Sympathy for the Devil: How a samba, a narrator, and Olympic Studios made the Stones’ most dangerous song

The sax player saw Jagger working on it in a cottage near Dartford. The song started as a folk poem—something Nick Cave might have written—and only turned into that driving samba after Keith Richards slowed it down at Olympic Studios in London. The percussion, the handclaps, the woo-woos—all of it was built on the fly, with conga player Rocky Dijon and a few session guys adding layers. Jagger was deep into Baudelaire and the idea of a charming, first-person narrator confessing to humanity’s worst moments: Christ’s crucifixion, the Russian Revolution, the Kennedy assassination.

That narrator—“please to meet you, hope you guess my name”—was deliberately ambiguous. It wasn’t meant to glorify the devil so much as force the listener to sit with the devil’s point of view and realize how much evil is committed by people who think they’re justified. The song got an instant backlash from nervous radio and church groups, which only cemented its legend. But the real genius is that the Stones never recorded it live properly until they did that samba version—it’s a party track about genocide. That tension still rattles.