Just wondering....

the book The Master & Margarita is said to be the source of the lyrical inspiration;
the original musical inspiration was apparently Dylan;
Mick's said it was Keith who had the idea of making it a samba.

and i'm still waiting to an even semi-reasonable explanation of the line about the troubadours who get killed before they reach Bombay.
(and lest we end up rehashing the non-reasonable non-explanations again: i know who troubadours were,
and they were not noted for attempting to reach Bombay or anywhere near it;
and there's no reason i can think of why Mick would refer to Gandhi as a "troubadour".)


"What do you want - what?!"
- Keith

And it's a very very good read, by the way.

Yes, fantastic book, really!

>> And it's a very very good read, by the way. <<

it sure is.


"What do you want - what?!"
- Keith

I imagine the inspiration was partly an emotional response to the atmosphere of the times, partly a felt pressure to write something "significant" as rock music gained in seriousness and stature. I think it's in Tony Sanchez's book that mick brought the acetate of the just-finished song down to this club that they all hung out at, played it to a great response, then paul mccartney came in and played "Hey Jude," to an overwhelming response! The band wasn't yet ready to say "it'$ only rock and roll$" thankfully...

The meaning as I hear it is that "evil" is a presence everywhere and at every time through history. The devil is a figure for that--I don't think the song commits very far to believing in an actual devil--he's a symbol for the constant "evil" that mick at least in this song proposes is amongst us, equally in "sinners" and in "saints". That's why it got recognized on that top conservative song list a little while ago. It's conservative not in the current american sense of jesus as your personal savior--jesus appears only as a bit player--but b/c it suggests that it doesn't really matter what you do, "evil" is present.

Dostoevskij?

Probably not, but if you read the episode when Ivan Karamazov meets the devil (I'm a man of taste ...) well, how can you not think of SFTD?

C

I have never read any of those books THANKS.. I will now. I always took the song to mean that man himself whats the devil, and the sympathy we should feel for man is actually man asking for forgiveness to god for all the devil he had done... Pretty deep huh!!lol.

I have never read any of those books THANKS.. I will now. I always took the song to mean that man himself whats the devil, and the sympathy we should feel for man is actually man asking for forgiveness to god for all the evil he had done... Pretty deep huh!!lol.

with sssoul, I always thought that the troubadours were the swinging London types like the beatles, new bohemians and so on (taking the words in a loose sense here), who were turning towards India for whatever spiritual purpose. The devil stopped them fairly short, most of them made it to Hollywood at best, or South of France...

interesting, Otonneau - thanks! i'll ponder that a while ...
wondering what the connection would be between between 13th-century French poet-heretics and swinging London types -
taking the term loosely, of course - but the rest of the lyric seems quite specific/topical.

>> the beatles <<

smile: so you're suggesting that SFTD is part of the Paul Is Dead cycle? :E


"What do you want - what?!"
- Keith



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2006-08-03 18:52 by with sssoul.

To me this is the Stones MASTEPIECE for many reasons but the most important to me is the use of light and dark.. the scale is incredible. The song has a mystery quality to it and to write a piece of music that can be disected in many ways and interpetated in hunderd on ways and only the artists know the answers is pretty cool....and amazing and this song will stand the test of time in my opinion and be looked at for its artistry, picture painting, scale, and use of light and dark for generations to come. I am in awe of it everytime I hear it.. I always pick out something new. INCREDIBLE!

it is a song against the pope
which makes the song a bit stupid
because beeing against the pope is easy and has some
countryside redneck style

didn't the National Review (cough, RAG, cough) explain to us that it's a song in which the Stones reveal their conservative political ideology? asked and answered, then.

When the song was written and recorded, the times were turbulent (they are now, but in a different way). It was toward the end of the '60's, the Vietnam War was in full swing, and there was a "good guys, bad guys" mentality, particularly as it pertained to the war. I have always thought the song spoke about the "evil" or the "lucifer" in everyone, that nobody had clean hands, and that the "devil" had always been in the world and much of human history was shaped by that present "evil", even among those who thought of themselves as the "good guys". It was a reminder that everyone should recognize that potential in themselves and be careful, to acknowledge that anyone is capable of doing anything.

otonneau, I really like with your assessment of the "troubadour" meaning of the song, as the old, classic troubadours never really trekked to Bombay. In the late 60's more and more musicians were gravitating toward Eastern influences.

Another side-note was that in the late 60's, there was a phenomenon in the U.S. called the "Jesus Movement", where young people by the thousands were converting to Christianity. There was a spiritual climate here that I haven't seen since that time. I think that spiritual environment had an influence on how young people interpreted the song, many of them really thinking that the song was literally about Satan, and that the Stones had "sold out" to the devil and were now his apologists. I remember reading an article in 1970 where Keith spoke about the fact that they were called "the devil's agents" and that they were baffled by that claim.

