Music Downloads & Lyrics
If there's a single moment you can point
to as the death of the hippie dream,
it's the evening of December 6th, 1969.
On that day, 300,000 people descended on
the Altoont Speedway about an hour away
from the San Francisco Bay for a free
concert featuring many of the biggest
names of the ' 60s counterculture,
including the headlining Rolling Stones.
The concert was imagined as a West Coast
version of Woodstock. It was to be a
display of the rich hippie culture that
had spawned out of San Francisco's Hate
Ashbury district. It was imagined as
further proof of the way that peace,
love, and flower power could change the
world. Instead, it was a catastrophe
that Rolling Stone magazine dubbed rock
and roll's worst day. Throughout the
Dayong concert, the supposedly
peaceloving audience grew restless and
violent, spurred on by a drunken cohort
of Hell's Angels who had been hired to
provide security for the event. By the
time the Stones took the stage, tempers
had come to a boiling point. 5,000
people were jammed to the edge of the
stage in a massive crowd crush, and
rowdy fans tried to climb on stage. Then
came the darkest moment of the evening
and one of the darkest moments of the
entire 60s rock movement. As Rolling
Stone first reported it in 1970, a fight
broke out in the middle of the Stone's
performance of Sympathy for the Devil. a
fight that resulted in the death of a
man named Meredith Hunter at the hands
of the Hell's Angels. The moment is
sometimes mythologized as part of rock
music's sinister legacy, a karmic
comeuppance for a movement that had been
coorting with the devil ever since its
origins. From the supposed Fouian
bargain that forms its founding myth to
the moral panics that defined its first
few decades, rock and roll music has a
long and storied relationship with the
devil. And in that context, the murder
of Meredith Hunter as the Stones played
a controversial song offering sympathy
for the devil is a cautionary tale about
playing around with dark
powers. Or at least it would be if it
were true. But like with so many of
Rock's supposed satanic connections, the
truth is not quite so dramatic. The
reporting in that Rolling Stone piece
was just plain wrong. While a number of
fights did break out during Sympathy for
the Devil, causing the band to stop the
song and restart, none of them led to
Meredith Hunter's death. Meredith Hunter
wouldn't die until several songs later
when another fight broke out during
Under My Thumb. So, unless Hunter's
tragic death was karmic payment for
routine 60s chauvinism, the Alimon
Festival isn't a case of divine
punishment. It's a case of poor event
organization and a reflection of the
fact that large groups of people tend to
be dangerous places if they're not dealt
with very carefully. In fact, the
supposedly idyllic Woodstock Festival
earlier that year had its own body count
thanks to two overdoses and a teen who
got run over by a tractor after falling
asleep in a hayfield. And while this
truth may strip some of the mystique
from Sympathy for the Devil, the story
of the song is no less interesting for
it. In fact, that very sort of
misconception-driven mystique helped
inspire the creation of the song in the
first place, and it remains a key reason
why Sympathy for the Devil endures as
one of Rock's greatest triumphs to this
very day. Let's take a closer
look.
Controversy has followed the Rolling
Stones basically since they formed in
1962. The gritty sexual rock and roll
that delivered them to fame stood as an
affront to the deeply conservative
Christian culture of mid-century
England. Their manager in the early
days, Andrew Lug Oldm, exacerbated this
controversy by dressing the band with a
messy, unckempt style that leaned into
that edge. Before the Stones had ever
sang a single word about Satan, they
were already being decrieded as evil and
satanic. These accusations only grew as
the Stones developed a reputation for
hard partying. In 1967, the band decided
to poke fun at these accusations with an
album satirically titled Their Satanic
Majesty's Request. They were of course
not satanic in any way. Most of their
songs were about love and sex,
experiences that are a fundamental part
of human existence and have inspired art
for millennia. Still, a conservative
older generation was determined to label
the Stones and their ilk as evil. This
constant controversy and labeling would
prove to be part of the inspiration for
Sympathy for the Devil. Keith Richards
explained in a 1971 interview with
Rolling Stone, "Before we were just
innocent kids out for a good time,
they're saying they're evil. They're
evil. Oh, I'm evil, really. So, that
makes you start thinking about evil.
