Midnight ramblers: Ronnie Wood, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones at Glastonbury.
In the pre-internet age, the Glastonbury festival was famously a hive of bizarre rumours about what was going on in the outside world. For a period in the early 90s, a story seemed to be passed around every year that Cliff Richard had died, while in 1995, the news that John Redwood was launching a leadership challenge to then-prime minister John Major somehow got mangled into a report that the entire Tory government had resigned en masse.
The rise of the web and the smartphone was supposed to have done for that kind of thing, but this year the spirit of the unlikely Glastonbury rumour seems to be abroad once again, although this time the stories are concerned not with the sad demise of the tennis-loving Peter Pan of Pop, but with a plethora of secret guest appearances. Lady Gaga is supposed to be turning up. Almost nowhere in the festival is safe from an imminent guerilla gig by Daft Punk. And David Bowie, we are earnestly informed, is going to appear on stage with the Rolling Stones, giving rise to the flatly horrifying thought that he and Mick Jagger might favour us with their cover version of Dancing in the Street.
By the time the Rolling Stones arrive, the crowd in front of the Pyramid stage has swelled to 100,000, something you might have predicted had you noted the sheer number of people walking around the site in Stones T-shirts: it's hard to think of another Glastonbury that's been so conclusively overtaken by a solitary headlining act. As U2 discovered a few years back, parachuting a hugely successful band in to headline Glastonbury doesn't always work, something of which Jagger at least appears aware. For someone with a reputation for lofty diffidence, he seems to have been on a charm offensive for weeks: no sooner had their headline slot been announced than he took to Twitter to claim, a little implausibly, that he was going to stay on site in a yurt. The charm offensive carries over into their set. Just as he joked about the cost of the seats at last November's O2 performance, he jokes about Glastonbury's dogged pursuit of the band over the years: "So, they finally asked us."
If mention of his actual sleeping arrangements is conspicuous by its absence, Jagger mentions having spent the previous night at the festival: "I went to Shangri-La!" he says, sounding as ever, exactly like a man doing an impersonation of Mick Jagger. "I saw the Arctic Monkeys." Indeed, so keen is he to underline his awareness that this show is more than just another stop off on the Stones' 50th Anniversary Tour, he has reworked the song Factory Girl for the occasion: Glastonbury Girl makes reference to wet wipes, inhaling nitrous oxide, camping and ecstasy.
What's striking about the other songs they perform is how thrillingly ramshackle the Stones sound. In contrast to most of their stadium-filling peers, you can hear the imperfections, the occasional fluffed notes. They sound like a real band, rather than bored multimillionaires going through the motions, which adds a genuine edge to the big hits: Wild Horses should be dulled by overfamiliarity, but it packs an emotional punch. It's a sense heightened by their evident delight at having former guitarist Mick Taylor back on stage with them – a delight not shared entirely by the audience, which thins out a bit during the lengthy versions of You Got the Silver and Midnight Rambler – and the set's occasional surprises: they perform a fantastic version of 2,000 Light Years From Home, from the most reviled of their 60s albums, the psychedelic folly Their Satanic Majesties Request.
As they play Sympathy for the Devil, the scrap-metal phoenix at the top of the Pyramid stage begins to slowly rise up and belch out fire. In the crowd, people are letting off flares and red smoke billows around. It's incredibly exciting: one of those much-vaunted Glastonbury moments.
(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction
| "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" | ||||||||||||||
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| Single by The Rolling Stones | ||||||||||||||
| from the album Out of Our Heads (US) | ||||||||||||||
| B-side |
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| Released |
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| Format | 7", 12" | |||||||||||||
| Recorded | 12 May 1965, RCA Studios, Hollywood | |||||||||||||
| Genre | ||||||||||||||
| Length | 3:44 | |||||||||||||
| Label |
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| Writer(s) | Jagger/Richards | |||||||||||||
| Producer(s) | Andrew Loog Oldham | |||||||||||||
| Certification | Gold (RIAA) | |||||||||||||
| The Rolling Stones singles chronology | ||||||||||||||
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"(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" is a song by the English rock band The Rolling Stones, released in 1965. It was written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and produced by Andrew Loog Oldham. Richards' three-note guitar riff—intended to be replaced by horns—opens and drives the song. The 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' fourth 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 is considered the greatest song the band ever recorded. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine placed "Satisfaction" in the second spot on its list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time". The song was added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2006.
Contents
Recording
Richards recorded the rough version of the riff in a hotel room. He ran through it once before falling asleep. He said when he listened back to it in the morning, there was about two minutes of acoustic guitar before you could hear him drop the pick and "then me snoring for the next forty minutes".
The Rolling Stones first recorded the track on 10 May 1965 at Chess Studios in Chicago – a version featuring Brian Jones on harmonica. The Stones lip-synched to a dub of this version the first time they debuted the song on ABC's Shindig. The group re-recorded it two days later at RCA Studios in Hollywood, with a different beat and the GibsonMaestro 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 Rolling Stones, 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.
Author Gary West cites a different source for the release of, "Satisfaction" in interviewing WTRY radio (Troy, NY) DJ Joe Condon. In the interview, Condon clearly states that his radio station began playing "Satisfaction" on 29 April 1965, making the above recording date impossible. It can be assumed that "Satisfaction" was probably recorded earlier in April, and that WTRY was playing a test pressing.
