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The “trap” I am forever pointing out to others — how Americans took what the British were singing and doing at face value (and in particular The Rolling Stones) was of course, a trap I first fell into myself. Somehow I felt the song “Sympathy For the Devil” had some sort of auto-biographical component when Georgia (then “Jo”) Bergman — who ran The Rolling Stones office when Beggars Banquet was released — told me it was based, at least in part on a Russian novel (The Master and Margarita)*.
At this time in the sixties the identification of the singer-songwriter with the lyric of the song was, for me anyway (although I think true for a lot of Americans,) almost absolute. And although I was of course capable of understanding what I was being told, something about the world we were living in, or something about the way Mick Jagger, the showman, could inhabit his characters, caused his personna to trump the allusion. Over time, it caused him a lot of grief. I was a college attendee after all. At Altamont, I feel certain, the Hell’s Angels were not thinking the man who was singing “Sympathy for the Devil” or “Midnight Rambler” as a performer. The Hells Angels weren’t performing their role, after all.
ETHAN RUSSELL:AN AMERICAN STORY
* In 1995 Jagger would also suggest he was influenced by Baudelaire. See Wikipedia
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