Mick Jagger has admitted that the deadly chaos of the 1969 Altamont Speedway Free Festival changed how he felt about performing The Rolling Stones' 1968 track "Sympathy For The Devil". The festival, intended as a West Coast counterpart to Woodstock, instead descended into disaster, including hit-and-run accidents and the on-site murder of Meredith Hunter, a young Black man, while the band played nearby. The event's grim fallout became closely tied to the band's public image, feeding into narratives about rock music's darker associations.

Speaking to Rolling Stone in 1995, Jagger said news of Hunter's death felt "just awful" and left him questioning how the situation had turned so wrong, though he pushed back on the media's framing of Altamont as a symbolic "loss of innocence" for the counterculture era. He conceded, however, that the song became so entangled with the tragedy afterwards that he grew wary of performing it, noting its supposed "black magic" theme was "not really what I meant". Security at the festival had been handled by the Hells Angels, a decision widely blamed for the breakdown in order that day.