It was time for The Rolling Stones to take America. Having already scored three number one hits in their native UK throughout 1964 and early 1965, the Stones were already posted up as the main rival to The Beatles for British Invasion supremacy. But what the Stones still didn’t have was an American number one, something that would elevate them beyond their sidekick status.
Enter ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, the riff-heavy track that finally landed the Stones their first number one song in America. Complete with one of the first major usages of a fuzz box distortion pedal, ‘Satisfaction’ quickly became the band’s signature song, continuing to get played in concerts nearly 60 years after its initial release. It all came to Keith Richards in a flash, or perhaps more accurately, a dream.
“I was between girlfriends at the time, in my flat in Carlton Hill, St. John’s Wood. Hence maybe the mood of the song. I wrote ‘Satisfaction’ in my sleep,” Richards wrote in his autobiography Life. “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 the end.”
“It was just a rough idea. There was only the skeleton of the music. It didn’t have all that noise. But the skeleton was everything we needed,” Richards added. “[Mick Jagger] only had the first verse and the riff. It sounded like country music on the guitar. It didn’t look like rock. But he thought it was a joke. He didn’t realise that it was a unique material. We all said, ‘You are crazy’, and he was, of course.”
In fact, Jagger and Richards attempted to block the release of ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ as a single. It came down to a band vote: Jagger and Richards voted against it, while Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, and Brian Jones voted for it. Even though the song’s writers weren’t initially keen on the song’s commercial prospects, they were swiftly proven wrong when ‘Satisfaction’ became a cross-continental hit. The song’s staying power continues to justify its place as the most essential Rolling Stones single and perhaps their most consequential song of all time.
