Did Mick Jagger write The Rolling Stones song ‘Bitch’ about Marianne Faithfull?
Featured on 1971’s Sticky Fingers, ‘Bitch’ didn’t help The Rolling Stones’ already-disharmonious relationship with second-wave feminist groups. While the ‘Bitch’ of the title could easily refer to love itself, many think the slur was directed at Mick Jagger’s ex-girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, who had recently broken things off with the frontman.
The Rolling Stones were surprisingly well-prepared when they entered the studio to record Sticky Fingers – and no wonder. Mick Jagger’s long-term relationship with Marianne Faithfull had just come to an end, and he had plenty to write about. That being said, Jagger doesn’t actually direct the titular slur towards anybody in particular. Instead, he paints a portrait of a man emerging from a post-breakup coma and drowning his sorrows with a new fling. The opening verse is a riff on the classic “can’t eat, can’t sleep” motif favoured by so many lovesick songwriters. “Ain’t touched a thing all week,” he sings, “I’m feeling hungry, can’t see the reason / Just had a horse meat pie.”
One wonders if that “horse meat pie” – something inviting which conceals unexpected contents – was intended as a cruel metaphor for Faithfull. As a teenager, she’d harboured ambitions to study at Oxford or Cambridge, but the possibility of a life in academia came to an end the night she met The Rolling Stones. When she was spotted by the band’s manager Andrew Loog Oldham, she was supposedly dismissed as “an angel with big tits” (via The Guardian), but one with real star potential. Drained of her creative ambition by the sexist ’60s music industry, she was reduced to being Jagger’s muse. It was Faithfull’s copy of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita that inspired ‘Sympathy for the Devil’.
From thereon, Faithfull was unfairly regarded as purely ornamental, “as somebody who not only can’t even sing, but doesn’t really write or anything, just something you can make into something”. This seems to have suited Jagger. When The Stones recorded her 1969 B-side ‘Sister Morphine‘, an incredibly bleak, autobiographical account of addiction, they removed her name from the writing credits, partly because they knew that any money she made from the single would only be used to feed her addiction.
Faithfull’s addiction meant she lost custody of her son Nicholas, which in turn led to her attempted suicide. By this point, she was suffering from addiction, depression and anorexia nervosa. She broke things off with Jagger in May 1970, sliding even further into addiction. In Jagger’s eyes, their relationship was yet further evidence of love’s deception. Faithfull’s decline may have shattered Jagger’s hopes of true love, but he’s hardly the victim in all of this. For him, getting over Faithfull seems to have been as easy as finding someone to make him “salivate like a Pavlov Dog”. For Faithfull, cutting ties with Jagger meant dissolving the foundations of her entire way of life.
