Diablo Records UK
2005
Rich Kid Blues
About This Album
A couple of lackluster country albums notwithstanding, Marianne Faithfull spent the '70s drifting through the same world of twilight hearsay and shadow that engrossed Iggy Pop for so much of the time. Rumors that she was recording were followed by stories of disheveled collapse or abandonment; rumors that she was filming generally ended with late-night airings for incomprehensible plays; and rumors that she was ever going to return as even a vaguely potent power on the music scene were laughed off as the ramblings of an overly forgiving fan club. Laugh again. Following her resurrection at the end of the decade, those ghostly sessions in the very early '70s came to haunt the extremes of the completist's consciousness, but it would be two decades more before listeners had the chance to discover whether those sessions could live up to the legend. In fact, they surpassed it, and Rich Kid Blues, drawn from a string of ultimately abortive recordings around 1970-1971, not only reassesses that aspect of Faithfull's life, it reappraises a lot of what she accomplished later. Neither Faithfull nor (surprisingly!) the liner essay rate the recordings highly. Though it certainly feeds out of the same basic mindset which inspired Faithfull's earlier recording of "Sister Morphine," Rich Kid Blues nevertheless catches the singer at her lowest ebb -- "probably on the edge of death," is Faithfull's own summary, and she serves up a selection of songs to match: sparse, stark interpretations of Cat Stevens' "Sad Lisa," Tim Hardin's "Southern Butterfly," Sandy Denny's "Crazy Lady Blues," Phil Ochs' "Chords of Fame," and, one of three Dylan covers, a positively spine-chilling "Visions of Johanna.
Track List (try tracks 1,3,5,6 and 7)

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