Episode 129: “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones

A History of Folk Music and 500 Songs

by Andrew Hickey.

Episode 129

Satisfaction

by The Rolling Stones

Today, we're going to look at one of the most important riffs in rock and roll history.

The record that turned the distorted guitar riff into the defining feature of the genre, even though the man who played that riff never liked it.

We're going to look at a record that took the social protest of the folk rock movement, aligned it with the misogyny its singer had found in many blues songs, and turned it into the most powerful expression of male adolescent frustration ever recorded to that point.

We're going to look at Satisfaction by The Rolling Stones.

I can't get no

sad disfaction.

I can't get no

sad disfaction.

Cause I tried, I tried,

I tried,

I tried.

A note before we start this: this episode deals with violence against women and with rape.

If you're likely to be upset hearing about those things, you might want to either skip this episode or read the transcript on the website first.

The relevant section comes right at the end of the episode, so you can also listen through to the point where I give another warning without missing any of the rest of the episode.

Another point I should make here.

Most of the Great Sixties groups have very accurate biographies written about them.

The Stones, even more than the Beatles, have kept a surprising amount of control over their public image, with the result that the only sources about them are either rather sanitised things made with their cooperation, or rather tabloid-y things, whose information mostly comes from people who are holding a grudge or have a particular agenda.

I believe that everything in this episode is the most likely of the various competing narratives.

But if you check out the books I used, which are listed on the blog post associated with this episode, you'll see that there are several different tellings of almost every bit of this story.

So bear that in mind as you're listening.

I've done my best.

Anyway, on with the episode.

When we left the Rolling Stones, they were at the very start of their recording career, having just released their first big hit single, a version of I Wanna Be Your Man, which had been written for them by Lennon and McCartney.

The day after they first appeared on Top of the Pops, they were back in the recording studio, but not to record for themselves.

The Five Stones, plus Ian Stewart, were being paid £2 a head by their manager-producer, Andrew Oldham, to be someone else's backing group.

Oldham was producing a version of To Know Him is To Love Him, the first hit by his idol Phil Spector, for a new singer he was managing named Cleo Sylvester.

In a further emulation of Spectre, the B-side was a throwaway instrumental.

Credited to the Andrew Oldham Orchestra, and with Michael Ander supervising, the song's title, There Are But Five Rolling Stones, gave away who the performers actually were.

At this point, the Stones were still not writing their own material, but Oldham had already seen the writing on the wall.

There was going to be no place in the new world opened up by the Beatles for bands that couldn't generate their own hits, and he had already decided who was going to be doing that for his group.

It would have been natural for him to turn to Brian Jones, still at this point the undisputed leader of the group, and someone who had a marvellous musical mind, but possibly in order to strengthen the group's identity as a group, rather than a leader and his followers.

Oldham has made many different statements about this at different points, or possibly just because they were were living in the same flat as him at the time, while Jones was living elsewhere, he decided that the Rolling Stones equivalent of Lennon and McCartney was going to be Jagger and Richards.

There are several inconsistencies in the stories of how Jagger and Richards started writing together, and things like what the actual first song they wrote together was, or when they wrote it, will probably always be lost to the combination of self-aggrandisement and drug-fuelled memory loss that makes it difficult to say anything definitive about much of their career.

But we do know that one of the earliest songs they wrote together was As Tears Go By, a song that wasn't considered suitable for the group, though they did later record a version of it, and was given instead to Marianne Faithful, a young singer with whom Jagger was about to enter into a relationship.

I sat and watched the trees run through.

Smiling faces I can see,

but not for me.

I sit and watch just as good.

It's not entirely clear who wrote what on that song.

It's usually referred to as a Jagger-Richards collaboration, but it's credited to Jagger, Richards, and Oldham, and at least one source claims it was actually written by Jagger and the session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan, and if so, this would be the first time of many that a song written by Jagger or Richards, in collaboration with someone else, would be credited to Jagger and Richards without any credit going to their co-writer.

But the consensus story, as far as there is a consensus, seems to be that Oldham locked Jagger and Richards into a kitchen and told them they weren't coming out until they had a song written, and it had to be a proper song, not a pastiche of something else, and it had to be the kind of song you could release as a single, not a blues song.

After spending all night in the kitchen, Richards eventually got bored of being stuck in there, and started strung his guitar and singing It Is the Evening of the Day, and the two of them quickly came up with the rest of the song.

After As Tears Go By, they wrote a lot of songs that they didn't feel were right for the group, but gave them away to other people, like Gene Pitney, who recorded That Girl Belongs to Yesterday.

I learned my lesson last,

but now I know at last that girl

belongs to yesterday.

Pitney and his former record producer Phil Spector had visited the Stones during the sessions for their first album, which started the day after that Clio session, and had added a little piano and percussion to a blues jam called Little by Little, which also featured Alan Clark and Graham Nash of the Hollies on backing vocals.

