In the early morning hours of May 7, 1965, during the Rolling Stones’ third American tour, Guitarist Keith Richards woke up with a melody ringing in his head. He immediately reached for his portable Philips cassette recorder and his guitar and recorded a simple eight-note riff and mumbled the line, “I can’t get no satisfaction,” before falling back asleep.
When he woke up the next morning, not remembering he actually wrote this, “I had no idea I’d written it,” Richards wrote in his 2010 memoir Life.
Upon playing the tape back, he found about 30 to 60 seconds of the famous riff followed by 45 minutes of himself snoring. He later recalled that the recording was a “drowsy sort of rendition” and sounded more like a country song on an acoustic guitar than a rock anthem.
Keith Richards was initially unsure of the idea, even worrying that he had accidentally copied the melody from Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street.” He also borrowed the grammatically incorrect line “I can’t get no satisfaction” from a Chuck Berry song titled “Thirty Days.”
Despite Richards’ hesitation, Mick Jagger was immediately inspired. While sitting by a pool in Clearwater, Jagger quickly wrote the rest of the lyrics.
The band first attempted to record the song on May 10, 1965, at the legendary Chess Studios in Chicago, the same place where their heroes like Muddy Waters had recorded. This early version was acoustic and country-ish.
The group flew to Los Angeles and entered RCA Studios on May 12 for an intense 18-hour session. It was here that the song finally found its voice. Richards plugged his guitar into a Gibson Maestro Fuzz-Tone pedal, a device designed to make a guitar sound like a horn section. Richards only intended the “fuzz” sound to be a temporary placeholder for real trumpets or saxophones, but the rest of the band and manager Andrew Loog Oldham loved the effect.
Released in the U.S. on June 6, 1965, “Satisfaction” became the Stones’ first number-one hit in America, staying at the top of the charts for four weeks. In 2024the song was ranked the second on Rolling Stone magazine’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list.
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