“Never apologize, never explain — didn’t we always say that? Well, I haven’t and I don’t.”

— Marianne Faithfull

The wild, wild ways of the rock star gent have long been a staple of hipster rock culture. The wild antics of the men in the biz are infamous and legion but there is one figure who has them all beat. She is the hipest of the hip and her tear-em-down and drag herself up story makes them all look like amateurs.

Marianne Faithfull began her career in 1964 as a pretty songstress delighting coffee crowds. But the coffee crowd were not the only folks who were seduced by her dulcet tones, artful bangs and compelling sexiness. At a launch party for The Rolling Stones, she caught Mick Jagger’s eye. He and Keith Richards wrote her first hit, “As Tears Go by” and a star was born.

One could say she was destined for stardom, and not just because the camera loved her face. As the daughter of an avant gard ballerina and the great niece of an Austrian nobleman who wrote the erotic novel entitled Venus in Furs, Faithfull had the necessary elan to become an icon.

She started early. At 19, already married and a mother, Faithfull took the next step towards infamy by sleeping with not just one, but three members of the Rolling Stones. She promptly left then husband John Dunbar to move in with Mick Jagger. This act precipitated a torrid adventure of music and destruction that would last 35 years.

It was Faithfull who wrote Sister Morphine. A fitting song for her future. A future that influenced the writing of Sympathy for the Devil and Wild Horses. Every great rock band needs its muse and Faithfull filled those shoes with style and a dark intelligence. Sadly, however, her role as a muse also involved a descent into serious drug addiction.

Pills, pot, alcohol, anorexia, cocaine and finally — heroin.

As the 70’s dawned, Faithull left Jagger and went on to spend the next two years homeless on the streets of London.

She was ‘rescued’ by Mike Leander who attempted revive her career. Faithfull began writing again and producing albums. But something significant had changed. Her once a lyrical voice had become whiskey soaked and life worn. Years of pushing her body and her soul beyond the pale created an entirely different, and profound kind of musical incarnation. Broken English produced in 1979 established Faithfull as a musician and songwriter to be reckoned with.

But despite the promise of that album and her re-entry into the rock world, Faithfull would continue to battle with drug addiction for two decades to come. Addiction led to broken relationships including a love affair with a mentally ill man who committed suicide by jumping out of their apartment window.

But all this destruction and suffering at last found form and a release. When her original and seminal album Vagabond Ways was released in 1999, It caused a sensation. Every song, every lyric, every sweep and attack of the music provokes and tears into the veil.

In a wise and weary act of self-commentary, Faithfull created a cabaret character of herself through which she artfully and achingly reveals the shadowy catharsis of self emergence. The album honors her Weimar roots as well as those men who continued to inspire her music and her career, Leonard Cohen and John waters among them. It is an album like no other and even as it stabs at the skin and bleeds, it is also a joyful ode to psychedelic willful survival.

Marianne Faitfhull could have ended up as a rock statistic, following in the footsteps of so many of the greats who succumbed to that decadence. But something finer than steel and more gossamer than determination exists in Faithfull. She has achieved sticking around, beating the fix and making music history. And she is still at it. Flawed? Oh yes. But brilliantly so. In these days when we have lost and continue to lose so many to the grave that can be rock stardom, it is admirable and, in fact, heroic that Faithull stands before us as she does — craven, hollowed and shining.