Get Some Satisfaction

Song 256: This week Satisfaction by The Rolling Stones, written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, rocks onto the playlist. Summer had already started rocking with a bunch of marvelous new songs like Ticket to Ride (Song 229), but then, in the middle of summer, along came this amazing new Rolling Stones single that topped them all. One of my friends got a pool party from his parents as a birthday gift, and that afternoon a handful of us enjoyed the water, the sun and the radio, which must have played this track at least 3 times in as many hours. Of course, a song this suggestive drew the ire of many of our religious parents who objected to our embrace of the devil's music, but I well remember a home gathering of our church youth group in '67 or '68 when one of the family's sons played a few RnR singles as we teenagers assembled, with this 45 as the very first, and we all quickly slipped into the groove. In that era of the generation gap, many of our parents felt a strong visceral repulsion to the music that turned us on, to the degree that they believed we couldn't possibly like what we heard -- they thought we were pretending to like the music simply for the sake of peer approval and acceptance. A Christian anti-RnR movie I saw back then featured an adult woman who reacted with extreme revulsion on hearing the lines of the 3rd verse of Satisfaction. I struggled with RnR, and at points tried to give up on the devil's music to live up to the religious ideals that ruled my family, but the pull of that back beat proved too strong for me to resist for very long. Keith Richards had me wrapped around this simple riff from the first time I heard it, and I wrote at least 1 song during my high school years by making mistakes while trying to figure out how to play the chords and riffs of this tune. Then during my first year at N.U., my roommate Abby, who I mentioned in my blurbs about Girls Talk (Song 246) and Subterranean Homesick Blues (Song 243), wanted to sing Satisfaction, and he assumed I knew it, so we blundered our way through it, and I mostly figured it out, but I was still missing one piece. I had the verses right, but for the riff on the chorus, even though I had the riff notes right, I just played the E first chord and the D third chord, leaving out the A middle chord. Playing the tune that way, it sounded close, but still not quite right, like I was missing something, which I truly was. When, a couple of decades later, I stumbled onto that missing piece, it seemed so obvious that I could hardly believe I hadn't figured it out sooner. The E-A-D-A repeated chord pattern was already a highly-overused RnR sequence the night Keith put it down on a tape in a hotel room just before dozing off, so it's understandable that even coupled with the lead riff, he still didn't think it was necessarily something special when he first played it for Mick, but lucky for us all, Mick understood on first hearing the real value of what Keith had stumbled upon. The Stones got plenty of mileage from this track, including their first chart-topper, but they followed it with plenty of others, so that by the time I saw them in Chicago in the summer of '78, everyone knew that despite how much fans might like to hear it, the band never played Satisfaction. Except, in this case, when they came out for their encore, they actually did play it! Whenever I've felt dissatisfied in my life, this track has perfectly expressed that feeling, and in so doing, has given me plenty of Satisfaction.