tidal, or YouTube.

• Yesterday I was truly crushed to find out Marianne Faithfull has died at age 78. Losing both her and (fellow Angelo Badalamenti collaborator) David Lynch in the same month, especially this month, is rather much, don’t you think? There’s going to be no one cool left. (Present company excepted.) I thought after Faithfull survived her coronavirus hospitalization a few years ago that she would go on, unkillable, indefinitely. She had already survived so much that would have pulverized lesser beings.
  
  That uncanny endurance marked her journey from penniless aristocrats’ daughter to Swinging London actress-chanteuse to Rolling Stones consort to scorned tabloid hussy to 1970s homeless addict to punk fellow-traveler to grand old dame. Hearing her post-punk masterwork Broken English in my mid-teens, several years after it was released, was probably the first time I grasped that “old” people could go on being actively bohemian and countercultural, unlike most of Faithfull’s calcifying classic-rock-star friends (she was in her late 30s but sounded older). And from a woman too, no doubt a lesson I needed then. The lyrics of “Why D’ya Do It?” utterly shocked me: Was it legal to sing these things? Was it even legal for me to hear them? (The scandalous words btw were by London poet and dramatist Heathcote Williams.)

  
  I’ve never been so enticed by the Stones mythos (though there certainly are tales). But Faithfull never stopped showing how expansive later life chapters could be. She was always seeking out younger collaborators (from downtown NYC jazzbos to Pulp, Metallica, Nick Cave, PJ Harvey), always exceeding the narratives anyone tried to reduce her to. I could point to dozens of songs, from her version of Shel Silverstein’s “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” on Broken English (an all-time-great recording, a divine ode to mundane life), through her Kurt Weill and Jacques Brel interpretations, to her ravishing tribute to her lifelong friend (and fellow sixties “muse” and wild child) Anita Pallenberg, “Born to Live,” from her second-last album, 2018’s fittingly named Negative Capability.
  
  But I’ll recommend a lesser-known track I’ve always loved, the autobiographical “Falling from Grace,” from 1983’s A Child’s Adventure. This is a live performance from 1989. Witness her incredible band at the time:
  
  Garth Hudson on keyboards and accordion (the last of the Band, gone too this month; he also worked multiple times with Neko Case)
  Dr. John on piano and rhythm guitar

  Marc Ribot on guitar

  Lew Soloff on trumpet and flugelhorn

  Fernando Saunders on bass and backing vocals

  Dougie Bowne on drums

• Speaking of David Lynch: I was so reminded of the feeling the day David Bowie died, the sense of the world contracting. I was going to write about Lynch’s sonic aesthetics and musical impact, but Madison Bloom in Pitchfork among others had it covered. I’d venture that Lynch’s sensibility permeated through music as much as it did in film. Neko Case is a perfect example, in fact—she discusses in her memoir how much she was affected by Twin Peaks’ representation of her Pacific Northwest homeland, and you can hear the neo-noir of Julee Cruise and Badalamenti among other Lynchian spirits wafting and creeping across her own sonic landscapes, especially on early albums such as Blacklisted and Furnace Room Lullaby (the Furnace Room sounding like a Lynchian netherworldly location).
  
  You can read much more about Lynchian auralities in a special 2024 feature section of The Wire, temporarily unpaywalled after he departed. And if you haven’t seen this Badalamenti interview talking about how he and Lynch composed the Laura Palmer theme together, well, you simply must.

• Furthermore speaking of Lynch: Are you watching the second season of Severance? I’m enjoying it, after three episodes, with no more than 50 per cent dread that they’re about to fumble and turn it stupid any minute. There are already warning signs but let’s stay optimistic for once.

• The best new thing on the Internet this week is improbably enough the trailer for the 50th anniversary doc special about the music of Saturday Night Live, which features an incredible montage (from the doc’s opening) of past SNL performances that is like a master’s thesis on the past half-century of American popular music. The creativity and deep musical intelligence of the mix bears all the fingerprints of co-director Questlove, who apparently spent a year on it on and off. (If only it weren’t interrupted repeatedly by Lorne-is-great talking heads—someone please re-cut?)
  
