As a long-time Stones fan recently blessed to be found by Christ, I can't listen to this song anymore. If any of the band (or anyone else) reads this, please know that Christ is real. I was more surprised than anyone to learn this. I'm the least likely born again candidate you'll ever meet. Disturbingly, hell is real to.

It's never to late to Shine A Light. What do you have to lose? What do you have to gain?

Peace and love to all. (But absolutely no SFTD. At all.)

>> That illustration above seems specific and literal.
For the troubadour part, it shows ships in battle at sea. <<

but ... how is that illustration related to either troubadours or Bombay??
i'd guess it's supposed to be illustrating whatever the artist thinks is meant by
kings & queens fighting for ten decades (and it doesn't look either specific or literal to me)

as for how traps can be laid for aircraft: some of the stuff on the Pacific War i've been reading
in hot pursuit of clari1977's theory seems to include some fairly good examples! check it out.

on the other hand: was it the aircraft that were called troubadours, or their pilots??
(talking about aircraft being killed isn't very apt.)

anyway i'm not finding any references to Mosquitoes (or any other aircraft) being called troubadours,
or any particularly apparent association between Bombay and any Burma missions
(and i don't buy that Mick didn't know the geography - or that he'd play dumb in this otherwise literate lyric.)
so even though it makes a hell of a lot more sense than any theory i've heard so far,
i'm not convinced yet. i'm working on it, though! :E



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 2008-01-26 21:16 by with sssoul.

smile: speaking of traps ... googling aircraft + troubadour turns up some pretty odd stuff: [science.howstuffworks.com]
see Story 4 ... i can't quite stretch "Bermuda" into "Bombay", but otherwise ... it fits! it fits! :E
and it's a story that certainly could have made an impression on a 5-year-old Mick, if he heard it ...

Quote
with sssoul
>> I don't know how that Smiley made his way into my posting. <<

you used a quote mark followed by a close-parenthesis. it's been creeping unwanted into a lot of posts.
the smiley-designer was really not thinking at all when he/she came up with that one.

Thanks sssoul baby......I had one pop up in one of my posts in a rather inappropriate place....I just assumed someone much more intelligent than me felt like I should be winking when I made my comment. Now I know.

Quote
with sssoul
(cf the Hundred Years War reference as well)

oh dear... thanks a lot, with sssoul, I've never realised, the "ten decades" refer to the Hundred Years War"... feel kinda stupid now...
And no, I've got no idea what is meant by the troubadours either.

well ... being puzzled by that line for nigh on four decades makes a sssoul want to know, you know?
and with this particular theory, being the daughter of an aviator may also have something to do with it

but since all the other references in the song are clearly to mighty famous historical events
it would help a lot to find some kind of clear & well-known ambushed-troubadour incident ...
i've written to the administrator of a site about Mosquitos to ask.

OK I'm hooked... haven't found an explanation yet that I buy, but did come across these on wikipedia (i like the Will & Grace reference)...

On The NBC comedy Will and Grace Karen wanted to walk down the aisle to the song.

In the Season 2 episode of The Simpsons, Bart Gets Hit by a Car Bart goes to hell and meets the devil. The first thing that Satan says is, "Please allow me to introduce myself."

In an episode of The Sopranos, Whoever Did This, Ralph Cifaretto uses the lines "pleased to meet you" and "please allow me to introduce myself." Father Phil Intintola asks Ralph if "you were there when Jesus Christ had his moment of doubt and pain?"

