The Rolling Stones Classic That Keith Richards Disliked and Didn’t Believe Was “Single Material”

Sometimes, a band knows they’ve made a hit right away, and other times, it takes a bit of convincing—such was the case for the Rolling Stones hit Keith Richards disliked and insisted wasn’t worth putting out as a single. Looking back now, imagining the Stones without this iconic track seems sacrilege.

Of course, hindsight is always 20/20. Regardless of what Richards thought about the song when he first wrote it, he certainly enjoyed the success the track brought the band all those years ago in 1965.

Keith Richards Disliked This Future Rolling Stones Hit At First

Singles are commercially sensible opportunities for a band to reach a wide audience before releasing a full album. The songs a band selects to put out as singles should be universally appealing, catchy, and enduring. Days after writing the now-instantly recognizable riff for “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” Richards wasn’t sure the track qualified.

“There’s this motel in Clearwater, Florida. I remember sitting with Keith and writing the song “Satisfaction,”” frontman Mick Jagger recalled in the BBC documentary My Life As A Rolling Stone. “[Then-manager] Andrew Oldham said, ‘This is like a No. 1 single—this is great.’ Keith was like, ‘I don’t really like it. It can’t come out as a single.’”

“He only had the first bit,” Jagger later explained (via History). “It sounded like a country sort of thing on acoustic guitar. It didn’t sound like rock. [Keith]…thought it was a joke. He really didn’t think it was single material, and we all said, ‘You’re off your head.’ Which he was, of course.”

The Valuable Lesson “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” Taught Richards

Amazingly, Keith Richards wrote what would later become one of the Rolling Stones’ most defining hits in his sleep. As he explained in his memoir Life, he had woken up in the middle of the night and recorded a small excerpt from “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” to a nearby cassette player, half-awake. “I had no idea I’d written it; it’s only thank God for the little Philips cassette player,” Richards wrote.

Noticing that the new tape he had put in the night before had reached its end, Richards played it back the next morning, unsure what he might hear. “There was “Satisfaction.” There was just the bare bones of the song [and] forty minutes of me snoring. But the bare bones is all you need.”

Richards said he had originally imagined his fuzzy guitar riff as a horn line. But when the band got in the studio, “We didn’t have any horns, and I was only going to lay down a dub. The fuzz tone came in handy, so I could give a shape to what the horns were supposed to do. Next thing I know, we’re listening to ourselves in Minnesota somewhere on the radio, “Hit of the Week,” and we didn’t even know Andrew had put the f***ing thing out!”

“At first, I was mortified,” Richards admitted. “As far as I was concerned, that was just the dub. Ten days on the road, and it’s number one nationally. The record of the summer of ‘65. So, I’m not arguing. And I learned that lesson. Sometimes, you can overwork things. Not everything’s designed for your taste and your taste alone.”

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