Fact #125480

Keith Richards : I dreamt it. That was the first time it had happened to me. I just woke up, picked up the guitar and … 'I can't get no … satisfaction'. I was so tired, I pushed the button and got the guitar and ran through the sequence once. On the tape, you can hear me drop the pick, and the rest is me snoring."

THE STORY OF SATISFACTION by Johnny Black
In the darkness of his room at the Gulf Motel in Clearwater, Florida, Keith Richards woke from a dream. In that fuzzy shadowland between sleep and wakefulness, an idea was running through his head. Fumbling around, he found the small tape recorder that he always kept near. His guitar was on the bed beside him. He took it in his hands, pushed the record button and played a little eight-note riff. Then he fell back to sleep until the next morning.

"On the tape you can hear me drop the pick," he says, recalling those moments in the early hours of May 6, 1965. "The rest is me snoring."

The Rolling Stones were in the middle of their third US tour. They'd scored two American Top 10 hits with Time Is On My Side and The Last Time, but they were a long way below the level of popularity achieved by the leaders of the British Invasion, The Beatles. They desperately needed something to catapult them up through the ranks and, although he didn't yet know it, Richards had just dreamed it.

"In the morning I still thought it sounded pretty good," recalls Keith. "I played it to Mick Jagger and said, 'The words that go with this are I can't get no satisfaction.' That was the working title."

Jagger confirmed to Rolling Stone Magazine in 1995 that, "Keith wrote the lick. I think he had this lyric, 'I can't get no satisfaction,' which, actually, is a line in a Chuck Berry song called 30 Days."

According to Stones' bassist, Bill Wyman, Keith had, "conceived it as a folk song, probably a good filler track for our next album." As the band toured the States, they were taking advantage of the best studios along their route to record their new ideas so, on May 10, following the previous night's gig in Chicago's Arie Crown Theater, they took themselves down to 2120 South Michigan Avenue. This was home to the legendary r'n'b label Chess Records, whose artists, including Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley had been the Stones' greatest inspiration. Keith Richards would have been well aware, for example, of the Muddy Waters' song, I Can't Be Satisfied.

What the Stones recorded that day at Chess, however, bore little resemblance to the song that would top the charts internationally later that summer. They taped a slab of down-home countrified rock with Bob-Dylanish verses and a chorus hook-line that their manager Andrew Loog Oldham described as "subliminal".

Nevertheless, one outsider instantly spotted the track's potential. "I heard a demo of the original track before the fuzz tone was put on," says New York radio deejay Scott Ross. "It was Brian on harmonica. I made a bet with Mick, Keith and Brian that it was going to be the biggest record the Stones had ever had."

Neither Keith nor Mick agreed. "I didn't think much of Satisfaction when we first recorded it," Keith admitted to the UK's New Musical Express. Continuing with their jam-packed tour, the Stones moved on to Los Angeles where, on the 12th, they settled into RCA Studios on Hollywood Boulevard. Richards has described RCA as, "a lovely big room, which meant you could work for hours and hours without getting tired."

Wyman has pointed out that RCA, "wasn't as funky as Chess, obviously, but it was more commercial," and it was here that Satisfaction took on its definitive form. Richards had realized by now that his guitar riff had drawn a measure of its inspiration from the Motown hit single Dancing In the Street by Martha And The Vandellas, and this realization seems to have further disenchanted him with the track.

Nevertheless, intrigued by the potential of a new effects pedal which Keith had just acquired, the Gibson Maestro Fuzztone, they laid down a much more aggressive version. "Charlie put down a different tempo," Keith explained, " and with the addition of the fuzzbox on my guitar, which takes off all the treble, we achieved a very interesting sound." The song benefited further from some frisky tambourine shaking by musical arranger Jack Nitzsche, who also added some pounding piano.

When Jagger was about to attempt a vocal, Dave Hassinger fed the piano and a newly added acoustic guitar track into the vocalist's headphones at an increased volume to provide a melodic bed, and ol' rubber lips knocked off the entire thing in one take.

Amazingly, Richards still wasn't thinking of it as a rock track. His fuzzed out guitar line was intended only as a sketch for a part to be played by a horn section when they came to record the final version. "We left it in the studio basically thinking, 'This is good, but it needs working up yet'," he says.

The Stones then carried on with their tour and, while they were out on the road, says Richards, "Andrew Oldham went to work. I guess he thought, 'They can work it up all they want, but it's about the freshness and the timing.' Which is, after all, everything."

One element to which Oldham paid particular attention was Jagger's vocal. Well aware that such a blatantly erotic lyric was likely to face stiff opposition from censorship lobbies, he tried to bury it. "I never heard the damn lyrics to Satisfaction for years," says Hassinger. "They kept telling me to bring the voice down more and more into the track. I thought they were crazy. I didn't know it had to do with the lyric and getting radio play."

Mixed to Oldham's, er, satisfaction, the single was released on May 27. "If I'd had my way," insists Richards, "Satisfaction would never have been released. The song was as basic as the hills and I thought the fuzz guitar thing was a bit of a gimmick."

As Oldham had figured, the establishment tried to stamp on it. After Newsweek magazine attacked the Stones as a "leering quintet" whose song featured "tasteless themes", Satisfaction was dropped from many radio playlists.

The Stones must have been as surprised as they were delighted, first on July 2 when Satisfaction was awarded a gold disc, and then again on the 10th when it reached No1 for the first of four weeks.

Nevertheless, when Otis Redding released his soulful version in February 1966,
Richards was the first to admit, "When I heard Otis do it with horns and everything, I thought, 'Shit, that's more what I had in mind.'"

The song has since been covered by artists as varied as Devo, Vanilla Ice and Britney Spears, but The Stones' original remains unsurpassed. It has become not just their signature song, but also the blueprint from which they built many subsequent tracks. In 1988, when Rolling Stone magazine voted it the greatest pop single of the past 25 years, Richards confessed, "I hear Satisfaction in Jumping Jack Flash. I hear it in half the songs the Stones have done."

Two years later, controversial Stones' business manager Allen Klein signed a $1.75m deal allowing a candy company to use the song in an advertisement, and in 2000, a poll of 700 music industry movers and shakers, conducted by VH1, concluded that Satisfaction was the No1 rock song of all time. If that doesn't give Jagger and Richards their satisfaction, nothing ever will.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mick Jagger (vocalist, Rolling Stones) : It was the song that really made The Rolling Stones, changed us from just another band into a huge, monster band. You always need one song. We weren't American, and America was a big thing, and we always wanted to make it here. It was very impressive the way that song and the popularity of the band became a worldwide thing. You know, we went to playing Singapore. The Beatles really opened all that up. But to do that you needed the song; otherwise you were just a picture in the newspaper, and you had these little hits.
(Source : not known)