Beggars Banquet: Fifty Years of Sympathy

I’m partial to this song – at my first real concert, the Rolling Stones played it in my backyard. I was 7 years old and the show was at Dodger Stadium, close enough to our house that we could walk and close enough that my dad could sit on our balcony and listen to the home-run cheers of “Brown Sugar” on the wind. We took my best friend Ezra, the other half of our first-grade grunge band “Silver Lightening” (currently seeking a record deal) as the two of us argued like schoolchildren – and bandmates – whether “Satisfaction” or “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” was the more awesome song. The Stones finally came on, two and a half hours late, and delivered an expectedly awesome set (both of us were validated when they opened with “Jack Flash” and closed with “Satisfaction”), parts of which we ended up dozing through in our elementary-school exhaustion. Still, it was the encore that absolutely floored me as a little kid getting a taste of rock and roll in the flesh: from the dark, empty stage was an explosion of fire and flames as Mick Jagger emerged in a red satin coat to ignite the opening howls to “Sympathy for the Devil,” their scathing samba masterpiece recalling human history through the crazed eyes of Satan himself. “Sympathy,” the first track off of Beggars Banquet (1968), turns 50 this year and is worthy of remembrance not just for its significance as a musical feat, but as the token example of the marriage between the rebellious evils of the devil and rock and roll. Never had Satan been so glorious.

Borne of the tumult that convulsed the social politics of the late ‘60s, “Sympathy” took the side of the enemy. At the time, the Rolling Stones were branded as the anti-Beatles, though even the Fab Four, in spite of their status as the ultimate pop icons, were still in recovery from the damages wrought by John Lennon’s off-hand comment that they had become “more popular than Jesus.” As the pop music paradigm grew dirtier, more defiant, and more culturally pervasive, the Rolling Stones ran with their “bad-boy” calling card to epitomize everything that became their rock and roll culture – scrappy, provocative, sanctimonious, and stylish.

“Sympathy” is an exercise in method acting, and Mick Jagger’s character is deliciously enticing. The inspiration for his lyrics came from Marianne Faithfull, Mick’s then girlfriend, who gave him the classic work of Russian literature, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. The novel follows Satan as a mysterious traveler, chic and suave as can be as he walks the streets of Moscow wielding power with godlike ease. Legend has it that Jagger devoured the book in one night (though it’s a pretty thick read…) which immediately juiced him to get writing.

Mick and Keith in the studio (courtesy of Words About Music)

“Sympathy” began to take shape as Jagger clued in the other Stones on his morbidly seductive idea. It was Keith Richards who would be the one to lead the charge of the song’s musical direction, picking up the tempo from Mick’s original progression – a haunting, Dylanesque folk song – to the tireless samba groove that’s come to mark its coaxing might. Jagger was very much down for the change: “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.” They knew exactly what they were doing with “Sympathy.” It was unlike anything they’d ever tried before, in message, length, feel, and mainstream appeal. The track was recorded in two takes; the first one disappointingly lackluster, the second one perfectly sinister.

The epic begins with the pitter-patter of handrums and Mick’s jungle cries of “yeeooow” that announce Lucifer’s hair-raising presence. It’s Satan’s identity – a walking paradox – that makes the lyrics so compelling: “Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste.” Boasting such extraordinary rank and class, the Devil brags of history’s many triumphs – the death of Christ, the bloodshed of the Russian Revolution, Blitzkrieg warfare, and the murder of Indian troubadours by thieving Afghani drug rings – of which he “watched with glee.” The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy two days after the Stones took the song to the studio forced a change in the line “I shouted out who killed Kennedy” to “I shouted out who killed the Kennedys / When after all, it was you and me.” Mick sings the part with fantastic flare, deliriously summoning Satan with his wicked sneer. He taunts with swagger, relishing in his character’s elusiveness: “Tell me baby, what’s my name / Tell me honey, can ya guess my name?” Snarling like a maniac, he answers Keith’s screeching guitar over the whooping chorus of background voices and boogie-woogie piano. On top of his seriously thumpy bass line, Keith Richards stamps the song with a guitar solo that bleeds from the biting depths of Satan’s lair. I’ve been playing that lead, note for note for almost ten years now and I’ll never play it with that kind of scorching attitude. It’s just hot as hell. I doubt that even Keith can play it like that anymore. It could have only been done by a man possessed.

To release an album kicking off its first track with lines like the ones in “Sympathy” was a flagrant fuck you to cushy pop sensibilities. Though certainly privileged by fame and fortune, boldness of this degree is becoming harder to find in the age of political correctness. The release of Beggars Banquet, following up their suspiciously-titled album Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967), led to all kinds of controversy casting the Rolling Stones as twisted, satanist fanatics. While “Sympathy for the Devil” did show an occult interest in the Devil’s hand in rock and roll, Mick Jagger intended it more as a tale of brutal human atrocity with Lucifer as its symbolic incarnation than a song of genuine mystical fascination.

Keith Richards, perhaps the greatest contrarian in rock and roll, was a bit more honest about his old friend: “‘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… When that song was written, it was a time of turmoil. 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.”

Happy birthday to their Devil, the idol of unspeakable horror, insuppressible spirit, and a man of wealth and taste.