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Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known facts and figures behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows, and more. We are your two men on the Internet telling you useless information supposed to fire your imagination and tell you how white your shirts can be.
I'm Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan Run Talk and Jordan.
Today we're talking about one of the all time greatest rock riffs. We're talking about a young man's snarl of anti consumerism that turned the young men who made it into some of the most insufferably wealthy musicians in all of recorded history. That's right, Jordan. We're talking about parentheses open. I can't get no parentheses clothes, Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones. I refuse to pontificate about this song. You're gonna do all that for us. It just is. It's satisfaction. It's
the demi urge of popular guitar music. It's the boundaries at which cool guitar tone and pop writing interact. That's it. It would just be one of those songs forever. Nothing more to say about it except for all the stuff we're about to say. But if you want to read a lot about what it means, find Clinton Halen or one of those jerk offs and let them explain to you how it fits into mid century white man malaise or possibly the Red Scare.
Yeah, I mean, that's kind of true. There's a book that I cited called The Sun and the Moon and the Rolling Stones, which is like, you know, the three things that have just sort of always been present. And yeah,
that's fair, that's very very fair. And also I got to say, as the resident Beatles guy on this show and possibly the resident Beatles guy in most of your lives, I have to say I was reluctant to tackle this topic initially, despite the fact that the song is turning sixty years old this month, which is insane.
It's crazy to think that there's a future in which Mick Jagger will still be singing this song when it turns sixty five, after he famously said he'd rather be dead than singing it when he was sixty five, So.
That means he's wanted to be dead for a long time.
Now, long time who among us?
Well, but yeah, you know, it's not that I buy into the whole Beatles Versus Stones thing, because that's just stupid and as any classic rock gri and will tell you, it's patently not true. The bands were very close friends, and there are tons of stories of them sharing cabs together around London and their early days and huddled around tables at clubs to work out their single release schedules
that didn't step on each other's toes. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were in the audience during the Beatles' famous TV broadcast that yielded All You Need Is Love in nineteen sixty seven, and the Beatles saying uncredited backup vocals on the Stones track We Love You that same year. So this is any kind of personal vendetta born of my psychotic Beatles fandom. It's just that at first, I kind of I didn't think there was that much to say about.
The song Rolling Stones won.
How so the fact that they're still out there on the road.
They put out Exile on Main Street.
You like Exile on Main Street more than any Beatles release? Question mark, Yes, Okay, let's talk about that for a minute.
No, No, I don't know, man, I mean, look, I because like I didn't I wasn't a Beatles' album guy until college, because it was just like I had Beatles one and I just knew all of the songs. Same with the Stones, honestly. But for me, like every time I listened to Exile, I find something new and interesting in it, and I just noticed some new weird production thing or some stray bit of genius. The only mark against it is the fin Angela Davis song, like the
worst song ever recorded, but ten Little Blackbirds. It's just like the most offensive thing. But everything about that album is also perfect with the exception of that. And you know, druggy experimentation from legitimate drug enthusiasts rather than the dainty, dainty boys of the Beatles is always going to be interesting to me, especially when it's like in an old, haunted castle and not like a studio where the technicians wear lab coats.
You know.
Okay, the problem is is that, like the Beetles may be better, but the Rolling Stones were cooler.
Sure, Okay, I can't fight you on that, that's true.
No, no, no, I.
Just I listened to Excel on Main Street and it just kind of all becomes one.
It's like when you make a stew and then you put it in the fridge.
A couple days later you take it out and it's just this kind of like brown sludge of well, you have.
Mid making your stews correctly than my friend. You got to keep some cohesion in there. You got to you got to do your vegetables to certain levels of dunness of some pop and some are you know, a little bit more mushy. I shouldn't. I shouldn't be telling you about this. You need to come to this stuff yourself. Yeah, I don't know. It's it's just hits, like a lot of the same wells of pathos and and just wonderful sounds and hooks every nook and cranny that record.
I'm not saying I hate the Stones. I like the Stones. But to me, they are a great attitude, They're a great vibe. Like you said, they are a great sound. But I feel like I could just kind of survive with like a double album greatest hit set for the Stones and be totally good. And I as you know, I was thrown into the deep end of Stone's lore because for a few years I was working on a
documentary style podcast for I Heart about the Stones. Recording of Excel on Main Street and their nineteen seventy two tour of the United States, and I really thought by like going deep on that I would glean more from it, I would appreciate it more, And for some reason I didn't. It just didn't really Even after interviewing all these people who were on the tour who knew the band intimately, I just never connected with it. And I'd even met some of the Stones on occasions, and I still didn't
really feel anything. And honestly, it wasn't until I had the chance to see the Stones perform last that I finally started to get it. Have you ever seen The Stones live?
No, dude, how much money do you think I have to throw at this stuff? Well? No.
I had two separate friends who, like a day or two before their Met Life shows, got super cheap last minute, like sub one hundred dollars tickets and they're like, do you want to go? And I went the first night and it ruled. And that another friend a couple days later who asked me the same question. I was like, Yeah, I went the other day. It was incredible. I'd love to go again. Yeah. I would have never spent the money that these things usually go for if they weren't.
Super super cheap, and I'm so glad I did so.
Folks, this is a PSA. If the Stones are coming to your town, wait till the last minute and see if you can get any last minute tickets at those big stadiums.
It ruled. I mean, you'd need forty licks, and then you also need exile sure, yeah, in its entirety, no skips, and then you'd need a whole other one of like deep cuts from all the country records, and even some of their eighties ones have some bangers, you know, let's not front really yeah, dude, waiting on a friend. It's even some good stuff on Black and Blue.
Can you give us Shattered? Give us the rap from Shattered please?
He's so obnoxious on that song? What is it? Rats in the hotel Roaches Downtown.
Everyone gives Dibby Harry so much grief for the Rapture rap.
Now his is awful.
I mean, I do love the Stones. It's more like the.
Beatles go deeper, do they? Yeah? They do deeper for you, or deeper into deeper into what I think.
They cover a wider swath of music. But the Stones rock. I was gonna say, Stones rock better. But here in Paul mccarton to do long tall sally and like I'm down all those little Richard songs.
Yeah, I think he has a better rock voice than Nick too. We're just getting into subjective measures here. I mean, I think the Stones, being originally a blues band and not a skiffle band whatever that was, I suggest already went a little bit deeper because they were not simply listening to whatever the skiffle was. They were listening to like hardcore Chess Records blues already qualifies them as going deeper.
And the fact that they like went down to muscle shoals and Jamaica, like they were just so much more globe trotting than the Beatles with where they chose to record, you know, I mean, like, yeah, the Beatles have like way more pastiches of different styles, but they were all still doing them out of all of the same studio, like with no other local musicians. You know, these Indian musicians did they Yeah, oh yeah they did, Okay, so I'll give them that.
And they wanted to record in Stacks, But as soon as the people at Stacks heard that the Beatles were involved, they just tried to price gouge them.
Yeah, and I mean that probably would have been pretty embarrassing for them. Honestly, Like, if you're like Ringo and you know Al Jackson junior of Booker T and the MG shows up drumming, I'd probably just quit. Any Stax musician. Duck Dun on bass, Pau McCarty's Duck Dunn comes in playing a bass the size of a telephone pole, they get blown out of the studio.
We can I agree to disagree on this, but I will say I'm forced to admit that, having researched this along with you, it's probably more fun to talk about the Stones than to talk about the Beatles.
Hell yeah it is.
Their stories are arguably way more entertaining and way more dramatic, and way more salacious and usually more hilarious than the Beatles. So I think this is gonna be a fun one. I went from fearing that we did have enough to talk about to us pounding out twenty pages this morning.
This is gonna be a good one. So join us as we ride around the world metaphorically doing this and signing that in an attempt to break our losing streak. Those are lyrics from the song Here's everything you didn't know about the Rolling Stones. I Can't get no satisfaction. In the mid sixties, the Rolling Stones were at a crossroads. They've released their first single, I Want to Be Your Man, written for them by The Beatles, and their manager Andrew Lug Oldham was low, I think.
Lug what is lug Luh?
What kind of name is that? Short for Lugi? That's what went on his birth certificate. His dad was like, oh, that's good. Doctor.
Doctor was like, okay, that's a good bit, very well, sir, Lugi tremendous and their manager, Andrew Lugi Oldham had in its wake of that single, begun his crafty plan to usurp The Stone's nominal leader, the dandyish, unstable and allegedly genius Brian Jones.
Oldham has given various reasons for his motivations for doing so. The most charitable one is, rather than continued to have the group based around the idea of one leader a la a Hermann in the Hermit's situation, he wanted a more collaborative identity for The Stone. But really he'd appreciately seen the Beatles as the end of an era, the era of pop stars who were delivered songs by professional
songwriters instead of merely writing them for themselves. So while there are different explanations and different versions of the story of how Mick and Keith begin writing, to the easiest explanation, and thus the one I'm going to go with, is that they were just living together at the time, whereas Jones had his own flat as I believe they call
them in sunny London Town. The story goes that Odin locked the Glimmer Twins into their kitchen and told them they weren't coming out until they'd written a proper song, not a pastiche of another musical style, and not a blues song, but something that could be released as a single.
They spent all night in the kitchen, and Richards eventually got bored of being stuck in there without an elephant supply of heroin and started strumming his guitar and singing It is the evening of the day, and the two of them quickly came up with the rest of the song, although at least one source does suggest that As Tears Go By was actually written by Jagger and a session guitarist, Big Jim Sullivan, who will pop up in this episode again.
If so, that would be the first time of many that a song written by Jagger or Richard's in collaboration with someone else would subsequently be to Jagger Richards and not the third person. Welcome to the music industry.
Lennonda McCartney did that a lot too, or rather, Paul McCartney would write a lot of things, especially around the Sergeant Pepper era with their Roady mal Evans and mal Evans's diaries were published recently and there's all these like really heartbreaking excerpts of him being like grow. Paul says that I'll be credited on Captain Pepper. Oh, it'll be so great. Maybe a new house for the family.
Oh yeah, Well, after the completed As Tears go By was correctly shipped out of their filthy mouths and off to someone less openly disreputable and leering, in this case Mary unfaithful.
All right, I don't think I realized that As Tears go By was the first Jagger Richard song. That's a good song for a first time, it is.
Yeah, absolutely so. Despite this push two original songwriting, the bulk of the Stones first album was made up of cover versions of songs by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Rufus Thomas, Marvin Gay and other black American musicians. So The Stones' debut album, eventually coming to be known as England's Newest hit Makers, went to number one in the UK charts
in April of nineteen sixty four. This was a big deal all the time because full albums, as opposed to single releases, were considered the province of the adult market, who generally had more money to spend on this time of things, so they were priced according and the sales
charts just turned over at an absolutely glacial pace. Between May of nineteen sixty three and February of nineteen sixty eight, so almost five years, the only artists to have number one albums in the UK with the Beatles, The Stones, Bob Dylan, The Monkeys, the Cast of the Sound of Music and Val dunikin.
Friend of the Pod, Val dunikin.
Anything on Val dunkin Jordan.
He had some incredible sweaters that much, I do know.
Well, Funnily enough, between May of nineteen sixty three and April of nineteen sixty five, so almost a full two years, it was only the Beatles in the Stones that had number one albums.
That's crazy. I didn't realize that. That's nuts, I know. And also I think the sound the music soundtrack was number one for some ridiculous length of time too, like I want to say, like the better part of the year. I think that might actually be one of the best selling albums of the decade in the UK. That's an insane stat though. Wow, I didn't realize that you were a school of me on this intro.
So the next single the band released, which the Bow didified version of Buddy Hawley's Not Fade Away. That came out in February nineteen sixty four and it hit number three on the UK charts, and it became the first Stones record to chart in the US, where it hit number forty eight. But that was considered enough of an achievement to begin discussions about getting them across the pond to the US to tour for the first time.
Yes and the Beatles. Famously, their first trip to America was this capitulation. America fell to them, huge crowds beating them at the airport, their famous record breaking at all of the show appearance playing at Carnegie Hall really really, really tremendous. The Stones first US journey, Uh was more
mixed show, we say. They went on Dean Martin's Variety show and he mocked them so much that Bob Dylan, in his liner notes to his album Another Side of Bob Dylan, wrote the line Dean Martin should apologize to the Rolling Stones. It was a lot of those jokes that you could imagine Dino with his you know, ice clinking in his glass, all the stump. I'd be great.
I wanna leave right after the show for London. They're challenging the Beatles to hair pulling contest. I could swear Jackie Coogan and Skippy we're in that group. Well, I'm gonna let you in on something. You know, all these singing groups today, you're under the impression they.
Have long hair.
Not to at all.
It's not to go to lousion.
They just have low foreheads and high eyebrows.
Sa Ron.
So as we leave you right now, we'll have our shorteren emission and we'll be back in Hollywood callous in about a minute.
Now.
Don't go away, you you wouldn't leave me here alone with the Rolling Stones.
I just feel like you got to be like a real punk to take it from Dean Martin. Take it from din O. Yeah, that's true, your D list rat packer and we're the Rolling Stones. Don't bully us.
Oh, come on, he's more than a D list member of the rat Pack. It's him and Frank. Him and Frank are like vibe for number one.
Was he?
Okay, he was number two, but he was always number two. It goes Frank Dean, Sammy Peter because of the Kennedy connection, and then Joey Bishop is last.
I stand by that, Okay, okay, yeah, I'll defer to you on that.
But Bob Dylan loved the Rolling Stones in a way that he seems to love few things then or now. It's kind of adorable, but it's also kind of weird. Dylan was obsessed with Brian Jones for some reason and repeatedly tried to call him to meet him when he was on tour of Britain in nineteen sixty five, and Brian Jones, as we'll discuss, was not a well man.
He was so paranoid that he refused to believe that it was Bob Dylan on the other end of the phone until Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman came on and convinced him, and Dylan supposedly told Brian Jones the Stones were the best band in the world, which seems like.
The kind of dumb thing that Bob Dylan would say.
And they spent so long on the phone over the next year that the Stone staff dreaded getting the phone bills because Brian Jones was talking long distance to Dylan at all hours, which is kind of adorable.
Is that where he picked up all his Carnabie Dandy exactly heels, Yeah, yep, yep. He started dressing like Brian Jones.
That's why Dylan's tour in nineteen sixty five when he did come over was his last like solo acoustic tour when he kind of showed up in the standard folky regalia of you know, denim and in platte. And then the next time he came over with his backing group who would later go on to be the band, he was wearing his Chelsea boots in a mod suit and
strapped in an electric guitar around him. When Brian Jones and Bob Dylan finally cross paths in New York for the first time at the end of the Stones nineteen sixty five US tour, Brian Jones was so paranoid about getting busted for pot that even Dylan admitted that he was bumming him out. And then things got even weirder when they went to Andy Warhol's factory and Brian Jones got a little too friendly with Edie Sedgwick, which also bummed Bob out.
