Sixty years ago, I received a small record through the post at the Jagger family home in Dartford, Kent.
It was the US release of ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’. The 45rpm was blue and white and had no centre. So I searched for a plastic insert and put the record on the Dansette player. Hey, that’s different. The guitar had a fuzz-box sound – and what the hell was Mick banging on about?
It was a quantum leap from the previous singles, though I fondly remember ‘Little Red Rooster’, as I happened to be present in the tiny studio in Denmark Street when it was cut. I was still at school, but somehow connected to the events playing out across the USA, where Sunset Strip and Los Angeles looked light years away from dim and dreary Dartford.
I never would have imagined that the same track would continue to close most Rolling Stones shows to this day – a testament to its longevity musically and lyrically.
As Mark Ellen writes on page 70, Keith Richards had woken up in the night, reached for a trusty acoustic guitar and phrased the riff into a cassette recorder, and then returned to the Land of Nod.
In the morning, or probably afternoon, he came to and saw the cassette tape was at the end of the spool. So he rewound it and, to his surprise, the riff was on there, followed by 40 minutes of snoring. As Allen Ginsberg once said, ‘Be a good secretary to your own consciousness.’
Plus he had a tag on the lyric, taken from a Chuck Berry song called ‘Forty Days’, with the line ‘can’t get no satisfaction from the judge...’ If you haven’t nicked from Chuck Berry, you haven’t nicked from anyone.
‘We had a first go at recording it, but it wasn’t right,’ Mick tells me down the phone. ‘Then we went into RCA Studios in Los Angeles with this new-fangled guitar fuzz box and very quickly had it down. We were on tour and the lines just came out as youthful frustration with everything that’s thrown at you from the radio and TV.’
Their then manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, wanted it released as a single. Keith didn’t agree, but Andrew went ahead, giving the band their first number-one single in the USA.
Earlier that year, 1965, we had ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, released by Mr Dylan – also a stream- of-consciousness tirade, born from earlier influences such as Jack Kerouac. So things were moving on from the days of syrupy lyrics about eternal love and heartbreak.
I recall a paperback, The Naked Society (1964), on the consumer society, by Vance Packard, that Mick left at home.
I read it with interest, taking in such novel notions as ‘built-in obsolescence’ and how our thoughts are moulded by advertising men and corporations, and was surprised at the cynicism.
Or perhaps this record is a nod to Buddhist thought – that desire just breeds further desire?
Whatever the case, it has a good beat.
Chris Jagger’s lastest album is Mixing Up the Medicine
