Composers: Mick
Jagger & Keith Richards
Recording date:
June 1968 Recording location: Olympic
Sound Studios, London
Producers: Jimmy Miller Chief engineer: Glyn
Johns
Performed
onstage: 1968-70, 1975-76,
1989-90, 1994-95, 1997-99, 2002-03, 2005-07, 2012-19,
2021-22, 2024
Probable line-up:
Drums: Charlie Watts
Bass: Keith Richards
Electric guitar: Keith
Richards
Lead vocal: Mick Jagger
Background vocals: Mick Jagger,
Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, Marianne
Faithfull,
Anita Pallenberg, Nicky Hopkins
& Jimmy Miller
Piano: Nicky Hopkins
Congas: Rocky Dijon
Maracas: Bill Wyman
TrackTalk
I think that was taken from an old idea of Baudelaire's, I think, but I could be wrong. Sometimes when I look at my Baudelaire books, I can't see it in there. But it was an idea I got from French writing*. And I just took a couple of lines and expanded on it. I wrote it as sort of like a Bob Dylan song. And you can see it in this movie Godard shot called Sympathy for the Devil, which is very fortuitous, because Godard wanted to do a film of us in the studio. I mean, it would never happen now, to get someone as interesting as Godard. And stuffy. We just happened to be recording that song. We could have been recording My Obsession. But it was Sympathy for the Devil, and it became the track that we used.
[*Note: The principal
inspiration for the song was actually the novel The
Master and Margarita by Soviet writer Mikhail
Bulgakov. Many lines from the song have direct references in
that book. In his 1981 book The Last Twenty Years,
David Dalton lists it as one of the books Mick purchased in
1968.]
(I wrote that song alone). I mean, Keith suggested that we do it in another rhythm, so that's how bands help you... I knew it was something good, 'cause I would just keep banging away at it until the fucking band recorded it... But I knew it was a good song. You just have this feeling. It had its poetic beginning, and then it had historic references and then philosophical jottings and so on. It's all very well to write that in verse, but to make it into a pop song is something different. Especially in England - you're skewered on the altar of pop culture if you become pretentious.
It started
out as a folky thing like Jigsaw
Puzzle, but that didn't make it so we kept going
over it and changing it until finally it comes out as a samba.
Sympathy
for the Devil started out as a Bob Dylan song and ended
up as a samba.
Sympathy
for the Devil started as sort of a folk song with
acoustics, and ended up as a kind of mad samba, with me
playing bass and overdubbing the guitar later. That's why I
don't like to go into the studio with all the songs worked out
and planned beforehand.
Sympathy
for the Devil was tried six different ways. I don't mean
at once. It was all night doing it one way, then another full
night trying it another way, and we just could not get it
right. It would never fit a regular rhythm. I first heard Mick
play that one on the steps of my house on an acoustic guitar.
The first time I heard it, it was really light and had a kind
of Brazilian sound. Then when we got in the studio we poured
things on it, and it was something different. I could never
get a rhythm for it, except this one, which is like a samba on
the snare drum. It was always a bit like a dance band until we
got Rocky Dijon in, playing the congas. By messing about with
that, we got the thing done.
Sympathy
was one of those songs where we tried everything. 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. It was at dinner;
he played it entirely on his own, the sun was going down - and
it was fantastic. We had a go at loads of different ways of
playing it; in the end I just played a jazz Latin feel in the
style that Kenny Clarke would have played on A Night In
Tunisia - not the actual rhythm he played, but the same
styling. Fortunately it worked, because it was a sod to get
together... Good song, though.
But if
you've got a good song, it could become anything. Which is the
mark of a good song, I think. That one is a good song.
We've done
about three nights of this kind of (film) shooting. We shot a
number called The Devil Is My Name which is on the LP.
The first run-through was a disaster and then the second take
everything went perfect. It could well be the feature track on
the album.
Anita (Pallenberg) was the epitome of what was happening at the
time. She was very Chelsea. She'd arrive with the elite film
crowd. During Sympathy for the Devil when I started
going whoo, whoo in the control room, so did they. I had
the engineer set up a mike so they could go out in the studio
and whoo, whoo.
My whole
thing of this song was not black magic and all this nonsense -
like Megadeth or whatever else came afterward. It was
different than that.
It has a
very hypnotic groove, a samba, which has a tremendous hypnotic
power, rather like good dance music. It doesn't speed up or
down. It keeps this constant groove. Plus, the actual samba
rhythm is a great one to sing on, but it's also got some other
suggestions in it, an undercurrent of being primitive -
because it is a primitive African, South American,
Afro-whatever-you-call-that rhythm. So to white people, it has
a very sinister thing about it. But forgetting the cultural
colors, it is a very good vehicle for producing a powerful
piece. It becomes less pretentious because it's a very
unpretentious groove. If it had been done as a ballad, it
wouldn't have been as good.
Vaguely,
(the line about the Kennedys) means you can't pin their deaths
on anyone, because there were so many people who would have
liked to see them dead. It is our responsibility because crime
in our society is our responsibility.
(We took
the subject of the devil seriously) for the duration of the
song. That's what those things are about. It's like acting in
a movie: you try to act out the scene as believably as
possible, whether you believe it or not. That's called GOOD
ACTING. You have to remember, when somebody writes a song,
it's not entirely autobiographical... Sympathy for the
Devil was pretty... ah, well, it's just one song, as I
said. Hell, you know, I neve really did the subject to death.
But I DID have to back off a little, because I could see what
was happening. It's an easily exploitable image, and people
really went for it in a big way.
Sympathy is quite an uplifting song. It's just a matter
of looking (the Devil) in the face. He's there all the time.
I've had very close contact with Lucifer - I've met him several
times. Evil - people tend to bury it and hope it sorts itself
out and doesn't rear its ugly head. Sympathy for the Devil is
just as appropriate now, with 9/11. There it is again, big time.
When that song was written, it was a time of turmoil. It was the
first sort of international chaos since World War II. And
confusion is not the ally of peace and love. You want to think
the world is perfect. Everybody gets sucked into that. And as
America has found out to its dismay, you can't hide. You might
as well accept the fact that evil is there and deal with it any
way you can. Sympathy for the Devil is a song that
says, Don't forget him. If you confront him, then he's
out of a job.
(It’s) such a bizarre thing to play. It’s incredible fun, because there’s all these gaps. Ronnie and I don’t even play until the bridge: Pleased to meet you! And there’s great dynamics in it. And then at the end, I can just dribble about a bit.