Satisfaction

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." It was just a rough idea. There was just the bare bones of the song, and it didn't have that noise, of course, because I was on acoustic. And forty minutes of me snoring. But the bare bones is all you need. I had that cassette for a while and I wish I'd kept it.

A peculiarity of "Satisfaction" is that it's a hell of a song to play on stage. For years and years we never played it, or very rarely, until maybe the past ten or fifteen years. Couldn't get the sound right, it didn't feel right, it just sounded weedy. It took the band a long time to figure out how to play "Satisfaction" on stage. What made us like it was when Otis Redding covered it. With that and Aretha Franklin's version, which Jerry Wexler produced, we heard what we'd tried to write in the first place. We liked it and started playing it because the very best of soul music was singing our song.

So we're the song factory. We start to think like songwriters, and once you get that habit, it stays with you all your life. It motors along in your subconscious, in the way you listen. Our songs were taking on some kind of edge in the lyrics, or at least they were beginning to sound like the image projected onto us. Cynical, nasty, skeptical, rude. We seemed to be ahead in this respect at the time. There was trouble in America; all these young American kids, they were being drafted to Vietnam. Which is why you have "Satisfaction" in Apocalypse Now. Because the nutters took us with them. The lyrics and the mood of the songs fitted with the kids' disenchantment with the grown-up world of America, and for a while we seemed to be the only provider, the soundtrack for the rumbling of rebellion, touching on those social nerves. I wouldn't say we were the first, but a lot of that mood had an English idiom, through our songs,  despite their being highly American influenced. We were taking the piss in the old English tradition.

K.Richards. Life