Sympathy For The Devil (Part I)
Creating The Narrative
We have all heard this song casually on the radio. This is one of those songs that I think about often. I know that most people hear it, sing some of the lyrics to it and then move on to the next song without ever thinking about what the lyrics are about, why it was written and the impact this one song had.
I always knew that this song had a lot packed into it. I have been thinking about tackling this topic for years. I just never had the opportunity to dig deep into it. It’s one of my favorite songs ever recorded. Not because “it’s cool to reference the devil” or “to go against the norm”. I look at it from an artistic angle. We have all been told the stories that this song contains from the morality side of the spectrum. This band spun those stories on their head and dared to ask the question: what would it be like from the devil’s perspective? That, in itself, was an interesting concept to me.
We are going to take a deep dive into the following questions:
~ Why was this record made?
~ How was the record made
~ What are the true stories told in this record
Before we do that, let's get all the known information out of the way. You know, for all those youngsters that are not familiar with this song.
“Sympathy For The Devil” is a song by the British rock band The Rolling Stones and released on their 1968 album “Beggars Banquet”. Although credited as a song written by lead singer Mick Jagger & lead guitarist Keith Richards, it was mostly written by Jagger. If you have not heard the song before (you must live under a rock), let me give you the basic synopsis. The song is as if the someone is standing on a tree stump bragging about his best accomplishments throughout history, while toying with you, begging you to guess who he is.
Of course, I had heard this as a kid growing up but it never really made an impact on me because I didn’t quite understand it. When I was 17, I began “working” for my Uncle Roy’s band, Rick Allen & The Upsetters. I was their roadie just so that I could get into the bars to see them play. It turned out to have a huge impact on my life.
They performed the only other version of this song that I ever found as impactful as the original. They would start it out very slow with just a piano and vocals, leading to the third verse, that’s when the entire band kicked in and really rocked it up.
So, how did a song of this magnitude come about? Mick Jagger stated in the 2012 documentary “Crossfire Hurricane” that he was influenced by French poet Charles Baudelaire as well as the book “The Master and Margarita” by Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov, which had just been released in 1967. The book was a gift to Jagger by his then girlfriend, actress/singer Marianne Faithfull. Mick Jagger told Rolling Stone Magazine in 1995 that he took a few lines from Baudelaire and expanded on them as a Bob Dylan type song.
In the book “According To The Rolling Stones” released in 2003. Drummer Charlie Watts recalled:
“The first time I ever heard the song was when Mick was playing it at the front door of a house I lived in in Sussex ... he played it entirely on his own ... and it was fantastic.”
It was Keith Richards who gave Jagger the idea to change it from a folk song to a samba.
In the past, The Rolling Stones had dealt with rumors from the press that they had experimented with Satanism. This song pushed all those rumors into the foreground. The press believed that the band were devil worshipers corrupting the adolescence. When “Sympathy For The Devil” was released, the public image of The Rolling Stones changed from being just some kids playing Rock N’ Roll to now being devil worshipers. Mick Jagger always thought the rumors to be off because after all, they only did one song about the Devil and not a whole album.
Until Next Time,
Thanks for reading!
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