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I Can't Get No Satisfaction

Rolling Stones

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I Can't Get No Satisfaction The Rolling Stones were the first real English rock-and-roll band with as much authority as the Beatles, but their recognition as such came slowly. They began with the intention of duplicating American blues, R&B and rock and roll and felt little need to write their own material. To them, the idea of writing an English blues song seemed utterly ludicrous. At the time, Mick Jagger rhetorically asked a reporter, "After all, can you imagine, a British-composed R&B number?" Well, times had changed. After the Beatles supplied the Rolling Stones with their second English single, "I Wanna Be Your Man," the idea didn't seem half-crazy after all. Why shouldn't they compose their own songs in the style of their tastes? On their next single, manager Andrew Oldham tried to solve the problem the easy way by suggesting that the Rolling Stonesclaim they actually wrote Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away". Thankfully, though, the song was credited properly on the record sleeve. "Tell Me" was original, but it was also horrible, so the Stones reverted to covers for their next singles. How long, though, could a bunch of middle-class white Britons continue to score hits in America with uniquely African-American music? In one sense, the Stones were bringing coals to Newcastle, but then again, the teenage audience that was buying their singles didn't have a clue about American black music, so the Rolling Stones were performing a service. By the time of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", the point was moot.

During the Stones' lukewarm first tour of America, Keith Richards woke up in the middle of the night. With a tape recorder and an acoustic guitar at his bedside, he recorded himself as he plucked out da daa, da-da-da and moaned, "I can't get no satisfaction" until he fell back asleep. Thinking it could be useful as a B-side or album filler, he gave the fragments to Jagger, who went off posthaste and wrote whatever came to mind. Lyrics about menstruating groupies and the idiocy of American consumerism (as he was witnessing it for the first time) spewed out of him and would forever cast the Rolling Stones as angry outsiders who thumbed their noses at those on the inside. Keith Richards added to the song’s perverse appeal when he stumbled upon a fuzz box in the studio and decided to give it a go, hoping it would generate a sound like a horn section. Instead, it sounded like an amplified buzz saw. The lyrics and the music were so thoroughly antiestablishment that it is a wonder how on earth they ever thought they could get away with it. Keith Richards couldn't have cared less about the song’s inherent nastiness, but he did adamantly argue against it being released as a single, feeling that it just didn't measure up to what he heard in his head. He later stated that he felt Otis Redding's version was more in line with his intentions. As it was, "Satisfaction" rose to #1 and stayed there for four weeks, making it the biggest record of 1965.

The social significance of "Satisfaction" would be difficult to exaggerate. Just like ten years earlier, disaffected youth were again champing at the bit and deliberately attempting to alienate their square parents. There was no better way to do this in 1965 than by liking the Rolling Stones. Andrew Oldham was in nirvana. The Rolling Stones' image as licentious bad boys was deliberate to the point of convention, but what made it doubly convincing was that it was truthful. It wasn't that the Stones were the antithesis of the Beatles; it was just that their image was more honest than the clean-cut, whitewashed stage persona that the Beatles carried around like a cross. John Lennon, the ultimate teddy-boy troublemaker if there ever was one, expressed resentment at having to comply with Brian Epstein's image of the Beatles while the Stones could cavort wildly and be congratulated for it. From this point on, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles would be portrayed as opposing forces, while the Rolling Stones would benefit from being elevated to the status of defining the true rebellious spirit of rock and roll.