It is a great song, one of the very best and meaningful by the Stones.

great insight everybody....Dale42, when I said, "Don't be a stranger," you jumped right in with a very thought provoking question. I have always loved this song and my interpretation of it has been that man is predisposed to evil, as many of you already pointed out. Dale42, I like the comments about the artistry, the light and dark, and "standing the test of time."

Y'all have a nice day

Thanks. Lukester. A discussion and the word POLITICS is spoke and no problem... THIS IS COOL!!!

maybe Dale42 is the great peacemaker we read about in the archives of iorr.org who has come to save us from ourselves.....maybe it's not a myth



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2006-08-03 23:16 by Lukester.

EVERY TING IS GONNA BE ALRIGHT!!! OH YEAH!!!! NO PROBLEM MAN,

Way off to make deep explanation here;
Jagger was out in the hazy shade of devil phantasm.

Douglas Marshall comes as close to providing a full explanation of the evolvment of 'Sympathy for the Devil' as anyone does -

"Sympathy for the Devil"
Mick Jagger's mad, erudite incantation strutted '60s rock toward the dark side of history.

By Douglas Cruickshank

The Stones have made plenty of mistakes over the years ("Their Satanic Majesties Request"), but producing a rock opera wasn't one of them. Though "Sympathy for the Devil" is embedded with enough historical and philosophical scope to seem like the opening act to a drama of operatic dimensions, they wisely kept it to a concise six minutes and 22 seconds. In interviews, Mick Jagger -- who wrote "Sympathy" ("I wrote it as sort of like a Bob Dylan song") without his usual writing partner, Keith Richards -- has said he was concerned at the time about the potential for the lyrics to come off as pretentious and the band to be "skewered on the altar of pop culture." So when Richards suggested changing the rhythm, Jagger agreed and as the band worked (and worked and worked) on the piece, it ended up as a samba, which Jagger has called "hypnotic" and Richards referred to as "mad."

Jagger, a voracious reader and history buff, claimed he was influenced in writing "Sympathy" by Baudelaire. But he was also, as others have pointed out, clearly under the spell of Mikhail Bulgakov's classic allegorical novel of good and evil, "The Master and Margarita." Of course Jagger was even more clearly under the spell of the 1960s, a time when -- for many -- heaven and hell seemed to have come to earth in the most lucid terms.

The song's opening -- "Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste" -- parallels the beginning of Bulgakov's novel, in which a sophisticated stranger, who turns out to be Satan, introduces himself to two gentlemen sitting in a Moscow park as they're discussing whether Jesus existed or not. ("'Please excuse me,' he said, speaking correctly, but with a foreign accent, 'for presuming to speak to you without an introduction.'") The song then references Christ and the story of Pontius Pilate, which the novel takes up in its second chapter. Before moving on to the Russian Revolution, the song's narrator, Lucifer, acknowledges that his listeners are mystified -- "But what's puzzling you is the nature of my game" -- just as, in "The Master and Margarita," one of the men approached by Satan in the park thinks to himself, "What the devil is he after?"

In the lyrics for "Sympathy," Jagger's narrator jumps from making "damn sure that Pilate washed his hands and sealed [Jesus'] fate" to St. Petersburg, "When I saw it was time for a change," and kills "the Czar and his ministers." Curiously (or not so curiously, given Jagger's penchant for reading history), the only other allusion in the song to Russia's dark past is an odd one: "Anastasia screamed in vain" -- a reference to the youngest daughter of the czar who was murdered with the rest of the Romanov royal family. For most of the 20th century Anastasia was an almost mythological figure, thanks to the specious claims that she alone had survived the murders.

But more interesting than what appear to be direct correlations between the book and the song is how Jagger and the Stones, drawing on numerous influences, Bulgakov's novel apparently among them, managed -- in a rock song -- to address serious, even profound, ideas to a samba beat without turning the whole affair into an exercise in dull earnestness. On the contrary, "Sympathy" sounds like a party and works so well, on multiple levels, because its lyrics evoke more than they spell out, while the music not only has an infectious rhythm, it features ingenious layering of sound and background vocals that build to an irresistible, kick-ass tribal hootenanny. Those "woo woos," by the way, which provide a self-deprecating, cartoonish poke at the song's spookiness, while adding to the chanting-around-the-bonfire nature of the music, were provided by the four demons themselves, along with two members of the Stones' 1968 coven -- Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull -- and the album's producer, Jimmy Miller.