Like most of the Stones' pre-1966 recordings, "Satisfaction" was originally released in mono only. In the mid-1980s, a true stereo version of the song was released on German and Japanese editions of the CD reissue of Hot Rocks 1964-1971. The stereo mix features a piano (played by session player Jack Nitzsche, who also provides the song's iconic tambourine) and acoustic guitar that are barely audible in the original mono release (both instruments are also audible on a bootleg recording of the instrumental track). This stereo mix of "Satisfaction" also appeared on a radio-promo CD of rare stereo tracks provided to US radio stations in the mid-1980s, but has not yet been featured on a worldwide commercial CD; even later pressings of the German and Japanese Hot Rocks CDs feature the mono mix, making the earlier releases with the stereo mix collectors' items. For the worldwide 2002 reissue of Hot Rocks, an alternative quasi-stereo mix was used featuring the lead guitar, bass, drums, and vocals in the center channel and the acoustic guitar and piano "split" left and right via a delay effect.
This audio file was created from a revision of the "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" article dated 2005-04-20, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. (Audio help)
Lyrics and melody
The song opens with the guitar riff, which is joined by the bass halfway through. It is repeated three times with the drums and acoustic guitar before the vocal enters with the line: "I can't get no satisfaction". The key is E major, but with the 3rd and 7th degreeoccasionally lowered, creating - in the first part of the verses ("I can't get no ...") - a distinctive mellow sound. The accompanying chords (i.e. E major, D major and A major) are borrowed from the E mixolydian scale, which is often used in Blues and Rock.
The title line is an example of a negative concord. Jagger sings the verses in a tone hovering between cynical commentary and frustrated protest, and then leaps half singing and half yelling into the chorus, where the guitar riff reappears. The lyrics outline the singer's irritation with the increasing commercialism of the modern world, where the radio broadcasts "useless information" and a man on television tells him "how white my shirts can be – but he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke the same cigarettes as me." Jagger also describes the stress of being a celebrity, and the tensions of touring. The reference in the verse to not getting any "girl reaction" was fairly controversial in its day, interpreted by some listeners (and radio programmers) as meaning a girl willing to have sex. Jagger commented that the dissers "didn't understand the dirtiest line", as afterwards the girl asks him to return the following week as she is "on a losing streak," an apparent reference to menstruation. The song closes with a fairly subdued repetition of the song's title, followed suddenly by a full shout of the line, with the final words repeated into the fade-out.
In its day the song was perceived as disturbing because of both its sexual connotations and the negative view of commercialism and other aspects of modern culture; critic Paul Gambaccini stated: "The lyrics to this were truly threatening to an older audience. This song was perceived as an attack on the status quo". When the Rolling Stones performed the song on Shindig! in 1965, the line "trying to make some girl" was censored although a performance on The Ed Sullivan Show on 13 February 1966 was uncensored. Forty years later, when the band performed three songs during the February 2006 Super Bowl XL halftime show, "Satisfaction" was the only one of the three songs not censored as it was broadcast.
Release and success
"Satisfaction" was released as a single in the US by London Records on 6 June 1965, with "The Under-Assistant West Coast Promotion Man" as its B-side. The single entered the Billboard Hot 100 charts in America in the week ending 12 June 1965, remaining there for 14 weeks, reaching the top on 10 July by displacing The Four Tops' "I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)". "Satisfaction" held the number one spot for four weeks, being knocked off on 7 August by "I'm Henry the Eighth, I Am" by Herman's Hermits. While in its eighth week on the American charts, the single was certified a gold record award by the RIAA for shipping over a million copies across the United States, giving the band their first of many gold disc awards in America. Later the song was also released by London Records onOut of Our Heads in America.[9] Billboard ranked the record as the No. 3 song of 1965.[20]
"Satisfaction" was not immediately released by Decca Records in Great Britain. Decca was already in the process of preparing a live Rolling Stones EP for release, so the new single did not come out in Britain until 20 August, with "The Spider and the Fly" on the B-side. The song peaked at number one for two weeks, replacingSonny & Cher's "I Got You Babe", between 11 and 25 September, before being toppled by the Walker Brothers' "Make It Easy on Yourself".
In the decades since its release, "Satisfaction" has repeatedly been acclaimed by the music industry. In 1976, Britain's New Musical Express listed "Satisfaction" 7th among the top 100 singles of all time. There was a resurgence of interest in the song after it was prominently featured in the 1979 movie Apocalypse Now. In 1991,Vox listed "Satisfaction" among "100 records that shook the world". In 1999, BMI named "Satisfaction" as the 91st-most performed song of the 20th century. In 2000, VH1 listed "Satisfaction" first among its "Top 100 Greatest Rock Songs"; the same year, "Satisfaction" also finished runner-up to "Yesterday" in a list jointly compiled by Rolling Stone and MTV.[23] In 2003, Q placed the song 68th out of its "1001 Best Songs Ever". In 2004, Rolling Stone's panel of judges named "Satisfaction" as the second-greatest song of all time, coming in second to Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone". Newsweek magazine has called the opening riff "five notes that shook the world".
Jagger said of "Satisfaction":
The song has become a staple at Rolling Stones shows. They have performed it on nearly every tour since its release, and concert renditions have been included on the albums Got Live If You Want It!, Still Life, Flashpoint, Live Licks, Shine a Light, and Sweet Summer Sun: Hyde Park Live. One unusual rendition is included inRobert Frank's film Cocksucker Blues from the 1972 tour, when the song was performed by both the Rolling Stones and Stevie Wonder's band as the second half of a medley with Wonder's "Uptight".
Chart performance[edit]
| Chart | Peak position |
|---|---|
| UK Singles Chart[18] | 1 |
| Austrian Singles Chart | 1 |
| Dutch Top 40 | 1 |
| French Singles Chart | 3 |
| German Singles Chart | 1 |
| US Billboard Hot 100[26] | 1 |
| US Billboard Top Selling Rhythm & Blues Singles[27] | 19 |
| US Cashbox Top Singles[28] | 1 |
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