I mean, he'sluck he didn't beat the shot out of her. Brian Jones was a notorious woman abuser. Yeah, we'll talk about that. Die like everyone in the band kind of hate him.
Yeah, oh yeah, we'll talk about that.
Okay, great, Oh yeah, that's in there. Yeah.
I think there's a direct quote from Keith that says he was not a good man.
Yeah. Yeah.
The Stones met up with Murray the Kay, the famous New York DJ and self appointed fifth beadle who would earn a very different, believable nickname from Keith Richards that I don't know this.
It's Murray the word that sounds like it starts with K, but it starts with a C. Okay, that's medium funny because he was really annoying.
Yeah, but despite not making a great impression on Keith Richards, Murray the K did play them a song by Bobby Womack called It's All Over Now, which had been a medium sized hit by a group called The Valentinos. The Stones decided on it as their next single, much to the annoyance of Bobby Womack himself, who wanted to release
his own version. Phil Spector had suggested to manager Andrew lug Oldham that since the Stones loved the Chicago blues label Chess Records so much, they said record there and time was booked, and this was the genesis of a legend that when they arrived they found Muddy Waters changing light bulbs and painting walls in the studio, which is not true.
He was what's the problem with that? He deserved better? Well, I mean maybe he was just like, you know, helping out. Yeah, just help being a team player. Light Bombs don't change themselves.
Aside from meeting several of their musical idols, which, aside from Muddy Waters, included Willie Dixon and Chuck Berry, the Stones managed to cut a version of It's All Over Now, which became their first UK number one single in nineteen sixty four. More tours and singles followed Little Red Rooster, which Brian Jones was dismayed to find the band had recorded without him.
He showed up to a session with only himself on engineer and Jagger's instructions on where to put his slide fills.
Wow, writing is on the wall because Brian Jones was the founder of this band and the leader of it for the early years. That's not nice, yeh.
On April twenty third and nineteen sixty five, the band kicked off their third tour of North America, the first of two that year.
Yeah, they really grounded out. They did several tours of the UK and Ireland that same year.
It's pretty nuts. They'd had two top ten hits at this time the last time and time is on my side. These were a respectable showing, but in the rankings of the British Invasion, they still notched below Herman's Hermits, who scored big with Missus Brown You've got a Lovely Daughter.
Truly dreadful song. Even I can't put a good face on that.
This bell You've got a Lovely Daughter.
That's the kind of song that gives, like mid sixties Mersey beat songs, a bad.
Yeah yeah yeah. Lead singer Peter Noon was considered a younger cuter jagger clomb and he looked also something like JFK, which helped the Hermit and his Hermits actually get distribution in the US. Herman's Hermits sold more tickets than the Stones and the Beatles combined over the next year, supposedly, which, as you can imagine, is an insane thing. The Stones shared concert bills with them in this period, and Mick
always hated them. Herman's Hermits were in the top of the bill and we were second, and there was some argument about the dressing rooms. Herman was complaining because his wasn't big enough. There were and he was top of the bill because Herman's Hermits were huge, and the most impossible thing was going out to have a Hamburger and some guy would go, are you guys Herman Hermits? It would it would kill us. We'd say, you Herman Hermit's is.
S Herbman's Emmitts. Is so funny because they are truly, truly, maybe second only to Freddie and the Dreamers, like the most saccherin pop group of the sixties, but they would always be the headlining act for these future rock legends. You've got the Stones, and then they also went on tour with The Who a little later in nineteen sixty seven, and the famous story of the Who trashing a holiday inn.
In I want to say Flint.
I think it was in Flint, and you know became like ground zero for rock bands trashing hotels. That was when they were on like a Hermit's Hermit's tour, and there's pictures of like Peter Noon of Herman's Hermet's like in the background as this holiday inn's getting torn apart. So it's just hilarious. But like the squeaky cleanest group of the British Invasion are evolved of all these like really nasty guys and.
In Flint too, like it doesn't have enough problems. Despite this, these early tours were remembered as a happy period before drugs and serious financial pressures took hold of the group. Photographer Jared with A g Mankowitz offered this evocative passage to Rich Cohen in his twenty sixteen book The Sun and the Moon and the Rolling Stones. That was the best time, Gerer jid manco Witz said, because we were still a gang. We didn't have that luxury or sophistication.
We didn't have backup bands. We didn't have sound checks or lightings. We just had each other. It was primitive and it was fantastic. One night we camped out on the Apache Reservation outside Phoenix. It was like something out of The Lone Ranger. We slept under the stars, cooked on a fire. Keith bought us all guns and Stetson's that whips. Yeah, sorry, I never did that for you guys. The biggest pressure making Keith had to deal with was to write the songs that kept their whole thing going.
Of course, though Jared with the g Mankowitz continued, we traveled at night. They'd come off the stage, go into the limo and straight to the airport. We'd fly until two, three, four am, check into some dump. Nobody to welcome us, nothing open, no food, Dadsville. The bulk of the tour was like that. You do the show, you're gone. And in all the in between times Mick and Keith were working.
They had orders to come up with material and struggled because the schedule wasn't conducive, but they pushed through, taking down the ideas wherever they came. You'd see them all the time, jotting little notes. Throughout the tour. Mick would later say that on the road was quote the best place to write because you're totally into it. You get back from a show, have something to eat, have a few beers, and just go into your room and write. I used to write about twelve songs in two weeks
on tour. They give you lots of ideas. The germ of the songs usually came from Keith, who played old blues legs which were then morph into something new over which he'd sing wordless vowel sounds, which is just like the strategy that literally everyone has in case you ever want to know how to write a song, which the just kind of to jam around and then you sing nonsense stuff over it. That's what Lenin did. There's when
they they did that Bermuda box set. Oh yeah. Some of the audio files where him like working on Watching the Wheels and maybe Beautiful Boy too, and it's literally just him banging out chords in a cycle until he finds the core progression he likes and that he's just singing gibberish over it, and then the rest is just set dressing. Keith Richard's My favorite bit of studio advice from him is add something new every thirty seconds. Huh.
That almost sounds stupid, but it's actually very smart.
It's great, great advice. Yeah, it keeps people's ears attuned. So this process Valeve movement, Valel movements. So Keith and Keith and Mick taking Valel movements is more or less where we got satisfaction from. It was completed on tour at the Fort Hotel in Clearwater, Florida, after the band played a gig at the nearby Jack Russell Stadium, named after the.
Dog that's a great question.
According to an article in the Saint Petersburg Times, about two hundred young fans got into an altercation with a line of police officers at the show. Hell Yeah, and the Stones made it through just four songs as chaos ensued and they were forced to flee in a white station wagon like a white Bronco.
I regret to inform you the Jack Russell as a baseball player.
Ah lame. While only a small fraction of the estimated three to four thousand attendees caused chaos, the frenzy was enough to push a local recreation director to his limit. What a high limit that must have been. That's it, he declared, There will never be another show like this as long as I'm here at the Jack Russell Stadium.
Well, it was during their stay in Clearwater, Florida that Keith Richards presented Mick with the infamous riff that we all know and love for satisfaction. As per rock legend, it came to him in a dream. However, the timing and location of the stream has been the source of much speculation.
Over the years.
I've seen it written that the dream actually occurred at this very same hotel in Clearwater, Florida, but I suspect that the tales evolved that way purely for economy of storytelling. I've also heard that this dream occurred at his apartment or his flat if you will, in Chelsea, his room at the London Hilton, or a different flat in the Saint John's.
Wood neighborhood of North London.
The latter spot is what Keith himself cites in his twenty ten memoir Life, So let's go with that, and the dream likely took place at some point in early nineteen sixty five. But regardless of location, the substance of the story is always the same. He's told it hundreds of times over the years, but this is perhaps one of my favorite versions from his appearance on NPR's Fresh Air. I wish all songs would come this way, where you just dream them and then the next morning there they are.
Satisfaction was a miracle that took place. I have one of the first little cassette players, Arauco or Phillips. It was a fascinating little machine to me, a set player where you could actually lay ideas down wherever you were. I set the machine up and put in a fresh tape. I go to bed as usual with my guitar, and I wake up the next morning and see the tape is run till the very end. And I said, well,
I didn't do anything. Maybe I hit the button while I was asleep, So I put it back to the beginning and pushed play, and there was sort of a ghostly version of Then after that, there's forty minutes of me snoring. The forty minutes is always very specific, and he's retelling of this, Yeah, it's always forty minutes.
I always like that. He notes that he sleeps us with his guitar, which is like one of the bits of advice that he gives in life. He's like, literally, sleep with your guitar.
Oh yeah, No. When I was working on that Rolling Stones show, one of the guys that I worked with on it was this Rolling Stone magazine journalist Robert Greenfield, and he lived with Keith at nellcut the the mansion on the French Riviera where they were recording Excel on Main Street, and he said, yeah, Keith truly did sleep with his guitar. He would go into the toilet with it like he was never without this guitar.
Awesome, Yeah, that's what you That's the attitude it.
Is, you know, Keith Richards in every sense it is not a quitter. Ah.
So in his autobiography Life, Richards also id'd this legendary recorder as a Phillips and it was actually pretty novel at the time. It had been released by the Phillips Corporation because they were trying to develop an engineer there or head of development there named lou Auten's was attempting to slim down the possibilities for mobile recording. Prior to this,
we're talking real to world tape units. You know, when Alan Lomax went and did his famous Southern Journey in this whole contraption that he had to carry around in his car to record people was like sixty seventy pounds. So qu Autins was walking through the halls of Phillips Development with like a carved block of wood roughly the size of the completed project, and telling everyone work on it. Okay, the internal real toil of the cassette tape has to
fit in this. So basically portability and size were the first priority there. So Richard's exact model of Phillips recorders believed to have been an e L thirty three oh two, which utilized germanium transistors. We will return to germanium transistors later. I think small, Wow, Yeah, it looks it's quite portable. But Richard's beyond using it to rescue satisfaction from the
realms of the subconscious. He basically ended up anchoring several Stones classics just with this device, he told the Wall Street Journal and an interview. I began to think of the machine not as a dictation advice, but as a mini recording studio. I just couldn't use an electric guitar to record on it. The sound just overwhelmed the mic and speaker. I tried to an acoustic guitar instead and got this dry crips guitar sound on the tape the
exact sound I'd been looking for. At the time, I was experimenting with open tunings on the guitar, you know, tuning the strings to form specific chords so I could bang out the broadest possible sound. That's how I came up with Street Fighting Man's opening riff. Sometime in early sixty eight, I took the Phillips recorder into London's Olympic Sound Studio and had Charlie Watts meet me there. Charlie had a snap drum kit that was made in the
nineteen thirties. Jazz drummers used to carry around this kit, which folded into a suitcase to practice while they were on the bus of the train, and had a little spring up high hat and a half sized tambourine for a snare. It was perfect because, like the acoustic guitar, it wouldn't overpower the recorder's mike. Everyone do yourself a favor and google this thing. It's like embarrassing what it
actually looks like. So he said, he had Charlie sit right next to the mic with his little kit, and then Keith just kneeled on the floor next to him with an acoustic a Gibson Hummingbird big guitar, and then he says, there we were in front of this little box, hammering away, and after we listened to playback, the sound
was perfect. He also explains a little bit more about the sound he got out of the Phillips in his autobiography Life Playing an acoustic You'd overload the Phillips cassette player to the point of distortion, so that when it played back it was effectively an electric guitar. You were using the cassette player as a pickup and an amplifier at the same time. Forcing acoustic guitars through a cassette player made what came out the other end electric as hell.
In the studio, I plugged the cassette into a little extension speaker and put a microphone in front of the extension speaker so it had a little bit more breadth and depth, and put that onto tape. That was the basic track. There are no electric instruments on Street Fighting Man at all, apart from the bass, which I overdubbed later. They're all acoustic guitars. Even the solo that we're like Wow sounds almost like a siren. Which I think was the point. Oh yeah, I know you're right. Yeah yeah,
I don't know. I'd have to dive into the true granularity of that. But maybe it maybe it was an acoustic guitar. But sadly the e L thirty three two as a studio tool had a limited shelf life because Phillips put a limitter on the device soon after in its production run, so that you couldn't overload it. As Keith says, just as you're getting off on something, they put a lock on it. But this is actually what's really wild about how he did this. For Street Fight,
Man Jumping Jack, Flash, Gimme Shelter. He would do what he was suggesting, which is just play this acoustic guitar into the tape recorder, but then he would overdob up to like eight other guitars on this And that's why the guitar sound is so full on those, because I think on Street Fighting, he says, it's up to eight. Back to you, Jordan.
So back to the morning that Keith Richards wakes up after having dreamed the satisfaction riff. He plays it back, he hears the ghostly No, I think it was just those five notes I don't even think it was the descending part. And at first he was really worried that it was too close to a recent Motown hit, Dancing in the Street by Martha and the Vandellas.
Dum oh, yeah, I can kind of hear it.
Sure.
Ultimately he decided that was fine. He perhaps recalled that the Love and Spoonful was worried that the riff would You Believe In Magic? Was a sped up version of another Martha and the Vendela's hit, heat Wave, and no one seemed to care. So maybe he was like, if it's good enough for Love and Spoonful, it's good enough for me.
That's often what I say. It is kind of the same core progression.
Fine, yeah, Keith put the tape into an envelope marked can't get no Satisfaction, which in some retellings he drowsily.
Sang on the tape too, just like mumbled.
Something about can't get anice satisfaction. I've heard two different versions of either just the riff or that he did sing. I've never heard the sleep demo, as I choose to call it. I would It's got to be in like some kind of like fireproof safe somewhere, like do you think it exists? I still I would like to think so, because that's like very I want to believe it's really high on my list of it belongs to the museum
type things. But oh for sure, I could also see as like a twenty something year old musician on the road with probably one, maybe two cassette tapes just like just overdubbed it, especially with all of us snoring on it, like because there's we'll talk about he really was not all that taken with this riff or this song it took. He's probably of everybody in the Stones, the person who likes it the least, second.
Maybe to Brian Jones, I guess, but we'll.
Get there, Sode I can't get no satisfaction line?
Where did that come from?
He's never explained the origin of the phrase himself, but in a Rolling Stone magazine interview years later, Mick Jagger theorized that Keith was probably influenced by Chuck Berry's Thirty Days, which includes the lyric if I don't get no satisfaction from the judge. Jagger explained Keith might have heard it back then because it's not any way an English person would have expressed it. Yeah, I'm not saying he purposely
nicked anything, but we played those records a lot. And it's also been theorized that another inspiration for the line was Muddy Water's nineteen forty eight song Ib's Troubled, which contains the line I'm never being satisfied and I just can't keep from crying.
I mean, Muddy Water is saying something about being satisfied in like every one of his songs. He just loves being satisfied or was constantly unsatisfied. That's true. Yeah, which one are you? Let's not go there.
Keith has been very open about discussing the possibility that artists are less composers than mediums channeling energy from beyond you and I talk.
