No Satisfaction

"(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" is a hit riff-driven rock song written by Mich Jagger and Keith Richards and produced by Andrew Loog Oldham.  Rolling Stone magazine ranks it the number 2 song on its 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.  

The riff came to Keith Richards in a dream one night in May 1965, in his motel room in Clearwater, Florida, the fifth stop on the Rolling Stones' third U.S. tour. He woke up, grabbed a guitar nearby and taped the music racing through his head on a handy cassette machine. Richards played the run of notes once, then fell back to sleep. "On the tape," he said later, "you can hear me drop the pick, and the rest of the tape is snoring."

Two decades later, Jagger admitted that "Satisfaction" was "my view of the world, my frustration with everything." Inspired by that riff and the title line, also Richards' idea, Jagger wrote the words -- a litany of disgust with "America, its advertising syndrome, the constant barrage" -- in ten minutes, by the motel pool the day after Richards' dream. They tried to cut the song a few days after Jagger and Richards wrote it, on May 10th at the Chess studios in Chicago. Two days after that, they finished it at RCA Studios in Hollywood, with the vital addition of that fuzz. "That riff needed to sustain itself," Richards said, "and Gibson had just brought out these little boxes." You can hear the click of Richards' foot on the fuzz-pedal button as he switches from a deep, clean twang in the verses to that homicidal snort.

"Satisfaction" was the first Stones single to hit Number One in both Britain and America. The Stones were now writing and recording a rock of their own bold design, although Richards may also have been dreaming of Chuck Berry that night in Clearwater. Jagger suggested in 1995 that Richards unconsciously got the title hook for "Satisfaction" from a line in Berry's 1955 single "30 Days" ("I don't get no satisfaction from the judge"). "It's not any way an English person would express it," Jagger noted. "I'm not saying that he purposely nicked anything, but we played those records a lot."

See the Rolling Stones perform the song: http://br.youtube.com/watch?v=RkiKgQmzM48