Satisfaction comes to Keith Richards in his sleep
In the early morning hours of May 7 1965 a bleary-eyed Keith Richards awoke grabbed a tape recorder and laid down one of the greatest pop hooks of all time The opening riff of (I Cant Get No) Satisfaction.He then promptly fell back to sleep.When I woke up in the morning the tape had run out Richards recalled many years later.I put it back on and theres this maybe 30 seconds of Satisfaction in a very drowsy sort of rendition.
And then it suddenlythe guitar goes CLANG and then theres like 45 minutes of snoring.It wasnt much to go on but he played it for Mick Jagger later that same day.He only had the first bit and then he had the riff Jagger recalls.
It sounded like a country sort of thing on acoustic guitarit didnt sound like rock.But he didnt really like it he thought it was a joke He really didnt think it was single material and we all said Youre off your head.Which he was of course.With verses written by JaggerRichards had already come up with the line I cant get no satisfactionthe Stones took the song into the Chess studios in Chicago just three days later on May 10 1965 and completed it on May 12 after a flight to Los Angeles and an 18-hour recording session at RCA.
It was there that Richards hooked up an early Gibson version of a fuzz box to his guitar and gave a riff hed initially envisioned being played by horns its distinctive iconic soundThough the Stones at the time were already midway through their third U.S.tour their only bona fide American hits to date were Time Is On My Side and the recently released The Last Time.Satisfaction was the song that would catapult them to superstar status.
Forty years later when Rolling Stone magazine ranked Satisfaction 2 on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time it put the following historical perspective on the riff Keith Richards discovered on this day in 1965 That spark in the nightwas the crossroads the point at which the rickety jump and puppy love of early rock and roll became rock.
