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  The French have a phrase for it (Don’t they have a phrase for everything?!?): “succès fou”—crazy success. There is “success,” then there is “unimaginable, wild success.” That is what the Stones achieved first in America, then all over the globe in 1965. Some of it was sheer luck; some of it was sheer timing; but all of it put them on the path unlike any other in music history.

  CHAPTER 8

  (I CAN’T GET NO) SATISFACTION

  AS MICK AND KEITH’S partnership matured and jelled, their strength as great rock ’n’ roll writers dovetailed beautifully with the image that Oldham had manufactured for them. Finally, by late 1964, early 1965, even the States began to notice. When their song “The Last Time” reached the Top 10 in April of 1965, they were poised and ready for the kind of explosion that catapults a semi-successful group into the stratosphere. It’s ironic, considering the message of the song, that it was “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” that did the trick.

  ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: We’d gone from the point of arranging somebody else’s song to the top of the mountain with “Satisfaction.” The rest of that run was almost too easy. They knew what they were doing. They knew the distances from it. We knew we were there. The one before we were in California—“The Last Time”—I called up Phil Spector to come down to the studio. “Listen to this. Tell me how high it will go.” I love him but I didn’t need him to tell me how far “Satisfaction” would go . . . All the way to the top!

  But let’s back up a second. One of the best Keith Richards lyrics cropped up in 1967’s “Ruby Tuesday”: “Catch your dreams before they slip away.” He may just have stumbled upon that advice when the Stones were on their third tour of North America in the spring of 1965. During a stay at the Gulf Motel in Clearwater, Florida, Keith woke up in the middle of the night.

  KEITH RICHARDS: It was one of the things where most songs I don’t remember where they came from. But I woke up in the middle of the night to this one, and for some reason I just grabbed a guitar and turned the tape machine on and said I can’t get no satisfaction; that’s what I had plus the melody, the chord changes. I woke up in the middle of a dream. Songs come at the weirdest time and you’ve got no control over it. You can be doing the most unlikely things when songs come to you and the only thing you hope is that you’ve got a cassette machine with you at the time. From there on I gave it to Mick.

  Continuing our theme about standing on the shoulders of giants, Chuck Berry has a lyric in his song “Thirty Days” that goes, “If I don’t get no satisfaction from the judge.” Keith also later acknowledged that the riff itself was a reworking of the backing track for Martha and the Vandellas’ huge Motown hit—“Dancing in the Streets.” Such borrowing used to be called “the folk process,” but now and forever it could also be called “the rock process.” But here is the real punch line to the Stones’ first number one single and best-known signature song: Keith himself did not think it was a hit single. Here’s his story:

  KEITH RICHARDS: The first time I ever, you know, sort of flexed a muscle about what record should go out [was “Satisfaction”]. I didn’t think it was a single. I mean it went right by me, you know. I just sort of wrote it down, put it on a tape. We cut it in two or three takes and I thought, “Oh well, there you go. That’s a nice track for the album, but that’s about all.” I thought if we were going to make a single of it, that we were gonna record it and sort of work on it . . . It just sticks out—that box that some bloke had given me made a nice fuzz . . . [and I went] “Wow! Oh that’s nice—Deet-Dee, Dee-Dee-Dee-Dee-Deet-Dee, Deet-Dee . . .”

  Thank God no one paid any attention to him!

  The reference track was recorded at Chess Studios in Chicago on May 10, but then the group decided to finish it in Los Angeles, where they had an established working relationship with engineer Dave Hassinger and the Phil Spector–tutored arranger Jack Nitzsche (who had been the musical director of the T.A.M.I. Show). The track rocked! The song put aside any notions of the Rolling Stones as merely a blues covers band. It synthesized all of the diverse styles that the group had been perfecting since 1962: blues, rhythm and blues, soul, folk, and their own unique brand of hard rock. Plus, they addressed all of their primary themes for the rest of the decade in the lyrics of that one song: frustration, hypocrisy, corruption, alienation, sexuality, boredom, aggression, suspicion, rage, and cynical mass-media manipulation.

