“Crazy Mary” – Victoria Williams and Lou Reed
(Words/music: Victoria Williams, appears on MTV’s 120 Minutes Live, Atlantic 1998)

To know Victoria Williams’ music is to know her story too.  In 1993, Williams was diagnosed with MS and because she made a living as a singer/songwriter, lacked health insurance.  Thus the Sweet Relief Fund was born, and through two compilations (the first consisting of covers of Williams’ songs) and other efforts raises money for musicians who cannot pay their medical bills.  Having endured a gap in health insurance coverage myself, I can attest that it’s not cheap for a healthy person, let alone someone with something like MS requiring plenty of treatments.  Still, what seemed like a tragedy became a triumph as Williams still writes songs and performs over fifteen years after her diagnosis.

Still, it’s the story in her song that’s more important.  “Crazy Mary” reads like a character sketch or a barebones short story.  I’m somewhat reminded of the oddball characters Flannery O’Connor created in her stories (although I’m still not 100% satisfied with that comparison – help me out in the comments if you have a better match).  The title character is the strange hermit woman in her town - if she lived in your town, she’d be the subject of childhood legends and dares to go knock on her door.  Unlike the stereotypical urban legend, the narrator has seen Mary and even met her on a few occasions.  Still, Mary’s voice is silent in the song – she waves her arms frantically and has “wild eyes” but never utters a word.  We don’t know what drove her to the outskirts of the town or rendered her silent (and if it was a story, we’d have a slight back story at least) and we don’t quite know what happens to her at the end.

I’ve always been struck by how Williams sings the song in this version (from a compilation of live performances on MTV’s now defunct 120 Minutes).  Like many, I first heard Pearl Jam’s version from the original Sweet Relief compilation and they do an admirable job with the song, but Williams tells the story like she lived it first hand.  There’s the clever turn of phrase spelling out “loitering” followed by “a-llowed” and how she enters into a Crazy (Mary)-like shriek near the end of the chorus.  It’s the first verse after the chorus where Williams’ performance makes the story; she quickly speaks the first two lines of the verse (kind of like her duet partner Lou Reed might have done) before leaning into the word “dreaming” just for a split second longer than any other word.  Her voice lifts slightly higher just at the part where the narrator shares her dream of flight into Mary’s home.  At the end of the verse, Mary’s “rising up above” her run down shack, and after hearing how a car crashed into her house in the final verse, it seems like Mary’s ascended from life into the afterlife.  I might be reading too much into the biblical connotation of her name (which would strengthen the O’Connor comparison), but there’s a certain collapsing of the story onto itself at the end as the dream and reality blur.  The lines repeated right after the discovery of the accident – “that what you fear the most / could meet you half way” is vague enough to refer to Mary (who despite her exile from town met her demise from one of the citizens) or the narrator (who empathizes with Mary and thus probably sees something of herself in the demise) but pointed enough to pierce the song open, leaving the scars as a reminder of Mary’s story.


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PS – I can’t decide if Lou Reed adds or subtracts to this version.  I like the lead guitar he’s playing throughout the song, and at times it sounds like whimpering or wailing.  His lead part sounds like a strange mutation of the blues – distorted, disoriented, and slightly disturbed.  Still, his spoken (and sometimes out of time) backing vocals are kind of distracting.  I almost wish they turned off his microphone and just let him play the guitar solo.

More on Victoria Williams: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm
More on Lou Reed: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm