Sympathy for the Devil

Jagger wrote most of it, and Richards suggested the samba tempo. They recorded it at Olympic Studios in June 1968 with Jimmy Miller producing. Nicky Hopkins played piano, Rocky Dzidzornu congas and Wyman shekere, while Richards played bass and guitar. Jagger has cited Baudelaire as an influence, and Marianne Faithfull gave him Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. Anita Pallenberg noticed Miller murmuring who who, and it became the backing vocal.

Jagger called the narrator a very long historical figure embodying good and evil, while Richards, in 1971, said it was everybody's Lucifer. Jean-Luc Godard filmed the session for his film One Plus One. A line about Robert Kennedy was changed after the June 1968 assassination.

Altamont and after

The song is tied in popular memory to Altamont, but the Stones were playing Under My Thumb when Meredith Hunter was killed. Wikipedia counts more than 800 performances, and setlist.fm counted 783 in May 2019. Guns N' Roses covered it in 1994 for the Interview with the Vampire soundtrack, reaching number 55 on the Hot 100, and 2003 remixes reached number 14 in the UK.