12 May 1965, a riff that arrived like a bolt from the blue
On 12 May 1965, The Rolling Stones recorded ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and produced by Andrew Loog Oldham.
The track is considered one of the greatest songs of the band. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine placed “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” in the second spot on its list of “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time” and in 2006 the song was added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress.
The lyrics refer to youth frustration and it declares openly against consumerism, but to stick to the point, the really important thing about this song is its guitar riff.
Richards recorded the first version of the riff during a night, before falling again asleep. The following morning, he figured out that he recorded about two minutes of acoustic guitar and “then me snoring for the next forty minutes[1]”.
The Rolling Stones first recorded the track on 10 May 1965 at Chess Studios in Chicago. Two days later, they came back to re-recorded the track at RCA Studios in Hollywood with a different beat and the Gibson Maestro fuzzbox adding sustain to the sound of the guitar riff.
Enjoy the reminder!
Cover Image: London, 1963. Left to right: Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts, Brian Jones, Keith Richards and Bill Wyman. (Photo by Terry O'Neill/Getty Images)
[1]Keith Richards – In His Own Words by Mick St Michael, Omnibus Press, 1994, page 24.ISBN 0-7119-3634-X
