Why Mick Jagger described The Rolling Stones song ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’ as “a joke”
The Rolling Stones are no strangers to controversy. Their posture as a bad boy Beatles alternative, mainly a shrewd fabrication courtesy of manager Andrew Loog Oldham, garnered the attention they needed to conquer the world over the 1960s.
While the ’60s was an era of liberation and socio-political transition, the hippies didn’t get off lightly. Prudent parents and obstinate politicians on both sides of the Atlantic were keen to put pop musicians in the guillotine as a response to their reprehensible and contagious antics. Taking the rough with the smooth, neither The Beatles nor The Rolling Stones escaped martyrdom over this period.
In 1996, while John Lennon was being reprimanded in the Land of the Free for his “blasphemous” statement that The Beatles were “more popular than Jesus”, Paul McCartney was in the midst of a media attack concerning his use of LSD and Mick Jagger was getting an earful about his divisive hit, ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’.
To hear the Stones’ 1966 hit single today, few would take issue with the lyrics, but in its original climate, Jagger told of people taking offence due to alleged romanticism of drug use.
“On our first trip I tried so hard to rearrange your mind/ But after a while, I realised you were disarranging mine”.
Over the subsequent months and years, the Stones’ drug use became increasingly evident as the media began to engulf them. This tension reached a head in February 1967 with Jagger and Keith Richards’ infamous Redlands drug bust, which was followed by Brian Jones’ arrest for possession just three months later.
As Jagger later reflected, ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’ was misread by many listeners who assumed it was autobiographical. “Things that are happening around me – everyday life as I see it. People say I’m always singing about pills and breakdowns, therefore I must be an addict – this is ridiculous. Some people are so narrow-minded they won’t admit to themselves that this really does happen to other people besides pop stars,” Jagger said, explaining the song’s true meaning via Mark Paytress’ Off The Record.
“That’s a very Los Angeles period, I remember being in the West Coast a lot then,” Jagger added. “‘19th Nervous Breakdown’ is a bit of a joke song, really. I mean, the idea that anyone could be offended by it really is funny. But I remember some people were. It’s very hard to put yourself back in that period now – popular songs didn’t really address anything very much.”
“Bob Dylan was addressing it, but he wasn’t thought of as a mainstream pop act,” he continued. “And anyway, no one knew what he was talking about… basically, his songs were too dense for most people. And so to write about anything other than the normal run-of-the-mill love clichés was considered very outre and it was never touched. Anything outside that would shock people. So songs like ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’ were slightly jarring to people. But I guess they soon got used to it. A couple years after that, things took a sort of turn and then saw an even more dark direction. But those were very innocent days, I think.”
Listen to The Rolling Stones’ ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’ below.
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