The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [118]
But What’s Puzzling You Is the Nature of My Game
Their Satanic Majesties Request—an album many still wrongly assume includes “Sympathy for the Devil”—was released in 1967. That was the year of the infamous Redlands Bust, when a police raid on Keith Richards’s Surrey mansion, Redlands, yielded a relatively modest haul of narcotics and a Marianne Faithfull infamously clad in just a fur rug. The UK press, pointing directly at the title of the new album, painted the band as if they were the center of some decadent, possibly demonic, cult—a reputation that further fueled Keith’s persecution complex.
You might think that Mick, after such a close shave, would avoid the subject for a while. But events kept pointing to these questions about evil and morality. The following year, when Marianne would lend Mick her copy of The Master and Margarita, students were rioting in Paris, the Vietnam War was in full fury, and Bobby Kennedy was assassinated on June 5th—his brother having been murdered five years earlier. The promise of the so-called “decade of peace and love” was starting to fracture alarmingly. Mick quickly saw the relevance of Bulgakov’s notion of evil.
To simply label “Sympathy for the Devil” another example of The Stones’ demonic obsession—or even worse, to dismiss it as just another plundering of the ‘Bluesman selling his soul to the Devil’ myth—does the song a great disservice; it remains an important part of the Stones’ canon and is a sophisticated counterpoint to Augustine’s notion of evil. It manages to do all of this while remaining true to Bulgakov’s explosive novel.
In the song, Jagger’s Devil is very much a presence at historical events; he’s there in religious wars—clear reference is made to the assassinations of the Russian Royal family in 1918 and the “Blitzkrieg” of World War II. And this devil is present as the Stones were recording the song. The most chilling moment is perhaps when the original lyric, “I shouted out, ‘Who killed Kennedy?’” was changed to “I shouted out, ‘Who Killed the Kennedys?”’ after the band heard about Bobby Kennedy’s assassination the night before a recording session at Olympic Studios.
Adding an existential dimension, one which Augustine tied himself up in knots to avoid, the song makes a robust case for our own complicity in all of this: The answer to this question in the song is “Well after all / It was you and me.” Mick’s Devil is much more of a human figure than Augustine or even Bulgakov conceived, and therefore he is just like us. For Mick, there’s not much to distinguish Satan from ordinary people. By repeatedly asking us to “Guess my name,” Jagger urges us to recognize that the Satan of the final verses of the song is us.
Far from being a paean to black magic, the Stones’ finest-hour forces us to confront our own actions, and not to view evil (or good) as benign, predetermined (and therefore Augustinian) forces. Shot though with the mythical utterances of Augustine, Bulgakov, and the Stones themselves, “Sympathy for the Devil” is something like a confession that our own impulses are, in fact, the originators of malice in the world, without regard to any divinely predestined plan.
I Tell You One Time, You’re to Blame
After the sessions were completed for Beggars Banquet, it was the beginning of the end for Mick and Marianne. The relationship that brought a new dimension to the Stones’ purely aesthetic and philosophical flirtation with the occult was on the rocks.
The French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, attracted by the anarchy the Stones seemed to embody, documented the “Sympathy” sessions, at London’s Olympic Studios in June 1968. The resulting movie shows a band in transition: Brian Jones is marginalized, sitting in his own booth, his acoustic guitar inaudible. Bill