  CHAPTER 9

  GET OFF OF MY CLOUD

  THE FIRST NUMBER ONE single of the rock ’n’ roll era was “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets. What could be more appealing than a number one hit? Every aspiring musician dreams of it.

  Some of the biggest names in pop music history have never scored a number one single. Bob Dylan, for instance. Or Van Morrison. Or, believe it or not, Creedence Clearwater Revival. That’s right. One of the biggest hit-making machines of the late ’60s and early ’70s never had a number one single.

  Then too, there are the so-called super one hit wonders whose fifteen minutes of fame rest entirely on putting one single song at the top of the Top 40.

  These harsh realities just magnify the accomplishments of that rare and select group of artists who manage to score multiple number one hits over the course of their career. Count the Rolling Stones in that hallowed group.

  After the meteoric success of “Satisfaction,” the Stones found themselves with a new problem.

  KEITH RICHARDS: I remember after “Satisfaction” got to number one—bang, bang at the door. “Where’s the follow-up?” I mean, every twelve weeks you had to have another one ready. The minute you put out a single, you had to start working your butt off on the next one, and the bigger the hit, the more pressure there was on the follow-up. But it was an incredibly good school for songwriting in that you couldn’t piss around for months and months agonizing about the deeper meaning of this or that. No matter what else you were doing, you had to make damn sure you didn’t let up on the writing. It made you search around and listen for ideas. It made you very aware of what was going on around you, because you were looking for that song. It might come in a coffee shop, or it might come on the street or in a cab. You might hear a phrase at a bus stop. You’re listening for it every moment, and anything could be a song, and if you don’t have one you’re up the creek without a paddle.

  Richards’s next act after “Satisfaction” turned out to be “Get Off of My Cloud”—a blistering, primal scream about the pressures attached to manufacturing that next big hit single. Another delicious irony about “Get Off of My Cloud” is that it toppled the Beatles’ vise-like, four-week grip at number one with “Yesterday.” “Hey you! Get off of my cloud,” indeed!

  CHAPTER 10

  PAINT IT BLACK

  “PAINT IT BLACK” is one of the Rolling Stones’ most enduring songs, and has been invoked in various bleak and scary movies, including Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, and the horror flicks The Devil’s Advocate and Stir of Echoes. In its earliest incarnation, it was nothing more than a send-up of an early Stones associate—Eric Easton (the man who co-managed the group with Andrew Loog Oldham from 1963 to 1965).

  KEITH RICHARDS: What’s amazing about that one for me is the sitar. Also, the fact that we cut it as a comedy track. Bill was playing an organ, doing a takeoff of our first manager who started his career in show business as an organist in a cinema pit. We’d been doing it with funky rhythms and it hadn’t worked, and he started playing like this and everybody got behind it. It’s a two-beat, very strange. Brian playing the sitar makes it a whole other thing.

  There’s no mystery about how and where Brian picked up the sitar.

  GEORGE HARRISON: I always used to see Brian in the clubs and hang out with him. In the mid-sixties he used to come out to my house—particularly when he’d got “the fear,” when he’d mixed too many weird things together. I’d hear his voice shouting to me from out in the garden: “George, George . . .” I’d let him in—he was a good mate. He would always come round
to my house in the sitar period. We talked about “Paint It Black” and he picked up my sitar and tried to play it—and the next thing was he did that track.

  Paint It, Black (sic)

  So that’s how it went from being an inside joke to a somber, deeply dark, nihilistic rant.

