Notes and Quotes: "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"

The fun guitar toy of 1965 was the "fuzz box," a somewhat erratic device that electronically reproduced what Dave Davies had to rip his speaker to achieve. The earliest fuzz tone device was probably custom built for Nashville guitarist, Chet Atkins, in the 1950s. "The first commercially made distortion pedal, the Maestro Fuzz-Tone, was introduced in '63 and was based on a circuit developed a few years earlier by Nashville studio engineer Glen Snotty" (Barry Cleveland, Electronic Musician, 1 January 2000).

Richards never felt completely happy with the song, never having quite got past the riff. His intention at the time was to compose a bridge and additional material. However, they needed a song sooner than he had time to finish the song.

Apart from being one of the longest songs to grace the top-ten at the time, Jagger played with how far he could push the semiotic envelope by talking about trying "to make some girl."

Keith Richards: I woke up one night in a hotel room. Hotel rooms are great. You can do some of your best writing in hotel rooms. I woke up with a riff in my head and the basic refrain and wrote it down. The record still sounded like a dub to me. I wanted to do…, I couldn't see getting excited about it. I'd really dug it that night in the hotel, but I'd gone past it. No, I didn't want it out, I said. I wanted to cut it again. It sounded all right, but I didn't really like that fuzz guitar. I wanted to make that thing different. But I don't think we could have done; you needed / either horns or something that could really knock that riff out. (Greenfield 1981: 170a/b)

Keith Richards: I didn't think much of "Satisfaction" when we first recorded it. We had a harmonica on then and it was considered to be a good b-side or maybe an LP track. ... Charlie put down a different tempo, and with the addition of a fuzzbox on my guitar, which takes off all the treble, we achieved a very interesting sound. [Originally NME 3 September 1965] (Wyman 2002: 187)

Oldham: On 9 May the group played the Air Crown Theatre in Chicago. The next day it was back to Chess. We recorded eighteen hours off and on the trot for two days, cutting for or five tracks. One of them was a harmonica-laden version of "Satisfaction" that just would not do. It was acoustic-driven, wayward, and the hook registered as marginal to nowt. ... We flew to Los Angeles and headed straight for RCA. "Satisfaction" was recorded again and nailed. It was unusual for a song to be allowed longer than thirty minutes to find its way, let alone be given a second chance, but there was something about "Satisfaction" that had the whole group happy to whack it out once more in Hollywood. (2003: 198-99)

Radio Corporation of America, RCA Building, 6363 W. Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, ca. 1965.

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27 February, 2012