A young girl is sitting in a chair in the corner of the room, as Bob Dylan types, Joan Baez sings Percy’s Song, and Albert Grossman looks smugly upon the scene.
See the video clip here – from Dont Look Back, Savoy Hotel, London, May 4, 1965:
The girl is Marianne Faithfull. Although she is now more associated with The Rolling Stones, she also has covered several of Bob Dylan’s songs, and has a connection to him, as recalled in her autobiography and later interviews.
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“God Himself checked into the Savoy Hotel. Bob Dylan came to town wearing Phil Spector shades and an aureole of hair and seething irony.
“Dylan was, at that moment in time, nothing less than the hippest person on earth. The zeitgeist streamed through him like electricity. He was my Existential hero, the gangling Rimbaud of rock, and I wanted to meet him more than any other living being. I wasn’t simply a fan; I worshipped him…
“… one minute I was walking down Oxford Street and the next I was knocking somewhat trepidatiously on a mysterious blue door. Of course, with Dylan you are drawn willy-nilly into his world of encoded messages. Doors are no longer doors; they take on Kafkaesque significance. There are answers behind them.
“Behind the blue door there was a room full of hipsters, hustlers, pop stars, swallow- tailed waiters, folkers, Fleet Street hacks, managers, blondes and beatniks…
“The most remarkable thing about Dylan was his rap. Stream-of-consciousness thought fragments…
“What people saw as abrasive in Dylan was really his elliptical approach to everything. He was nothing if not a slippery subject, and he did not suffer fools gladly. His testiness came into play mostly with the press. A master of the anti-interview, Dylan fairly bristled at direct questions.” (London, 1965)
(From “Faithfull: An Autobiography,” by Marianne Faithfull with David Dalton)
Faithfull, Marianne, and David Dalton. Faithfull: An Autobiography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994, 0316273244
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What might have been?
Marianne Faithfull has also revealed how Bob Dylan was ‘interested’ in her.
She said:
“It’s true what they say: You regret the things you don’t do the most. Apparently Bob Dylan spent days and days writing a poem for me in 1964 and I think it was understood in his circle that I would go to bed with him. I mean, I presume that’s the intention when you’re a very pretty girl and you go to a big star’s bedroom, isn’t it? But I didn’t realize this at the time because I was just a silly teenager and it was all a bit much.
“I very much wanted to go to bed with him, but I was pregnant and about to get married (to her first husband John Dunbar) at the time. I told him all this and he was furious and ripped the poem up in front of me. We are still very fond of each other and still talk about that night. I’ll always say to him, ‘But Bob, I was only 17’ and he always says, ‘Yeah, but I was only 22 myself!’
But Faithfull was more interested to see what Dylan had been writing about her:
“The saddest thing for me was not that we didn’t go to bed together, but that I never got to see than poem.”
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Bob Dylan met Marianne Faithfull backstage after his show on February 17, 2003, at the Sydney Entertainment Centre, Australia. At one point there were photographs online, but they appear to have been removed from more obvious searchable sources. The magic of EDLIS provides them here for Café members!