'Satisfaction': 3 minutes, 43 seconds, 50 years
It’s three minutes and 43 seconds long. It seems to emerge from some basement of our subconscious, lean and sinewy, a vaguely metallic template of thematic economy, an angular expression of everyday unease.
The song was a righteous nose-thumbing to the two-minutes-and-change diktat of song duration in the AM-radio-driven era of the early and mid 60’s it was born into.
And the full title of the song — “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” — is itself a contradiction, what etymologists call a negative concord ... or, put more colloquially, a double negative. This titular no-but-yes embodies, probably by accident, the contradictions inherent in our own lives, the tension between what we want and what we say we can’t get, between what we get and what we say we don’t want.
The song ushered in the era of rock music as the truly democratic experience it was always purported to be. Anybody can play The Posterity Riff in nothing flat. No capos are necessary, no exotic fingering’s needed, no translation by a guitar teacher is required. Tablature doesn’t really even do it justice.
Then it’s back to fourth fret, fifth string, and then back to second fret, fifth string. Rinse. Repeat. That’s it. Three notes on two strings, in three positions on the fretboard. That’s the basis for the guitar riff of our time, the heart of what Rolling Stone judged the second-greatest rock song of all time, the foundation for what the BMI music licensing organization called the 91st-most performed song of the 20th century.
In three minutes and 43 seconds long, it embodies the disquiet and unease of modern life, an unease that persists to this day. Acid, muscular, pugnacious, it’s a clarion expression of the collective unconscious, the drift of life in the nuclear age, that sense that everything could come crashing down at any given moment, that feeling at the heart of the frowns we wear, the scowls we can’t seem to shake.
But the song’s no funeral dirge, no mopey, woe-is-me, minor-chord lamentation. Its rhythm, its dogged persistence, its relentless beat is at the heart of the uplift in the human experience, Dylan Thomas’ force driving the green fuse through that flower, the human drive perfectly described by Samuel Beckett: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
It’s all there: the tension, the warring impulses of surrender and determination, capitulation and resolve, despair and hope — the same polar forces that power our lives today.
“Satisfaction” changed everything because it revealed everything we couldn't quite reveal to ourselves. And it’s no less pertinent today than it was on June 6, 1965 — 50 years ago Saturday.
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The Year That Exploded
Almost by design, 1965 as a year of general upheaval became so right outta the gate, from almost the exact start of the year. On Jan. 4, President Lyndon Johnson made his second State of the Union address, and announced the initiatives creating a “Great Society.” But war was destined to be the order of the year. In April, the first march sponsored by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) took place in Washington, and attracted between 20,000 and 25,000 protesters against the Vietnam War.
Protesters returned to Washington in June for an anti-war “teach-in,” a five-hour event in which thousands of leaflets were distributed in and around the Pentagon. The battle between anti-war activists and the U.S. government was joined in July, when President Johnson ordered an increase in the number of U.S. forces in Vietnam, from 75,000 men to 125,000. Making matters worse, he ordered the number of American men drafted every month to be doubled, to more than 35,000. That set the stage for a massive increase in U.S. troops, which Johnson ordered in November. The number of Americans in Vietnam climbed to about 400,000.
The Book of a Genesis:
The Origin Story
“Satisfaction” has its legitimate genesis in more than one place. At least two locations are or may be central to the song’s birth:
There’s Richards’ flat on Carlton Hill, in the St. John’s Wood section of London. That’s where Richards lived for a time, at least briefly without being in a relationship (he’d been living there with Linda Keith). Numerous reports (including Richards’ own account) have it that Richards woke up in that London flat early one morning, hounded into consciousness by the riff that would come to move the world.
Bloomberg News reported in October 2010: “The Rolling Stones guitarist was temporarily without a girlfriend and home alone in St. John’s Wood, London, in 1965. Moaning about his lack of a companion, he picked out the riff on an acoustic guitar and dozed off, leaving his cassette recorder running.”
