“Mick came in with a song, but it was very Dylan-esque. It was like a ballad. ‘No, no. Let’s rethink. What if we push the beat up a bit?’”: How The Rolling Stones created their Satanic, samba-fuelled masterpiece Sympathy For The Devil

On Tuesday 4 June 1968, The Rolling Stones began recording a song that would come to be regarded as one of their greatest compositions.

The five members of the group arrived at Olympic Recording Studios in the leafy south-west London suburb of Barnes for what would be an 18-hour recording session.

They were almost three months into recording Beggars Banquet, an album that would kickstart a stream of Stones classics, mark a creative high point for the band and signal a return to their raw blues-rock roots.

The song they were about to record that day was Sympathy For The Devil, destined to become the album’s dramatic opening track.

Over the course of five days – 4, 5, 8, 9 and 10 June 1968 – the song would evolve from a plaintive folk-inspired composition to a samba-infused rock masterpiece.

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By 1968, the Stones had left their psychedelic posturing behind them and were hitting a whole new creative peak.

The previous year had been a tough time for the band. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had narrowly escaped serving long jail sentences for drug possession. Jagger in particular was looking to new paths for inspiration.

“I was educating myself,” Jagger told Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone. “I was reading a lot of poetry, I was reading a lot of philosophy.”

From his girlfriend, the singer Marianne Faithfull, Jagger had been given a novel called The Master And Margarita, by Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov. That book, along with the works of French poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire, would provide inspiration for Sympathy For The Devil.

The song was initially called Fallen Angels and had a working title of The Devil Is My Name. Lyrically, it delves into the nature of evil and its presence throughout history.

Sympathy For The Devil is written in the first person, with Jagger taking on the persona of Satan and reeling off a veritable roll call of atrocities — the trial and crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the Hundred Years’ War and the 1918 massacre of the Russian Romanov royal family, to name a few.

As a narrative, it is grandiose. But it was also relevant at a time of widespread conflict, particularly in the US — social upheaval, the push for civil rights, anti-war protests and inner-city riots following the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King.

Jagger’s lyrics also referenced the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy, but on 5 June 1968, one day after the Stones began recording Sympathy For The Devil, JFK’s younger brother Robert Kennedy was also gunned down and killed.

Jagger promptly changed his lyric from “Who killed Kennedy” to “Who killed the Kennedys”.

From the outset, Sympathy For The Devil was controversial, prompting media rumours and fears from religious groups that the Stones were devil worshippers and a corrupting influence on youth.

The opening lines of the song were delivered by Jagger in dark, seductive tones: “Please allow me to introduce myself/I’m a man of wealth and taste/I've been around for a long, long year/Stole many a man's soul and faith…”

Jagger inhabits the character with zeal and conviction. It’s a far cry from the original rendition of the song that he played to the band on 4 June 1968.

“Mick came in with a song, but it was very Dylanesque,” recalled Keith Richards in an interview with Matt Sweeney on the Guitar Moves web series in 2016. “It was like a ballad. And, you know, you go through the process in the studio, which is the process I love of everybody going, ‘No, no. Let’s rethink. What if we, like, push the beat up a bit?’”

The evolution of the song is comprehensively captured by Jean-Luc Godard in his film Sympathy For The Devil (originally titled One Plus One).

Sympathy For The Devil [4K Clip] - In the Beginning | ABKCO - YouTube

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Godard’s film also provides a glimpse of the sad demise of Stones’ co-founder Brian Jones, once such an invaluable, multi-faceted musician yet here consigned to the margins, haunted by anxieties and struggling to function due to drug and alcohol use.

One of the first scenes shows Jagger, seated on a high stool, playing a Gibson Hummingbird and strumming the chord pattern to Richards and Jones who are also playing acoustics. Before long, the folk-style song has been transformed into something far more intense and raucous.

It was Keith Richards who suggested changing the tempo, and adding additional percussion, transforming the song into a samba.

It was then down to drummer Charlie Watts to nail the groove that would give the song its intoxicating, hypnotic feel.

“It was all night doing it one way," Watts is quoted as saying on the BBC website in 2021, “then another full night trying it another way, and we just could not get it right. It would never fit a regular rhythm.”

In the end, they settled on an Afro-Brazilian samba groove known as Candomblé.

Ghanaian-born percussionist Rocky Dijon was brought in to play congas, while Stones bassist Bill Wyman added a shekere, an African percussion instrument.

By this point, Wyman would normally have been laying down his bass part. But things didn’t quite pan out that way.

“So suddenly I’m on bass [and] it’s a samba,” chuckled Keith Richards in his 2016 interview with Matt Sweeney on the Guitar Moves web series.

And there Richards is in the Godard footage, with his dense black signature ‘rooster’ haircut, grooving contentedly away on a gleaming new sunburst Fender Precision.

