If I am not mistaken I read somewhere that there was a dockworkers strike (called stevedors) in bombay and england sent marines to unload the ships in the harbor with the rotting food etc. on board but they never reached Bombay. I have tried to find out if this is the event he is talking about and incorrectly called them troubadours and can't find this out and it has bugging me for many years. If someone can tell me if this is the event I would appreciate it a lot.

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schillid
REALLY dumb question...

If troubadours were FLIERS...
then how could anyone "lay traps" to kill them?
( (Esp. BEFORE they got to Bombay... Unless they were un-earthly traps ; ) !)

I agree, not that the question's dumb, but that the answer isn't an aircraft. Consider as well that if they were planes, they wouldn't be killed. It hardly makes sense for Satan to speak of "killing" an aircraft.

Listening to the Godard film, there's a lot of lyrics that didn't get used in this song; I imagine that Jagger had a much longer Dylan-like set of lyrics that was eventually cropped and refined into what ultimately became SFTD. There's some possibility that the larger context for this line was truncated/ lost, while the line was kept because it worked musically. Of course I'm guessing, not unlike the aircraft idea . . . and could be shot down by any of you.

With sssoul the troubadour line could mean many things but this is the most likely -


Mick was not referring to the Beatles whose songs and
actions contributed to the great hippie trail searching for enlightenment
on the Indian subcontinent.
The "Troubadours" were in fact the hippies who followed the 'Beatles' to India in search of transendendal enlightenment or inner peace but never actually reached the end point of their journey.

The "Troubadours who got killed before they reached Bombay" refers to the hippies who traveled the "Hippie Trail" by road.(1967 onwards)
Many on them were killed and ripped off by drug peddlers in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Those shady deals were probably the "traps".

Stones40: I've heard that theory as well, and as I've said before I'm not buying it.
Mick Jagger had no reason to refer to random hippies as "troubadours",
and while a few hippies may have occasionally come to a bad end on the way to India,
it wasn't on a scale to be listed side-by-side with crucifixions, assassinations and wars.
Just about any other theory (except the Beatles notion) makes more sense to me than that one. Sorry.