“Let me introduce myself/I am a man of wealth and good taste,” Jagger began before reciting the song’s catalogue of Great Evil Moments, including the murder of Jesus Christ and the assassination of “the Tsar and his ministers” in St. Petersburg, when “Anastasia cried in vain.”
Anyone who loves “Sympathy for the Devil” knows what happens in the third verse, just as “Godfather” fans know what awaits Sonny when he shows up at the tollbooth. Except that in Philadelphia, on that night last month, Jagger crossed the lines that astonished me years ago as a teenager, the audacious question “I yelled, ‘Who killed the Kennedys?'” (I thought we knew), and the mocking answer, “When after all, it was you and me.”
“Did I miss the Kennedy Line?” I asked my wife, who was wondering why the octogenarian singer had now skipped the entire length of the sprawling stage. If Jagger sang Kennedy’s line, she missed it too.
Have the Stones sanitized their ode to madness? Has “Sympathy for the Devil” become a lite “Sympathy”?
Jagger wrote the song in 1968, a year when America was in crisis, with the Vietnam War sparking massive antiwar protests and assassins killing Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Jagger, inspired by the writings of Charles Baudelaire, said he wanted “Sympathy” to be “a Bob Dylan song.” Keith Richards suggested a samba beat, giving the tune a feverish vibe that reflected the mood of the moment.
When the Stones entered the recording studio in early June 1968, a moment documented by Jean-Luc Godard in his film “Sympathy for the Devil,”,Jagger’s lyrics were: “I shouted, ‘Who killed Kennedy?'” referring only to President John F. Kennedy. The band was still working on the song on June 6, when RFK died. Jagger updated the lyrics to the plural: “I shouted, ‘Who killed the Kennedys?'”
“Those were the lyrics that really struck,” said music critic Anthony DeCurtis, a Rolling Stone editor who taught a course at the University of Pennsylvania this spring called “Let It Rock: The Rolling Stones, Writing and Creativity.” “To me, it was an indication of how the zeitgeist was moving through the Stones and how connected they were to what was happening at that moment.”
DeCurtis attended the Stones’ concert at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey in May and didn’t know what to think when he noticed Jagger’s omission. “That’s my favorite verse. I thought, ‘What happened to Kennedy’s verse?'”
The mystery deepened for me when videos on social media showed that Jagger had not mentioned Kennedy at other shows on the 2024 tour, including Seattle, Houston, Chicago and New Orleans. I texted my old friend Serge Kovaleski, who, in addition to being an excellent New York Times reporter, is the most devoted Stones fan I know. By his own count, Serge has attended some 80 concerts in 13 countries since 1975, including a half-dozen this year.
Serge hadn’t noticed the absence of Kennedy’s lyrics and speculated that sensitivity to contemporary political mores might have prompted the Stones to make an adjustment. After all, the band had stopped playing “Brown Sugar” in recent years, with its images of the slave trade and sex, and had deleted a line from “Some Girls,” about the sexual appetites of black women, that had angered the Reverend Jesse Jackson upon its release. (That said, Richards still sings “Little T & A,” suggesting that the Stones don’t exactly spend much time studying contemporary etiquette guides.)
Further study has proven that none of this is new. In fact, the Stones managed to perform an edited version of “Sympathy” for years without provoking significant commentary. One place where the revision was noticed was on the website It’s Only Rock’n Roll, a meeting place for Stones obsessives, where commenters traded theories about the missing lyrics as early as 2015.
“It’s pretty widely believed that Jagger ‘changed his art’ at the request of the… Kennedys (John Jr.). I applaud his decision to honor that request,” wrote someone identifying himself as MisterDDDD. But that explanation seems unlikely, given that author C. David Heymann, in his late-2000s biography of John Jr. and Caroline, quoted a friend as saying that the president’s son “loved to shock” his friends by singing the lyrics to “Kennedys” during his own impromptu renditions of “Sympathy.”
Robert Christgau, a former music editor at the Village Voice known among journalists as the “dean of American rock critics,” has written about popular music since the 1960s. Christgau said he hadn’t seen the Stones in concert since the early 2000s and was unaware that Jagger no longer sang Kennedy’s verse live. The lyric, he said, meant that “we live in a world where people are getting killed and we are all, to one degree or another, implicated in the fact that we live in that world.”
“That was the time when people were arguing about whether the Beatles or the Stones were more relevant,” Christgau said. “The ’60s were over, and it was a time when the Stones were more respected politically because they were writing more about evil, which is not to say they were encouraging it as much as they had this dark side to their worldview.”
As for whether it will matter in 2024 if Jagger sings those lyrics, Christgau laughed and said: “It’s almost 60 years later. Who cares? ‘Who killed the Kennedys?’ doesn’t make sense to younger audiences, and even to the Stones’ contemporaries, because we’ve been living with that for over 50 years. It’s their song, and they can do whatever they want with it.”
Christgau suggested that the best way to solve the mystery of the missing lyrics was to ask the Stones themselves.
An email to the Stones’ PR department led to a phone call with a spokeswoman who introduced herself by saying, “I work with Mick.” She then decreed that everything she said from that point on was off-topic, making any explanation she may or may not have provided useless. She indicated she would follow up with a printable document.
In the meantime, I dug deeper into the archives and discovered that the Stones had already dropped the “Kennedys” verse in 2006 at a benefit concert for Bill Clinton’s 60th birthday in New York. Martin Scorsese filmed the performance for his documentary “Shine A Light.”
The New York Daily News speculated at the time that Jagger had omitted the verse because Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was in the audience. When asked by a reporter if he had omitted the song out of respect for RFK Jr., Jagger gave a response as deft as his onstage movements.
“Did I forget that?” he asked. “This song is so long that I always cut out a verse. I guess this is the one.”
His explanation may seem plausible, except that the entire verse is only about 30 seconds in a song that lasts over six minutes. That’s not exactly an eternity in a two-hour show.
Fortunately, for those who prefer full-length renditions of “Sympathy for the Devil,” there are plenty of live renditions in the Stones’ catalog. Naturally, the trove also includes plenty of stellar (and unedited) versions of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”