AS MICK AND KEITH’S partnership matured and jelled, their strength as great rock ’n’ roll writers dovetailed beautifully with the image that Oldham had manufactured for them. Finally, by late 1964, early 1965, even the States began to notice. When their song “The Last Time” reached the Top 10 in April of 1965, they were poised and ready for the kind of explosion that catapults a semi-successful group into the stratosphere. It’s ironic, considering the message of the song, that it was “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” that did the trick.
ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: We’d gone from the point of arranging somebody else’s song to the top of the mountain with “Satisfaction.” The rest of that run was almost too easy. They knew what they were doing. They knew the distances from it. We knew we were there. The one before we were in California—“The Last Time”—I called up Phil Spector to come down to the studio. “Listen to this. Tell me how high it will go.” I love him but I didn’t need him to tell me how far “Satisfaction” would go . . . All the way to the top!
But let’s back up a second. One of the best Keith Richards lyrics cropped up in 1967’s “Ruby Tuesday”: “Catch your dreams before they slip away.” He may just have stumbled upon that advice when the Stones were on their third tour of North America in the spring of 1965. During a stay at the Gulf Motel in Clearwater, Florida, Keith woke up in the middle of the night.
KEITH RICHARDS: It was one of the things where most songs I don’t remember where they came from. But I woke up in the middle of the night to this one, and for some reason I just grabbed a guitar and turned the tape machine on and said I can’t get no satisfaction; that’s what I had plus the melody, the chord changes. I woke up in the middle of a dream. Songs come at the weirdest time and you’ve got no control over it. You can be doing the most unlikely things when songs come to you and the only thing you hope is that you’ve got a cassette machine with you at the time. From there on I gave it to Mick.
Continuing our theme about standing on the shoulders of giants, Chuck Berry has a lyric in his song “Thirty Days” that goes, “If I don’t get no satisfaction from the judge.” Keith also later acknowledged that the riff itself was a reworking of the backing track for Martha and the Vandellas’ huge Motown hit—“Dancing in the Streets.” Such borrowing used to be called “the folk process,” but now and forever it could also be called “the rock process.” But here is the real punch line to the Stones’ first number one single and best-known signature song: Keith himself did not think it was a hit single. Here’s his story:
KEITH RICHARDS: The first time I ever, you know, sort of flexed a muscle about what record should go out [was “Satisfaction”]. I didn’t think it was a single. I mean it went right by me, you know. I just sort of wrote it down, put it on a tape. We cut it in two or three takes and I thought, “Oh well, there you go. That’s a nice track for the album, but that’s about all.” I thought if we were going to make a single of it, that we were gonna record it and sort of work on it . . . It just sticks out—that box that some bloke had given me made a nice fuzz . . . [and I went] “Wow! Oh that’s nice—Deet-Dee, Dee-Dee-Dee-Dee-Deet-Dee, Deet-Dee . . .”
Thank God no one paid any attention to him!
The reference track was recorded at Chess Studios in Chicago on May 10, but then the group decided to finish it in Los Angeles, where they had an established working relationship with engineer Dave Hassinger and the Phil Spector–tutored arranger Jack Nitzsche (who had been the musical director of the T.A.M.I. Show). The track rocked! The song put aside any notions of the Rolling Stones as merely a blues covers band. It synthesized all of the diverse styles that the group had been perfecting since 1962: blues, rhythm and blues, soul, folk, and their own unique brand of hard rock. Plus, they addressed all of their primary themes for the rest of the decade in the lyrics of that one song: frustration, hypocrisy, corruption, alienation, sexuality, boredom, aggression, suspicion, rage, and cynical mass-media manipulation.