About this a lot.
Robert Hunter, the lyricists for The Grateful Dead, as fast as the ped would pull you, pulled the idea.
Out of the ether.
But it's also worth noting that there's a surprisingly long wiki list of art that supposedly sprung from dreams.
Oh, I bet you're gonna tell us about it, Yes, i am.
There's a few here that surprised me.
Well, this first one didn't surprise me.
The most famous example to me as the Beatles guy, is Yesterday. In early nineteen sixty five, probably around the same time that Keith had his satisfaction dream, Paul McCartney woke up with the tune to Yesterday in his head.
You just can't give them anything. No, we don't know.
Which one came first, though, we don't know. I mean, honestly, if history he's anything to go by, the Beatles probably did it first.
I begrudgingly concede that parts yes, yes, yes, yeah.
Paul McCartney was living in a little artist garrett on the top floor of his girlfriend at the time, Jane Asher's family's house, and he had a little spin it piano by the bed, and he just rolled out of bed and kind of found the chords to what became Yesterday, And he was so convinced that he'd stolen it from an old jazz.
Tune because his dad really loved old jazz.
Songs and played piano around the house, that he compulsively played the song to anyone and everyone who would listen, asking if they knew what this was. And he famously used the working title Scrambled Eggs as the dummy lyrics when he sang this around to people said.
He yesterday was scrambled eggs.
Years later, he admitted that the lyrics were probably a lot of processing is grief around his late mother. He once made fun of the way she spoke, which he regretted the rest of his life. And he reflected on the line said something wrong. Now I long for yesterday as maybe having its origins in that trauma. So yeah, dreams way we process unresolved feelings, un resolved issues. Trauma is a very real possibility that Yesterday sprung from that and we got a second Paul McCartney entry on this list.
Aren't you lucky?
Jesus Christ.
Singing which let it Be?
Paul McCartney has also claimed that the idea for let It Be came to him after a dream.
Do you think it's just kind of his go to explanation when he gets tired of actually talking about how he wrote the song, Oh, dream one, there was another dream one right there? Let me stop you right there dream.
He does get weird about talking about where these songs came from. There is a n iHeart podcast actually where you know the Paul McCartney lyrics book that came out a few years ago where he goes like really deep into They took tapes from those interviews and made a podcast out of it, and it's actually really well done, and that's kind of the most in depth I heard him talk about truly what he was thinking of when he wrote specific lines. It's all my heart, so uh,
it's worth checking out. But yeah, let it be. He said he had a dream where his mother came to him during a really tense period when the Beatles were starting to split up, and he said, it was great to visit with her again. I felt very blessed to have that dream, so that got me writing let it Be.
Unfortunately I made fun of her voice again and she hasn't spoken to me since.
Terrible.
I'm an awful person.
In the dream, she supposedly offered words of comfort to her son that culminated in the phrase for anyone who looks like him.
That's actually where they got the line in Training Day from is the unpublished part of his dream about his mom. She said, King Kong ain't got on me. You let those motherfuckers be, Paul, I'm gonna put papers on every single one of them, on every single one.
You Another work of art that was supposedly inspired by a dream. I didn't know this Mary Shelley's eighteen eighteen book Frankenstein. Did you know this?
I did not. I mean I know that it was at this whole artist institute and like artist retreat or whatever they're doing, like channeling, and you know she was married to Percy B. Shelley at the time. And yeah, she knocked it out of the park. She made like the first essentially the first science fiction novel in you know, Jules, like fifty years later, sixty years later. Yeah, you're right, yeah, yeah, And but I don't know what were you gonna say about it? Something less cool?
It was less cool. But these are her words, so they that makes them more cool. It's a quote from her. She said. When I placed my head upon my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness, far on the usual bounds of reverie. I saw the pale student of unhollowed arts, kneeling beside the thing he had
put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be? For supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous creator of the world.
Tell you what does you? Didn't dream? An editor really thought that was great? No? No, I mean I've have you ever read the actual Franken sign?
Oh yeah, I think I read as a kid, like an abridged version that I thought was.
The real thing. And then because the actual version is so much talking. That's why it's so damn funny that the monster in popular consciousness is this mute, a hulking beast. Because Frankenstein's monster in that book chatty. He's a real chatty bitch pill chatterbox. Well, have you been dead for a while, you probably have things to say too. Yeah. Do you think it's like every single body part was sending him memories that he had to talk about? Oh my god, that's an incredible thought.
Wow, that's great, that's that bit. Yeah, we got a Oh, if you were a loved one.
I think of writing a screenplay with that. Don't verbal copyright or.
If you have thoughts on that. Wow, somebody sent me because I guess they wanted to make me cry. This woman was getting married and her young son had died and his heart he was an organ doner, and his heart had been put in another little boy. And then this little boy surprised her on her wedding day.
Oh God, listened to.
Her little boy's heartbeat before she walked.
Down the aisle. Yeah that's crushing.
Yeah, yeah, big time. Yeah. Somebody sent that to me today. And now it's your problem. Lists I can't take the burden alone. From Frank and Simon, we go to Twilight. The inspiration for Stephanie Meyer's book series came in a dream. She said. It was two people in a kind of little circular meadow with really bright sunlight, and one of them was a beautiful, sparkly boy, and one of them was just a girl who was human and normal, and
they were having this conversation. The boy was a vampire, which is so bizarre that I'd be dreaming about vampires, And he was trying to explain to her how much you cared about her and yet at the same time how much you wanted to kill her. Who among us?
Yeah? What I was I gonna say, Oh yeah. David Lynch in his book Catching the Big Fish, which is all about transcendental meditation, he talks about in there he'd been napping in his trailer and then like went out into the parking lot and put his hand on the hood of a car without realizing how hot it was, and the second he realized how hot it was and
yanked his hand off. He says that this scene in the diner from Mulholland Drive where they guy explains his nightmare and he goes out and goes behind the you get that great jump scare when the creeping bag lady jumps out from behind the dumpster, that all came to him like at that moment, fully formed, which I just think is such a it's ever happened to me. But I'm happy it happened to David.
I mean that makes sense though, Like that would be.
A horrifying thing to pop out of your dream.
Ohyah. That it was just like a visual representation of like that shock of like the physical shock. That's really interesting to me. Huh. I don't think we touched on this on our Christmas Songs grab Bag episode, but a little town of Bethlehem was also at least the music for it also came from a dream. The American musician Lewis Redner wrote the tune into a Little Town of Bethlehem in December eighteen sixty eight, at the request of
an Episcopal clergyman who had written the lyrics already. Redner had not written the tune on the night before he was scheduled to rehearse it, which God bless this man. According to his account, he was quote roused from sleep late in the night, hearing an angel strain whispering in my ear, and seizing a piece of music paper, I jotted down the treble of the tune as we now have it, and on Sunday morning, before going to church,
I filled in the harmony. I used to do that when I was in screenwriting school and we really had strict deadlines about finishing scripts and stuff.
And I just was like out, I had no idea where to go next. I would usually go to sleep, and then I would.
Sleep really poorly, but I would wake up usually with whatever needed to happen next kind of already there.
Interesting.
Yeah, I also like, I remember, do you ever do this because you're you have whatever freaky thing I do. And you can extrapolate on that and whichever way you wish. I remember, I like turned it in like a really long article, and then I went to bed, I like emailed it in, and then I in the middle of the night, I was like, oh, page six, paragraph nine, there's a typo there. And I went in and there it was. And it was like.
I tortured myself in my sleep, is what I'm saying. Well, there's a great there's a great scene in the in the Wire where one of the I think it's in the fifth season, the one newspaper editor does exactly that. Oh really, yeah, He like calls downstairs to the page. He like wakes up, goes downstairs, calls the paper and like asks them about a comma or says like something's errant and they're like, no, this was actually correct, just your average run of the mill. He calls it like
night before printing editor nightmare or something like that. I just thought, was it's a great touch.
I didn't know this. The song Black Sabbath apparently came to Geezer Butler in a dream or a nightmare, I should say, he had a nightmare that he encountered a tall black figure at the edge of his bed, gazing at him. It was probably aussy. After he woke up, the book on the Occult that he'd been reading prior to his nightmare had mysteriously vanished from his room. Again, probably aussy. He later told the band about his experience and recorded both of.
You to assume that Ozzie was literate at this point, respectfully, but come on.
Now. Brian May said that he wrote the Queen song The Prophet Song nineteen seventy five Queen Song after a hepatitis induced fever dream he had about an apocalyptic flood.
Okay, you must have.
Known this, but I had no idea. James Cameron's said that he dreamed the Terminator. He said he had a soaring fever when he was sick and dead broke in Rome, Italy during the final cut of Piranha.
II that he was directing great film.
He dreamed of quote a chrome skeleton emerging from a fire, and made some sketches on hotel stationary Upon waking. He said, the first sketch I did showed a metal skeleton cut in half at the waist, crawling over a tile floor using a large kitchen knife. To pull itself forward while reaching out with the other hand extremely metal in the second drawing the characters threatening a crawling woman minus the kitchen knife. These images became the finale of The Terminator
almost exactly good for him? Yeah, and didn't Terminator two. I want to say the plot was loosely inspired by a MDMA trip he like listened to. Uh, he listened to one of Sting's albums about like built the Russians hug their kids too or something.
I don't know, you're you're pulling for me, but we will do T two. Oh yeah, because it's the best action movie up there.
Wait, I need to find this. Keep talking about T two?
Oh well, I mean how much time he got? Yeah? What do you want me to say about it? Actually, the only thing that I don't like about that movie is poor Eddie Furlong, who was just like, you know, he's a child actor, so it's tough, but it's just so annoying in that movie.
Yes.
Yes.
In a recent thirtieth anniversary oral history of Terminator Too, James Cameron admitted that he was on ecstasy when he conceived that the plot of the film. Yeah, he told the ringer, I remember sitting there once high on writing notes for terminator, and I was struck by sting song. I hope the Russians love their children too, And I thought, you know what, the idea of nuclear war is just so anithetical to life itself. That's where the kid came from.
Why was he doing ecstasy just to feel something?
Yeah, he hadn't gone in a large boat for a while.
No.
Wait, two more things that surprised me that supposedly came from dreams. The periodic table. Did you know this?
Of course? Do you guys? Have you guys heard about this?
Please hear this. The chemist Dmitri Mendelev is said to have invented the modern periodic table in a dream where all the elements fell into place as required. Mendelev, a chemistry professor and an added player of the card game solitaire. Hell yeah, had been attempting to clearly organize the elements, which at the time were grouped either by atomic weight
or by common properties. However, in Solitaire cards are arranged by suit horizontally and also by number vertically, and after three days of NonStop attempts to invent the periodic table, mendeleevs said to have fallen asleep, whereupon he promptly dreamt its structure based on Solitaire.
That's nice.
I also I didn't include this because it's been verified, but I also read that the modern sewing machine was supposedly inspired in a dream.
Fascinating. Yeah.
Yeah, and we're going to end on a real damp squib here.
Salesforce.
The user interface of Salesforce, the widely used enterprise software platform founded in nineteen ninety nine.
Was inspired by a dream of its co founder, Mark Benioff, who owns our former employer, well, not people, but he owns Time magazine. Now I didn't know that, okay.
Benioff envisioned application interface resembling that of Amazon, which included labeled tabs. Benioff said that in his dream, quote, I could see this app that looked like Amazon, and it said Contacts, Accounts, Opportunities, forecast reports at tabs. No one had ever built enterprise software quite.
Like like that, that quite before. Wow, what a huge moment for him, You rich guy, What did you expect me to say? There?
Yeah, I just thought about all these like deeply moving pieces.
Of art, or like the periodic table, or like so you know, yeah, oh yeah, the salesforce interfaced real cool story. What's your name? Doug? Bill? What was it Mark?
Mark?
No, Doug's better. As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information after these messages. Wow, things that didn't happen in dreams. A stay at the Fort Harrison Hotel in early May of what year, metthew sixty five, nineteen sixty five. Keith not really a fan of the song. He gave his jagger and as Mick would later say, I think Keith thought it was a bit basic. I don't think he really listened to it properly. He was too close to it and just felt like
it was kind of a silly riff. Together, they posted up by the pool and Mick took shot at fleshing out the lyrics It was Born in Large Park. From the tensions of the tour, the crass commercialism of the loud TV ads came out in the line about the man on television telling him how white my shirts can be, but he can't be a man because he doesn't smoke the same cigarettes as me, a reference to the then ubiquitous Marble Marble cow Marvel marl Borough cowboy.
Right, I have a fact I'd like to share go on, it's really just the name of the show. One of the original Marlborough Men, he was in ads in the fifties, Robert C. Norris. He never smoked, and after twelve years as the Marlboro Man, he quit the role to avoid influencing children, and he lived until age ninety in twenty nineteen.
Uh huh, good for him. Yeah. Anyway, they have this aggression of youth so that they'd seen writing at their concert. The general frustrations that arise while touring related to women, sleeping, arrangements, women, alcohol, women. One of the biggest lyrical inspirations likely came from Bob Dylan, who's Bringing It All Back Home had Hit Shells earlier that year. A photo from the time even shows Jagger lounging pool side and clear water, intently reading the album's
back cover. Dylan at the time was shaking up songwriting, showing that lyrics could be deeply personal, cryptic, and rooted in lived experience. Less like storyteller, you're more like overhearing a private joke you're not quite in on. It was a move borrowed from the beat poets, a modernist sleight of hand that made songs feel like puzzles. By keeping things elusive, Dylan encouraged listeners to come back again and again.
After all, a few things are more intriguing than a rock star is half told anecdote, the kind of story you're left to finish in your own head. Accordingly, satisfaction central figure is a thinly veiled version of Jagger himself, a young man already famous but bracing for superstardom, railing against the growing pressures of fame, consumerism, and societal expectations. I said we weren't going to pontificate earlier. I know, I'm sorry. I would have read this, Okay, go ahead.
It's less a traditional song than a defiant stance, a crystallization of Jagger's public persona and his way of moving through the world.
The lyrics struck a nerve.
Of the generation increasingly skeptical of authority in marketing, but beneath the sneer as a broader rebellion, a rejection of parental values, conventional wisdom, and the ever looming figure of capital t Capital am the man, a stand in for institutional control and discipline. It's the kind of attitude that, as later pop culture entities like School of Rock would argue feels like a generational mission resist at all costs.
The fundamental dichotomy of the Stones, these you know, middle class white guys from England, can be summed up in the image of them writing this anti consumerist the Hell with the Man tirade while sitting around the swimming pool out of Florida hotel.
That they are not paying for hypocrisy. Good for them.
When I asked how he was able to write songs that connected so strongly to the zeitgeist, Jagger would later tell journalist Rich Cohen, It's about being a social animal.
We're in an ant hill. We've got these antennas, I will.
Say Jagger, having gone through like sixty hours of tapes with The Stones from nineteen seventy two for that podcast I worked on Jagger divorced from like how he looks at how he presents himself when you just hear his words.
