Sympathy For The Devil: A Dark Mirror to Our Times
- Gael MacLean
- May 11
- 3 min read
Reflections on Evil’s patient game
We tell ourselves stories in order to live, or so I once believed. But there are songs that tell us stories about ourselves that I would rather not hear. I remember the summer of ’68 when “Sympathy For The Devil” first crawled through the airwaves. The assassinations had already begun to blur together — JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and then Bobby. The Stones changed a lyric to keep pace with our collective despair: “Who killed Kennedy?” became “Who killed the Kennedys?” History was moving faster than vinyl could be pressed.
I keep returning to this song as one returns to a troubling dream. There is something in Jagger’s voice — part accusation, part seduction — that seems to understand America better than we understand ourselves. The devil introduces himself with the practiced charm of a politician or a CEO. He’s been there all along, he reminds us, watching us rationalize our worst impulses, our violence, our capacity for self-deception.
Bulgakov knew this, of course. His novel “The Master and Margarita” gave us a devil who walked among Muscovites during Stalin’s purges, exposing hypocrisy with the casual flick of a match. When Marianne Faithfull placed this book in Mick Jagger’s hands, she was passing along a Russian warning about power and corruption that would find new life in Western rock and roll. The literary becomes sonic; the cautionary tale becomes a samba.
What haunts me most about “Sympathy” is not its references to historical atrocities — the crucifixion, the Russian Revolution, the German blitzkrieg — but rather its insistence on our complicity. “Hope you guess my name,” Jagger taunts, knowing full well we always fail to recognize evil until it’s too late, until it’s wearing our face. “What’s puzzling you is the nature of my game.” Indeed.
I play this song now in my car while driving past American flags and campaign signs, past churches and banks and prisons. The puzzle has not been solved. The game continues. The devil still moves through history, through our history, with wealth and taste. And we, with our phones and our algorithms and our blind certainties, may be easier to fool than ever before.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. But sometimes a song tells us the truth about how close we live to dying.
And how complicit we are …
In the dimly lit circus-themed studio on December 11, 1968, as dawn crept toward 5:30 AM, the Rolling Stones unleashed the first-ever live performance of ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ to a select audience that included John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
What unfolded was a moment of pure rock history — Jagger’s hypnotic, exhausted intensity commanding the makeshift Big Top stage while Lennon, fresh from his performance with the one-night supergroup The Dirty Mac, watched mesmerized from the sidelines.
This would also prove to be the final time the original Stones lineup performed together, as Brian Jones would leave the band just six months later. Watch closely around the 5-minute mark to see Lennon, already electrified by his foray outside The Beatles, completely absorbed by the dark, samba-infused spell being cast before him.
Image © 2025 Gael MacLean
