(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction

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Written by: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards
Produced by: Andrew Loog Oldham
Released: May '65 on London
Charts: 14 weeks
Top spot: No. 1

"It's the riff heard round the world," says Steve Van Zandt, guitarist for the E Street Band. "And it's one of the earliest examples of Dylan influencing the Stones and the Beatles. It was their interaction in that year -- 1965 -- that changed history. The degree of cynicism that Dylan introduced, and the idea of bringing more personal lyrics from the folk and blues tradition into popular music, took the Stones from 'The Last Time,' their first remarkable record, to 'Satisfaction' just a few months later."

The riff came to Keith Richards in a dream one night in May 1965, in his motel room in Clearwater, Florida, the fifth stop on the Rolling Stones' third U.S. tour. He woke up, grabbed a guitar nearby and taped the music racing through his head on a handy cassette machine. Richards played the run of notes once, then fell back to sleep. "On the tape," he said later, "you can hear me drop the pick, and the rest of the tape is snoring."

That spark in the night -- the riff that opens and defines "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" -- was the crossroads: the point at which the rickety jump and puppy love of early rock & roll became rock. The primal temper of Richards' creation, played through a Gibson Fuzz Box; the sneering dismissal in Mick Jagger's lyrics and his devouring howl in the chorus; the avenging strut of rhythm guitarist Brian Jones, bassist Bill Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts: They were the sound of a generation impatient to inherit the earth.

Two decades later, Jagger admitted that "Satisfaction" was "my view of the world, my frustration with everything." Inspired by that riff and the title line, also Richards' idea, Jagger wrote the words -- a litany of disgust with "America, its advertising syndrome, the constant barrage" -- in ten minutes, by the motel pool the day after Richards' dream. They tried to cut the song a few days after Jagger and Richards wrote it, on May 10th at the Chess studios in Chicago. Two days after that, they finished it at RCA Studios in Hollywood, with the vital addition of that fuzz. "That riff needed to sustain itself," Richards said, "and Gibson had just brought out these little boxes." You can hear the click of Richards' foot on the fuzz-pedal button as he switches from a deep, clean twang in the verses to that homicidal snort.

"Satisfaction" was the first Stones single to hit Number One in both Britain and America. The Stones were now writing and recording a rock of their own bold design, although Richards may also have been dreaming of Chuck Berry that night in Clearwater. Jagger suggested in 1995 that Richards unconsciously got the title hook for "Satisfaction" from a line in Berry's 1955 single "30 Days" ("I don't get no satisfaction from the judge"). "It's not any way an English person would express it," Jagger noted. "I'm not saying that he purposely nicked anything, but we played those records a lot."

Appears on: Out of Our Heads (ABKCO)

Next: Imagine

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