Writers: Mick Jagger and Keith Richard
Producer: Jimmy Miller
Recorded: June 1968 at Olympic Studios, London
Released: December 5, 1968
| Players: | Mick Jagger – vocals, harmonica Keith Richard – guitars Bill Wyman – bass Charlie Watts – drums Brian Jones – guitar Nicky Hopkins – piano |
| Album: | Beggars Banquet (London, 1968) |
Inspired by the Mikhail Bulgakov novel The Master And Margarita — in which Satan appears in Moscow to observe the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution — “Sympathy For The Devil” began as a folk-styled song called “The Devil Is My Name.”
Jean-Luc Goddard filmed the band recording the song for a movie that was to be called One Plus One but was later changed to “Sympathy For The Devil.”
With its menacing polyrhythms and dark lyrics, the song became a symbol of the Rolling Stones' violent Altamont Speedway concert in 1969. CriticRobert Christgau wrote, “An Afro-American bohemian is murdered by a lower-class white Hell's Angel while the Englishmen do a song called 'Sympathy For The Devil.'” Many came to see the festival and, by association, the song as the crashing end of the '60s counter-culture.
However, the film Gimme Shelter later showed that the Stones were actually playing “Under My Thumb” at the time of the stabbing.
The band dropped “Sympathy For The Devil” from its live shows for several years because it became such a symbol of the Altamont horror.
Beggars Banquet was the band's first album with producer Jimmy Miller, who said: “Mick (Jagger) contacted me and said he liked the things I did with Traffic. He had been producing the Rolling Stones but he says he doesn't want to be on two sides of the control room window now.”
During sessions, guitarist Brian Jones and his lackadaisical habits got on the other Stones' nerves. “What can I play?” he asked Mick, who responded, cynically, “Yeah, what CAN you play, Brian?”
A 4:15 a.m. studio fire interrupted the session, and the firemen's extinguishers wrecked a lot of equipment. Said drummer Charlie Watts: “It was bloody frightening.”
Jagger originally wrote the lyric “who killed Kennedy” but altered it after Robert F. Kennedy's assassination to “who killed the Kennedys.”
The Stones performed the song during the Rock And Roll Circus, a lavish show held on December 8, 1968 and filmed for BBC Television that featured performances by the Who, Jethro Tull, Taj Mahal, Marianne Faithfull, Yoko Ono, and the Dirty Mac, an all-star band featuring guitarists Keith Richards, John Lennon, and Eric Clapton, and drummer Mitch Mitchell from the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Unhappy with the performance, the Stones did not release a video and album of the event until 1996.