That distillation’s consistent with the verbatim of Richards’ own writing. From Richards’ 2010 autobiography, “Life”: “I wrote ‘Satisfaction’ in my sleep. I had no idea I’d written it, it’s only thank God for the little Philips cassette player. The miracle being that I looked at the cassette player that morning and I knew I’d put a brand-new tape in the previous night, and I saw it was at the end. Then I pushed rewind and there was ‘Satisfaction.’”
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But in the book “Keith Richards: Satisfaction” by Christopher Sandford, it all began in the Fort Harrison Hotel in Clearwater, Florida: “Keith went up alone to room 3 (there were only seventeen in the place), watched The Tonight Show and nodded off. Towards dawn he woke up with a riff ... ringing in his head. Keith, who was in the habit of keeping a tape recorder by his bed to capture such moments, grabbed his new Gibson Firebird, taped the lick, then fell asleep again.”
You’d think the specifics of Sandford’s reporting — the number of the hotel room, what Keith was watching on TV, the particular guitar he used — would give him the edge, but with a contrary assessment straight from the horse’s mouth, you’ve gotta go with Keith's recollection of events. Unless Keith was misremembering things, of course.
Other dates and facts related to the song’s creation are just as tantalizingly imprecise. Some reports have Stones frontman Mick Jagger writing most of the lyrics in his Clearwater hotel room. Others say he was poolside at the hotel. Some reports say that happened on May 6, 1965, others claim it was May 7.
Richards has been thought to have come up with the title. “That was just a working title,” he said in an oft-quoted passage. “It could just as well have been ‘Auntie Millie’s Caught Her Left Tit in the Mangle.’”
Well, maybe. The title has a legitimate provenance with Chuck Berry, whose song “30 Days,” recorded in 1955, contains this lyric:
“If I don't get no satisfaction from the judge
I'm gonna take it to the FBI and voice my grudge ...”
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He didn’t think the song was ready for prime-time. “I thought of it as an album filler,” Richards said, as quoted in the book “Mick: The Wild Life and Mad Genius of Jagger” by Christopher Andersen. “I never thought it was anything like commercial enough to be a single.”
The rest of the song – the lyrics that have endured as long as the music — were perhaps largely Jagger’s ironically world-weary invention, and it’s here that “Satisfaction” succeeds beyond the purely visceral music.
From the viewpoint of the song’s unnamed protagonist, we’re witness to the pressures and challenges of modern life. Doin’ this and signin’ that ... at the same time hoping for connection with women, a connection thwarted by the same biological imperative — that monthly “losing streak” of the object of his affection — as the one that got him interested in her in the first place. “Satisfaction” was born as a song you could dance to; the lyrics made it a smart song you could dance to. Twenty-five days after “Satisfaction” was recorded, the world did just that.
But He Can’t Understand
Cause He Doesn’t Wear
The Same Color Skin As Me:
‘Satisfaction’ in the Civil Rights Era
But however unwittingly, “Satisfaction” got to the psychic core of the dissatisfaction of black Americans pushing back against the punishments of the Jim Crow era like nothing else on the radio in the years before Brown and other African American artists took point on the defining social issue of the American 20th century.
Nineteen sixty-five was a bitter crucible year for African Americans; it was as if the corrosive qualities of the Jim Crow South and those of a more generally segregated, race-fearful America had finally, tragically dovetailed. If anyone could relate to feeling that they “can’t get no satisfaction,” it was the 20 million black Americans enduring life in a country that didn’t seem to want them around.
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Barely two weeks later, on March 7, about 530 civil rights demonstrators intending to march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., were trampled and beaten by 200 Alabama state troopers on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma. It was the first such confrontation at the site; two days later, on March 9, demonstrators returned to the bridge for a prayer service before returning to Selma, after troopers offered to let them pass. A third march, on March 21, went off without incident (and with federal protection). The civil rights activists reached Montgomery, Ala., on March 25, not long after President Johnson’s moving “We Shall Overcome” speech.