Not a very articulate guy. I don't I've never thought he was a good lyricist. I mean, like, do people like get rolling Stone arm tattoos or like that's a good point. Yeah, I don't know, I don't know. Yeah, start me up. I got start me up and the name of my mom because you know, and then the day that I was born, because that's when she started me up. So wow, my rolling Stone tattoo the lips there,
that's true. Yeah, yeah, I guess you could. I'm trying to think of other sympathy for the Devil's pretty good. That's like probably one of the few that I would
give him credit for actually being a good song. Yeah, but it's such an old trope, you know, I know, but it's like, but but you know, how many people had read Master and Margarita at that point, or like had gotten these different you know, gotten any like even stringing something as a narrative together like that, Like that's like the idea of like the Eternal Warrior or whatever.
You know, we wouldn't even get that until years later with Rolling the Heads and Headless Thompson Gunner, Wow, Warren and by Warren. Yeah, I'll give him that one. What else would I give him? That's okay?
Yeah, let's okay.
Moonlight Mile, it's kind of got some nice imagery, I guess Wild Horses, Uh well, I THNK.
Graham Parsons ghost write a lot of that.
I don't know.
I was up.
I was touring the hard rock vaults many years ago, and the head archivist became a friend of mine, and he was a really brilliant guy.
He's a really brilliant guy.
And one of the things he was most excited to show me was Grand Parsons Diaries, in which he had written an early version of Wild Horses and and he was very excitedly saying, you know, you don't you understand, like this change is rock history. This is like shows proves because Graham Parsons, the famous country rock pioneer, was a very close friend of Keith Richards before before he died of a heroin overdose and his body stolen and set on fire.
But that's another episode.
So yeah, it was always theorized that Graham Parsons played a role in writing that song, but this was like pretty definitive proof that he he wrote a great deal of it.
How about that?
Yeah, So I'm not giving that one to Mick or Keith. That's fairy.
I always liked.
The lyrics, probably for the same reason of like the Dylan role that we talked about earlier, where it feels like you're in like a joke that you're not you're hearing a joke you're not in on. I always liked you can't always get what you want, just because it was so specific. It scans so well, but I very rarely knew what any of it meant.
Yeah, I don't know. That's just kind of generic to me, maybe maybe fitting the specific definition you're talking about. I kind of I would always get that from like play with Fire. It's just like, what for you people talking about all of these different locations and names in England, anything else good that they've written, Torn and Freed has kind of a oh yeah, nice narrative to it. Got a session guitarist coat. That's it. I don't feel like talking about this any much longer. Okay, So and you.
Know what, that's okay, that's okay.
If you find one, get back to me.
Well, now, I'd like to talk about the Fort Harrison Hotel where the stones were staying Jordan.
Please.
The fact that it's the origin of one of the most iconic rock songs in history. We more than enough to put the Fort Harrison Hotel on the Florida Registry of Historic Sites, and yet, and yet there's so much more of the history of this building is so much weirder. It was built in nineteen twenty six and managed by Ransom Olds, incredibly named Ransom Olds, the namesake of the Oldsmobile and to markets opening the Daredevil, Henry Rowland climbed the exterior in a blindfold.
Which is pretty bad ass.
And for a time it's where the Philadelphia Phillies would stay when they were doing spring training in Clearwater. Okay, but then, but then, but then strap in, folks. The building was later purchased by the Church of Scientology and since nineteen seventy five it served as the main building of the church's chief campus in.
Clearwater where they do nothing wrong, called flag Land Base. It must be said, I don't want them around me in my house. Yes, they've done nothing wrong.
Ever, Clearwater is basically like the Washington d C.
Of Scientology.
So this hotel where the Stones wrote Satisfaction is essentially the White House of Scientology. I think I have that right. If I don't, I'm sure I will hear. Is that weird?
That is a horrifying thing to you think of as something that exists. That's really weird. Washington d C. Of Scientology being in Clearwater, Florida.
I remember seeing It might have been in the Going Cleared Alex Gibney documentary on HBO from a maybe I don't know, maybe a decade ago now. I think I remember hearing that they've basically slowly been buying up real estate and clear water for I mean fifty years now. Yeah. Yeah, that's been kind of their home base. I'm not really sure totally why it might be. I was going to say, might be for tax reasons, but they don't need to worry about that, per Wikipedia, which for legal reasons I
want to read from directly. The Fort Harrison Hotel has been the site of at least three suspicious deaths since nineteen seventy five, when scientology took over the premises, most notably the death of Lisa McPherson, who died on December fifth, nineteen ninety five, after spending seventeen days in room one seven to four of.
The building, or maybe she didn't.
The official reported cause of death was a blood clot cause by dehydration and bed rest.
She rested to death. Oh my God, the dream.
The church later challenged the finding of the autopsy in court years before. In February nineteen eighty, a scientologist named Josephus A. Havinith was found dead at the Fort Harrison Hotel. He was discovered in a bathtub filled with water hot enough to have burned his skin off. Oh this is still a quote from Wikipedia. By the way, the official reported cause of death was drowning, although the coroner noted that when he was found Haneth's head was not submerged.
In August nineteen eighty eight, scientologist Hubert Faff died of a seizure in the Fort Harrison Hotel. He had recently stopped taking his seizure medication in favor of a vitamin program.
Oh boy, it's.
Worth noting that in nineteen ninety seven, this is still a quote. Clearwater Police received over one hundred and sixty emergency calls from the Fort Harrison Hotel all but they were denied entry into the hotel by Scientology security. If you want to know more, you all can google it yourselves.
And get on the same watch list. Jordan is now fascinating.
Yeah, yeah, the vibes in that place must be rancid, because I do believe there is something vaguely satanic about the stones.
Well, you know, like the Robert Johnson continuum. Yeah. Sure, yeah.
Well, oh yeah, you're gonna have you're gonna have something, you have some satan.
Yeah, I don't know. I don't know, though, I feel like I feel like British blues guitarists would be like better if they had figured out how to sell their souls.
You know. I think it's the conversion rate from the pounds to souls.
Oh it just doesn't they get like a yeah, they get like a discounted, they get guitar skills. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the tariffs you know in this economy.
Selling my soul.
That's a terrible that's a terrible bit son.
Oh well, the non Glimmer twin rolling Stones aka the not as good ones got their first satisfied. Yes, they are very much the rest man. Which one's Gilligan in which island's a skipper? I mean, Keith is probably Gilligan and the skipper's probably mixed.
Right, this is your area of expertise. Sure, no it's not, Yes, it is.
Which one seems like more of a dumb ass and which one seems more like an uptight control free I mean, oh.
Yeah, I mean okay, but I think Jagger, honestly, I think Jagger by the like certainly in an exile and stuff was just flying in to do his vocals.
Yeah, no, that was Keith's. But that was like the one time Keith was in control divers Yeah pretty much. Yeah, actually really the only time.
I think, uh, Mick is mary Anne. Do you know thay they used to do the rest of the Stones used to call him debor have you ever heard that? That sounds familiar?
But I thought that was like a like an Elton John Freddie Mercury, like how they all or Rod Stewart where they all called each other like drag names essentially.
Oh, I'm not sure who was that. I thought they were just making fun of him because he was, you know, kind of a ponce. That's the perfect word. That's the perfect word.
Yes, Now I should have brushed up on that Rolling Stone show. I did, because I remember there were a lot of really funny interpersonal dynamics because yeah, they they were messy, messy people. They were mesches, yes, yes, yes they were.
Yeah. You gotta put in a proper plug for that show.
I'll put it in the episode description if anyone's to hear fourteen or fifteen hours about a single Rolling Stones tour. Although we did do like two episodes about them recording exile on Main Street, and those are pretty good, but.
Yeah they are. Those are the ones I listened to. Yeah, yeah, it's okay.
So yes, the non Glimmer Twins Rolling Stones got their first listen to Satisfaction in their hotel rooms at.
The Fort Harrison Hotel in Clearwater, Florida.
At this stage, Satisfaction was a folky acoustic dirge. Dirge is that inherently like pejorative. There's never it's never like a positive I think.
So there's very many you don't Yeah, you typically don't hear about a lot of like upbeat dirges. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure technically there are some in like the history of Orion, yeah, or just like really slow bock pieces there. Even though they were about death, it's probably like considered like a laudatory thing, yeah, because it's like, well, we're going to be together again. It's a crocish by the way, you just were on the ground.
So neither Mick nor Keith saw much potential in this nascent version of Satisfaction as a single, and certainly not a hit. Bill Wyman, the bass player for the Stones, wrote Keith's instinct must have told him it was worth some effort, though, because he kept working on it. On May tenth, four days after completing the lyrics, the band ventured to Chess Records during their tour stop in Chicago. We mentioned this earlier for Blues Officionados from Britain. This
was very much like visiting the Holy Land. This is the room where Muddy Waters had laid down his thunderous riffs. Holland Wolf growled into the mic, and Chuck Berry reshaped rhythm and blues into something electric and new. And it was here, by their idol's ghosts, that The Stones first attempted to capture satisfaction on tape and failed, and failed failed miserably.
Yeah, it didn't go well.
It was at the end of a nine hour session where they cut the songs try Me, That's how Strong My Love Is, the under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man, and Mercy Mercy.
Which one of those song titles does not belong. Yeah. Yeah, what was that other one? Was that like an attempt at doing like a Kinks title?
Yeah, actually pretty much. Yeah, the under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man, that's exactly. Yeah, you know, it's a good song, though Yeah manager producer Andrew loug Oldham later described this early version of Satisfaction as quote.
Acoustic wayward Harmonica Leyden.
It just would not do the hook registered as marginal to nout What does knaut mean?
Naw T never seen that word. Oh that's an angler, that's like I think that like that like but w T I think maybe the it's like Yorkshire dialect.
Oh interesting, so like non existent basically yes, Ok. Jagger and Richards were very nearly ready to abandon the song altogether, but Oldham urged them to keep after it. They try to get a few days later, when the tour brought them to Los Angeles, they were hold up at RCA Studios with sound enginior David Hassinger and Phil Spector arranger Jack Nasch. Jack would prove crucial for coming up with the arrangement of the song that we Know on Love.
He's kind of a legend in Stone circles. I think he did did we do the arrangements for can Always Give You One? And maybe a street fighting man. He definitely stayed involved with the Stones for a long time. In addition to working with Neil Young Yeah on his new Young album some of Buffalo Springfield too. I think the beautiful strings for Expecting to Fly we're done by him.
I want to say, real, he's one of the few Wall of Sound acolytes that really transcended the early sixties girl group phil Spector stuff and actually like did interesting stuff. I think he did the soundtrack to one flu of the Cougo's Nest too, with the rob of Native American instrumentation. And I want to say he wrote low lifts us
up where we belong? I think hmm. Anyway, So Jack Niche, for all of his arrangement prowess, he would prove crucial for coming up with the arrangement for satisfaction that made it into the song that we now hold So dear Jack Niche began the sessions by pounding out a new faster, aggressive tempo on the piano. Better faster or stronger, younger, younger, Yeah, and it was younger. Though the piano part was removed from the final track, Andrew liul Golden, the producer, would
claim this essentially established the groove of the song. And Jack also plays the tambourine, which remained on the final recording, which is pretty great. Like as far as tambourine parts go. That's a pretty iconic one, you.
Know, tambourin U tambourine is really a secret weapon. It had a lot of great songs. That's why the one thing that Brian Jonestown Massacre did right was have a guy whose sole job was to play tambourine.
I mean the Monkeys did too, but no, well it's Stevie Diggs play guitar on stage.
But she did play. I mean she played tambourine, but she Okay, greatest tambourinists the guys on town, like any black person who grew up in church, not Stevie Nicks. I'm sorry. Like great tambourine playing is an art, just putting your lead singer out there with something listlessly shake because otherwise they feel like they aren't doing anything, which is true. That's an entirely different matter. That's a whole different color.
How did your I said that when I was in the was it of oz playing in high school?
Is my line? I know you've told us that. I think it's on record. It is.
You were when we were in your band, there were sometimes when you weren't playing guitar up front and you were just lead singer. Yeah, how was that like for you? Did you have a preference? Seems stressful to like not have a thing.
No, because I was just running around half the time. I did pick up tambourine because the only thing I can do is the double timeline, and I would often routinely peel vast swaths of my palm skin. I remember that, I do remember well doing that. So it's it's a hard it's a it's a get. You've got to beat the out of your hand with it. It's a tricky instrument.
But there's really I mean, like if you listen to those early if you find like the stems of those Motown recordings, Yeah, here like actual like church gospel inspired tambourine playing. That is just truly wonderful. So don't listen to Stevie Nicks for your tambo playing. Sorry, I'm sorry, young women out there.
So they finally have the groove established for Satisfaction, Mick got his vocals in one take, but the backing track took much more.
Time to evolve.
Andrew lou Goldham will to compare this early version of Satisfaction to the song walk Right In by the folk pop collective The rooftop singers.
It called for striped shirts, he.
Said, real cream, basketball slacks and a timeout in other words, no grit. In the early morning of May twelfth, nineteen sixty five, at the end of a fourteen hour session, Charlie Watts, drummer for the Stones, switched the tempo. After trying all sorts of different rhythmic accompaniments.
Charlie branded on the simplest one.
Which he borrowed from Roy Orbison's Pretty Woman.
And there was another motown song, Uptight Everything's all right, no No.
Stevie Wonder borrowed that from the Stones song Oh interesting, okay, which is why when Stevie Wonder went out with the Stones on their nineteen seventy two tour as their opening act, he would come out on stage when they did Satisfaction and sometimes they would do a medley that went between Uptight and sa which if you could find his bootlegs of that on YouTube, Damn, I mean The Stones with Stevie Wonder rules, it's incredible.
Yeah, Well, didn't he also get booed off stage at a lot of those shows because people were racist.
Not a lot of the shows, actually not really, No, it wasn't that he didn't get booed. I think the closest that they came was in Boston because the Stones had gotten arrested in Rhode Island and like hours before the show was supposed to begin, and the show went forward thinking that they would get out of jail in time, and they weren't, And so they were in jail when Stevie Wonder was as their opening act was on stage, and they were basically just like stretch, stretch, after god
knows how long on stage. The audience was like, all right, we get it, Now where's the Stones, And then they started getting hostile and then see.
Right before the busing stuff, Yeah, they don't really do too well with that.
No, no, So Stevie was like, I don't need this some Stevie Wonder, so he left the stage, and then people with Boston just just it was in the summer too. They're just cooking in the old garden waiting for the Stones to come. They had to get the mayor of Boston to put in a personal appeal to the governor of Rhode Island. They're like, please, we're gonna have a riot. My city's already on fire because of various I forget which specific racially motivated riot for at that moment, but
just too many to keep seriously. Yeah, in the early to mid seventies. Yeah, so I think that's kind of the closest to Stevie ever being blewed God forbid. So Yeah. Anyway, when drummer Charlie Watts hit upon the extremely steady rock Solid, he says, hoping that you don't correct him. Uh, pretty woman.
