Keith Richards writes "Satisfaction" in his sleep - May 7th, 1965

On this day in 1965, in a fit of nocturnal inspiration, Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards wrote “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio,
Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show that belts out the greatest hits of history one
day at a time. I'm Gabe Bluesier, and today we're
looking at a story from rock and roll history that

(00:20):
proves that inspiration really can strike anyway, sometimes even in
your dreams. The day was May seventh, nineteen sixty five.
In a fit of nocturnal inspiration, Rolling Stones guitarist Keith

(00:41):
Richards wrote I Can't get No Satisfaction. More specifically, he
wrote the now famous three note opening riff to the song,
as well as the titular line. He had awoken in
the early morning hours with the tune running through his head,
and after groggily laying it down on a bedside tape recorder,

(01:02):
he promptly fell back to sleep. Released as a single
the following month, the completed version of Satisfaction became the
band's first number one single in America, solidifying their superstar
status and launching one of the most celebrated careers in
rock and roll history. If you've somehow never heard the

(01:22):
track before, here's a clip to set the scene, Sass

(01:44):
where exactly Keith Richards dreamt up the hit song is
a matter of debate. The most common answer is at
a hotel room in Clearwater, Florida, in the midst of
the band's third US tour. However, Richards himself told the
story story differently in his twenty ten autobiography. According to him,
the episode actually took place at his London flat while

(02:08):
he was quote between girlfriends. The rocker says that detail
accounts for the overarching themes of the song frustration, alienation,
and a lack of well satisfaction, regardless of where he was.
Richards went to bed on May sixth after a long
night of partying, a fact that may help explain the

(02:30):
uncertainty regarding his whereabouts. He woke up the next morning
with no recollection of what had happened in between. But
when he looked at the portable tape player that he
kept next to his bed, he noticed that the brand
new tape he had put in just the night before
was inexplicably at its end. When I woke up in
the morning, Richards later reflected, the tape had run out.

(02:54):
I put it back on and there's this maybe thirty
seconds of satisfaction in a very drowse sort of rendition,
and then the guitar suddenly goes clang, and then there's
like forty five minutes of snoring. Richards had no memory
of creating the song's framework, and he wasn't much of
a fan when he finally heard it. Nonetheless, later that

(03:16):
day he played it for his bandmate and co songwriter
Mick Jagger. He only had the first bit, Jagger recalled
years later, and then he had the riff. It sounded
like a country sort of thing on acoustic guitar. It
didn't sound like rock, but he didn't really like it.
He thought it was a joke. Jagger, however, felt otherwise.

(03:37):
He wrote the rest of the lyrics while pool side
in Clearwater, Florida, and just three days later, the Stones
recorded a preliminary version of the track at Chess Studios
in Chicago. On May twelfth, the group re recorded the
song at RCA Studios in Hollywood. It had a different
beat by that point, and Richards used a new guitar

(03:58):
effect to emulate the sound of horns. To do this,
he used the Gibson Maestro f Z one fuzz tone,
an early distortion pedal that added a fuzzy quality to
a guitar sound, while also highlighting the brass like quality
of certain tones. Richards had intended the fuzzbox to be
a placeholder, a scratch track that would later be replaced

(04:21):
by actual horn playing. However, the rest of the band
and their producer, Andrew loug Oldham thought the sound was
so interesting and distinctive that they insisted it remain untouched.
That decision led to the first high profile use of
a distortion pedal in a rock song and helped the
tracks stand out from the crowd when it was released

(04:42):
later that summer. The song didn't stay Horns free forever, though,
as King of soul Otis Redding would release his classic
Horn's Heavy cover later that same year came again Is.

(05:08):
As for the Stones version, Richards wasn't a fan of
the finished track and didn't think it was commercial enough
to be their next single. Once Again, though the producer
and the rest of the band disagreed, the guitarist was overruled,
and on June fourth, nineteen sixty five, I Can't Get
No Satisfaction was released as a single in the United States.

(05:29):
For the lyrics, Mick Jagger had leaned into the inherent
frustration of the song's title, taking aim at the emptiness
of consumer culture and the commercialization of the Stone's own music.
It's somewhat ironic, then, that the song became the band's
biggest hit up to that point. It spent fourteen weeks
on the Billboard Hot one hundred chart, and for four

(05:50):
of them it was in the top position. More than
a million copies of the single were sold during that time,
resulting in the first of the band's many records in America.
Satisfaction was also included on the band's fourth studio album,
Out of Our Heads, which released that same July. About

(06:10):
a month later, the song was finally released as a
single in Great Britain, giving the Stones their fourth number
one in their home country. A true cross continental hit,
Satisfaction dominated the airwaves all summer long, proving that the
era's British invasion wouldn't be restricted to just the Beatles.

(06:31):
And speaking of the Beatles, they also had a single
in nineteen sixty five that stayed at number one in
the US for four weeks. It was the song Yesterday,
and in a strange coincidence, Paul McCartney also came up
with the melody while he was sleeping. There must have
been something in the air that year that boosted musician's

(06:52):
unconscious creativity. And since it's nineteen sixty five, were talking
about I bet I know what it was. I'm gay
blues yay, and hopefully you now know a little more
about history today than you did yesterday. If you'd like
to keep up with the show, you can follow us
on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at TDI HC Show, and

(07:17):
if you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to
send them my way by writing to This Day at
iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks to kazb Bias for producing the show,
and thanks to you for listening. I'll see you back
here again tomorrow for another day in History class.