'(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' Lyrics/Song Meaning And How It Was Written By Accident By The Rolling Stones

By | May 6, 2020

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Keith Richards with his drivers (source: Reddit)

When Keith Richards sat down to write one of the most iconic riffs in music history, to the point where the song is in the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress since 2006, to the point where it was played on only pirate radio stations at first, and then became The Rolling Stones first #1 in the U.S., he wasn't exactly lucid. He, in fact, had no idea he'd written it at all. He listened to the recording one morning, and there were maybe two minutes of an acoustic guitar playing the pervasive riff, followed by about forty minutes of "then me snoring," according to Richards. That's how "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" was written to start, just a fleeting memory of inspiration, no lyrics, no music, no horn section (the horn section would never happen), and no plan. Just a stray message on an old Phillips tape recorder. 

The song was actually written in two places

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source: reddit

There's some confusion as to how the rest of the song was written. Some stories tell of the hotel room in Clearwater, Florida, at the Fort Harrison Hotel, while Keith Richards' autobiography mentions he recorded it in his flat in Carlton Hill, St. John's Wood, while Jagger wrote the lyrics by the pool in that Florida Hotel a couple of days before they hit the studio to record it.

Record companies and studios used to have a lot more power in that they would dictate a lot more of the musical qualities of the songs they spend their lives commodifying, calling for broad appeal, diminishing some of the art, and ultimately homogenizing the process. This process, by the way, isn't necessarily a bad one or one that we don't need. We wouldn't have some of the greatest songs the world has ever seen without these people exercising their right and duty to make this song as well-loved as possible, which is a wonderful way to think about songwriting, but it just isn't how it happens most of the time.

When the song was originally recorded, it had Brian Jones on harmonica, and after performing it once, they re-recorded it with a Maestro fuzzbox to add some sustain to the guitar riff that Richards wrote with no recollection. He had since then thought of it as a line for horns, so the fuzzbox was really there to mimic what the horns would do. "[It] was just a little sketch," according to Richards, and he wanted a whole horn section doing what the guitar was doing. Later on, though, producer/manager Andrew Loog Oldham and their engineer David Hassinger persuaded Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to keep the song as it was.  Fans agreed.