Rip.
That's when things began to fall into place.
Oh, I don't have my phone over here. Oh no I do. Let's see. Let's be about No, I'm going to see. I'm going to see if the if satisfaction ends at the same tempo. Oh, that's interesting. Like every other Rolling Stone song, it in fact speeds up by anywhere from five to ten clicks. All right, we're starting off in between around one thirty four, one thirty six. Yeah, I was I was wrong. Good credit to Charlie stays within a couple beats the whole time. Good for him, do it his job.
Yeah, there's one job, alrip Charlie.
Yeah, you would have hated or like ri Ip Charlie, you would have hated five year olds who can play drums better than your own TikTok oh kim, all these British drummers who were like, I'm really jazz drummer? Like, are you deaf? Do you hear the difference between what you play and what black people play? Like you get the out of here. You're not a jazz drummer. You're a toddler. You've wandered into a room a conversation. You
have absolutely no context for claiming that you are. You have facility in this fat here?
Where were we that Walter subject talk?
Some of it was a bit of big lebousek. Yeah.
Yeah, it's interesting to note I mentioned this earlier as a fourteen hour session that yielded satisfaction off of Stephen Davis, who probably most famous for writing the legendary led Zeppelin ton Hammer of the Gods. In his book Old Gods Almost Dead about the Rolling Stones, says that La Sceinsters brought cocaine to the session, a first in Stone's history. Oh, he's kind of he's kind of famously sillacious and not
always the most trustworthy. But if this is true, it certainly would not be the last session that cocaine was used at for the Stones.
Yeah, I mean it's quite funny, because I wonder if you can then chart Charlie's rushing in real time. Oh my god, following the introduction of cocaine into his particular toxology. Yes, good for him.
Well, the thick enough the guitar riff, with Keith already knew was the heart of the song. He dispatched ancillary Stone Ian Stewart, who honestly deserves an episode of his own, to a nearby music store Wallack's Music City to find something that could do the trick. We should we should talk about Ian Stewart for a second. In Stewart was original Rolling Stone. The Rolling Stones originally had six members.
He was the piano and when Andrew loul Goldham came into the picture to be the Stones manager, he basically was like, six people's too many for a band. Five is already kind of pushing it, and you don't look like the others. Ian was like, I want to say, like ten years older than the other guys, and like very square jawed, and like he just looks like like a trucker. Basically, he's like, you don't look the part. You are no longer a stone. We're gonna find like
roady jobs for you to do. He's a big guy and you can like back them on stage on piano if you want, but like you're not a stone. And instead of basically saying go to hell, he was like, Okay, cool, I love these guys.
And like I just went to hang out with my mates.
Yeah, and like make a not a huge living, but a decent living, like lugging their stuff around and like sometimes playing ogi wiggie piano on stage from me.
Yeah.
Yeah. So he was sent to get something for Keith at this music store to make the guitar riffs sound thicker. This was the early days of guitar pedals, and he came back with something called a Gibson Maestro buzz box, which distorted Keith's guitar. Keith later told Guitar Player Magazine it was a miracle. I was screaming for more distortion. This rift's really got a hang hard and long. That was just like constant thing he would say during the session.
This riffs got a hang hard and long. We burnt the amps up and turned everything up, and it still wasn't right. And then Ian Stuart ran around the corner to Wallack's Music City or something and came around with a distortion box. Try this. It was as offhand as that. It was just from nowhere. I never really got into the thing after that either. It had very limited use, but it was just right for the song, and Keith initially envisioned redoing the track later with a horn section
playing this riff. He said, this was just a little sketch because to my mind, the fuzz tone was really there to denote what the horns would be doing, which is really interesting now, Heigel, Yes, I know, I'm looking at you like a bo that's been pulled back.
I've trained my whole life for this.
Please, I want you to tell us about guitar pedals.
Well, specifically, we're going to hone in on just the overall concept of distortion in general and how that's been applied to guitar historically, not only in this song, but in many others. I'm giving you a playlist and you will learn today. So many people, including Keith himself in his own book, which is his right, have claimed that his use of the Maestro f Z one fuzz tone as the first recorded use of fuzz in history. That
is incorrect, as we will see. But first let's figure out what differentiates fuzz from distortion and overdrive, which are three terms that you will constantly hear when you're talking about guitar music, specifically recorded electric guitar. So there are obviously many ways looking at the concept just distortion, but in pure audio terms, a great working definition of it is the falsified reproduction of an audio signal caused by
change in the original signals waveform. So, as is fairly common knowledge, sounds travel via waves and in a wave when you see this surrendered horizontally over a period of time, there are natural peaks and valleys within that waveform. Guitar sounds are transformed when either amps just power amps, or tubes within those amps, or pedals or pre amps any kind of other signal is added to the guitar's original tone,
and that changes the waveform it pushes them to. Clip Clipping is generally considered a negative thing because that means you're overloading a particular I guess a particular jack or
socket or sound sources ability to process sound cleanly. But you can use soft and hard clipping before it gets truly distorted for a pleasing effect, which people have termed overdrive, and then is kind of slightly separate from that, and then at the next one is fuzz, and fuzz is the hardest form of clipping because what it does is just essentially clips off the peaks and the valleys from a guitar signal, and it literally turns the waveform into
a square shape. So that's why you hear a lot of fuzz guitar and some synthesizers will sound the same because synthesizers also use square wave to give their signals shapes. So distortion changes the harmonic content of a note by adding new frequencies. Every note has what's called a fundamental, or the pure undistorted pitch of whatever the sound is. Because the way sound works, you can hear different multiples
of overtones of any fundamental on different instruments. For example, if you go into a piano and jam a C chord, you know, you can often hear the with a g ringing separately. You can also hear this on stringed instruments occasionally even saxophones if people are overblowing and doing and generating these these overtones.
Vocals too, sometimes like people like David Lee Roth and.
Yeah, yeah, although I'm not sure if his whistle tones count as distortion, or as they count as two tones, you know. Anyway, So the quick way of getting a bunch more overtones onto a signal and thus make it sound more pleasing. People talk about it sounding fuller or more gleaming and bright. Carl Santana, I think has called it, like, you know, the an entire new palette of sounds building onto the original in terms of painting colors. So you can either turn your stuff up real loud, which is
why stuff sounds better loud. Stuff does sound better loud always, that's the rule. And so there's an invisible space at the top and bottom of every waveform between the absolute top level that any source is capable of generating in terms of volume and those waveforms, and the space in between is called headroom. So you have headroom until you max out the volume, and then you run out of headroom and your thing is running it dimed, is what you know. You call it running into the red. Everything's
turned up to ten. You know, that's the stereotypical like, oh, this would turn it up two eleven, Like that's what you're talking about. So the bigger you make your waveform relative to the headroom the more distorted your signal becomes, and lightly if you're pushing it lightly into the headroom,
you get what's called natural overdrive. You might also hear people call this tube overdrive because before it was in pedals, it was from actually saturating the power tubes of the amp and pushing that through the speaker, and everything from speaker cone to the kind of tubes you use in the power amp section effect that natural overdrive. So all
of these sounds, though, were done prior to satisfaction. One of the earliest examples of like an overdriven dirty guitar is actually from a Western swing record called Bob Will's Boogie that is from nineteen forty six, though it is more likely that that song, with the studio technology at the time, would have been overdriven through a solid state
amplifier rather than a twoe band. A couple years later, nineteen forty nine, Gory Carter recorded Rockaway, which has some gnarly disorted guitar tone and also basically the Chuck Berry riff no no no no no no no no no no no no, years before Chuck Berry played it. However, generally agreed upon first rock and roll song ever recorded, is Rocket eighty eight in nineteen fifty one that amp achieved its tone simply by being damaged in some unspecified way.
So in nineteen fifty three, James Cotton releases a song called Cotton Crop Blues, and the guitarist on there is a guy named Pat Hare. You can hear him use power chords about when is this fifty three? About five years before link Ray is credited with inventing the power chord on rumble powerchord on electric guitar anyway. Fun fact after this recording Hair, the next thing he recorded in the studio was a version of a nineteen forties blues
song delightfully titled I'm going to Murder my Baby. And then nine years later he did just that, shooting his girlfriend in Minneapolis, and the policeman who came to investigate this was in this Member of nineteen sixty three. He
pleaded guilty and died in prison in nineteen eighty. The next popular song you might have heard destroyed guitar on was by Johnny Burnett and the Rock and Roll trios Train Kept a Roll in a nineteen fifty six This happened when guitarist Paul Burlison deliberately loosened the tubes in his amps. When you have your tubes aren't fitted correctly into the amp, they will not produce enough power and you can get what's called a sag like a sag
voltage effect. There are pedals that replicate this, this idea of like a pedal running out of something running out of power, and that's when you get sort of those fuzz effects. They just kind of trail off, they kind of fizzle out, the idea being that like it's replicating the sound of something not having enough power. But there were early attempts at making discrete fuzzboxes for this purpose.
None other than Lee Hazelwood our boy Lee hazel would Love commissioned an unnamed radio technician to develop a fuzzbox for his use in the studio and Wrecking Crew guitarist Al Casey was one of the first guys to be recorded using it on a contract record by Sanford Clark. Name of that song is go On Home in nineteen fifty six. Two years later, Link Ray just jabbed a pencil into the speaker cone of his amplifier to achieve the sound on Rumble is Menacing nineteen fifty eight. Instrumental.
Brady Martin, who is the other guitarist on that Johnny Burnett session, replicated the trick on a Marty Robins song nineteen sixty one's Don't Worry. That's one of those high profile songs to use this sound thus far. Martin himself was so entranced by the sound that he recorded his own instrumental using the trick to record a track that he simply called the Fuzz and may have earned its popular title that came out in nineteen sixty one. One.
One of the true stars of the fuzzbox technology at this time was a pedal steel player named Red Rhodes. This guy's kind of famous in weird circles. He was a prime collaborator of is it Mickey? Which monkey hung out with him? Nesmyth?
It must have been Nesmuth because Nesmuth was more of a country guy.
Yeah, So Red Rhodes, also a bit of a tinkerer, built his own fuzzbox. Several of them actually loaned one out to another wrecking Crew player, Billy Strange, who used it on of all things, and Margaret's I Just Don't Understand in nineteen sixty one. So Red was he built another one of these and sold them to the Ventures. They came to him in nineteen sixty two asking for one of these fuzzboxes, and then they quickly put its use on their song two hundred pounds B Great Size, Yeah,
sounds like what it is. Perhaps the most enduring a proto metal guitar tone came courtesy of The Kinks Dave Davies, who copied link Ras approach by slicing up his amp's speaker cone with a razorblade for their nineteen sixty four hit You Really Got Me.
Fuzz.
Of the three distortion types, sounds the gnarliest, and that is because most fuzz circuits in pedals utilized transistors that have a lower fidelity sound and add more harmonics into the signal as the waveform becomes more squared. So not only is it reducing and clipping the size of the waveform, but it is also adding more and more harmonics into it, which is why they sound generally very muddy and disgusting. And those transistors are germanium, which, as we noted early
we're using Keith's Phillips tape recorder. Germanium transistors have a smoother tone profile. Silicone transistors are more aggressive and bright, and so to this day you will see guitar pedal builders differentiating or even providing multiple modes on their pedals of which kind of transistor you can use. There is little disagreement though, however, over who introduced the first commercially
available fuzz pedal. That is the venerable guitar maker Gibson, who released the aforementioned f Z one fuzz tone in nineteen sixty two through their subsidiary Maestro. Now the product was an actual invention of recording engineer Glenn Snoddy with
D's and another radio engineer, Revis V. Hobbes. They sold their idea for the circuit to Gibson, but they did get the patent on it, I believe, and the FZ one fuzz tone dropped in nineteen sixty two, containing a three transistor circuit using RCA two N two seven zero germanium transistors. This is all germane to guitar nerds, because people are literally still looking up dead stock RCA two nd two seventy germanium transistors to use in there Maestro
FZ one fuzz tone copies. But the thing was designed multiple times. Funnily enough, a subsequent redesign of this pedal was done by Robert mog of all people, so not only did he create the most iconic synthesizers of all time, he had a hand in redesigning the first commercial fuzz pedal.
These pedals must be I mean, I'm on eBay right now, going for you know, close to one thousand dollars these vintage ones.
It's funny because Seth Applebaum of the Ghost Funk Orchestra, who provided our show with its theme song, has a tone bender, which was another one of these early fuzz things. And not only is it the size of an NBA player's shoe, but it is just so finicky that I think he played it on like one show and then quickly pulled it off the board and replaced it with something newer. So early guitar pedals were usually made without size as a factor, because nobody could have foreseen that
one day, thirty years, forty years. However, in the future, people were gonna have pedal boards with like twenty pedals on them, and silence was also not a virtue with the stiff action of these switches. So indeed, Richard's f Z one appears on satisfaction in not just its tone, but in the audible click that the pedal makes when
he turns it on. The best part, he turns it off for the verse, and right before the chorus backs in he turns it on, and around thirty five seconds in you can hear a very audible mechanical click on the master track.
I always thought that was like a dead note on his guitar that he was doing intentionally.
That's my favorite part of the song. No, it's one of my favorite kind of things that get left in and become sort of the grain of the song, Like the crazy like kick drum squeak you got on certain that's all over certain Zeppelin recordings, That's all over James Brown recordings. I think it's the one Ludwig kick pedal that's just famous for having this horrible rat like squeak to it. Just made it on all his records. Well,
that was amazing, Thank you, Hagel. Yeah, yeah, I mean I think the other big famous one is the fuzz face, which was designed by British engineers for Hendrix.
Are you familiar with I'm afraid that this is going to cause your head to explode. The Bobby socks and blue jeans. Version of Zippity Doda that Phil Spector produced that also has an early version of fuzz.
No No, I'm not is a you look so sad right now?
This was more of a studio accident as opposed to a pedal, but it was late nineteen sixty two. This is actually according to George Harrison, who became close to Phil Spector. When Phil Spector was making Zippity Doo Dah, the engineer who set up the track overloaded the microphone on the guitar player and it became very distorted. Phil Spector said, leave it like that, it's great. Some years later everyone tried to copy that sound, and so they invented the fuzz box. H And that would have been
recorded h yeah, in late nineteen sixty two. So that's another early fuzzz example, all right, So it goes without saying the Maestra pedal was the MVP of Satisfaction. But even after this revamp, Keith Riches was not convinced that the song had would it take to be a single? Come on, Keith, I know he's really for somebody who's usually like pretty down to take a chance on things like Heroin this is really he's really being a bummer in this episode.
Yeah, quite a conservatory little boy. Come on now, conservative little boy, I should say.
As Mick would recall, it sounded like a folk song when we first started working on it, and Keith didn't like it much. He didn't want it to be a single. He didn't think he would do very well. That's the only time we've had a disagreement.
