19th Nervous Breakdown

19th Nervous Breakdown (1966)

"A lyrical breakthrough, with references to drugs and therapy, "19th Nervous Breakdown" showed The Rolling Stones could pack sharp social criticism into headlong rock & roll. Jagger came up with the title phrase after five weeks of an exhausting U.S. tour. He spun it into lyrics about the trendy neurosis of posh London girls, sung over jagged Bo Diddley-style riffing. As the song fades out, Wyman uncorks a wild dive-bombing bass sound that ups the sense of harried intensity."

 

Excerpt from Who is that Man? by David Dalton

"An agile, subtle, polytropic mind, he registered America’s 19th nervous breakdown with hallucinatory precision. Fragmented images and cubist songs replaced the storytelling and ballad tableaux of folk songs and transformed the agitprop of protest songs into a roiling, nightmarish vision in which you couldn’t distinguish the chaos outside from the turmoil within."   Who is that Man? 


The Witmark Demos and The Original Mono Recordings

"Few artists could match the proficiency that young Bob Dylan had when he was in his early twenties. Starting with his self-titled debut in 1962 when he was only twenty years old and the twenty four months that followed, Dylan released 47 studio recordings on four albums of astonishing quality.

The press labeled him “the voice of his generation,” and Dylan quickly became an icon of many movements: civil rights and war protests, namely. But pinpointing him to a specific style and image made Dylan feel trapped and repressed. Few realized at the time that he was simply playing out a persona, a persona that was about to change.

The two years that followed found Dylan changing his persona. He ‘went electric,’ inspiring a new genre of folk-rock, but leaving many of his fans outraged for putting down his simplistic acoustic sound. His proficiency remained at a high level, and Dylan released three albums containing 34 songs. Under the pressures of constant touring, writing and recording, and nearing a nervous breakdown, Dylan exited the scene after a mysterious motorcycle accident."    puddlegum

 1966 Nervous Breakdown; or, When Did Postmodernism Begin?

In or about 1966, modernity changed. In the spirit of recent reflections on “the year as period,” the present article undertakes a thought experiment: What if we dated the beginning of postmodernism to 1966 instead of, say, 1972–73, the date preferred by Charles Jencks, Fredric Jameson, and Andreas Killen, among others? What might such a thought experiment tell us about postmodernism, and about periodization in general? Even more decisively than in 1973, culture in 1966 is characterized by a series of “breakdowns”—of developments that get ahead of themselves, that stall out and recoil on themselves. Traceable across a variety of cultural practices, this pattern is especially evident in rock music, which achieves aesthetic “escape velocity” in 1966 in such works as the Beatles' Revolver and Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde but then stalls out. The pattern of stall and recoil is only one of a number of topological signatures of cultural practices and products also datable to 1966, among them the rediscovery of meta (self-reflection, recursiveness, strange loops) and the opening of paraworld spaces. These topological signatures constitute the building blocks of a postmodernist poetics.  Duke Journals