(I CAN’T GET NO) SATISFACTION ![]()
“(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” was the Rolling Stones’ first #1 hit in America; and believe it or not, that did not happen until the Stones had released some 12 or 15 previous singles over nearly a two-year period. Their previous Top 10 hits were “Time Is on My Side” and “The Last Time”. “Satisfaction” was released in the US 50 years ago, in June 1965. After that, there was no stopping them.
“Get off of My Cloud” was one of the Stones’ non-grammatical song titles according to what my English teachers told me, as was “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” (in fact, this second #1 song was their next single).
(May 2015)
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I discussed last month that the opening riff from “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” came to Keith Richards in a dream. “Yesterday” has a similar origin; Paul McCartney had the entire melody in his head after a dream (probably sometime in 1964), and he rushed to the piano to play the tune before it faded from memory. This worried him considerably, as he wondered whether his “dream” was actually someone else's song; but after checking with several people, Paul was convinced that it was an original work. There were no lyrics initially; the working title of the song was “Scrambled Eggs”, with these opening lines: “Scrambled eggs / Oh, my baby how I love your legs”.
(June 2015)
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The following year, as I wrote a couple of months back, Keith Richards ran his classic opening riffs for the Rolling Stones’ monster hit “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” through a fuzzbox, thus adding this to the rock repertoire.
(July 2015)
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According to the promotional material by Bomp! Records for the band’s EP, Amanda Jones, Amanda Jones was born in March 1995 as a collaboration of Amanda (Mandy) Brix and Jeff Drake, previously in the punk rock band the Joneses. The combination of her first name and his former band name clearly brought about the band name Amanda Jones, but they were almost certainly mindful of the Rolling Stones connection also: Their sound has the same kind of playful spirit as early mid-period Stones albums like Between the Buttons (released in January 1967); besides “Miss Amanda Jones” and “Ruby Tuesday”, the album also includes the song “Let’s Spend the Night Together” that got the band into so much trouble with The Ed Sullivan Show – Mick Jagger sung the title lyric as “let’s spend some time together” as Ed Sullivan insisted, though he and bassist Bill Wyman were rolling their eyes at the time. A few months back, I discussed the controversial lyrics in their first big hit “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”; the Rolling Stones were able to sing that number on The Ed Sullivan Show with no censorship. (December 2015) |