I voice it was not.
I can't figure out if this was like a very very early quote or he's being very tongue in cheek.
I'm not sure.
Keith elaborated, saying that the version of satisfaction that we know in love always felt incomplete to him. He said it sounded like a dub or a demo.
To me.
I couldn't get excited about it. I really dug it that night. I wrote it in the motel, but I'd gone past it. I didn't want it out. It sounded all right, but I didn't really like that fuzz guitar. I wanted to make that thing different. You needed either horns or something else that could knock that riff out. The riff was gonna make the song or break it. He was correct, and it wasn't meant for guitar. Just as there are multiple conflicting versions of the song's genesis,
there are also multiple versions concerning the song's release. According to one manager, Andrew lug Oldham decided to put the decision to a band vote, which feels like something out of Flight of the Concords. That's oddly adorable. According to Bill Wyman, the vote was close, with Charlie Watts the drummer, Bill Wyman, bass player, and Brian Jones, the guitarist, voting yes, put it out, which is prizing considering the pop hating
blues purist. Brian Jones actually went for it, but we'll talk more about that later.
Mcking Keith meanwhile opposed.
The choice of releasing it as a single. Mick Meanwhile has been asked about this and says he doesn't remember voting, which I guess it's probably done a good look for him to say, yeah, I didn't think we should put.
Our most sign up.
Yeah, A lot of people are charmed by those stories. There's a lot of stories.
Yeah, I guess he just he probably is incapable of bending. He was wrong, right, And yeah, no, that's true. That's the hold up there that's very true.
Keith would say over the years that he only discovered that the song was released when driving through the United States. He said, we left the track and went back out on the road, and two weeks later I heard it on the radio. I said, no, that was just a demo. The timeline of that doesn't fully line up, because the US tour had rapped by the time the song was
available in Chops. But it could have been a promo that Andrew Logodam leaked the radio stations because a favorite way of putting the muscle on record companies or bands who didn't want to release a song or were giving promos or tapes to radio networks and trying to get a ground swell of listeners to request it often enough that basically forced the label's hand to put it out,
So maybe that was what he was doing. In any event, Satisfaction was released in the US on June fourth, nineteen sixty five, barely a month after Mike it first put words to Keith's riff by a Florida swimming pool. The song answered the Billboard Hot one hundred the week ending June twelfth, and by July tenth, the song was number one toppling the four tops. I can't help myself, sugar Pie,
Honey Bunch that song wise, Yeah, a great song. It held the top spot for four weeks before the band was supplanted by their own nemesis, Hermit's Hermits and their truly dreadful song I'm Enery the Eighth I Am That song blows.
Oh god, I forgot they also did that, Hey, I told yeah, yeah a song yeah sus sucks. Oh Menory the eight Menory the I Done. You would gain some kind of a perverse No, no, I hate that song now.
That and Winchester Cathedral by the New Christy Minstrels. No, yeah, there's there's a there's a level of kitch that even I don't mess with. In the sixties, Yeah, no, I can't deal with that. Do the Freddy by Freddie and the Dreamers also blows.
Yeah, I don't. You're already talking about you passed into I don't know or care about and leave it. Keep it that way.
In the UK, Satisfaction wasn't issued until August twentieth, so the Stones could promote it in person. Hit number one there on September fifteenth, and stayed for two weeks. Interesting that it was a number one in September because it's such a summer song. To me, it was interesting, classic classic song of the summer. I would argue, maybe there's something in the fifties I'm forgetting, but like that seems like the prototypical summer song to me.
Interesting. What about Mungo Jerry.
That was later though?
That was seventy Oh so you think it's the first song of the summer.
Yeah, I would say Satisfaction is the first song of the summer in all caps.
I don't care to debate you with this, okay at this point, but I don't think that's true. And we will revisit this, Okay, think about this.
I am think real hard. You're messing with the I am.
I sure will, Okay, all.
Right, okay, Okay, you know what Percy Face theme from a summer place in nineteen sixty did really well?
Okay, I mean, I'm gonna come at this with my own kind of standards. But we'll talk. We'll cut. Get everyone caught up on this at some point, right.
Think about it, worry about it, put in an email, don't send it.
Yeah, you know, find any gods you hold dear?
Yeah, more than their first American number one. Satisfaction was a quantum leak beyond anything the Stones had ever achieved. Mick is a cherished memory of driving up La Specific Coast Highway with Andrew lug Oldham that summer and a red Ford Mustang, pouching the Radi buttons and hearing satisfaction on each station. That is a top five memory for anybody, really, YEA.
In order to understand the song's popularity, it's important to compare the song to other songs in the chart at the time, polished pop tunes like The Birds and the Bees by Joeykins, The Song Also Blows, or This Diamond Ring by Gary Lewis and the Playboys. That song's Okay
satisfaction sounded raw and rebellious, even just sonically. As you mentioned, it was the first big hit to feature fuzzbox distortion, a sound the Beatles themselves would borrow a year later for Paul's base on Think for Yourself, a rare example of the Stones doing something before the Beatles. Speaking of the Beatles, Satisfaction truly clarified Andrew lou Goldham's goal positioning the Stones as the anti Fab four in a pop.
Culture ruled by either oars.
Pepsi or Coke Marlborough or Cool. Rock and Roll would now be either the Beatles or the Stones. It's interesting to note that the summer sixty five, the summer that Satisfaction hit number one and established the Stones as the bad boys of rock. The Beatles were included on the Queen's birthday honors list as mbes or members of the British Empire, and later that year they would come the Buckingham Palace and be given the honor in person by the Queen.
Because there was such nice boys, I know.
But it's just interesting that in the same month, June nineteen sixty five, that the Beatles were quite literally welcomed into the British establishment with the capitol eed, the Stones were scandalizing the populace with Satisfaction.
Did John Lennon like send it back? No? But I mean, do you think did he like privately agonize over the fact that he was just, by association with Paul like suddenly thought to be like not as dangerous as the Stone Like? Did he worry about his bad boy image being supplanted by the Stones?
I don't think at that time, No, I don't think he cared much that at that time he got as he got the little medal or badge they gave him and gave he gave it to his auntie Mimi. He was the woman who raised him, and she kept it on top of her television set.
I didn't ask all that.
And then in like nineteen sixty nine he asked for it back and he sent it back to the queen as a protest against a taxes that was some kind of massacre in Biafra.
Oh well, okay, I saying corrected.
That was cool with him, It was, yeah, So yeah, I don't think he actually in sixty five, I think he was perfectly happy.
Yeah, I vet him up, I ve him up, na na.
I mean that was the summer that help came out, which was a literal cry for help from him. So he was dealing with certain demons, but I don't think they really had much to do with Uh.
Whether or not he was perceived as cool as the rolling Stones, Yeah, he definitely wasn't. So it definitely bothered him. I'm just trying to sell this so hard to you and just sitting at home clenching his tiny fits, seething. He throws his dumb little scally Greek fisherman's hat.
Away that that was dumb. Even I admit that was bad.
Yeah.
The woman who like introduced him to that hat was like an art school Greek and uh no, but my Greek friend just texted me the moment you just said Greek, that was weird. Uh No, she was not Greek. She was just a friend from art school. And now she sells those caps. She makes them herself, so you can have an authentic John Lennon terrible cap. The other Beatles used to call it caps. Yeah, yeah, Anyway. Much of the public perception of the Stones as bad boys was
down to the lyrics of Satisfaction. At the time of its release, the song was seen as provocative, not just for its sexual undertones, but for its scathing take on consumer culture in the modern world. Music critic Paul Gambuccini my interviewed once He's wonderful. He's a really interesting guy's written some great stuff. He noted the lyrics to this
were truly threatening to an older audience. This song was perceived as an attack on the status quo, and in his BC Jagger biography God Awful Rock, His Story and Philip Norman, who wrote a not great book about the Beatles called Shout proclaims this the first pop song to directly reference sex, which feels both incorrect and deliberately obscure with the whole pop qualifier. But I just want to reference that as red meat to you and see.
What you do with that. I'm gonna leave it alone, okay, which you didn't think I was gonna do.
No, Well, I already took the fun out of it.
Yeah, I also disagree.
From the very start, producer manager Andrew lug Oldham knew that the lyrics of Satisfaction would cause some issues, particularly in the States. As a result, when mixing the song, he ordered engineer Dave Hessinger to bury the vocals. Dave Hessinger would later say, I never heard the damn lyrics of satisfaction for years. They kept telling me to bring the voice down in the track. I thought they were crazy. I didn't know it had to do with the lyrics
and getting radio play. The most defensive line at the time was the bit about Jagger quote trying to make some girl, which I always heard until working on this episode as trying to meet some girl, which says more about me than it does about Mick Jagger or America in the sixties. Even though it was buried in the mix, this line was too much for WABC, the New York City Broadcasting powerhouse, made their own edit of Satisfaction, cutting
the verse entirely. I've seen multiple reports that the line was beeped during the band's February nineteen sixty six performance on The All Important and Sullivan Show, but the versions available online have the line intact. However, the following year, when the Stones performed on Ed Sullivan, they had to change the title of Let's Spend the Night Together to Let's spend some time together. And it's really funny to watch because Mick rolls his eyes every time he gets to the chorus good.
For him with a bitch yeah.
Jagger would later claim that the Pearl Clutchers always missed what he considered quote the dirtiest line of the song. This is the one where the girl pleads baby better come back later next week because you see, I'm on a losing streak. I never really thought much about what that line meant, did you.
I never even understood what he said. It's also mushmouthy. That's true.
Yes, apparently, according to Mick, he intended this line to mean that the girl was on her period.
Streak.
That's not nice, but Jagger later elaborated, it's just life. That's what really happens to girls. Why shouldn't people write about it?
Charming? He's so gross. I think, I don't know.
I think he was young when he gave that quote.
He was, no, but he was one of those young old people. Like even when he's like young and very pretty, he looks old, maybe just because he's English. Yeah yeah, English friends. Yeah, I'm sorry, guys born old. Nothing you can do about that. Yeah, since since for the Empire, it's such.
A tough period being between young man and like daddy. I was thinking about that today, something that haunts here because I'm in the mid period now.
Yeah. Yeah, I'm not a young man. No, that's just oh okay, so just no point in me continuing that.
Okay, all right, what.
Was your what was your contender for the first song of the summer Satisfaction? Okay? Yeah, what was your other one?
Maybe theme from a Summer Place by Percy Faith, which I want to see in sixty or sixty one.
Okay. I have the actual Billboard list up here.
Well, I mean, there were big songs in summers, but that's different than Song of the Summer, which is like a you know, like Umbrella was two thousand and eight, I want to say, or seven that might have been two thousand and seven, like the huge songs that just define the summer. Satisfaction was argued defined the summer sixty five.
Well, according to Billboard, you're wrong that whatever you just said, Percy Faith did not appear. It doesn't even appear on their list of top ten songs of the year. In nineteen sixty was I'm Sorry by Brenda Lee. Nope, number two summer It's Gonna be uplifting? Oh well, Ali Oop by the Hollywood Argyles, making its second appearance on this podcast, and followed by the actual song of the Summer of nineteen sixty it'sy Bitsy Tina Weeny yellow polka dot Bikini.
Just qualified for being a novelty song.
Walk Don't Run by the Ventures.
Oh damn. I would say that transcends Song of Summer just being a killer song.
All right, Well, if you're just gonna make up different rules, then let's go to nineteen sixty one. Okay, okay, sure, tossing and Turning by Bobby Lewis.
That song goes, but it doesn't have the abiquity. I was there quarter to three by us Oh, that was also a great song. That's too it's too nebulous. It's not like it's no a real melody to that song. It's just like a party song. So it was recorded at a party.
The ball Weavil Song by Book Brenton. No Michael by the Highwayman. Oh god, no, it's like a folk song. Rain Drops d Clark. No Moody River by Pat Boone.
Not moon River.
No. No. Well, then by virtue of elimination, we're gonna have to go with last Night by the Marquis.
That song goes, but that's another like garage rock, like it's not a song of the summer. Has to be almost cinematic, you know what I mean?
Billboard clearly doesn't. Nineteen sixty two. Okay, I Can't Stop Loving You by Ray Charles. It has to be upbeat, the locomotion. Okay, we're getting closer, getting closer.
That's the closest one we have so far.
What's that in the whah WAHTUSI in nineteen sixty two? So I'm gonna go ahead and give it to one of them. Okay. Nineteen sixty three, Yeah, pretty easy. It's Wipe Out by the Sufaris, or Surf City by Jan and Deine, or Fingertips Part two by Little Stevie.
Wow.
Okay, any of those I think could have qualified? I would are you never mind? But go ahead?
Nothing nothing. It's not a melody based thing, are you talking about, charl Summer should be like the theme song to the greatest movie you've ever seen.
Okay, it should paint pictures in your mind. Man, something called the bowl Weavil Summer doesn't do that for you. No bull Weavil song? Okay. Nineteen sixty four, Where did I Love Go? By the Supremes? I Get Around by the Beach Boys?
Okay, getting Closer that's also good.
Under the Boardwalk by the Drift.
Oh, that's also really good. Okay, so we've glad we've settled it. I question the ubiquity of those songs, whereas.
I'm getting this, I'm getting this right from Billboard.
No, those are popular songs in the summer of blank year, as opposed to be the song of the summer.
Okay. The tunes below a rank based on each track's performance on the Billboard Hot one hundred chart during the summer for the period through nineteen ninety one, prior to the advent of illuminate radio monitoring point of sales data. The rankings are based on an inverse point system, with weeks at number one earning the greatest point value and weeks at lower ranks earning less. So off, every single one of those I listed first was actually the thing that sold the most during the summer.
I'm picturing it.
Is coming out of every car speakers in the way that we were talking about. I'm telling you that, according to the people who ran the chart, those songs I named wore that song Okay, okay, must have been really depressing to be a live in nineteen fifty nine when it was Lonely Boy by Paul Anka.
Oh my friend, Paul Anka. How was the song of the summer?
Yeah, in nineteen sixty it was I'm Sorry by Brenda Lee. Oh my friend Brenda. Oh Jesus Christ.
We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more. Too much information in just a moment.
Wow, wow, Wow, where were you dragging this out?
Well, there were all sorts of stupid interpretations about the
lyrics Dissatisfaction. Apparently, a woman stopped the Stones at the airport and quized them about the line hey hey Hey, which she assumed meant hey hey hey as an h a y wow yeh grass, which is uniquely dumb, more dumb, in fact, than Bob Dylan thinking that the Beatles smoked pot after hearing the line on I want to hold your hand, it's such a feeling that my love I can't hide, which he thought was it's such a feeling that my love I get high, Yeah yeah, which would
have been advanced for that song was released in like December sixty three, so that's it would have been pretty daring had they actually meant that. Amusingly, forty years after Satisfaction was released, the Stones performed three songs during Super Bowl XCEL in February two thousand and six. Satisfaction was the only one of the three songs that wasn't censored
when it was broadcast. They censored Start Me Up for the Grown Man, Come of It All, and the song rough Justice, which I don't know is a new song of Theirs that I don't remember what the lines.