In writing the song, Jagger used words with impressive economy. He cites Jesus Christ, Pontius Pilate, the czar, Anastasia, the blitzkrieg (World War II), the Kennedys and the city of Bombay and mentions Lucifer by name (just once) and in so doing creates a deep, amplified portrait of a world torn by religion, war, assassination and confusion where "Every cop is a criminal/And all the sinners saints." Threaded throughout are taunts from the teasing narrator -- the traditional demon trickster -- trying to get the listener to speak his name: "Hope you guess my name," "Tell me, baby, what's my name?" "Tell me, sweetie, what's my name?" And -- at the very pinnacle of the Flower Power era, remember -- he then turns on his starry-eyed audience and tells them that they, in league with him, are to blame for the deaths of the '60s most promising political leaders.



Jagger concedes that the song may have been something of an inspiration for all the '70s and '80s heavy metal bands that flirted with Satanism, but in interviews he's repeatedly distanced the Stones from any of it. In an exchange with Creem magazine, he said, "[When people started taking us as devil worshippers], I thought it was a really odd thing, because it was only one song, after all. It wasnt like it was a whole album, with lots of occult signs on the back. People seemed to embrace the image so readily, [and] it has carried all the way over into heavy metal bands today."

Regardless of, or maybe because of, the swath it has cut, "Sympathy for the Devil," as good art often does, continues to resonate at least as strongly today as it did when it was first created. Woo woo.


As withsssoul stated the line 'Troubadours killed before they reach 'Bombay'
has never been explained and is really difficult to understand unless it has a hidden meaning.
Troubadours were aristocratic poet-musicians of S France (Provence) who flourished from the end of the 11th cent. through the 13th cent. Many troubadours were noblemen and crusader knights; some were kings, e.g., Richard I, Cœur de Lion; Thibaut IV, king of Navarre; and Alfonso X, king of Castile and León.
It is possible that Mick's line about 'Troubadours' is about crusader knights
or kings who wre killed on their travels.

THATS WHAT IAM TALKING ABOUT... NOW THAT IS TRULY COOL!!! THANK YOU!

Very good read, thanks

Damn right, Stones40....that was breathtaking........thanks

Anybody knows When Jagger said this ?

___________________________________________________________________________________
Jagger concedes that the song may have been something of an inspiration for all the '70s and '80s heavy metal bands that flirted with Satanism, but in interviews he's repeatedly distanced the Stones from any of it. In an exchange with Creem magazine, he said, "[When people started taking us as devil worshippers], I thought it was a really odd thing, because it was only one song, after all. It wasnt like it was a whole album, with lots of occult signs on the back. People seemed to embrace the image so readily, [and] it has carried all the way over into heavy metal bands today."
___________________________________________________________________________________

__________________________

thanks Stones40. a nice read indeed.

>> It is possible that Mick's line about 'Troubadours' is about crusader knights
or kings who wre killed on their travels. <<

yeah, that's one of the "explanations" i don't find very reasonable, sorry -
the lyric is so historically apt and so literate that it doesn't make sense to me
that Mick would fumble when it came to plausible destinations of medieval troubadours (which Bombay wasn't).
and interesting as Otonneau's take on it is, i am puzzled as to why he would suddenly use such an obscure metaphor for swinging Londoners
when the rest of the lyric is so direct and specific about the historical figures it mentions.

ah well: it's sure an evocative line, and it's given me something to ponder for 38 years -
that's a good start on forever, which is what this piece of music is for.


"What do you want - what?!"
- Keith

Being French, I am not very well placed to judge how obscure a word is "troubadour". In French today, it really means more "itinerant musicians" than anything connected with Knights and crusades, hence my explanation...

It's funny, I had never ever found that line puzzling before! A bunch of itinerant poets heading for Bombay and getting killed by the devil before they got whatever was lying there... But now you got me wondering.

DaveG Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> When the song was written and recorded, the times
> were turbulent (they are now, but in a different
> way). It was toward the end of the '60's, the
> Vietnam War was in full swing, and there was a
> "good guys, bad guys" mentality, particularly as
> it pertained to the war. I have always thought the
> song spoke about the "evil" or the "lucifer" in
> everyone, that nobody had clean hands, and that
> the "devil" had always been in the world and much
> of human history was shaped by that present
> "evil", even among those who thought of themselves
> as the "good guys". It was a reminder that
> everyone should recognize that potential in
> themselves and be careful, to acknowledge that
> anyone is capable of doing anything.
>

That's a really great analysis of the song. Really thought provoking stuff there.

I think it had to do with a little thing called LSD.

It's only rock 'n' roll ...