60 YEARS AGO TODAY:
5/6/65 – Keith Richards begins writing “Satisfaction” in a Clearwater, Florida hotel room.
He had just picked up a new Gibson fuzz-box earlier that day … and started playing around with it .
That opening riff has to be one of the most recognizable riffs in the history of rock and roll.
In his own words ...
KEITH RICHARDS: "I wrote 'Satisfaction' in my sleep. I had no idea I'd written it. It's only thank God for the little Philips cassette player. The miracle being that I looked at the cassette player that morning and I knew I'd put a brand new tape in the previous night, and I saw it was at the end. Then I pushed rewind and there was 'Satisfaction.'
"It was just a rough idea. There was just the bare bones of the song, and it didn't have that noise, of course, because I was on acoustic. And forty minutes of me snoring. But the bare bones is all you need. I had that cassette for a while and I wish I'd kept it.
"Mick wrote the lyrics by the pool in Clearwater, Florida, four days before we went into the studio and recorded it ... first at Chess in Chicago, an acoustic version, and later with the fuzz tone at RCA in Hollywood.
"It was down to one little foot pedal, the Gibson fuzz tone, a little box they put out at that time. I've only ever used foot pedals twice ... the other time was for 'Some Girls' in the late '70's when I used an XR box with a nice hillbilly Sun Records slap-echo on it.
"In 'Satisfaction,' I was imagining horns, trying to imitate their sound to put on the track later when we recorded it. I'd already heard the riff in my head the way Otis Redding did it later, thinking this is gonna be the horn line. But we didn't have any horns and I was only going to lay down a dub. The fuzz tone came in handy, so I could give a shape to what the horns were supposed to do. But the fuzz tone had never been heard before anywhere, and that's the sound that caught everybody's imagination. Next thing I know, we're listening to ourselves in Minnesota somewhere on the radio, 'Hit Of The Week,' and we didn't even know Andrew (Loog Oldham, their manager at the time) had put the fucking thing out! At first I was mortified. As far as I was concerned, that was just the dub. Ten days on the road and it's number one nationally! The record of the Summer of '65. So I'm not arguing.
'Satisfaction' was a typical collaboration between Mick and me at the time. I would say on a general scale, I would come up with the song and the basic idea and Mick would do all the hard work of filling it it and making it interesting. I would come up with 'I can't get no satisfaction ... I can't get no satisfaction ... I tried and I tried and I tried and I tried, but I cant get no satisfaction' ... and then we'd put ourselves together and Mick would come back and say, 'Hey, when I'm riding in my car ... same cigarettes as me,' and then we'd tinker about with that."
Also on 5/6 – James Brown records “I Got You”
Two '60's Classics, For Sure!!! (kk)
