“What a drag it is getting old,” Mick Jagger famously sang on the Rolling Stones’ classic 1966 track, “Mother’s Little Helper.” Ironically, Jagger was a mere lad of 22 when he wrote those iconic lyrics, but of course, he wasn’t singing about himself.
“Mother’s Little Helper” was written while the Stones were on tour in 1965, as were quite a few tunes, as Jagger explained: A whopping twelve songs in two weeks.
“You get back from a show, have something to eat, a few beers, and just go to your room and write,” Mick said, according to The Rolling Stones: The Biography by Bob Spitz. The Stones went on to record ten of those new songs in three days at RCA, including “Mother’s Little Helper” (which Jagger described as a “very strange record, like a music-hall number”).
The lyrics, as fans are well aware, are about what was perceived as a sort of epidemic in the ’60s: Miserable suburban housewives getting hooked on sedatives.
‘Kids are different today,’ I hear every mother say
Mother needs something today to calm her down
And though she’s not really ill, there’s a little yellow pill
She goes running for the shelter of her mother’s little helper
And it helps her on her way, gets her through her busy day
Though the BBC banned the song over drug references, “Mother’s Little Helper” was a hit anyway, peaking at #8 on the Billboard Hot 100. And as Jagger pointed out later, it was never meant to be taken all that seriously.
“It’s about drug dependence, but in a sort of like spoofy way,” he said, per Songfacts. “As a songwriter, I didn’t really think about addressing things like that. It was just everyday stuff that you I’d observe and write about. It’s what writing is for really. There is a sort of naivety, but there’s also a lot of humor in those songs. They’re a lot based on humor. It was almost like a different band, a different world, a different view when we wrote them.”
“I get inspiration from things that are happening around me — everyday life as I see it,” Jagger continued. “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 beside pop stars.”
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According to Keith Richards, the “strange guitar sound” on “Mother’s Little Helper” is a 12-string with a slide on it.
“The track just needed something to make it twang,” Richards explained, adding, “Otherwise, the song was quite vaudeville in a way. I wanted to add some nice bite to it. And it was just one of those things where someone walked in and, Look, it’s an electric 12-string. It was some gashed-up job. No name on it. God knows where it came from. Or where it went. But I put it together with a bottleneck. Then we had a riff that tied the whole thing together. And I think we overdubbed onto that. Because I played an acoustic guitar as well.”
While the band managed to achieve the perfect sound in the studio, they apparently were never able to recreate that magic live.
“We’ve often tried to perform ‘Mother’s Little Helper’ and it’s never been any good, never gelled for some reason — it’s either me not playing it right or Keith not wanting to do it like that,” Charlie Watts said in the 2003 book According to the Rolling Stones.
“It’s never worked,” Watts added. “It’s just one of those songs. We used to try it live but it’s a bloody hard record to play.”
Despite the fact that “Mother’s Little Helper” was never a concert staple, it remains one of the Stones’ most beloved tracks. At the time of this writing, the song has over 45 million streams on Spotify alone.
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