The song Keith Richards called a musical “miracle”
Some of the ideas for the best songs in history arrived in a dream. Keith Richards knows this better than anyone.
When you look into the psychology of why that is, it’s actually pretty interesting. Put it this way, if you think about the basic reason we have dreams at all, like Freud saying it’s us processing day’s residues, it makes sense as to why so many musicians have their best ideas when they’re catching some much-needed shut-eye.
So by that logic, because musicians are so immersed in their own creative world, their mind processes memories and experiences they’ve lived through that day, sometimes even coming up with new ideas when they’re not even conscious. It’s a well-known Lady Gaga approach to lean over in a half-asleep state and sing a half-baked idea into a voice recording app.
Countless musicians across history have done and continue to do the exact same thing. Echo & The Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch might be a winner when it comes to this, having come up with the main lyric to ‘The Killing Moon’ while knocked out and being so impressed with himself he half credited it to god. Paul McCartney said that ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Let It Be’ came to him in a dream. Of course, there’s also a Rolling Stone in the mix, with ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ coming to Keith Richards while he left a tape running through his brain’s most overactive hours during one prophetic night in 1965.
Apparently, in his barely-there state, he’d started humming the melody to ‘Satisfaction’ in between a few minutes of acoustic guitar and 40 minutes of “me snoring”. Mick Jagger made it into the smash hit it became, but without its visceral origin story, it probably wouldn’t have ever seen the light of day. Literally. Naturally, therefore, Richards said its entire inception was a miracle.
“‘Satisfaction’ was that sort of miracle that took place,” Richards later told Terry Gross. “ I had one of the first little cassette players, it was a fascinating little machine to me, a cassette player, that you could actually just lay ideas down, you know, wherever you were. I set the machine up, and I put it in a fresh tape. I go to bed as usual with my guitar, and I wake up the next morning, I see that the tape has run to the very end.”
He went on: “And I think, well, I didn’t do anything, you know. I said, maybe I hit a button while I was asleep, you know? So I put it back to the beginning and pushed play. And there in some sort of ghostly version is I can’t get no satisfaction. And so there is a whole verse of it.”
In all fairness, it probably actually was pretty miraculous to fall asleep and somehow come up with the anthem of an entire generation. Most ideas that come to people in their sleep end up leaving nothing more than furrowed eyebrows the next morning, but Richards knew immediately he’d accidentally and unknowingly created gold.
And it remains one of the best songs in history – signalling the juncture between immense societal change and the desire for youth to dismantle the malaise left behind by their parents. And all it was at first was a mumbled garble from someone who probably went to sleep drunk.
