Remember when your parents told you the 1960s counterculture was a cesspool of drugs and moral decay?
Turns out they were right all along.
And Marianne Faithfull just spilled the beans about what really went down behind the scenes with some of the biggest names in rock history.
New documentary exposes the seedy underbelly of 1960s rock culture
A new documentary called Broken English premiered at the Venice Film Festival and boy, does it paint a picture of the 1960s that would make Ward Cleaver roll over in his grave.
Marianne Faithfull, the British singer who died earlier this year at 78, decided to come clean about her wild days running with the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan crowd.
And what she revealed should surprise absolutely no one who lived through that era with their eyes open.
The documentary shows Faithfull sitting there with oxygen tubes in her nose – the physical toll of decades of hard living written all over her face – talking about taking LSD with Mick Jagger the night before a major interview.¹
"The night before I did this interview, Mick and I had taken LSD, and maybe that affected me," she admits in the film.
You think?
But it gets better – or worse, depending on how you look at it.
Bob Dylan tried to seduce teenage Faithfull with poetry
Here’s where things get really sleazy.
Faithfull reveals that when she was just 19 years old, Bob Dylan – the folk hero liberals have been worshipping for decades – was hitting on her while she was in a recording studio.
"He was coming on to me," Faithfull says about Dylan. "Bob said to me, ‘I’ve been writing poem about you.’ That’s what he was typing."
Dylan used his status as a famous songwriter to try and seduce a teenager when he was fully five years older than her. Talk about walking the line of the half plus seven rule.
Faithfull, who clearly learned a thing or two over the years, wasn’t buying it.
"Well, it was probably completely made up," she says. "If I had a dollar for every cute man who’s told me, ‘This song, this poem is about you, darling,’ I’d be rich."
Smart woman – too bad she figured that out after getting caught up in their world.
The drug-fueled chaos that destroyed a generation
The documentary doesn’t shy away from showing the real consequences of the "sex, drugs, and rock and roll" lifestyle that Hollywood and the music industry have been glamorizing for decades.
Faithfull talks openly about her addiction struggles, a suicide attempt, and how the constant chaos eventually caught up with all of them.
Remember that famous 1967 police raid on Keith Richards’ house?
Faithfull was caught in the middle of it – and let’s just say she wasn’t exactly dressed for company when law enforcement showed up.
"It never occurred to me that the powers that be would ever do something like that, walk into Keith’s house and arrest us," she says.
Really? It never occurred to her that openly flaunting drug use and lawless behavior might have consequences?
This is what happens when you reject every moral guardrail society puts in place.
The raid became a media circus, and Faithfull became the poster child for the moral bankruptcy of the era.
"I really was like that," she admits. "I was very anarchic."
Look what happened to the generation that rejected traditional values
Here’s the thing our audience has understood all along – there are consequences to rejecting the values that built this country.
Faithfull’s story isn’t unique. It’s the story of an entire generation that threw away everything their parents and grandparents fought to build.
They called it "liberation." They called it "progress." They called it "breaking free from oppressive social norms."
What they really did was destroy themselves and poison American culture for decades to come.
Faithfull died at 78 after years of health problems directly related to her lifestyle choices. In her final interview, she says, "I hate what’s happened," referring to how her body had been ravaged by decades of abuse.
Dylan, Jagger, Richards – these were the people who were supposedly leading a cultural revolution. What they were really doing was leading young people straight into hell.
And the media celebrated them for it.
You want to know why this matters? Because we’re still dealing with the consequences of the moral relativism these people pushed in the 1960s.
When Bob Dylan was using his fame to hit on teenagers, the cultural establishment was celebrating him as a visionary. When the Rolling Stones were promoting drug use through their music, critics called it artistic genius.
The same people who clutch their pearls about every conservative politician’s personal life spent decades making heroes out of predatory rock stars and drug dealers.
Faithfull’s documentary is accidentally honest about what really went on behind the scenes. While parents across America were trying to protect their kids from this garbage, the entertainment industry was pushing it as hard as they could.
They told us we were uptight. They told us we didn’t understand art. They told us we were standing in the way of progress.
Turns out we were just trying to protect our children from becoming Marianne Faithfull.
The woman spent her final years connected to oxygen tubes, reflecting on a life destroyed by the very people liberals still worship today.
Maybe it’s time we stopped pretending the 1960s counterculture was anything other than a disaster for American society.
Your parents were right all along.
¹ Jeremy Helligar, "Marianne Faithfull Recalls Taking LSD with Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan ‘Coming on to Me’ and Performs for the Last Time in New Doc," People, August 30, 2025.