What is evil? That question, what is
evil, is something humankind has always
been eager to explore. John Milton's
Paradise Lost is an epic retelling of
the biblical fall of man, written in
blank verse and first published in 1667.
It's one of the greatest touchstones for
our modern conception of Lucifer. And
it's a work that by some interpretations
seems to offer up a sort of sympathy for
the devil. While Milton's book is rooted
in a Christianity that believes in Satan
as absolute evil, the text itself
explores Satan's inner motivations,
framing him much more as a complex human
than a paragon of absolute darkness.
Many poets of the romantic age
explicitly read Milton's Lucifer as the
hero of the story. As William Blake
wrote in the marriage of heaven and
hell, the reason Milton wrote in Feds
when he wrote of angels and God and at
liberty when of devils and hell is
because he was a true poet and of the
devil's party without knowing it. Blake
was a poet, painter, and philosopher
with his own complex vision of Christian
morality. He viewed heaven and hell not
as places of good and evil, but rather
as representations of a duality of order
and chaos that both existed within the
human spirit and were both necessary
aspects of life. Much of Blake's view on
morality was developed during a radical
time as the French Revolution was in the
process of turning meaning on its head
and transforming the world forever. A
generation later, a French poet named
Charlair would come out of this age of
revolution with his own nuanced visions
of the nature of evil. Most of
Bodilair's poetry was collected in a
controversial book called Leelur Dumal,
the flowers of evil. Just like the
Rolling Stones, Bodilair's work was
criticized for its decadence and
sexuality. And just like Blake,
Bodilair's poetry interrogated the true
nature of Satan and evil. One poem in
particular, Leitony to Satan, inverts a
Catholic liturgy into a prayer to Satan.
Bodilair's prayer, like Milton's poem,
posit Satan as someone closer to
humanity, someone who is constantly
involved in all of the messy affairs of
human life rather than sitting and
watching passively from a throne in the
skies. This sharp criticism of the
Catholic Church had Bodilair's critics
charging him with blasphemy. But it
posed questions that inspired many in
the generations to come, including
possibly Mick Jagger. In a 1995
interview with Rolling Stone, MC Jagger
recalled that sympathy for the devil
came from an old idea of bodilairs.
While Jagger admitted that he doesn't
remember the exact Bodilair piece that
inspired the song, I think leitan de
Satan is the likeliest culprit. But
that's not the only literary influence.
When Jagger wrote the song in 1968, he
had just finished reading The Master in
Margarita by Soviet author Mikal
Bulgakov. While most of Bulgakov's novel
was written during the height of
Stalinism in the 1930s, it didn't see
the light of day until 1967. The novel
tells a surreal and satirical story of
Satan visiting the Soviet Union,
interspersed with flashbacks to ancient
Jerusalem, where Pontius Pilate is about
to sentence Jesus Christ to death. That
book inspired Jagger to put together his
own take on Satan. This influence is
clear in the first two verses of
sympathy for the devil which leap from
Pontius Pilot to the Russian Revolution.
I was around when Jesus Christ had his
moment of doubt and
pain made damn sure that
Pilot washed his hands to seal his
faith. Stuck around St.
Petersburg when I saw it was a time for
a
change killed the saw and it
ministers
Anastasia. There's one more key literary
influence on the structure of Jagger's
piece though it's much closer to home
than Bodilair or Bulgakov. In that same
1995 interview, Jagger said that he
wrote the song sort of like a Bob Dylan
song. Jagger admitted that everyone in
the era looked up to Dylan's lyricism.
And that's because Dylan was a master at
pulling literary and historical
illusions into pieces that were urgently
modern, speaking to the unique political
and cultural moment of the 1960s. He did
so with a structure that assued the pop
writing of the time. Many of Dylan's
songs didn't really have choruses, but
instead featured dense verses that each
came to a simple, often repeated refrain
at the end. This is exactly what Jagger
and the Stones do on Sympathy for the
Devil with each verse ending on the same
rhyming coupllet. Pleased to meet you.
Hope
you puzzling you with the nature of my
game.
