Report: Marianne Faithfull Live Oakland

The iconic British songstress kicks the collective ass of posh jazz club Yoshi's on March 3.

By Jud Cost

Raising her hands over her head like a triumphant prize fighter, Marianne Faithfull strides confidently onstage, then coughs into the mic. "Sorry," she says in a well-heeled British accent. "I've got a bit of a cold coming on. Just a little one," she reassures the devotees who have filled Yoshi's, the posh jazz club next to the railroad tracks that run through Oakland's Jack London Square. It's the perfect introduction to the legendary singer who somehow combines an air of nervous vulnerability with an attitude that lets you know she could probably kick your ass from here to the Bay Bridge just down the road.

"I loved Jack London," she says, referring to the namesake of the once upscale, now decidedly lifeless shopping center just across the tracks. "When I was a young girl, I wrote an essay on White Fang." It's opening night of a two-night stand, and a rare chance to catch this rags-to-riches, then rags-to-riches again chanteuse in a fairly intimate setting not much bigger than your living room-if you have a very large living room.

No amps onstage. It's evident tonight will bask in Faithfull's quieter side. "We won't be able to play the rockers," she says, nodding towards Doug Pettibone, the nimble acoustic guitarist seated next to her. "Saying that, could you please turn up the guitar in my monitor," she laughs, ended by a bit of a wheeze. Faithfull's fragile condition has her bundled up in a black sweater with what looks like white ostrich feathers protruding rakishly from the sleeves. She dedicates "Falling From Grace" to old pal Allen Ginsberg. "I really miss Allen," she says of the beat poet who helped her through some tough times. "I felt if Allen can do it, so can I," she says. "But I will not be doing 'Howl' tonight." Then she offers up the first line of the epic poem, anyway, once dragged through the U.S. legal system as obscene: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked..."

Faithfull now collaborates with the best minds of a much younger generation, including Colin Meloy of Portland's Decemberists, whose song "The Crane Wife," a highlight of her 2009 album, Easy Come, Easy Go (Decca) sounded even better tonight, stripped to the bone. "Crazy Love," a collaboration with Nick Cave, is simultaneously melancholy and hopeful. "I have to make you listen to my new songs," she smirks. "Then you get rewarded for your attention." The carrot she tosses the faithful is her diary of a mad housewife, "The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan," from her 1979 comeback LP, Broken English: "At the age of thirty-seven she realized she'd never/Ride through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair/So she let the phone keep ringing and she sat there softly singing/Little nursery rhymes she'd memorized in her daddy's easy chair." 

Equally as heartfelt was "Miss Otis Regrets,"  a Cole Porter chestnut she once warbled as a teenager in coffee bars in her Thames Valley hometown of Reading, about 40 miles west of London. "My god, I thought I was so grown-up at seventeen," she says of the days when she was about to receive "an education" only hinted at by the Carrie Mulligan character in the recent film of the same name.

Her long day's journey into night, which saw Faithfull fall all the way from pop royalty as consort to Mick Jagger to heroin addiction, anorexia and homelessness in the streets of London, was prophesied with deadly accuracy by "Sister Morphine," an eviscerating song she co-wrote in 1969 with Jagger and Keith Richards. "Come on, Sister Morphine, you better make up my bed/'Cause you know and I know in the morning I'll be dead/And you can sit around, and you can watch all the clean white sheets stained red." Faithfull now adds an eyes-wide-open postscript to her lost decade: "I wouldn't change a thing. It's been a long, strange journey, but we're all still here."

When she sings "As Tears Go By," her 1964 debut American hit (and the first song ever penned by Jagger and Richards), Faithfull is old enough now to give the tune a whole new depth of meaning. But nothing could have topped the set-closer to this exquisite evening, "Sing Me Back Home," a Merle Haggard death-row prison tune she learned from Richards and his former compadre, onetime Byrd and Flying Burrito Brother, Gram Parsons. Like her generational peer Van Morrison, and few others, Faithfull is living proof of the old adage: Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. In her case, life's crucible has turned Marianne Faithfull into the singer she was always meant to be.