Richards plays with a pick and gives it a punchy, percussive Stax/Motown-style feel over Watt’s fiery Latin-jazz flavoured beat.

The transformation from plodding folky ballad to blisteringly infectious groove is dramatic.

“But that to me is the beauty of recording, of going to a studio,” continued Richards. “You go in with some sort of semi-conceived idea of what you think this song is supposed to come out like, and it comes out something totally different because it’s been filtered through all of the other guys in the band.”

One musician who was pivotal to the song and the Beggar’s Banquet album was in-demand session pianist and organist Nicky Hopkins. His percussive piano playing is a prominent feature of Sympathy For The Devil and helps propel the song along.

Another defining element of the song came from Anita Pallenberg, the Italian-German actor, artist and model who was romantically involved with Keith Richards at the time. The charismatic Pallenberg was in the engineering booth at Olympic Studios, with producer Jimmy Miller, when Jagger was laying down vocal takes for the song.

At one point, between takes, Miller reportedly asked Jagger, “Who you singing about Mick? Who? Who?”

According to Pallenberg, Miller then repeated the words “Who? Who?” to himself while Jagger sang on, and Pallenberg realised how great this sounded.

She then suggested to Jagger that “Who? Who?” be used in the song as a background chant.

It was an inspired suggestion.

They tried it out and after the first attempt changed it from “Who? Who?” to “Woo woo”.

Marianne Faithfull and photographer Michael Cooper soon joined Pallenberg in the vocal booth, alongside Brian Jones, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts, to record the iconic “Woo woo” backing vocal chant.

Godard’s film gives an enthralling insight. A few feet away from the backing vocal pack, behind a large screen, stands Mick Jagger, dressed in white ruffled dandy-esque shirt and lemon yellow trousers.

Jagger is midway through a vocal take and wholly immersed in the live moment, his left leg moving furiously to the groove, both hands clutching the headphones, then pulling away in a dramatic flutter of hands and arms.

His voice has rarely sounded better.

For all the late-’60s frippery and flamboyance, this is a vocal performance rooted firmly in the blues.

One of the strengths of Sympathy For The Devil is its organic nature — how it builds slowly and instinctively, beginning with percussion and high echoey wailing vocals that are both catchy and menacing.

African-style congas are the first sound to be heard, before a shekere, maracas and Jagger’s echoey high-pitched yelps and grunts enter the mix.

21 seconds in, Jagger’s main vocal, Nick Hopkins’ full piano chord and Keith Richard’s bass create a resounding opening to the song.

While the piano is prominent throughout, the rhythm guitars are far more subtle as they nestle within the groove.

At 1:57, the first ‘woo-woo’s are introduced and they appear on each line of the song from that point on – 154 times in total to be precise.

By 2:30 the pace and urgency is really picking up as the rhythm guitar comes through with more prominence.

Then, at 2:48, Keith Richards unveils one of his greatest guitar solos, played on a ’57 Les Paul Custom through a Vox AC30 with a treble boost.

It’s a beautifully judged piece of playing that is incisive, searing and melodic.

At 3:23, Jagger launches back into the chorus and from that point on the whole thing just flies, building in momentum and power with added elements such as a cowbell enhancing the infectious rolling groove. By then there’s a real attack to Keith Richards’ blistering stabs of lead, which continue to punctuate the song as it begins its slow fade almost six minutes in.

Sympathy For The Devil was released as a single in its edited 4mins 9secs version on 6 December 1968.

Six days later, the Stones performed the song live for the first time in front of a live audience at the filming of The Rolling Stones Rock And Roll Circus.

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One year later, on 11 December 1969, the band had to stop the song halfway while performing at the Altamont Speedway when a fight broke out between Hells Angels.

The subsequent fatal stabbing of Meredith Hunter by Hells Angels hired to police the Altamont concert is often believed to have occurred during Sympathy For The Devil. In fact, the tragic event actually occurred during the Stones’ performance of Under My Thumb — but the dark overtones of Sympathy For The Devil seem forever linked with that event.

Almost six decades on from its release, Sympathy For The Devil remains a high point of the Stones’ live setlist and is one of their most enduringly popular songs.

In 2007, a poll of the greatest Stones songs in Mojo magazine placed Sympathy For The Devil at No.1.

Not surprisingly, any controversy about the Stones as devil worshippers soon passed as the moral panic subsided.

But in 2002, Keith Richards acknowledged that the core message of this dark and unique masterpiece from the Stones remained a cautionary tale in contemporary times.

“Sympathy is quite an uplifting song,” Richards is quoted as saying on the songfacts website. “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…

“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…

“Sympathy For The Devil is a song that says, ‘Don't forget him. If you confront him, then he's out of a job’.”