The crowded year for civil rights had its high point when Johnson sent a bill to Congress; the legislation was the foundation for what would soon become the Voting Rights Act of 1965. With lightning speed (certainly compared to the U.S. Congress of today), Congress passed the bill by July, and Johnson signed it — one of the landmark laws of American history — in August ... less than a week before the Watts riots exploded in Los Angeles.
Cover Me:
The Other Flavors of ‘Satisfaction’
Artists from Otis Redding to Devo, from Cat Power to Britney Spears, Aretha Franklin to Jerry Lee Lewis have interpreted the song with treatments as singular as the artists themselves. Listening to alternate flavors of “satisfaction” is something of a Rashomon experience, with each successive artist offering a different, unseen side to the message of a classic. Everybody got somethin to say.
When Redding performed the song at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival — a few years after recording it on his “Otis Blue” album — it got the full Memphis R&B treatment, with a horn section filling in what the Stones recorded on a lead guitar part. In fact, Keith Richards is on record saying that he envisioned the Stones recording the song with horns:
“[T]his was just a little sketch, because, to my mind, the fuzz tone was really there to denote what the horns would be doing.” Richards said. “Sometimes an artist’s sketches are better than the finished painting, and that’s probably one of the perfect examples.” Richards said as quoted in the book “According to the Rolling Stones” by Jagger, Dora Loewenstein, Philip Dodd and Charlie Watts.
But it was soon out of his hands. In one of the more unsung but momentous exercises of rock-band majority rule, Richards was apparently overruled by producer Andrew Loog Oldham and the rest of the Stones when the song was chosen as a single.
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On her “The Covers Record,” released in early 2000, Cat Power offers a version is almost sorrowful, tapping into the song’s lyrics as a downbeat experience. With one guitar and her voice, and nothing else, Power revealed another, more downbeat dimension of the song’s message of alienation and missed connection.
In 2007, the singer Jackie ‘O’ released a disco-driven interpretation that’s also uncannily faithful to the original.
In February of 2015, the Twilight Soul Cats (featuring Tony Grant) offered a completely different take on “Satisfaction”: slowed down and soulful, the buzzy guitar dropped out completely.
On the NBC talent program “The Voice,” contestant Moses Stone performed an upbeat, pop-infused version, horns and piano in place — all in all perfectly serviceable when Stone collapses some of the lyrics into a hip-hop cadence.
The song’s made its way into the movies as well. It was featured in a celebrated surf scene from Francis Coppola’s Vietnam War classic “Apocalypse Now” (1979), with a beanpole-thin Laurence Fishburne rockin’ out as the ill-fated boat moves up river in search of Colonel Kurtz. In the 1986 action film “Raw Deal,” the song gets Arnold Schwarzenegger juiced for battle; he plays the track from a cassette tape on his car stereo before kicking ass in a gravel pit, machine gun as counterpoint.
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Both songs, of course, tap into the 20th/21st-century collective unconscious in much the same way; both give voice to those warring emotions we can’t quite nail down in ourselves, though we know they’re there.
But while Dylan’s approach is deeply poetic, lyrical, almost a ballad by comparison, “Satisfaction” has a bark and bite that’s almost willfully confrontational; its way to the je ne sais quoi of modern life is announced as a challenge, a raw yawp, a short sharp shock that suits the times then and now. The search for satisfaction — for love, for money, for peace, for power, for social and economic justice, for a seat at the table, for a place in the sun — is the Holy-Grail hunt that animates all our lives. One of the best songs to explore that search, with wit and power, still contains the multitudes. After all these years.
Image credits: Musical notation of 'Satisfaction' riff: via wikipedia. com. Transcribed and originally uploaded by Cielomobile at Wikipedia. Fair use rationale: Use of image here is purely for informational purposes. Rolling Stones top: Hulton Archive, Getty Images. Dylan: Harry Thompson/Getty images. Linda Keith: via pinterest.com. Chess Records, Chicago (former location): via americanbluesscene.com. MLK, Selma 1965: © 1965, 2010 Dennis Hopper. The Selma March: © 1965, 2010 Dennis Hopper. Otis Redding: via kalamu.com. Cat Power: via kickassmusicwomen.com.
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