  And although certainly not intended, the song has always had a strong connection to the war in Vietnam. At the end of Full Metal Jacket, it plays over the credits to illustrate the literal and emotional deaths of all men engaged in war. It was also the theme song of a short-lived CBS television series (Tour of Duty) about Vietnam that ran from 1987 to 1990. And Thomas Bird, founder of the Vietnam Veterans Ensemble Theater Company (VETCo), told me that it was the most compelling and relatable song that he listened to during his entire time in Southeast Asia. Then too there is this powerful recollection from www.songfacts.com of a Vietnam vet from Queens, New York:

  BILL FROM QUEENS: While the Rolling Stones’ song “Paint It Black” was not written about the Vietnam War, it has great meaning for many combat veterans from that war. The depression, the aura of premature death, loss of innocence, abandonment of all hope, are perfectly expressed in the song. When you walk off the killing fields, still alive, physically intact, you want everything painted black, like your heart, your soul, your mind, your life.

  This is a clear-cut case of life imitating art rather than art imitating life. The Stones had their fingers on the pulse of the mid-sixties international turmoil even when that was not their primary artistic intention.

  CHAPTER 11

  LITTLE T & A

  SHALL WE TALK about sex? Don’t we have to? It’s a Rolling Stones book, after all.

  The phrase itself—“rock ’n’ roll”—is a euphemism for sexual intercourse. “I’m gonna rock my baby with a steady roll” isn’t about dancing. “Rock me baby, rock me baby, all night long” isn’t a lullaby. And “Little T & A” isn’t about Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.

  The early uproar about rock ’n’ roll being the devil’s music was elevated to iconic status in this 1950s sermon by the Reverend Jimmy Snow that you’ve seen and heard in countless documentaries about the evils of Elvis: “Rock ’n’ roll music and why I preach against it. I believe that it is a contributing factor to our juvenile delinquency of today. I know what it does to you. And I know of the evil feeling that you feel when you sing it. And I know the . . . the . . . lost position that you get into . . . and the beat . . . well . . . uhmm . . . if you talk to the average teenager of today and you ask them what it is about rock ’n’ roll music that they like, and the first thing that they’ll say is the beat, the beat, THE BEAT!”

  A less hysterical, much more measured analysis of the same phenomenon was offered by television journalist and commentator Jeff Greenfield:

  JEFF GREENFIELD: It began with the Music. Nothing we see in the counterculture—not the clothes, the hair, the sexuality, the drugs, the rejection of reason, the resort to symbols and magic—none of it is separable from the coming to power in the 1950s of rock ’n’ roll music. Brewed in the hidden corners of black America’s cities, its rhythms infected white Americans, seducing them out of the kind of temperate bobby-sox passions out of which Andy Hardy films are spun. Rock ’n’ roll was elemental, savage, dripping with sex; it was just as our parents feared. Not in the conspiracy theories of moral guardians, not that we dropped our books and molested children, but in the more subtle sense of what the music did, unleashing with its power knowledge that our bodies were our own Joy Machines. It would take years for successive generations of young Americans to work the equation out fully; it would take a disillusioning that included a wretched war, a wave of violence, and a brace of public murders of great men to spur on the rejection of reason as a tool of death, and the embrace of rock ’n’ roll not as pleasure but as salvation. But in rock ’n’ roll it began; the first tremors along the generational fault.

  Doctor Fred Newman offers this explanation of the connection between music and sexuality: “Psychiatrists have long known that the source of mass hysteria springs from repressed sexual urges, composed of both sadistic and aggressive elements. The number of occasions on which pop singers are physically assaulted by their fans—Jagger himself was recently pulled off a twenty-foot platform in a Zurich stadium and almost torn to pieces—confirms the nature of the emotions involved. Essentially therefore the concert hall hysteria represents a sudden escape of the kind of emotions which the forces of Puritanism, morality, and authority—both social and parental—normally seek to contain. When a pop audience blows its top, it is in fact indulging in a communal act of defiance against a set of values which it feels to be unnecessarily and intolerably restrictive. It is a group protest against a society which it regards as impersonal, mechanistic, and money-bound. Undoubtedly Mick Jagger, purveying as he does his own brand of untamed rebelliousness, is at once a symbol and focal point of this seething insurrection.”