This refrain leans into a familiar
characterization of the devil, that of a
playful, wellspoken trickster trying to
deceive humankind. There are plenty of
works out there that depict the devil as
loving games and gambling, in particular
gambling for human souls. But while many
of these culminate with a clear morality
and end, Jagger's devil is a little more
enigmatic, urging us all to guess at the
true nature of his game. In the first
two verses, it would seem the devil is
simply an agent of chaos and violence.
He claims credit for killing the SAR and
his ministers and depicts himself riding
a tank in the Blitz Creek. But as the
song builds and grows to the third
verse, Jagger introduces some
uncertainty to the equation.
Kings and queens for 10.
The changes here are subtle but
essential to understanding the meaning
of the song. Lucifer isn't playing a
hand in encouraging the wars that
constantly devastate the world. He's
simply watching and enjoying. Jagger is
declaring humankind's complicity in our
own history of violence. In this way,
sympathy for the Devil seems to be in
clear conversation with one Dylan song
in particular, with God on our side. In
that song, Dylan details a history of
human violence and conquest, noting the
way the perpetrators of this violence
always justify it by saying they had God
on their side. And then in the last
verse, Dylan makes his final
declaration. If God really was on
humanity's side, he would stop the next
war. Sympathy for the Devil inverts this
framework, but comes to the same
conclusion. No divine force, whether
benevolent or malevolent, is truly
responsible for the state of human
society. The world around us is the
direct result of the actions of human
beings. Jagger makes this clear with a
lyric speaking directly to his own era.
I shouted out who killed the
Kennedes when after all it was you and
me. Originally that line was written as
I shouted out who killed Kennedy but as
the Stones were working on the song
Robert Kennedy was assassinated which
only underlined the urgency of the
lyrics. This verse exploring moral
ambiguity gives way to a stilted
shrieking solo by Keith Richard.
I see this solo as an embodiment of
Jagger's version of Lucifer. It's a
slippery, twisting thing. Every time you
think you have a grasp on what Richard's
doing, he freezes and jumps away to
another half lick.
The result is something that feels
disorienting and dangerous, but has a
distinct and unmistakable allure to it.
And out of this solo, Jagger erupts into
the fourth verse, one that explicitly
states everything he'd been hinting at
throughout the song. Just as every cop
is a
criminal and all the sinners
saints fail just call me Lucifer cuz I'm
in need of some restraint.
Jagger's plea to have sympathy for the
devil isn't a plea for the audience to
associate themselves with pure evil.
Instead, it's a plea to acknowledge that
there is no such thing as pure evil and
that the true sources of destruction,
tumult and pain are humanity's own
actions. And the song was written at a
time when it was important to be asking
these questions. All the exploration of
moral ambiguity was created against a
backdrop of political and cultural
upheaval. The societal norms of an older
generation were collapsing in the face
of the baby boom and a new generation
was beginning to question the moral
quality of institutions at the core of
western society. And they were right to
question these institutions because so
many of them were built on unjust and
harmful hierarchies. One of the reasons
why the Rolling Stones drew so much eye
in their early days is because of these
harmful hierarchies. Rock and roll
scandalized conservatives so much
because it had grown out of a black
musical tradition. Some of rock's
earliest moral panics grew out of the
way the music broke down racial barriers
and saw teens of different races dancing
and socializing with each other. And
while that stigma was slowly
disappearing by 1968, racism was still
very present in Western society. In
fact, the Stones deliberately played on
those racial biases when designing the
sound of the song. In its early
iterations, Jagger wrote the music for
Sympathy for the Devil as something a
lot more like the Dylan songs that had
inspired
it. Hope you guessed my
name. But Keith Richards didn't think
this sound was right. So the band
started to play around with arrangements
until they landed on the unique samba
inspired groove that drives the song.
The Stones brought in Ghanian
percussionist Rocky Zidorno aka Rocky
Djon to play a conga groove throughout
the piece. And while the core of that
groove is a samba, it pulls influences
beyond that as well. As Jagger told
Rolling Stone, the actual samba rhythm
is a great one to sing on, but it's also
got some other suggestions to 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. While I
very much disagree with Jagger's use of
the word primitive here, I think he
makes a salient point about the way
music from the global south can put
white audiences on edge by pushing them
out of their comfort zone and offering
them musical frameworks they're not
quite as familiar with. But just as
those frameworks have an imagined edge,
they also have an allure to them. That's
what drew the Stones and their
contemporaries to American blues in the
first place. It was something different
from the music their parents grew up on.
