Inspiration can and often does come from the strangest places, and in the case of the classic Rolling Stones track, “Sympathy For The Devil”, some of the best songs are made by taking every possible source of inspiration and rolling it into one track. The Beggar’s Banquet opener was rare in that Mick Jagger was the sole songwriter, although the band continued its Jagger-Richards partnership by giving Keith Richards a credit on the album. (And to the guitarist’s credit, he was partially responsible for the song taking on a samba feel instead of a rambling folk song.)
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Indeed, if it had only been up to Jagger, “Sympathy For The Devil” might have sounded like something straight off of Highway 61 Revisited. “I wrote it as sort of like a Bob Dylan song,” Jagger told Rolling Stone in 1995. Even without that revealing tidbit, it’s easy to imagine the song coming out à la “Like a Rolling Stone”. Just imagine Dylan’s nasally voice throwing out the lines, “Pleased to meet you, won’t you guess my name,” the same way he sang, “Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?”
But neither Dylan nor Richard was the only creative who inspired Jagger during the writing of “Sympathy For The Devil”.
A Trip to Brazil, French Poetry, and Marianne Faithfull
The Rolling Stones’ 1968 classic, “Sympathy For The Devil”, is one of many songs that one can trace back to the band’s muse-in-residence, Marianne Faithfull. In fact, in a 2005 interview with Mojo, Faithfull called the Beggar’s Banquet opening track the most associated with her. “I got Mick to read [Bulgakov’s] The Mast and Margarita, and out of that, after discussing it at length with me, he wrote that song. I was more subtle with Mick than Yoko [Ono was with John Lennon]. But I opened up a new world for him.”
Mikhail Bulgakov was a Russian and Soviet novelist, but interestingly, in his 1995 interview with Rolling Stone, Jagger attributed his literary inspiration to France. “I think that was taken from an old idea of Baudelaire’s, I think,” Jagger said. “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.”
Perhaps Jagger confused Bulgakov and Baudelaire. (It had been three decades earlier, after all.) Or, more likely, Jagger combined all of these influences—including a trip to Brazil, which helped shape the Latin rhythms and percussion in the song—into one seminal track, which became synonymous with The Rolling Stones’ musical legacy. And that was no small feat, either. More conservative pockets of the media had already begun accusing The Rolling Stones of Satanistic practices in the late 1960s, and a song titled “Sympathy For The Devil” only added fuel to the fire.
Still, Keith Richards once argued the track was “uplifting. It’s just a matter of looking the Devil in the face. He’s there all the time.”
Photo by Mark and Colleen Hayward/Redferns
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