Do you know what troubadours are? They were traveling story tellers/singers/musicians who would travel from town to town, performing for donations. Usually along pilgrimage routes so that they could perform to pilgrims. It was not a safe job since bandits and thieves would look for victims along roads
That may be what Mick refers to when he states
I laid traps for troubadours who got killed before they reached Bombay.
Again the line was a continuation of the songwriter addressing the question of evil and apocalypse in a sophisticated way.
In writing the song, Jagger used words with impressive economy. He cites Jesus Christ, Pontius Pilate, the czar, Anastasia, the blitzkrieg (World War II), the Kennedys and the city of Bombay and mentions Lucifer by name (just once) and in so doing creates a deep, amplified portrait of a world torn by religion, war, assassination and confusion where "Every cop is a criminal/And all the sinners saints." Threaded throughout are taunts from the teasing narrator -- the traditional demon trickster -- trying to get the listener to speak his name: "Hope you guess my name," "Tell me, baby, what's my name?" "Tell me, sweetie, what's my name?" And -- at the very pinnacle of the Flower Power era, remember -- he then turns on his starry-eyed audience and tells them that they, in league with him, are to blame for the deaths of the '60s most promising political leaders.
One also has to praise the singer's "beautiful use of incantation ... a lovely word for a special kind of vocal recurrence, one that combines overtones of prayer, magic, spell casting ... a kind of vocal voodoo."
The song's opening -- "Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste" -- parallels the beginning of Bulgakov's novel, in which a sophisticated stranger, who turns out to be Satan, introduces himself to two gentlemen sitting in a Moscow park as they're discussing whether Jesus existed or not. ("'Please excuse me,' he said, speaking correctly, but with a foreign accent, 'for presuming to speak to you without an introduction.'" The song then references Christ and the story of Pontius Pilate, which the novel takes up in its second chapter. Before moving on to the Russian Revolution, the song's narrator, Lucifer, acknowledges that his listeners are mystified -- "But what's puzzling you is the nature of my game" -- just as, in "The Master and Margarita," one of the men approached by Satan in the park thinks to himself, "What the devil is he after?"
Jagger, a voracious reader and history buff, claimed he was influenced in writing "Sympathy" by Baudelaire. But he was also, as others have pointed out, clearly under the spell of Mikhail Bulgakov's classic allegorical novel of good and evil, "The Master and Margarita." Of course Jagger was even more clearly under the spell of the 1960s, a time when -- for many -- heaven and hell seemed to have come to earth in the most lucid terms.

Another possibilty for the line -

'And I laid traps for troubadours who got killed before they reached Bombay' is probably a reference to the Thugee cult, devoted to Kali, the goddess of death, active in India for hundreds of years before being suppressed in the 1850's.

Yet another possible choice is -

The song Sympathy for the Devil seemed strong in its logic till it came to this line – the killing of troubadours before they reached Bombay. I can hardly recall any troubadour coming to India through the Gateway of India. Unless if it is on a metaphysical level.

Troubadours are travelling musicians. Some defend the line saying troubadours refer to The Beatles. They became mystical in their song writing after coming to India, losing touch with reality and the commom man.

Now, as “new age guru” Deepak Chopra would have us believe, The Beatles did a lot of LSD at Mahesh Yogi’s abode in India.
So, did wide-mouth Mick mean the India trips did The Beatles in? Or did he simply mean The Beatles were killed because of the growing popularity of The Rolling Stones? Very difficult to say:

Hope you guessed my name, oh yeah
But what’s confusing you
Is just the nature of my game



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2008-01-27 01:17 by stones40.

schillid, that comic ultra cool, thanks a lot!

Was the Thugee cult the one that strangled all strangers in honor of Kali? Hate to wander into that town.

>> Do you know what troubadours are? <<

LoFL: yes - whoever wrote the passage you've pasted up there doesn't seem to, though!
thanks stones40 for regurgitating that collection of time-worn non-explanations.
where did you find them, by the way?

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".

LoFL: stones40, if you like that "explanation" you're welcome to it -
personally i'm holding out for one that makes a little sense, on any level.
clari1977's idea about the Mosquitos doesn't work either, but at least it was different!
and it lead me to read some stuff about the history of India, the trek out of Burma, Tul Bahadur -
all very interesting! i recommend it

Does the lyric have anything to do with the Bauls of Bengal?
These can be regarded a kind of minstrels or troubedours and always had to struggle with orthodox Hindus and Muslims in their region, who wanted to prevent their flock from embrasing the theories of the Bauls. In the early 19th century there was some kind of genocide in which many Bauls were killed.
Bob Dylan and The Band worked with Bauls around 1967.

thanks for another fascinating cultural/historical trail to explore, marcovandereijk -
Bengal is of course the opposite side of India from Bombay, but ... well, maybe we're getting warmer!
and meantime it's interesting, at least. for what it's worth, here's a wikipedia page about the Baul: [en.wikipedia.org]

I assume that given the number of Stones historians on this forum that Mick has never publically discussed the lyrics. Otherwise, we'd know what he was thinking.

I've been following this thread with much interest (in part because the live version on YaYa's is very near the top of my favorite recorded song by the RS or any other band/musician) and do find it strange(?) that Mick would have included an obscure reference amongst the other pretty straighforward historical events.

I don't accept the bomber theory that clari077 wrote, as interesting as it is, mainly because it doesn't fit into the time line that is laid out in the song.

From what I've found, this song was recorded during the period of 6/4 - 6/10/1968. RFK was assassinated on 6/5/1968. That leads me to believe that the original lyrics might have been along the lines of "You shouted out, 'Who killed John Kennedy...'" and it was changed to pluralize Kennedy because of the recent event. (I guess you could argue that the entire verse was added after the assassination.)

