Rock and roll roughness: the classic Rolling Stones song that features three glaring mistakes
Who said rock and roll needed to be perfect? The biggest names in the genre, like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, may have some fantastic songs throughout their catalogue, but one of the genre’s calling cards was capturing a feeling on the record whenever you walk into the studio rather than being on the same level as a classical musician. It might always be more important to capture the vibe rather than the one magical take, but The Rolling Stones were flying blind throughout most of their early years.
Granted, The Stones having a few blemishes in their recordings is nothing new throughout the years. The band always used unconventional ways of getting their music to sound weird, and from plugging in an acoustic guitar played through a cassette tape on ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ to Keith Richards’ piercing lead guitar tone ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, they were willing to do everything they could to make things sound strange.
But let’s backtrack for a second. The year is 1965, and Richards is about to deliver one of the most iconic performances of all time with ‘Satisfaction’. He already had the idea of making something based around a horn line, but instead of getting an entire brass section, Richards took a page out of The Kinks’s playbook and made the kind of guitar tone that made his six-string snarl a bit more.
The results sounded fantastic, but it’s easy to tell that Richards is new to the effect as well. Compared to the warm feel of the rest of the record, his lead tone sounds like it hasn’t been properly mixed, with Brian Jones’s guitar sounding a lot more comfortable. And judging by what Richards had to work with, he sounds extremely clumsy, especially after the first chorus, where you can hear him switch his tone knob off and on.
If that was the only time that happened, though, it would have been a nice sonic artefact, but Richards still makes mistakes throughout the song. At one point, you hear him hit the switch too late and come in way later than the rest of the band on the chorus. That must have mortified him because, in the next chorus, he comes in too early and even plays a bum note in the middle of the verse to make sure it sounds right.
It’s easy to overlook this kind of thing now, but looking back on it, it’s no wonder why people thought that The Stones were the unprofessional version of The Beatles. The band weren’t afraid to make glaring mistakes in the middle of their song, but it’s not like the Fab Four were completely spotless, either.
After all, McCartney sounds like a ball of nerves when singing ‘Love Me Do’ on every remaster of the song, and even their later material like ‘I’m Looking Through You’ featured some moments where things weren’t exactly perfect. If anything, the Fabs did take a few cues from The Stones as well, with tracks like ‘Day Tripper’ and ‘Paperback Writer’ feeling like a direct retort to what Richards had been playing.
Call it unprofessional all you want, but those imperfections in ‘Satisfaction’ are half the reason why it still sounds interesting all these years later. Compared to the prog rock musicians who grew more and more meticulous as the years went on, this was the closest thing to punk that The Stones were going to spit out during the 1960s. It’s not going to earn any Guitarist of the Year awards from a technical perspective, but as a wise man once said, it’s only rock and roll.
