The 1965 Rolling Stones classic that was a complete fluke: “The most superb, lucky song ever”
It’s impossible to predict the life that a song will go on to have and how the masses will react, as The Rolling Stones know all too well.
When a band heads into the studio with the ambition of creating a hit song, chances are that audiences will pick up on that when it’s finally released and react coldly. For a song to connect, it needs to be authentic and not be overthought to a scientific extent, but even then, it’s in the hands of the gods as to whether it’ll be legacy-defining.
There is no formula for a hit song, and a team of Grammy-Award-winning songwriters cobbled together by a major record label could never replicate what came to Keith Richards in a dream in 1965.
There is a reason why hit songs don’t arrive in the dreams of you and me, but happen to the likes of Richards or Paul McCartney. Music is an all-encompassing thought for them, which takes up the majority of their intellectual bandwidth on a daily basis, causing it to follow them even during sleep.
A dream once gifted McCartney with ‘Yesterday’, and in the case of Richards, it delivered the initial building blocks for ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’.
One night, midway through his deep sleep, the riff for the famous Stones song appeared out of nowhere. Remember, this was 1965, before the invention of the iPhone voice notes, and for most, this would have been lost in the ether. Fortunately, in this case, the guitarist had a Phillips cassette player near his bedside and captured the magical piece of music rather than let it float into oblivion while half asleep.
In his autobiography, Life, Richards recalled: “It was just a rough idea. There was just the bare bones of the song, and it didn’t have that noise, of course, because I was on acoustic… But the bare bones is all you need.”
Those bare bones quickly grew into an entire song, which helped define the career of The Rolling Stones. While they’d had hits before, ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ put them into a different stratosphere, a position that they’ve remained for the last 61 years. If it wasn’t for Richards’ dream, the track would never have come to fruition, and who knows whether they’d have achieved that same degree of success.
Even after it was recorded, The Stones didn’t know they had a mammoth hit on their hands. Years later, in the BBC documentary My Life as a Rolling Stone, Jagger revealed Richards didn’t even want it released as a single.
“There’s this motel in Clearwater, Florida, and I remember sitting with Keith and writing the song ‘Satisfaction’. [Our manager] Andrew Oldham said, ‘This is like a number one single, this is great!’ Keith was like, ‘I don’t really like it. It can’t come out as a single.’ And it went to number one like instantly,” he gleefully recalled.
Thankfully, Richards’ position has changed, and now, he couldn’t be more positive towards ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, even if it was a complete one-off. When asked if he still gets songs appearing to him in dreams, Richards told GQ in 2020: “I wish. That was the most superb, lucky song ever. No, I’ve never quite dreamt up another one in the middle of the night.”
“But that was very early days for me writing, and just the idea that that could actually happen was incredible. I’m still waiting for the next dream, you know,” Richards added.
As much as that next song has never come to him in a dream, Richards can be content with the stroke of luck that came his way in 1965 when one of the most iconic riffs of all time fell from the sky into his mind.
If Richards didn’t have that cassette player by his bedside, ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ would never have materialised, which is a horrendous thought that doesn’t bear thinking about. Thankfully, we don’t live in that alternate reality, and can listen to it at full blast, which still sounds just as euphoric all these years later.
