(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction

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(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction
The Rolling Stones
publication May 1965
Genre (s) skirt
Author (s) Jagger / Richards

(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction , translated as "(I can't find any) satisfaction," is a rock song from 1965. It was written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards for their band The Rolling Stones . The single became the Rolling Stones' first number 1 chart success in the United States and their fourth number 1 in their native UK . It was the first track that the band recorded entirely in the USA.

Emergence

The idea for the unmistakable opening riff of Satisfaction came to Keith Richards on the night of May 7, 1965, after the fifth concert of their third US tour , in Clearwater , Florida . The band was well received by the US audience at the concert; their repertoire at the time consisted largely of cover versions of American hits by artists such as Chuck Berry , Willie Dixon , Buddy Holly , Jimmy Reed and Bo Diddley . What they lacked were their own pieces. Richards could not sleep at the Fort Harrison Hotel that night; He did, however, think of a chord progression that he immediately played on guitar and recorded on his portable cassette recorder - the opening sequence of (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction .

\ relative c {\ key e \ major \ tempo 4 = 150 b'4 b4 r8 b8 (cis8 d8 ~ | d4) r8 d8 d4 (cis4) | b4 b4 r8 b8 (cis8 d8 ~ | d4) r8 d8 d4 (cis4) | }

The next morning he played the recording to his songwriter partner Mick Jagger and suggested the line “I can't get no satisfaction” as the text. Jagger was thrilled and finished writing the song. He tried to write a text that dealt with the rampant commercialization that British people thought they were experiencing in the United States, a " litany of loathing for America and its advertising syndrome , the permanent inundation," like the music magazine Rolling Stone later wrote. Jagger expressed the aimless dissatisfaction of the young people of his time with love and life in a materialistic society.

On May 10th, Satisfaction was recorded with producer and manager Andrew Loog Oldham in the Chess -Studios in Chicago . Completed May at RCA in Hollywood . Richards sang the background to Jagger's lead vocals and played rhythm guitar . Jack Nitzsche , who was working with the Stones at the time, played the tambourine after Jagger himself had not come to a satisfactory result. Richards used a Maestro Fuzz-Tone FZ-1 Fuzz (manufactured by Gibson ) on his guitar . It was a pedal that distorted the sound of the electric guitar in a foghorn-like manner. It had only hit the market a few days earlier as a technological innovation in electric guitar playing, and Richards initially only used it for experimental purposes when recording the riff. He wasn't enthusiastic about it himself, but his bandmates found the distortion great and overruled him.

Richards later admitted that the riff had been influenced by the hit song Nowhere to Run by Martha & the Vandellas . He actually wanted to hear it played by wind players, but the others convinced him that it had to sound the way it was ultimately recorded. The song ultimately not only became a number 1 hit on both sides of the Atlantic , but also became the band's trademark for many years.

Both Jagger and Richards later claimed they never intended to release the song as recorded. In her opinion, it was still unfinished. So Richards plays the wrong note when he starts the riff again after the last verse. Richards didn't want Satisfaction to be released as a single either because he thought it sounded like it was stolen from Nowhere to Run .

But in May 1965 London Records released the single (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction in the USA with the B-side The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man . The band was still on tour in the US, but wasn't even asked. The single rose steadily higher in the US charts from June 1965 and reached number one on July 10, which it held for four weeks.

In the UK, Satisfaction was supposed to appear on an EP . But the transatlantic success convinced both the record company Decca Records and the Stones themselves, and so (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction with the B-side The Spider And The Fly (also by Jagger and Richards) came here in August as well Single in the record stores. It entered the UK charts for the first time on August 26 and was number 1 for two weeks from September 9.

In the USA the song was then pressed onto the album Out of Our Heads (September 1965); the British version contained other tracks , as it was common practice there not to put a hit single on an album. The release rights to the song do not belong to the Rolling Stones or Jagger / Richards. In a contract with lawyer Allen Klein , which the Rolling Stones had signed to avoid high taxes in Great Britain, they had given him the rights to all songs they had written until 1969.

reception

Despite the enthusiasm of the fans, it took a few years for the music establishment to recognize the song. Newsweek called the opening riff "five notes that shook the world". In 1976 the British New Musical Express listed 'Satisfaction' at number 7 of the top 100 singles of all time. Eleven years later, the song fell to # 82 when the magazine put together another top 150 list of the best singles. In 1991 Vox (magazine) brought Satisfaction to the “100 records that shook the world”. In 1999, the BMI , the US society for exploitation rights for pieces of music, published that Satisfaction ranked 91st among the most played songs of the 20th century. The following year, he was among the Top 100 Greatest Rock Songs of VH1 's number one. In the same year he was second (behind Yesterday by The Beatles ) in a list that Rolling Stone and MTV jointly created.

In 2003, Q magazine placed the song at number 68 of the “1001 best songs of all time”. 2004, a jury of Rolling Stone , including Art Garfunkel and Brian Wilson , Satisfaction at number 2 of its list of 500 best songs of all time , behind Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone . The German offshoot of the magazine, which also included German editors and artists (including Heinz-Rudolf Kunze and Judith Holofernes ) among the jurors , saw the two songs in this order in first and second place.

Text and melody

The success is also related to the lyrics, which firstly contain some sexual innuendos and secondly are directed against the establishment of the mid-1960s - testimony to the emerging wave of social and political songs and songwriters in all genres of music. A little later Mick Jagger said of the hit: "I would rather die than sing Satisfaction at the age of 45. "

The song opens with the guitar riff that turns into Jagger's “I can't get no… satisfaction”. Jagger sings in time with the tambourine in a voice that is difficult to understand, oscillating between suppressed whispering comment and cynical protest. He starts the verse with more compelling and desperate repetitions of the sentence fragment “and I try” and then jumps into the chorus where the riff from the beginning reappears while Jagger half sings, half shouts “I can't get no”, whereby he noticeably omits the last word of the song title. The song then becomes a monologue in which Jagger describes his irritation over the increasing commercialization of the modern world, in which radio announcers send useless information and in which a man appears on television telling him how white his shirts could be. Jagger also briefly describes the stress of being a star and the tension he has from touring with his girlfriend.