  There was nothing new about all this, of course. The same dynamic could certainly be offered up to explain Frank Sinatra’s “bobby-soxer” hysteria in the 1940s. Witness this article from the January 10, 1945, issue of Britain’s the Guardian: “The United States is now in the midst of one of those remarkable phenomena of mass hysteria which occur from time to time on this side of the Atlantic. Mr. Frank Sinatra, an amiable young singer of popular songs, is inspiring extraordinary personal devotion on the part of many thousands of young people, and particularly young girls between the ages of, say, twelve and eighteen . . . Psychologists have written soberly about the hypnotic quality of his voice and the remarkable effect upon susceptible young women.”

  Even the Beatles have to be viewed through the lens of sexual awakening. In 1978, famed director Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump) made his directorial debut with a film executive produced by no less a cinema luminary than Steven Spielberg. The movie was called I Wanna Hold Your Hand, and it was the fictional account of that Sunday in 1964 when the Beatles debuted in America on Ed Sullivan. Six teens from New Jersey make their way to Broadway and Fifty-third Street in New York City determined to see their idols up close and personal even though none of them has a ticket to the broadcast.

  One of the tag lines describing the film sets the stage: “These youngsters are suffering from a highly contagious disease called ‘Beatlemania.’ The symptoms are . . . screaming, hysteria, hyperventilation, fainting fits, seizures, and spasmodic convulsions. It isn’t fatal but it sure is fun.” It is also very sexy.

  FILM CRITIC MIKE WHITE: The most dynamic of the group is [actress Nancy] Allen who plays Pam Mitchell, the frantic fiancée of Eddie. She’s being forced to grow up too fast and be overly responsible. Cutting loose and enjoying a Beatles song or two isn’t an option in her little world. Ironically . . . Allen’s character lucks into a trip into the Beatles’ hotel room where her world and her legs open up at the sight of Paul McCartney’s bass. Witnessing a character’s sexual awakening while moaning and licking the long, hard neck of a guitar is not standard fare in lighthearted teen romps. Without a doubt, Allen’s character’s transformation is remarkable. The once-uptight teen sheds the chains of her premarital oppression, announcing her triumph with screams of orgasmic delight at the sight of the group of crooning British youths.

  There was, however, a difference between the way the Beatles aroused teenage girls’ sexuality, and the way the Stones did.

  CHRISSIE HYNDE: I listened to the Stones a lot when I was between fourteen and nineteen. Somehow rock ’n’ roll music sounds different when you’re just discovering the opposite sex and all that.

  Let me illustrate with two extreme examples.

  Do you remember Joyce Maynard? She was the teen wunderkind who made a name for herself when the New York Times published an article she had written called An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life on April 23, 1972. She was back in the headlines in 1998 when she revealed intimate details of her relationship with author J.D. Salinger when he was fifty-three and she was ei
ghteen.

  When the Rolling Stones came to perform at Madison Square Garden in New York City during their 1975 Tour of the Americas, Maynard wrote, again for the New York Times:

  JOYCE MAYNARD: The first time I heard the Rolling Stones was in 1965, when I was 12. I had seen and loved the Beatles but this was entirely different. The Beatles were round-faced and bouncy, and if they wanted to hug or kiss you, it was in a friendly way. The Rolling Stones were never cuddly, even on Sunday night TV, and in the company of Ed Sullivan, hollow-eyed, cold, looking a bit evil, they were leopards to the Beatles’ springer spaniels, and I thought they were marvelous.

  The Stones touched off what were, I think, my first adult sexual rumblings. There was nothing teeny-bopperish in my feelings for the Rolling Stones. I didn’t scream at the sight of them or paste their pictures on my walls. I don’t suppose I understood what I felt when I put on “Satisfaction” and danced in front of the mirror or lay in bed at night as Mick Jagger pleaded, “Come on baby, cry to me” . . .

  It is a problem for most 12-year-old girls—and certainly it was for me—that their bodies rarely match their minds. So while the young girl lies in the dark and dreams of being the one who will, at last, give Mick Jagger his Satisfaction, the next morning she must go to school and give an oral report on Bolivia.