(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction (1965)

"(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" is a song by the English rock band The Rolling Stones. A product of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards' songwriting partnership, it features a guitar riff by Richards that opens and drives the song. The riff is widely considered one of the greatest hooks in rock history. The song's lyrics refer to sexual frustration and commercialism.

The song was first released as a single in the United States in June 1965 and was also featured on the American version of The Rolling Stones' third studio album, Out of Our Heads, released that July. "Satisfaction" was a hit, giving the Stones their first number one in the US. In the UK, the song initially was played only on pirate radio stations, because its lyrics were considered too sexually suggestive. It later became The Rolling Stones' fourth number one in the United Kingdom.

The song was ranked No. 2 on Rolling Stone magazine's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list in 2004. It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998 and added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2006.

Recording

Keith Richards wrote "Satisfaction" in his sleep and recorded a rough version of the riff on a Philips cassette player. He had no idea he had written it. He said when he listened to the recording in the morning, there were about two minutes of acoustic guitar before you could hear him drop the pick and "then me snoring for the next forty minutes". Sources vary as to where this story happened. While they make reference to a hotel room at the Fort Harrison Hotel in Clearwater, Florida, a house in Chelsea, and the London Hilton, Richards wrote in his most recent autobiography that he was in his flat in Carlton Hill, St. John's Wood. He specifies that Mick Jagger wrote the lyrics by the pool in Clearwater, four days before they went into the studio, hence the confusion.

The Rolling Stones first recorded the track on 10 May 1965 at Chess Studios in Chicago, Illinois, which included Brian Jones on harmonica. The Stones lip-synched to a dub of this version the first time they debuted the song on the American music variety television programme Shindig! The group re-recorded it two days later at RCA Studios in Hollywood, California, with a different beat and the Maestro fuzzbox adding sustain to the sound of the guitar riff. Richards envisioned redoing the track later with a horn section playing the riff: "this was just a little sketch, because, to my mind, the fuzz tone was really there to denote what the horns would be doing." The other band members (Jones, Watts, and Wyman), as well as producer and manager Andrew Loog Oldham and sound engineer David Hassinger eventually outvoted Richards and Jagger so the track was selected for release as a single. The song's success boosted sales of the Gibson fuzzbox so that the entire available stock sold out by the end of 1965.