(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction

That riff is often called one of rock's best hooks. The words touch on sexual frustration and the pressures of commercialism. The Rolling Stones first cut the song on May 10, 1965, at Chess Studios in Chicago, with Brian Jones playing harmonica. They lip-synced to a dub of this version when they first performed it on the TV show Shindig!

Two days later, they rerecorded it at RCA Studios in Hollywood, using a different beat and a Maestro fuzzbox to give the guitar riff more sustain. Richards had planned to later replace the riff with a horn section, calling the fuzz tone a placeholder for what the horns would do. But the other band members, along with producer Andrew Loog Oldham and engineer David Hassinger, outvoted Richards and Jagger to release the track as a single. The song's success sold out the entire stock of Gibson fuzzboxes by the end of 1965.

The song first came out as a single in the United States in June 1965, and appeared on the American version of the album Out of Our Heads that July. It became the Stones' first number one in the US. In the UK, pirate radio stations were the only ones to play it at first, because the lyrics were seen as too sexually suggestive. It later became the band's fourth number one in Britain.

One of the most popular songs worldwide, it ranked number two on Rolling Stone's 2004 list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. It entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998 and was added to the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry in 2006. Richards wrote the riff in his sleep and recorded it on a Philips cassette player. He didn't realize he'd written it; when he listened back in the morning, he heard about two minutes of acoustic guitar, then the sound of him dropping his pick, followed by forty minutes of snoring.

The location of this event is disputed—sources mention the Fort Harrison Hotel in Clearwater, Florida, a house in Chelsea, or the London Hilton. But Richards wrote in his autobiography that he was in his flat on Carlton Hill in St. John's Wood. He added that Jagger wrote the lyrics by the pool in Clearwater four days before the studio session, which explains the confusion. The song opens with the guitar riff, joined halfway through by the bass.

Lyrics and melody

The chords—E, D, and A—come from the E mixolydian scale, common in blues and rock. The title line uses a double negative. Jagger's voice shifts from cynical commentary to half-sung, half-yelled frustration in the chorus, where the riff returns. The lyrics complain about modern commercialism: radio plays "useless information," a TV ad tells him "how white my shirts can be—but he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke the same cigarettes as me," a jab at Marlboro ads.

He also sings about the stress of fame and touring. The line about not getting "girl reaction" caused controversy, with some hearing it as a reference to sex. Jagger later said listeners missed the dirtiest part: the girl asks him to come back next week because she's "on a losing streak," a reference to menstruation. The song ends with a quiet repetition of the title, then a full shout of the line, with the final words fading out.