Satisfaction guaranteed

MARION MCMULLEN DISCOVERS HOW A ROCK ANTHEM WAS BORN 60 YEARS AGO

- MARION MCMULLEN

BED, snooze and rock ‘n’ roll. Inspiration struck Rolling Stone guitarist Keith Richards as he was drifting off to sleep in a hotel room in Florida 60 years ago.

He luckily hit the button of a cassette recorder by his bedside and played a riff and one line of lyrics before dropping off.

Keith said he was extremely tired and the tape also recorded him dropping the guitar pick ... the rest of the cassette was filled with 40 minutes of the sound of the musician snoring.

The next morning he rewound the 45-minute tape back to the start and heard, “I can’t get no satisfaction”.

He said it was the only time a song had come to him that way and he recalled: “It was about two minutes of this acoustic guitar and a very rough riff of Satisfaction.”

The captured snippet was developed into (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction and a version was recorded at Chess Studios in Chicago featuring Brian Jones on harmonica.

The group re-recorded it two days later at RCA Studios in Hollywood with Keith using a recently acquired Gibson Maestro fuzzbox to distort the sound on the track.

The same effect was later used to great effect again on the song 19th Nervous Breakdown.