The allusion to the fact that he couldn't get a “girl with action” was very controversial in his day; some listeners (and radio DJs ) interpreted it as a symbol of a girl ready for sex . The song closes with a low whisper of the song title, whereupon Jagger suddenly lapses into a loud scream of “I can't get no… satisfaction” and repeats the last word until the song fades out.

Jagger once said that “the lyrics were really threatening to an older audience. The song was seen as an attack on the status quo . ”The part in which Jagger addresses the problems of his love life was taken as an open sexual innuendo. When the Rolling Stones played the song on US television in 1966 (on the Ed Sullivan Show ), the line “trying to make some girl” fell victim to censorship . Many American radio stations cut the last verse ("Come back next week, can't you see I'm on a losing streak") from the song because they believed it was about menstruation .

Cover versions

Of Satisfaction there are many cover versions . Some of the most significant and successful are:

  • In 1965 jazz organist Jimmy Smith released a version of the song (on the LP Got My Mojo Workin ' ). He was only accompanied by guitar, bass and drums and sang rudimentary, but quite effective.
  • Otis Redding had some success with his soul version of the song, which appeared on the album Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul (1966) and as a single; in Great Britain it climbed to number 33. In this version, the famous guitar riff was played by wind players, as Keith Richards originally had in mind. Redding's version was recorded back in July 1965, just two months after the Stones single was released. Redding had never heard the original, which was itself influenced by R&B singers like Redding. He changed a few words, including singing "Satisfashion" rather than "Satisfaction".
  • In 1968 Bill Cosby released on his album Bill Cosby Sings Hooray for the Salvation Army Band! its own version.
  • In 1967 Aretha Franklin released a soul version on the album Aretha Arrives . The arrangement for the wind section was written by Ralph Burns .
  • Devo released a version in 1978 under the title Satisfaction (I Can't Get Me No) , which climbed to number 41 on the UK charts. They kept the original text, but radically reinterpreted the music in their own choppy, "mechanical" style. The Telegraph chose this version as one of the 50 greatest cover versions of all time.
  • The Troggs also tried their hand at Satisfaction and released a slightly softer version.
  • Paul Revere & the Raiders made a version relatively similar to the original, but less rough.
  • Junior Wells covered Satisfaction on Paint It Blue .
  • Guitar Wolf made a version in their own loud, rough style. At the end of this version you can hear the beginning of the Star-Spangled Banner , the US national anthem , in a style reminiscent of Jimi Hendrix .
  • The Residents created their own radical and disrespectful reinterpretation of the song and had some success when they released it as a single in 1976.
  • Weird Al Yankovic used the song at the end of The Hot Rocks Polka , a medley of Rolling Stones songs arranged as polka , on the soundtrack album for his film UHF .
  • At the 1995 BRIT Awards , PJ Harvey and Björk sang Satisfaction together .
  • In May 2000 Britney Spears made her cover version for the album Oops! ... I did it again . At the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards ceremony , Spears sang a medley of Oops! … I Did It Again and (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction .
  • Cat Power made a quiet acoustic guitar ballad out of the song for their album The Covers Record (also 1999) , leaving out the chorus.
  • The song was recorded with altered lyrics for an American episode of the television show Sesame Street ( Sesame Street ) under the title I Can't Get No Cooperation .
  • Three other versions became hits in Great Britain: Aretha Franklin brought Satisfaction to number 37 in the charts in 1968 and Jonathan King reached number 29 in 1974 (under the pseudonym Bubblerock ). In 1991 the rapper Vanilla Ice came with a version to number 22.
  • In 1990 the German DJ and producer WestBam released No More Fucking Rock and Roll , in which the guitar riff is used. Allegedly he was then confronted by Mick Jagger with a $ 60 million claim for damages.

Quotes in pop culture

Udo Lindenberg sings in Mädchen (from Galaxo Gang 1976): “They are active and creative, they do a lot of action / they play the guitar in a band and sing: /“ I can't get no satisfaction ”/ They hit the drums that it just cracks / and when a philistine comes and says / that is not for girls / then they just laugh out loud ”.

The rapper Method Man alludes to Satisfaction in the song Da Rockwilder (1999, feat. Redman ) with the following line of text : “Still homes I'm never satisfied like the Stones”.

The group Millencolin also refers to the song in their song Greener Grass (2002): “I wanna get satisfaction just like The Stones and Manu Chao ”.

Chart placements

United States
from June 26, 1965 to August 20, 1965: 8 weeks
highest ranking: 1st place on July 3, 1965 for 3 weeks
D.
from September 11, 1965 to December 10, 1965: 13 weeks
highest ranking: 1st place on October 23, 1965 for 6 weeks
GB
from August 28, 1965 to October 15, 1965: 7 weeks
highest ranking: 1st place on September 4, 1965 for 3 weeks

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Fred Bronson: The Billboard Book of Number One Hits. 3rd revised and expanded edition. Billboard Publications, New York City, New York 1992, p. 179.
  2. ↑ Keith Richards: Life. German edition.
  3. ^ For a musicological analysis of the recording, see: Ansgar Jerrentrup: Development of rock music from the beginning to the beat. in: Cologne contributions to music research. Vol. 113, Gustav Bosse Verlag, Regensburg 1981 (= Diss. Phil. University of Cologne 1980). P. 203f. Score transcription of the recording pp. 247–249.