Are, man, it doesn't sound very good. No rough justice, you guys doling out or at the receiving end of a lot of rough justice these days.
Well, as we'll talk about, the Stones kind of had their own like self policing unit when they were on the road, Like whenever there were things that they had to like settle amongst themselves, they usually locked themselves in a hotel room and had like a little utofficial judicial committee. Well, we'll talk more about that in a little bit, but
it's interesting. They had this in nineteen sixty five in the American tour, and they had this seven years later in the nineteen seventy two tour of the United States and people got messed up.
The make some Girl line was in fact bleeped out during the band's appearance on the ABC variety show Shindig on May twentieth, nineteen sixty five. Jordan's mother was ten on that day.
Yes, turn ten that day, Yes, Friend of the Pod Shindig, Front of the Pod, Chris Runtalk and Friend of the Pod Shindig.
This is weeks before Satisfaction had actually been released, and it is thought to be the television premiere of the song. It is performed, However, without the fuzzbox. As previously mentioned, Keith had only intended that to be a placeholder for horns, and still had not accepted that it was a crucial part of the song.
He had not accepted the fuzzbox into his heart as his Lord and savior.
He had non As part of their agreement for appearing on the program, the band insisted to producers that formative Delta Blues icon Howland Wolf be a guest among them one of the coolest things that they ever did. Brian Jones introduced his performance of how Many More Years, which is one of the most fascinating crossovers and mid sixties television this side of the j justins meeting the Flintstones during the rehearsals, though, Holene Wolf took Mick aside and said,
I want you to meet someone. He took him into the audience and introduced him to Son House, the man who had done the original version of Little Red Rooster, which is the blue standard that the Stones had taken to number one in England a few months before. Howland Wolf introduced Mick to sun House by saying, this is the man who did the original Little Red Rooster. Mayck had enough wherewithal to fear that son House might have been pissed, and was probably pissed in both senses of
the word. I think this is into his wet brain era. Sun House was reportedly very gracious about this, though he says, don't you worry about copy and Little Red Rooster because I wasn't the first one to do it, which might actually be true because Sunhouse, I think was Charlie Patten's protege or contemporary, so he might have gotten it from sun House, which is one of the ways that people got songs associated with them. They just learned them from
other guys. But despite its global success, Satisfaction did not earn the band praise from his circle of British blues purists who with their peers in the early sixties. Chris Barber, a major figure in that scene, expressed his displeasure about the song when speaking to author Rich Cohen in the aforementioned Sun Moon and Rolling Stones book It's Not Real.
He said of Mick and Keith's music, specifically Satisfaction, and the sad thing is they were capable of the real thing, but they found something else which is not real but makes them an awful lot of money, and everybody else makes a lot of money on it too, so everybody likes it, but it's not real, and if you are a serious musician, you know it's not real. I've always found that annoying. Calling an original song not real when
you are a cover artist kind of stupid. Another person who apparently hated the song was one of Mick and Keith's own band mates. As you mentioned at the top of the episode, the Rolling Stones had been originally been the tiny, furious, well dressed father of a thousand Bastards, Brian Jones. From the group's earliest days, he was the star. He had been mentored by one of the biggest blues
figures in London, Alexis Corner. But Jones's inability to write his own songs, which was deemed crucial following the rise of Lennon McCartney the British music scene, led to a power shift within the band from him to Jagger and Richard's engineered As previously mentioned by Andrew lug e Oldham, the material that the Glimmer Twins were turning out of this point were more poppy than what Brian Jones would
have liked. Brian never felt right about it, Barbara continued in Cohen's book, it was clear to anyone who knew him has led to a serious schism within the band, with Brian on one side and making Keith on the other. No one knows how Charlie and Bill felt, because they were the rhythm section and asleep most of the time,
often on stage. Brian's discomfort over this dynamic, not to mention the depression that resulted from feeling though, as his band had been taken out from under him, led Brian to abuse drugs and alcohol in great quantities, and women, and he was apparently not a great guy, even at the best of the situations. Keith himself would bluntly say he was not a good man, and Charlie Watts roused himself to offer an even less varnish take he was
a little prick. Brian Jones father at least four children with four different women, though some estimates put this number as high as six, and rejected all of the children that he knew about, although he did make poultry financial settlements in some cases. One former girlfriend, Valerie Corbett, gave birth to a son in nineteen sixty one named Julian Mark Andrews Jones acknowledged him but never supported the son financially.
Another girlfriend, Linda Lawrence, had Jones's son, also named Julian, in nineteen sixty four. That child was later adopted by the singer Donovan, whom Linda Lawrence married. Then, in nineteen sixty five, Jones reportedly paid a lump sum of seven hundred pounds to sell a paternity suit with a teenage girlfriend, with the condition that he have no contact with a child. Yet another alleged son, Simon Jones, has since spoken out
about the emotional toll of being kept a secret. Jones's wild lifestyle and reluctance to face fatherhood meant that many of his relationships ended in estrangement or private legal wrangling. Decades later, The mystery of how many children he truly fathered and how many were quietly paid off still lingers as part of his so so stupid legacy.
So yeah, I'm not exactly an A plus human, but uh, don't take my word for it. Let's hear what three of the four Beatles had to say about Brian Jones.
Shall we get his ass?
Yes, it's George Harrison, per the Beatles' anthology book. I used to see Brian in the clubs and hang out with him. In the mid sixties, he used to come to my house, particularly when he got the fear when he mixed too many weird things together.
I love George so much. I mean, that's a have you night, no, but that's a very real concern. I'd hear his voice shouting to me from out in the garden, George, George.
I'd let him in. He was a good mate.
He would always come around to my house.
In the Setar period. We talked about Painted Black and he picked up my star and tried to play it. And the next thing was he did that track. We had a lot in common when I think about it. We shared the same date of birth or nearly so he must have been a Pisces as well. We also share the same positions in the most prominent bands in the universe, him with Mick and Keith and me with Paul and John. I think he related to me a lot,
and I liked him. Some people didn't have time for him, but I thought he was one of the most interesting ones. And then Paul per the anthology book. Brian was a nervous guy, very shy, quite serious and maybe into drugs a little more than he should have been, because he used to shake a bit. We knew he was on heroin. He was lovely though, and John, speaking the Rolling Stone magazine in nineteen seventy, said Brian was different over the
years as he disintegrated. He ended up the kind of guy that you dread he'd come on the phone because he knew it was trouble. He was in a lot of pain. But in the early days he was all right because he was young and confident. He was one of those guys that disintegrates in front of you. He was all right, not brilliant or anything, just a nice guy narrator voice. That's not what his bandmate said.
Yeah, I was gonna say. I was hoping for more savagery.
Yeah. He just died like less than a year or about a year before that. And John was in his primal scream era, so he probably saw somebody else who was in a ton of pain and them like maybe took more of a more sympathy towards him than he ordinarily would have.
Well, recognizing that Brian was clearly in some kind of psychological, spiritual, or chemical distress, the Beatles reacted the way that most men in their early twenties would do. They started to feed Brian Yeah. John Lennon had a PA system installed in his Rolls Royce the mid sixties, which he would use primarily for his own amusement. Keith Moon, as an example,
did something similar. Paul says that in this period he and John would leave late night recording sessions in John's rolls and speed through the London suburbs at two or three in the morning. They would be tailing George, a future Formula one enthusiast who loved driving his Ferraris at high speeds. John would then get on the mic and adopt the tone of a constable driving a police chase. It is foolish to resist. It is foolish to resist pull over. As Paul remembered it in Anthology, it was insane.
All the lights would go on in the houses went past. Must have freaked everybody out, and more to the point, one day they used this tricked out roles to terrify Brian Jones. As we were going through Regent's Park and a way to North London to do a session. We were in John's roles. Suddenly we pulled up behind Brian Jones, who was sitting quietly in the back of his Austin Princess. John had been a very funny guy, and he shouted through the microphone, Brian Jones, do not move. You have
been under surveillance. You are under arrest. Brian leaped up about eight feet and went as white as a sheet, going, oh my god, Oh my god. Then he saw it was us, you bunch of bastards. It nearly killed him that day. John was so official sounding. That's pretty funn So yes, Brian Jones was a man in crisis, and it was sparked in large part by the success. And
I can't get no satisfaction. One illustrated example set into the aforementioned book by Stephen Davis, Old God's Almost Dead supposedly went down on the same day Mick and Keith were finalizing the lyrics to satisfaction by that Florida swimming pool feels a little too on the nose, but print the legend. That night, Brian apparently met a model at the hotel bar and brought her back to his room. The following morning, she emerged covered in bruises with both
eyes blackened. She told her girlfriend, who had spent the night with Bill Wyman that Brian beat her up and raped her. She was dissuaded from calling the cops. But on this tour, the stones Coterie had their own internal justice system.
Yeah, this has been confirmed to me by people who toured with the Stones. They did not bring police into things. They handled things among themselves, not unlike the mafia.
So after this incident, one of the Stones roadies stormed into Brian's room and, according to Davis, broke two of his ribs. Jones was taken to a nearby hospital where he was taped up and given painkillers, and the band made up a story that he'd fallen while practicing karate by the hotel swimming pool. To quote Davis, he spent the rest of the tour depressed and isolated, whacked out on pills and booze.
Because of this, it seems unlikely that Brian Jones actually played on the track Satisfaction. Producer Andrew lou Goldham isn't sure himself, but it wasn't just the track that marked the turning point. It was the scale of the song's success. When Satisfaction hit number one, it signals seismic shift in the Rolling Stones power structure. Mick and Keith were now firmly in control, and Brian had been sidelined. He would never again lead the band or occupy center stage, and
the loss devastated him. That summer, his behavior became increasingly erratic. He drank heavily, turned violent and sullen, and often lashed out or disappeared entirely. During the La stop of their spring tour in the United States, Brian was given orange Sunshine acid by Ken Keasey's Mary Pranksters, who came down from San Francisco to party with the Stones. Brian went missing for so long that they nearly missed the next
gig in San Diego. The next day, the Birds, their opening act, played Stone songs to prevent a riot whenever the band performed Satisfaction. After to become a massive hit, Brian mockingly vamped on the theme to Popeye the Sailor Man, which he was convinced the song sounded like. It was a move that provoked at least one furious backstage fight. To Brian, it wasn't just a joke, it was a protest.
He saw Mick and Keith's growing creative dominance, encouraged by their manager Andrew Lou Goldham as a direct threat to his identity as the band's original leader, and now pushed the sidelines. He felt the cold edge of exclusion, and this would get worse in the case of Keith Richards, who, after stealing Brian's band, stole his girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg.
You know the story, Yeah, I've heard some of it.
Yeah.
So Anita Pallenberg first crossed pass with the Rolling Stones in nineteen sixty five when she snuck into one of the band's concerts in Munich, Germany. This exquisitely beautiful twenty one year old model was able to talk her way backstage, where she quickly hit it off with Jones. The fact that Jones spoke German certainly helped Ooh, when you're that blonde and you speak germanly, you don't.
Have to that's interesting.
I needed produced Amle nitrates or Amle poppers from her purse and offered them around. Jones was the only one who accepted. I don't know who you are, but I need you the beasatted guitarist told her, that's a good line.
That's a good line. We look at Brian Jones at least. Yeah, somewhat diffused by the fact that he was four feet tall. Yeah, but anyway.
After meeting Anita Pallenberg, the returned to his hotel, but instead of a night of torrid passion, Pallenberg held Jones while he apparently sobbed hurt by a perceived slight by his bandmates. The rift between Jones and the Two Stones front man would intensify. Pallenberg and Jones quickly became an item, or, as she later recalled, I decided to kidnap Brian. Brian seems sexually the most flexible. Now, there's a couple ways that could be read.
Yeah, yeah, picking on that now, the fashionista would have a marked effect on the reticent Jones' style, cutting his hair into a delicate blonde bob and encouraging him to dawn flamboyant androgynous attire.
They swapped outfits and jewelry on a regular basis, setting trends in the hit fashion districts of Carnaby Street and King's Road. She once summed up her style as boots, belts, cashmere hats, sunglasses and furs as well.
It's kind of mine too, Yeah, for all the.
Color for clothes, she introduced a dark edge to the band, turning them onto a cult imagery and encouraging them to embrace.
Quote evil as a subject matter. Yes, the Rolling.
Stones nineteen sixty eight hit Simpathy for the Devil is largely her inspiration. She lends her voice to the who who on the backing vocals. Filmmaker Kenneth Anger no stranger to the demonic himself. The film Lucifer Rising is arguably his most famous work. Once said, I believe Anita is, for want of a better word, a witch. Photographer Tony Sanchez, a longtime assistant to the band that he was known
as Spanish Tony agreed. She was obsessed with black magic and began carrying a string of garlic with her everywhere, even to bed to word off vampires. He wrote in his largely debunked memoir. She also had a strange, mysterious old shaker for holy water, which she used for some of her rituals. Her ceremonies became increasingly secret, and she warned me never to rupt her when she was working.
On a spell. I mean, come on, that's it just sounds like a woman in Bushwick. We've all dealt with witchy women in one way or another. Yeah we have yeah, Yeah, we have yeah, to varying degrees of success. By nineteen sixty seven, Jones and Pallenberg were one of the hottest couples in London, but their drug use took a toll on the relationship. They began to experiment with LSD, which had a disastrous effect on Joan's tenuous mental state, giving
him horrible nightmares. He was also prone to jealous rages that often turned violent. He was short but very strong, and his assaults were terrible. She later said, for days afterwards, I'd have lumps and bruises all over me. In his tantrums, he would throw things at me whatever he could pick up, lamps, clocks, chairs, a plate of food, and when the storm inside him died down, he'd feel guilty. He begged me to forgive him. At one point he punched her in the face so
hard that he broke his own hand. Keith Richards then moved into the South Kensington home that Jones shared with Pallenberg that spring while his own estate was being renovated. Richards also found himself drawn to the enigmatic model's worldly nature. She knew everything, and she could say it in five languages. He once marveled. She scared the pants off me. He began to question, though, whether she was with the right man.
The first time I saw Anita, my obvious reaction was, what the fuck is a chick like that doing with Brian. Anita is an incredibly strong a much stronger personality than Brian, more confident, with no reservations, whereas Brian was full of doubts. That March, the three of them decided to take a trip to Morocco, where Jones had previously fallen in love with the music, food and laid back lifestyle. Unfortunately, on
this trip, Richards fell in love with Pallenberg. We went by car a Bentley with the driver and Brian got sick and ended up in the hospital. Pallenberg remembered, as he was very sickly fragile, So Keith and I drove on and left him there, and that was when we had a physical relationship. Richard says. The affair began in the back seat of his luxury car as it cruised through southern Europe. I still remember the smell of the orange trees in Valencia. When you get laid with Anita
Pallenberg for the first time you remember things. What a quote machine he is.
