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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.
In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine placed "(I Can't Get No) 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.
Richards recorded the rough version of the riff in a hotel room at the Fort Harrison Hotel in Clearwater, Florida. 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, Illinois – 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, Los Angeles, California, with a different beat and the Gibson Maestro 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.
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