serted crossroads at midnight... Most often tied to the enigmatic Robert Johnson, creator of such seminal tracks as
J
“Hellhound on My Trail” and “Me and the Devil Blues,” the legend has been recounted by countless performers from the blues canon. Researchers believe that the tale has its roots in African folklore, more precisely the spirit of a trickster deity called Legba, who eventually translated on North American soil as a more familiar fiend: Satan. When rock ’n’ roll exploded in the 1950s, all it took was an Elvis Presley hip gyration
for the new craze to be branded “Devil music.” Lewd, suggestive and lascivious, few artists better embodied the image than Jerry Lee Lewis. A genuinely tortured soul, Lewis had learned to play the piano in church but was constantly torn between the lure of Satan (Fame! Money! Women!) and the calling of the Lord. (Lewis’ cousin, tel- evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, even regularly used him as an example in his sermons.) Nicknamed “The Killer,” Lewis – who was married and divorced five times, lost both
his sons, was hooked on pills and booze, and earned and lost a fortune twice before the age of 45 – often claimed he knew Satan intimately. However, this image of a rock star’s ongoing struggle with Ol’ Scratch changed with
the arrival of The Rolling Stones in the 1960s. The opening track of their 1968 album Beggar’s Banquet told not of a struggle with, but of “Sympathy for the Devil.” Instead of being tormented by Lucifer, Mick Jagger adopted the Fallen Angel’s guise, singing of his exploits in the first person. After some distinctly Jerry Lee-like primal howling and growling, Jagger eloquently voiced the opening lines: “Please allow me to in- troduce myself/I’m a man of wealth and taste/I’ve been around for a long, long year/Stole many a man’s soul and faith,” before citing works of evil from various eras in human history, including the betrayal of Jesus Christ, the execution of the Russian royal family, and the Blitzkrieg, when the narrator “held a general’s rank” and “the bodies stank.” Lyrically, Jagger has admitted he was influenced by 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire, but comparisons have also been made to The
ust as Lucifer is as old as creation, the Devil has been a part of popular music almost from its inception. The root of all popular music, the blues, has its own mythology, wherein the best known lore is the Faustian concept of selling your soul in return for brilliant musicianship. Just bring your guitar to a de-
Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. The song eschews the supernatural almost completely, focusing instead on very real, human acts of evil. The listener is made an accomplice in the passage referencing the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy (the latter killed while the band was in the studio, requiring a last-minute change to a plural): “I shouted out ‘Who killed the Kennedys? / When after all it was you and me.” Having previously released the album Their Satanic Majesties Request, The
Stones were soon accused of actually being Satanists, and “Sympathy” continued to gather a shady reputation. During the band’s notorious 1969 concert at the Altamont Speedway (immortalized in the Maysles brothers’ 1970 film Gimme Shelter), a member of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, who were hired as show security, stabbed an audience member to death. The concert is often cited as the end of the hippie movement. But Jagger’s revamping of the Devil in rock – from a threatening force into an
alluring, even sexy, figure – resonated with many bands that followed. In the spirit of one-upmanship, groups such as Black Sabbath toyed with the subject increas- ingly more overtly. Singer Ozzy Osbourne later acknowledged the debt he and Sabbath owed to The Stones when he included a version of “Sympathy for the Devil” on his 2005 album Under Cover, and more modern groups such as Guns ’n’ Roses (for the soundtrack to the film Interview with the Vampire) and Jane’s Addiction have recorded it, too. The list of bands that have adopted satanic im- agery into their iconographies since then is lengthy and still being written; the recurring controversy never waning long, as witnessed by the media frenzy sur- rounding Norway’s church-burning black metal scene of the 1990s. Stones guitarist Keith Richards summed it up with astonishing clarity in a
2002 interview with Rolling Stone when he said, “‘I've had very close contact with Lucifer – I’ve met him several times. Evil – people tend to bury it and hope it sorts itself out and doesn’t rear its ugly head. ... You might as well accept the fact that evil is there and deal with it any way you can. ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ is a song that says, ‘Don’t forget him.’ If you confront him, then he’s out of a job.”
TOM MES
RM70
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