  The rest of the special is predictably uneven, but more than worth your time. For one thing it is dedicated to the late Hal Willner, who shows up talking among other things about booking Miles Davis and Captain Beefheart, whose appearances were considered disasters. (Nobody clapped for the Captain. One guy shouted “shit!” into the silence.) There’s Bowie in Dada constructed costumes with Klaus Nomi and Joey Arias, there’s baby Dirty Mind Prince, there’s Debbie Harry bringing in the first nationally broadcast rap performance by the Funky 4 + 1 in 1981 (the group is also interviewed), and there’s also MAGA Kanye going off the rails and Bad Bunny doing double hosting-and-music duty in 2023. Which leads to some nerdy process stuff too. I especially loved the section that tells the full story of the notorious segment (arranged by John Belushi, again in 1981) when Fear brought along a retinue of slam-dancing hardcore kids. It includes a very sweet interview with Lee Ving. In short, contrary to myth there was no riot and everything was fine.
  
  Of course the SNL staff are bullshitting when they say they never censored anything but FCC-forbidden language—Tom Morello tells how Rage Against the Machine were forcibly prevented from hanging upside-down flags on their amps. Worse, they all pretend they always agreed with Sinead O’Connor, as if Lorne Michaels didn’t rethink it only after her death like so much of America did. (I didn’t know she’d faked them out in rehearsal with a photo of a random Irish kid instead of the Pope, so they wouldn’t be thrown off by her holding a picture. Very smart.) Also they never acknowledge how shitty the sound’s often been. There’s tons of things I’d like to see that are missing, but still, without someone as galaxy-brained as Questlove involved (he says he watched every single episode) it easily could have stuck to the most recognizable popular stuff instead of giving such a capacious tour of the archive.

  
  Sadly Marianne Faithfull’s own controversial 1980 SNL stint is not included, and as Ann Powers pointed out to me, it also doesn’t seem to be up anywhere online. Read up on it this blog by a veteran UK music journo, with details disputed in the comments.

• Following up on our Bob Dylan and A Complete Unknown discussion awhile back, you have to read two great interviews from Ray Padgett’s Dylan substack Flagging Down the Double E’s: First, with Dylan’s first manager (and Dave Van Ronk’s then-wife) Terri Thal, who provides a first-hand look at the Greenwich Village of the time, and particularly reinforces the points that I was trying to make about Suze Rotolo and Dylan’s protest period. And second, of particular Toronto interest, Ray’s talk with photographer Paul Till, who took the picture that ended up on the cover of Blood on the Tracks (as well as one on a Dylan sheet-music book I also used to have). The trivia jackpot is that he was working at Coach House Books at the time! But it’s also a window into how randomly things could happen back then in Dylanland.

• Another casualty of the past week, somewhat closer to home: Jane McGarrigle, the third, mostly non-performing member of the sisterhood. For many years, Jane did much of the producing, booking, organizing, and other business that enabled Kate and Anna’s music. Her death leaves Anna as the only sister standing (Kate passed in 2010), which makes me feel so lonely for her. Read a brief, relatively recent interview with Jane by my old Hour weekly friend and colleague Richard Burnett, “The Montréal of the McGarrigles.”

• On a more niche note: I was a longtime admirer from afar of the sparkling NYC avant-garde psycho-theatrical poetic-spectacularist Richard Foreman, who died this month at 89, creating till the end. Helen Shaw writes about him for The New Yorker. After his death I discovered that PennSound has a huge archive of audio and video recordings of Foreman’s work. I only got to see one of his shows live, back in the nineties, and now I’m hoping to go back and watch My Head Was a Sledgehammer and many others.

• Finally, one more fallen great: Jules Feiffer at 95, the Village Voice cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter and generally huge cultural force of the 1950s to the 1970s. It’s hard to imagine Doonesbury, for instance, or Mash, or the general satirical bent of the era without him. Please read Jeet Heer on the empathy of Feiffer’s work and watch Munro, his 1960 Oscar-winning anti-military animated short. Because the idiocy and venality of power is a constant.