‘Sister Morphine’: The song Marianne Faithfull fought the Rolling Stones over
The singer, who recently passed away, had to wait two decades for Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to include her in the writing credits on a track that contains much of her life
Spain got the censored version. Instead of the defiant cover designed by Andy Warhol for the Rolling Stones’ album Sticky Fingers (1971), with a male pelvis encased in jeans (“the zipper cover” it was called), they simply and uninspiringly placed female fingers sticking out of a jar of molasses. It was not comparable. But there was another form of censorship that Spanish music lovers did not fail to notice: instead of the song Sister Morphine, the album for sale in Spain had Let It Rock, a rock-and-roll creation by Chuck Berry performed in the style of Mick Taylor’s Stones. Why? According to Franco’s censors, because Sister Morphine “contained sexual material.” They were wrong even about that.
Sister Morphine concealed yet another deliberate omission, this one by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards themselves. We are talking about a song that Marianne Faithfull had released earlier, in February 1969. Let us remember: Faithfull and Jagger’s romantic relationship lasted four years, from 1966 to 1970, a time when the Stones began to try all kinds of drugs, even the most powerful ones, and when arrests and court appearances were frequent, to the logical glee of the paparazzi. When she released Sister Morphine as the B-side of a single that included as its main track on side A Something Better, the song was signed by all three: Keith Richards, Marianne Faithfull and Mick Jagger. The single was withdrawn from the market a few weeks later because the head of Decca Records was frightened by the allusions to hard drugs. Sister Morphine had begun its rocky journey. When the piece was released on Sticky Fingers, only the two Rolling Stones songwriters appeared in the credits. Faithfull had mysteriously disappeared.
“I fought and fought until I got the credit back, but it took me 20 years.” Faithfull did sue the group, and it wasn’t until 1994, 23 years later, that she was legally recognized as the author. In 1998, the Stones included the song on their live album No Security, and there, for the first time publicly, all three appeared in the writing credits. When Keith Richards released his memoirs, Life, in 2010, he acknowledged Faithfull’s authorship: “Marianne had a lot to do with ‘Sister Morphine. I know Mick’s writing, and he was living with Marianne at the time, and I know from the style of it there were a few Marianne lines in there.” In passing, the guitarist was playing one of his favorite games: bringing Jagger down to earth. Mick took the bait: “She always says she wrote everything, but she only wrote two lines, and I don’t even remember what they are.” In his lengthy biography Mick Jagger, writer Philip Norman notes that the collaboration between Jagger and Faithfull was evident, and not just on Sister Morphine. Norman hints at the singer’s qualms about letting it all hang out: “Turning his mistress into an artistic partner in the style of John Lennon and Yoko Ono held no appeal for Mick. The singer was too busy efficiently spinning a golden dynamo called Jagger-Richards.”
Faithfull’s big hit of the 1960s was As Tears Go By, a song by the Jagger/Richards duo. In 1969, Faithfull was one of the few female appearances on the ill-fated Rock and Roll Circus television special. Sitting in the center of the circular circus stage, her black skirt billowing out onto the platform, she sang a chilling Something Better.
Spanish censors were confused by Sister Morphine, since it talks more about drugs than sex. “Please, Sister Morphine, turn my nightmares into dreams. / Oh, can’t you see I’m fading fast and that this shot will be my last?” says the piece, which is about someone lying in a hospital bed and asking for a powerful painkiller to ease the pain. The song was important to Faithfull, who acknowledged in an interview with The Guardian that it was quite autobiographical: “The story is about a man who is badly injured in a car accident and would rather die than suffer, so he asks for a lethal dose of morphine. It’s not exactly what happened to me, but my feelings about it are probably the same. I was hospitalized in Sydney after a suicide attempt. It was a terrible time.” Faithfull had lost custody of her son and was deeply affected by the death of Brian Jones (in July 1969), the guitarist and founder of The Rolling Stones.
Which Sister Morphine is better? Faithfull’s has a murky Velvet Underground-style sensuality, and the Rolling Stones’ has the swagger of those who saw themselves at the center of the world. Both are fantastic.
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