Anyhow, going with the theory that the verse was changed to pluralize Kennedy, but the rest of the lyrics were left intact. From a time line perspective, whatever event is being discussed would then have had to have occurred between November 1963 (JFK's assassination) and June 1968 (RFK's assassination). That's the time period in which I'm searching for clues.

Another lyric that I don't know the historical reference is "I watched with glee when your kings and queens faught for 10 decades for the gods they made". Any insight to that one?

Note also on that comic that was posted on page one, "Just as every cop is a criminal..." seems to be associated with the Kent State massacre which occurred in 1970, 2 years after the song was recorded.

Dares a rabbit in dis hole en I'm gonna eatem up.........eeeeehhhhhhh..I don't want any tea, it give me a headache!

a slight digression:
why does he say in the ad lib
"I tell you one time, you're to blame" ?

Quote
WMiller
Note also on that comic that was posted on page one, "Just as every cop is a criminal..." seems to be associated with the Kent State massacre which occurred in 1970, 2 years after the song was recorded.

sssoul pointed this out already...
the drawing is just one artist's interpretation of the lyric...

I wouldn't assume that the artist had the correct interpretation or chronology

How is this interpretation of the troubadours part?...

In the mid-twentieth century, at a time when such places were becoming fairly common... an Indian restaurant named "Bombay Masala" opened on the Lower East Side. Live musicians provided entertainment. These "troubadours," as they were known, came to the neighborhood by subway. Some of these musicans were killed or kidnapped en route. Details have always been very sketchy.

>> (I guess you could argue that the entire verse was added after the assassination.) <<

no, he made it plural when Robert was killed - he's talked about that.
the events don't seem to be in chronological order anyway;
and we've already discussed the Hundred Years War a bit,
but i gather the thread's gotten too longwinded to read through. :E

i'm not 100% sure the Hundred Years War is what he means by the kings and queens fighting for ten decades -
i reckon a reasonable claim could be made that he meant whatever 10 decades anyone cares to point out.
but the Hundred Years War does spring easily to mind, fits the overall sense, etc.

historically of course troubadours flourished in the 11th-13th centuries,
but there's nothing (0) connecting those troubadours with Bombay - which (at least so far!)
is the same reason that i still can't buy clari1977's or marcovandereijk's intriguing ideas.
i really am having a great time rooting around for more details on both Burma and the Baul, though! [passing popcorn]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2008-01-28 21:20 by with sssoul.

Quote
Christian
a slight digression:
why does he say in the ad lib
"I tell you one time, you're to blame" ?

nobody ?

The Kathaks were the troubadours (dancers, singers and storytellers) of India
pursued by the british puritanism. Could be ?

I thought the Hundred Years' War, in the 1400s, was between England and France over territory, lineage, and other petty royal concerns, not over religion. The song probably refers to the religious wars that followed the Protestant movement of the late 16th century, in several countries, including England but also in central Europe. The "ten decades" might mean the 17th century generally, or it might be poetic license for "a long time," or it might be a mistake!

lest we forget, there was also the so-called Second Hundred Years War from 1688 to 18-whatever,
which included territorial disputes, succession disputes and religious disputes,
and covered at least three continents - quite an extravaganza!
anyway yeah, there are plenty of candidates for that "ten decades" line,
even if we stick to just European history

>> it might be poetic license for "a long time" <<

yep! and "the gods they made" could involve some poetic license as well -
but i'd better shut up before someone decides it's another reference to the Beatles. :E



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2008-01-28 23:54 by with sssoul.

Perhaps he was thinking of a different Bombay:



and how the band protected its cache from other bands on the bill

.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2008-09-24 16:20 by parislocksmith.

there's some mention of some of the sources on wiki for the song but none of them clear up this line about Bombay.

At least it isn't just me, I thought t was just some event I was too stupid to have heard of

Sssoul pointed out that "Lucifer clearly isn't into a Linear-Time Thing." Gotta agree. Interesting to me in that drawing, about that. The artist seems to understand that linear time doesn't apply if you're the Devil. So you see... Kent State or The man in the limo pulling up in years BC.

Another thing about Bombay Troubadours...
Mick's lines in the song all end more or less in an "AY" sound:

...wealth and TASTE
...soul and FAITH
...doubt and PAIN
...sealed his FATE

Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my NAME
What's puzzlin' you
...nature of my GAME

...time for a CHANGE
...screamed in VAIN
...TANK, RANK, RAGED, STANK

Hmmm.... "BOMBAY" rhymes. Kennedy almost rhymes...
Could it be that he was just looking for a rhyme?