For a young generation looking to find
themselves, that difference was
exciting. But for the older generation,
it was scary. And more than any satanic
compulsion, it's that fear of the other
that has been behind so many of
humanity's greatest crimes. The
declaration of other cultures and
identities as being heathens is one of
the great drivers of suffering to this
very day. Sympathy for the devil is
pulling influence from cultures that
have literally been demonized over the
years. And by doing so, the Stones were
able to make a musical statement that
matched Jagger's lyrical examination of
evil and moral relativism. Put together,
the result is one of the finest pieces
in the Stones catalog and indeed one of
the finest rock songs ever put to wax.
When the Stones took the stage at
Alamont to perform Sympathy for the
Devil, they weren't petitioning dark
forces on an asuspicious day. They were
singing a song about the complex nature
of good and evil and the struggle being
waged within all of us every day. And I
think that context allows us to reframe
the tragedy at Altoont in our heads.
This was not some divine act of
retribution. It was just another case of
mankind's constant fallibility, another
story of optimistic and idealistic human
vision collapsing in the face of the
real and messy nature of humankind.
Sympathy for the Devil is a masterful
track, both in terms of its lyrical
relevance and its musical structure. And
while I delve deeply into the former in
this video, my discussions on the latter
were limited because frankly, I'm no
music theorist. I tend to focus more on
the abstract ideas behind music and on
placing it within a cultural and
historical perspective that helps us
better understand where the art we love
fits within the grand and marvelous
human experience. But if you're more
interested in knowing which specific
dutes everyone played in the song, well,
you'll be happy to hear that this video
is a collaboration with my good friend
and podcast co-host Corey from 12tone.
If you head on over to Cory's channel
now, you can watch a theorybased
analysis of the song that gets into the
nitty-gritty of what the notes are and
says the word pentatonic several times.
Once you've watched that, you can head
on over to Nebula and listen to an
episode of our podcast Ghost Notes where
we talk about the experience of breaking
down the song from each of our
respective angles. It's a great little
peak under the hood to see how each of
our channels work and a really fun
conversation on a song that's impossible
to say too much about. That episode is
live on Nebula now and will be up on all
other podcast platforms next month. This
sort of bonus early content is just a
small part of everything that makes
Nebula such an exciting place. Nebula is
a prestige streaming platform full of
creative and thoughtful content that you
can't find anywhere else. It's got an
everrowing library of amazing originals
to watch. Personally, I've been really
enjoying the new show Amolish Everything
where comedians argue for pet peeves
that they want banned from society. And
there's so so much more beyond that.
from riveting historical documentaries
to thought-provoking fiction originals
to my own pieces like Polyonic Magazine.
And Nebula is super active in trying to
innovate and redefine the ways that we
think of streaming platforms. One of
these innovations is Nebula's guest
passes, which allow you to share videos
with people that don't have Nebula
subscriptions. So, if there's an
original you really think your buddies
would like, or if you just want more
people to join so you have somebody to
talk jet lag with, then you can hand out
some guest passes, why not check it out?
With my link, you can get 40% off an
annual subscription, which means getting
a whole library of incredible content
for just $36 a year or three bucks a
month. So, head on over to
go.nebula.tv/polyonic and check out
Abolish Everything Now. I think you'll
really dig it. And hey, thanks for
watching.
Discover the full lyrics and enjoy the official audio for 'Understanding Sympathy for the Devil' by The Rolling Stones. Download the MP3 and video for this iconic song for free. Get high-quality audio, free music, and MP3 download options. Perfect for fans seeking the best song lyrics, official video download, and remixes. Listen now and experience the legendary track anytime. Our site offers the latest in free music and MP3 downloads, ensuring you access the original song with lyrics, video, and audio. Don't miss out on this must-have song for music lovers wanting the best quality. Enjoy free music, official releases, and high-definition video download options today.