He's a romantic in his own unique way.
That's true. The songs were very weird, it must be said, when it came to sleeping with each other's girlfriends, or basically anyone that any of the others said previously slept with. Apparently in the early nineteen sixty five tour basis Bill Wyman and Brian Jones being a sport out of stealing each other's sexual partners, sometimes multiples in a day. At a barbecue in Melbourne famously semi famously slept with both
the hostess and her daughter. This is all per the Old God's Almost Dead book, which you know was a trashy book. Yeah, and it's written by a guy who wrote another trashy book that was largely discredited. So do with that what you will. I need a Pallenberg for her part split with Jones for good as soon after her affair with Keith began. Obviously, this further strained relations within the band. Jones, who was alienated from Richard and Jagger already saw it, stole some drugs and alcohol, wreaking
havoc on his health. By the following year, he was a shadow of his former self, abdicating his role as co creator and the Rolling Stones. His musical contributions had dwindled by the time they recorded nineteen sixty nine to Let It Bleed, and he was asked to leave the band that June. Within a month, he was found dead in the swimming pool of his East Sussex estate, a farm formerly owned by Winnie the Pooh author A. A. Milne. Jones was an early entry into the infamous twenty seven Club,
having to deal with his jealousy. Keith would later say, it becomes intolerable and you can really get nasty about it. I tried to be fair to him, but to be honest, he was a bit of a bastard and it doesn't surprise me that he came to a sticky end a stick.
He d.
Damn And for those of you who don't know, Brian Jones's death is somewhat controversial.
That's a whole other episode, but look that up.
The other way Satisfaction disrupted The stones interpersonal dynamics was that it introduced notorious rock villain Alan Klein into the group's orbit. Their manager at the time, Andrew lug Oldham, was more or less a young pr hustler rather than a proper entertainment in Pasario. He was the band's age and had his finger on what was happening in the music world, but he was not much of a business figure. With a gargantuan global success of satisfaction, he found himself
in way too far over his head. Enter Alan Klein, a prototypical cigar chopping executive up there with Louis B. Mayer and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Really the primo music industry shark. Please enjoy this quote from his own nephew, Ronnie Schneider, who worked as the Stones tour manager for a time. Was Klein villified absolutely, But vilification works two ways. Saddam Hussein used vilification to keep himself safe for many years. Yes,
Alan Klin's own nephew compared him to Saddam Hussein. Before managing the Rolling Stones, Klein had made a name for himself as one of the most aggressive and controversial figures in the music business. Raised in a New Jersey orphanage, he began his career as an accountant, specializing in auditing
the royalty statements of record labels. In the late fifties, he gained notoriety for recovering unpaid royalties for artists like Bobby Darren and Connie Francis, often exposing shady record industry practices in the process. It's worth noting that Klein would often pocket at least half of these recovered royalties for his troubles. Klein soon expanded into artist management, quickly earning a reputation as a tough negotiator who could bring better
contracts out of labels. He's big breakthrough came in the early sixties when he took over the business affairs of Sam Cook, legendary soul singer, helping him take the hundreds of thousands of dollars he recovered.
Through royalty statement audience, which again.
Was Clin's specialty, and using the proceeds to establish Cook's own label and publishing company, which I feel.
Is very, very overlooked in sort of the legend and history of black music in the United States, So that Sam Cook was a label owner, Yeah.
Oh, extremely, I mean it kind of got overshadowed, and I'm not trying to flip it by him getting murdered like with the yeah and a half of that happening. Client success with Cook cemented his status as a savvy if ruthless power player, drawing the attention of major artists.
By the mid sixties, Client had hitched.
Himself to the British Invasion bandwagon, doing deals with people like The Day Clark Five and The Stones, Nemesis Hermit's Sermits, Enemy the Pod Hermit's Ermitts.
I just loved how much they pop up unless they annoy both you and the Rolling Stones.
Actually though, I me there's a kind of hush show over the world that sounds good tonight.
I like that song? Okay.
So by working with these British Invasion bands that brought him into the Stone's orbit. Andelou Goldham, the Stone's nominal manager, was attracted by his tough guy persona, the way he eschewed suits for turtlenecks and swinged whiskey from the bottle and carried rolls of cash.
Oh yeah.
Ultimately, he brought Klein into the business organization in the summer of nineteen sixty five to help negotiate a new record deal between The Stones and their label, Decca following the global Successive Satisfaction. Klein's famous line at the time was that he promised to get the Stones more money than their friendly rivals, the Beatles. This he did on paper, where the money actually went is a little more complicated. Once Klein got his hooks into the Stones, it would
prove next to impossible to get them out. Odum's role in the band quickly diminished as he sunk for the drug use. To quote Wikipedia, when Jagger and Richards were arrested for drug possession in nineteen sixty seven, instead of devising a strategy for their legal defense and public relations, Oldham fled to the United States, leaving Klein to deal.
With the problem. Nah well, who among us? Yeah, yeah, I'm out of here. Sorry, guys, I haven't just getting way too heavy for old old loogie. Oldham sold his rights to the band to Klein later that year, effectively
making him their sole manager. This was generally considered bad news for the Stones, considering that Klein generally operated under the mantra, why take twenty percent of my clients when I can have it all, although, as author Rich Cohen noted, it was fitting that a bunch of blues obsessed Brits got robbed blind by an scrupulous industry heavy giving them an authentic taste of what it was like for their
black musical heroes. Klein died in two thousand and nine, but Jordan is still afraid of him, so for legal reasons, we'll phrase this next section as such. Klein has been accused of such a fences as pocketing the Rolling Stones one point twenty five million label advance, with holding royalty payments, stealing publishing rights to their songs, and neglecting to pay taxes for five years, which ultimately led to their famous taxile in France in nineteen seventy one, yielding their epic
double album Exile on Main Street. So all things considered, it was a why. For more on this, please listen to Jordan's aforementioned Stone's Touring Party podcast. Klein is most famous these days as the management figure. He came in to oversee the Beatles during their death throws in nineteen sixty nine, following the death of their original manager Brian Epstein.
Paul McCartney famously hated Climb while the other three Beatles loved him, and the followout from that disagreement did much more to break up the band than Yoko Ono ever did. Paul hated Klein because he'd heard bad things about him from his new in laws, Lynda Eastman's father and brother, who were both New York entertainment attorneys, and Paul's friends,
and the Stones. The Beatles actually called a meeting with Mick Jaggert asking about his experience with Klein, but unfortunately Clin was also invited to that meeting and Mick pussied out. Paul would say, we the Beatles were all gathered in the big boardroom there. We asked Mick how Klein was, and he said, well, he's all right if you like that kind of thing. He didn't say he's a robber, even though Klein had already taken all those copyrights off
them by that time. Nick did approach John Lennon privately after the meeting and offered a much more dire warning, saying that signing with Clein would be quote the biggest mistake of your life. Lenin ignored the warning, and support for Clein jeopardized the band's entire business future and played a key role in their eventual breakup. Meanwhile, McCartney, taking Jagger's concerns to Hart, filed lawsuit against his fellow Beatles to formally dissolve the group, a move that ultimately protected
their catalog from falling under Cline's control. Lenin would later admit that Paul and Mick had been right, but by that point it was too late and the Beatles were legally dissolved. So by the transitive property, Alan Klein used the Scrolling Stones to get to the Beatles, so descent in the ranks of the Beatles which led to their split. Klein had been brought into the Stones organization following the success Satisfaction. Therefore, Satisfaction led to the breakup of the Beatles.
I mean, I mean, yeah, it's plausible. I mean so, I guess in the end the Rolling Stones did win. I'm still kind of that as Rolling Stones won Beatles zero. Go ahead though, okay if I must.
According to whosample dot com, there are one hundred and forty four covers of Satisfaction, ranging from Everyone to Aretha Franklin to Devo, Phillis Diller to Cat Power and Britney Spears to the Grateful Dead, But as far as Keith Riches is concerned, the definitive version was Otis Reddings. Reddings recorded his version of Satisfaction a year after The Stones in nineteen sixty six, encouraged by stack spand mats, Steve Cropper and Booker T.
Jones.
At first reading wasn't familiar with the song, and once he heard it he really wasn't a fan. So he imagined it entirely, swapping out the iconic guitar riff for a brassy horn section and taking major liberties with the lyrics. Ironically, this was closer to what Keith Riches had originally envisioned for the track, and he praised Redding's bold interpretation. The way Otis ended up doing it is probably closer to my original conception for the song. He later said, it's
an obvious horn riff. Otis got it right. Our version was a demo for Otis. That's a nice thing to say, it is.
Yeah.
At a time when British bands were regularly covering black American artists, Redding's take flipped the script. It became one of the first notable examples of a black artist reworking a British rock song. Otis's version reached number thirty one on the US charts. According to Setless FM, the Stone's
a play it. I Can't get No status faction one thousand and seven times to date during concerts which must mean they've done one thousand and seven concerts, because there's no way they didn't play that song after it became a hit. Also, Peter Noon of Hermas Hermit's has performed at six times. I have not heard it.
So, as we mentioned earlier, one of Jagger's most famous quotes is I'd rather be dead than singing Satisfaction when I'm sixty five. So he turned sixty five years old on July twenty six, two thousand and eight, and since then they have played Satisfaction another one hundred and ninety
eight times. So if anything about Big Jagger bothers, you know that since two thousand and eight he has privately wished for death on stage on some of the world's biggest stages in front of the world's biggest crowds at least one hundred and ninety eight times.
This may be true, but Mick also said this in nineteen ninety five. People get very blase about their big hit. This was the song that really made Rolling Stones changed us from just another band into a huge monster band. You always need one song. We weren't American, and America was a big thing and we always wanted to make it here. It was very impressive the way that song and the popularity of the band became a worldwide thing.
It's a signature tune really, rather than a great classic painting, because it's only like one thing, a kind of signature that everyone knows. Its a very catchy title, as a very catchy guitar riff, as a great guitar sound, which was original at the time, and it captures the spirit of the times, which is very important in those kinds of songs. Decades later, Satisfactions steal pulses with the urgency and frustration that first electrified the airwaves in nineteen sixty five.
It wasn't just a hit. It was a howl of discontent, a declaration of identity in a world that felt increasingly hollow and overpackaged. With one slashing riff, the Rolling Stones gave voice to a generation that didn't see itself reflected in the polish smiles of TV ads or the promises of the post war dream. It was raw, restless, and unapologetically alive. It continues to rank high on lists of so called greatest rock and roll songs, but those lists
are subjective and stupid. Nothing else Satisfaction represents the moment rock and roll stopped asking for permission.
I'm gonna think about that for a while. What do you think you got another one?
You got another song of the summer and another song that stopped asking for permission?
Which is which proto rock and roll song didn't ask for permission?
I think scale is crucial. I think something that was aimed this high on the charts.
And probably the song that that blues guy, the blues guitarist I mentioned earlier cut called I'm Gonna Murder that woman.
Okay, maybe the moment pop stopped asking for permission there?
Are you happy with that?
Yeah?
Yeah, I mean there's a lot of murder ballads where they just talk about it. I murdered this I heard I didn't ask so.
Yeah, Eminem kind of like that Unlocked in the top forty.
Yeah, possibly the most famous songs about murdering in the top twenty, I guess. Yeah, hang down your head, Tom.
Juelas, Oh wow, that's good. All right, songs about murder, hit songs about murder, hit songs about murder.
Let's look no, because now you have to go into like the whole history of the child ballads and everything through Appalaysia which are like you know, I mean, because then you have Hey Joe, well, yeah, hey Joe.
Oh goodbye Earl. Did you actually kill him or was it just the plan?
I forget, I remember the specifics in there. There's a Nick Cave for Cobby. That one my name was Las Jane Mac the knife, Mack the knife badly Roy Brown. I thought that was just cutting people up in barrooms? Is it about killing people?
What's the other one? Then, don't mess around with Jim? Which I always thought was one was a sequel song or the other?
I forget? Yeah, yeah, has that been disproven that? I don't know.
We came along this road Nick Cave, Yeah, oh.
Nick Cave has dozens of songs about murder. But I'm I'm I'm speaking. The wild Rose is like an old English. It's one of those old English ones. God, he's got so many songs about murder. Actually, one of my favorite songs that the Dead do from around this time is called Me and My Uncle, which is actually written by John Phillips of all people, and I can't give away the twist, but it does involve murder.
Hm.
This feels like kind of a fool's game. A lot of songs about murder. I've ruined your nice kicker with it, though, so.
See cat that as a win.
I shot the sheriff, rolling stones too, beetles zero, oh Maxwell silver hammer, forgot about that?
Oh yeah, Delilah, Delilah. I shot the sheriff psycho killer yeah, fullsome prison blues of course, of course, of course, excitable boy, but he bean raps it, man downs Rihanna.
Oh well. The Kicks is also about by Foster. The People is also about murder. Oh, pumped up kicks. Yeah, school shooting, right, all the little kids with pumped up kicks, better run and run. Yes, somebody's gun. Yeah yeah, I don't like that. I don't like that. Man, don't do I don't It's in poor taste, not like all of our jokes. Uh sorry, why don't you just cut all
this out of it? The stop messing for permission, and I'll say, And they never would again until LMFAO cut their song Sorry for Party Rocking, which threw the nation into a tizzy because once again rock had saw well, actually, in the maximum of Church Hill, it's always easier to ask for forgiveness than beg for permission. So that was suppose now I don't know, I don't know, I'm making
that up. So in a sense, LMFAO embodied this for a troubled new millennium torn asunder by wars, on terrors, drugs, facing the Great Recession two thousand and eight, and so when they released Sorry for Party Rocking, not only were they asking for forgiveness instead of permission, but they were apologizing on behalf of the elders of that country. Because you remember, one of those men is like forty seven, yeah, yeah.
And he's er Barry Gordy's kid, right or nephew or something.
Yes, yes, So you have a member of the older landed gentry apologizing in song to the younger millennials. And in that way you have a baby boomer apologizing and it fits right in the grand tradition of satisfaction. I'm tying it all together in a kicker right now. Sorry for Satisfaction Rocking. This has been too much information. Sorry for Satisfaction Rocking. I'm Alex Heigelan. This is my co host, Clinton Halen. Sorry, what's your name again? And I'm Jordan
Roun talk. That's right, Okay, we'll see next time, folks. We'll do it. We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna catch you if it just will catch you.
Said it like the family guy, creepy old man voice.
I'm gonna catch you. This has been this has been too much information and uh, we'll catch you, you little pig with some bitch.
No, no, no, This is how we're gonna sign off that we forgot to after Galaxy Quest and Tim Allen would leave set he just was say leaving, that's where we ended, okay, leaving leaving too much information was a production of iHeart Radio.
The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtog.
The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.
The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtog and Alex Heigel.
With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows