Chapter Seven
Blink and they might have missed it, it happened so fast. At least, it appeared to. On Friday 10 May 1963, the Stones checked into Olympic Sound Studios near London’s Marble Arch1 to record what would turn out to be their debut single: a cover of Chuck Berry’s rich, catchy ‘Come On’. The man who once said, ‘I wanted to play the blues, but I wasn’t blue enough; we always had food on the table’ had forged a reputation as the definitive reeler and rocker, but he failed to score a hit with this one. The decision to cover it was probably Keith’s: ‘Chuck had the swing,’ swooned Richards, one of his biggest fans. ‘There’s rock, but it’s the roll that counts.’
If there had ever been a more clear-cut case of the blind leading the blind, it might not be on record. ‘I’m the producer, and this is the first session that I’ve ever handled,’ declared a defiant Andrew Oldham. ‘I don’t know a damned thing about recording, or music for that matter.’ His disingenuity was disarming. ‘A bunch of bloody amateurs going to make a hit single,’ was Mick’s recollection. He didn’t care for the band’s take or Oldham’s skittish production. Nor did the others. But listening to it now, almost sixty years down the line, the recording has an innocent, moreish charm. The Stones’ cover may be shriller and less stately than Chuck’s. Its raw twang, clipped vocal and urgent harmonica, wailed by Brian Jones at the top of his game, do nicely. Mick’s comically stretched vowels – ‘Cum-OUNN!’ – linger in the ear long after the conclusive drum flourish. Some expected the Stones to be a flash in the pan and for it to have been all downhill from there. Some ate their words. Released on 7 June, ‘Come On’ managed a respectable No. 21. Their follow-up, John and Paul’s ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, released on 1 November, was the first song ever performed on BBC’s Top of the Pops, presented by the now-disgraced late DJ Jimmy Savile on New Year’s Day 1964. The Stones’ new record was at No. 13. Their appearance on the show took it up a notch, where it peaked, at No. 12. Getting warmer. At No. 1 that week were the Beatles, with ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’.
The following month, they were back with ‘Not Fade Away’, their cover of Buddy Holly’s and Norman Petty’s composition for the Crickets, released as the B-side of ‘Oh, Boy!’ in 1957. The Stones’ version made it to No. 3 in the UK, and was also their first US release, where it achieved a modest No. 48. ‘It’s All Over Now’, written by Bobby Womack and his sister-in-law Shirley Womack and released by the Womack brothers as the Valentinos, scored them their first British No. 1 in July 1964.
‘We cut that in Chess Studios the first time in Chicago,’ recalled Keith. ‘The year before, we were playing bars in England, you know. And then we’re walking into Chess Studios, which was where all of these records had been made that were so important to us. Now and again in life you get this feeling that you’ve died and gone to heaven. Luckily, neither was true. American studios at that time were so much more together than in England. I mean, they had some good stuff in England, but they didn’t have knowledge of how to record it. We were lucky. There were a couple of guys like Glyn Johns in England who had a rough idea of recording. But the way you’d get a sound in an American studio in those days was the difference between day and night, compared to working in England or Europe. I mean, these cats, in America, they’d done it already. So to work in Chess was our first taste of American record[ing].’
The first of five consecutive chart-toppers, it would be followed by ‘Little Red Rooster’ (November 1964), the song recorded for Chess by Howlin’ Wolf as ‘The Red Rooster’ three years earlier. The Stones’ second single to conquer the UK chart, it spent a single week at the top that December. ‘The Last Time’ (March 1965), co-produced by Phil Spector and recorded at RCA Studios in Hollywood that January, was their first ‘original’ song to be released as a British A-side. Except that it wasn’t entirely original. Do yourself a favour and pull up the Staple Singers’ 1954 recording ‘This May Be the Last Time’ a traditional gospel song. Its eerie, haunting holler will never leave you. Keith Richards later confessed that the Stones had ripped it off. Ah down’ knouw.2 ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ ensued (September 1965), as did ‘Get Off of My Cloud’ (November 1965). There would be three further No. 1s, making eight in total. In May 1966, ‘Paint It, Black’; in June 1968, ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’; and in July 1969, ‘Honky Tonk Women’. Pause to reflect on the startling fact that the Stones enjoyed their last No. 1 record fifty-three years ago.
Back we go, to the song that changed everything: not only in the field of musical endeavour, but in terms of moving on from the past, grabbing the present by the short’n’curlies, and embracing a brave new future. To the chroniclers of music history, this sharp encapsulation of the status quo, this incisive slice of social commentary, was a watershed.
‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ remains one of the world’s most popular songs. ‘It was the song that really made the Rolling Stones,’ Jagger told Rolling Stone magazine’s Jann Wenner in 1995. ‘[It] changed us from just another band into a huge, monster band. You always need one song. We weren’t American, and America was a big thing and we always wanted to make it [t]here. It was very impressive, the way that song and the popularity of the band became a worldwide thing. It’s a signature tune, really … a kind of signature that everyone knows. It has a very catchy title. It has a very catchy guitar riff. It has a great guitar sound, which was original at that time. And it captures a spirit of the times, which is very important in those kinds of songs. Which was alienation. Or it’s a bit more than that, maybe, but a kind of sexual alienation. Alienation’s not quite the right word, but it’s one word that would do.’ Gotcha.
There was no shortage of sixties artists establishing names and reputations as capturers of the zeitgeist. But it wasn’t only about harnessing prevailing moods, breaking beliefs and challenging values. The times were a-changin’ across the board. Music seemed almost to rise to a new self-imposed remit to deliver on multiple levels, reflecting social progress and enlightenment as never before. Many artists sought to achieve popularity not only as entertainers but also as provocateurs of thought. They hunkered down to write songs that projected alternative viewpoints, expressed objection or took a stand. The Greenwich Village folk revival scene that flourished in the neighbourhood’s coffee houses is credited as the genesis of the sixties. It delivered the likes of Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Woody Guthrie, and Peter, Paul and Mary. It offered up Joan Baez and Bob Dylan: musicians who set themselves the mighty task of changing the world with songs. The soundtrack of ’64 featured Dylan’s ‘Only a Pawn in their Game’, Buffy Sainte-Marie’s ‘Universal Soldier’ and Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change is Gonna Come’. Within four years, Godfather of soul James Brown was funking his way through ‘Say It Loud: I’m Black and Proud’: a new national anthem. The 1960s came to be regarded as the golden age of the protest song, inspired by causes from civil rights to Vietnam. Protest marches and sit-ins needed a soundtrack. The counterculture and hippy movement preached peace, love and wretched longing for a utopian world.
Bob Dylan, a key figure in the protest movement, influenced both the Beatles and the Stones. His songs were less about specific events, more theme-focused and intent on raising awareness. He would later distance himself from the movement, but not before he had tentacled into the cerebral lobes and creative muscles of those who followed him. Artists like the Stones, Pete Townshend and especially the Beatles. They discovered him via his second studio album, 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and met him in person in August 1964 at New York’s Delmonico Hotel. He introduced them to marijuana. Their drug use soared, as did their courage. They began to experiment beyond the accepted boundaries of popular songwriting. ‘I started being me about the songs, not writing them objectively but subjectively,’ commented John Lennon. ‘I’d started thinking about my own emotions … instead of projecting myself into a situation, I would try to express what I felt about myself … it was Dylan who helped me realise that.’ He wasn’t the only one. McCartney had hitched to the same paddle. Check out John’s ‘I’m a Loser’, ‘In My Life’, ‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away’, and Paul’s ‘I’ll Follow the Sun’ and ‘Yesterday’.
It was no longer enough to get up, look pretty and strum and hum some ditty of the boy-meets-girl, happy-ever-after, babe-you-broke-my-heart variety. The shifting socio-political landscape and changing sensibilities demanded much more. Jagger was well aware of this. He had identified Dylan as a major exponent of the new songwriting long before he flew the family nest.
‘I was playing Bob Dylan records at my parents’ home when he was still an acoustic folk singer,’ Mick said. ‘But he was already very important and his lyrics were on point. The delivery isn’t just the words, it’s the accentuation and the moods and twists he puts on them. His greatness lies in the body of work.’
Mick later picked out his all-time favourite Dylan song: ‘Desolation Row’, recorded in August 1965 and released on the Highway 61 Revisited album. One of Zimmerman’s greatest songs, it wraps sinister imagery and worrying scenarios in fine layers of sublime melody, deft guitar work and a compelling, unforgettable vocal. What is that if not a direct influence on the songwriting of the Rolling Stones? Dylan rated the Stones in return. ‘[They] are truly the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world, and always will be,’ he said. ‘The last, too. Everything that came after them, metal, rap, punk, new wave, pop-rock, you name it … you can trace it all back to the Rolling Stones. They were the first and last, and no one’s ever done it better.’
‘Satisfaction’, a classic from the moment it was born, demonstrated beyond doubt that the Stones were more than they were cracked down to be. Much more than rock’n’roll, this song was rock and pop’s answer to the Greenwich Village folk theme. Its hard-drive sound provided the perfect vehicle for unexpected lyrics expressing dissatisfaction in the status quo. Its tight, sneery lyrics projected anger and exasperation in superficial obsessions such as materialism and consumerism. It confronted sexual frustration. It raged against the confining, contradictory, controlling attitude of the older generation towards the sex lives of the young. It connected and chimed perfectly with its target audience. It was their breakthrough.
The story of the song’s conception is legendary. Keith Richards created its immortal riff without knowing he had done so. Just ahead of the band’s 1965 North American tour, he popped awake one night in bed in his London flat – ‘I slept with a guitar in those days’ – and committed a three-note riff, some basic chords, the elementary refrain and forty minutes’ worth of snoring to the Philips cassette recorder that was lying beside his bed, there on standby to capture flashes of inspiration. He then dropped back into a deep sleep. He later awoke to find a recording on his machine that he had no recollection of having put there.
Jagger suspected that Keith’s subconscious had dredged a memory of Chuck Berry’s 1955 song ‘30 Days’, featuring the line ‘I don’t get no satisfaction from the judge’. Not that a little thing like possible plagiarism was going to stop them. Mick started to work up the song, attacking the advertising and media industries in graphic terms. He and Keith began to hone it together once they hit American soil and started their trek across the states. In Chicago, they had a go at recording it at Chess Records. They weren’t satisfied. They razored it down at RCA’s studios in Los Angeles with the help of the infamous Gibson Fuzz Box, which Keith had intended as a placeholder until they could get a horn section in. But the buzzy, urgent energy imparted by the fuzz box gave the song something unique and addictive. A vote was taken, and the horns were off the case. Mick and Keith, going on twenty-two and on the threshold of a career they could never have dared to dream of, had just created their greatest ever hit.
‘The fuzz tone had never been heard before anywhere, and that’s the sound that caught everybody’s imagination,’ said Keith in Life. ‘As far as I was concerned, that was just the dub. [But] ten days on the road and it’s No. 1 nationally. The record of the summer of ’65 … I learned that lesson – sometimes you can overwork things. Not everything’s designed for your taste and your taste alone.’
Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about ‘Satisfaction’ was that it emerged at a time when it could have been sunk by a barrage of greatest hits by other artists; records by acts so powerful that they ought to have seen it off. As the British Invasion marched on, embracing new groups all the time including Freddie and the Dreamers and Herman’s Hermits; as the Beach Boys kept building their surf-around sound with ‘Help Me Rhonda’ and ‘California Girls’; as Dylan went electric at the Newport Jazz Festival, Rhode Island, and performed his first rock’n’roll set to the dismay of his fans, and the Beatles played New York’s Shea Stadium; as Motown’s Supremes triumphed with ‘Stop in the Name of Love’ and the Four Tops with ‘I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)’, the Byrds with ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, the Yardbirds with ‘For Your Love’ and Sonny and Cher with ‘I Got You Babe’ … up swaggered these cheeky-boy Stones with the cut to eclipse them all.
But ‘Satisfaction’ was more than a record. It was more than a song. We could stick our necks out and say that it was nothing less than a clarion call to sixties youth, an exhortation to quit the flock, recognise an emperor in the altogether when they saw one, and to say it loud and proud. If not exactly a ‘protest’, it was a song with the requisite anti-Establishment message. Key to its phenomenal success was that its young, impressionable listeners were dissatisfied too. They felt as the Stones felt. It was as though the songwriters had tapped into their brains and had been jump-started by their own emotions. Relatively tame by modern standards, the song was raw and controversial for its time. The older generation, the so-called Establishment, perceived it as a nuclear threat. Not only were its lyrics aggressive, but its sound, its attitude and the bile with which they performed it constituted an all-out attack.
Crucial to its success was the fact that the band, who were in the middle of their third outing to the States, performed the song on American television before the single appeared. Just over a fortnight ahead of its release on 6 June 1965, they debuted ‘Satisfaction’ on the Los Angeles ABC show Shindig! (when the line ‘trying to make some girl’, interpreted as a boy attempting to coerce a girl into sexual intercourse, was censored. This would happen again on The Ed Sullivan Show the following year. Both must have missed the obscure, in those days offensive references to menstruation).3 The turnout to the university and small-stadium shows had hitherto been modest. After their latest television exposure, the single climbed the Billboard Hot 100, felled the Four Tops and snatched the No. 1 slot as easy as pie. It shifted half a million copies over the first eight weeks, lingered on the chart for a further six, and earned the band their first gold record from the Recording Industry Association of America. The song that marked the true beginning of their matchless career would never go away.
‘Satisfaction’ made it to the runner-up position on Rolling Stone magazine’s ‘500 Greatest Songs of All Time’ list in 2004, behind Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. Seventeen years later, when the list was at long last updated, it had dropped. The 2021 reckoning featured Aretha Franklin in the top slot with her version of Otis Redding’s ‘Respect’. Second was Public Enemy’s ‘Fight the Power’. The Beatles came in at No. 7 with ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, and at No. 15 with ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. John Lennon made No. 19 with ‘Imagine’. The 1970s turned out to be the best-represented era in the whole update, cited by the publication as the decade that resonates most with younger audiences. The times, they a-change yet again. Dylan’s previous chart-topper had slipped to No. 4. The Stones bagged the No. 13 slot with ‘Gimme Shelter’. ‘Satisfaction’, now languishing at No. 31, had been displaced. What the hell, it’s not going anywhere.