The songwriting on that track was credited to Spector and Nanka Felge,

a group pseudonym that was used for jam sessions and instrumentals.

It was one of two Nanker Felge songs on the album, and there was also an early Jagar and Richards song, Tell Me, an unoriginal Mersey beat pastiche.

You gotta tell me

But the bulk of the album was made up of cover versions of songs by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Rufus Thomas, Marvin Gaye and other black American musicians.

The album went to number one in the UK album charts, which is a much more impressive achievement than it might sound.

At this point, albums sold primarily to adults with spending money, and the album charts changed very slowly.

Between May 1963 and February 1968, the only artists to have number one albums in the UK were The Beatles, The Stones, Dylan, The Monkeys, The Cast of the Sound of Music, and Valduniken.

And between May 63 and April 1965, it was only The Beatles and the Stones.

But while they'd had a number one album, they'd still not had a number one single, or even a top ten one.

I Wanna Be Your Man had been written for them, and had hit number 12, but they were still not writing songs that they thought were suited for release as singles, and they couldn't keep asking the Beatles to help them out.

So, while Jagger and Richards kept improving as songwriters, for their next single, they chose a Buddy Holly B-side.

I'm gonna tell you how it's gonna be.

Are you gonna give your love to me?

I wanna love you night and day.

You know my love will not fade away.

You know my love will not fade away.

The group had latched on to the bow diddley rhythm in that song, along with its machismo.

Many of the cover versions they chose in this period seem to have not just a sexual subtext, but to be overtly dragging, and if Little Richard is to be believed on the subject, Holly's line, My Love is Bigger Than a Cadillac, isn't that much of an exaggeration.

It's often claimed that the Stones exaggerated and emphasised the Bo Diddley sound, and made their version more of an R and B number than Holly's, but if anything, their version owes more to someone else.

The Stones' first real UK tour had been on a bill with Mickey Most, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, and the Everly brothers, and Keith Richards, in particular, had been amazed by the Everleys.

He said later, The best rhythm guitar playing I ever heard was from Don Everly.

Nobody ever thinks about that, but their rhythm guitar playing is perfect.

Don Everly, of course, was himself very influenced by Bo Diddley, and learned to play an open G tuning from Diddley.

And several years later, Keith Richards would make that tuning his own, after being inspired by Everly and Raikuda.

The Stones version of Not Fade Away owes at least as much to Don Everly's rhythm guitar style as to that of Holly or Diddley.

Compare, say, the opening of Wake Up Little Susie.

wake up.

We've both been sound asleep.

Wake up, little Susie, and weep.

The movie's over, it's four o'clock, and we're in trouble deep.

Wake up, we'll do Susie.

Wake up, little Susie.

The rhythm guitar on the Stones version of Not Fade Away is definitely Keith Richards doing Don Everly doing Bo Diddley.

I'm gonna love you night and day.

That was recorded during the sessions for their first album, and was, depending on whose story you believe, another track that featured Phil Spector and Gene Pitney on percussion, recorded at the same session as Little by Little, which became its B-side.

Bill Wyman, who kept copious notes of the group's activities, has always said that the idea that it was recorded at that session was nonsense, and that it was recorded weeks later, and Oldham merely claimed Spectre was on the record for publicity purposes.

On the other hand, Jean Pitney had a very strong memory of being at that session.

Spectre had been in the country because the Ronettes had been touring the UK with the Stones as one of their support acts, along with the Swinging Blue Jeans and Marty Wilde, and Spectre was worried that Ronnie might end up with one of the British musicians.

He wasn't wrong to worry.

According to Ronnie's autobiography, there were several occasions when she came very close to sleeping with John Lennon, though they never ended up doing anything and remained just friends.

While according to Keith Richards' autobiography, he and Ronnie had a chaste affair on that tour which became less chaste when the stones later hit America.

But Spectre had flown over to the UK to make sure that he remained in control of the young woman who he considered his property.

Pitney, meanwhile, according to his recollection, turned up to the session at the request of Oldham, as the group were fighting in the studio and not getting the track recorded.

Pitney arrived with cognac, telling the group that it was his birthday and that they all needed to get drunk with him.

They did.

They stopped fighting and they recorded the track.

Not Fade Away made number 3 on the UK charts, and also became the first Stones record to chart in the US at all, though it only scraped its way to number 48, not any higher.

But in itself, that was a lot.

It meant that the Stones had a record doing well enough to justify them going to the US for their first American tour.

But before that, they had to go through yet another UK tour, though this isn't counted as an official tour in the listings of their tours.

It's just a bunch of shows in different places that happened to be almost every night for a couple of months.

By this time, the audience response was getting overwhelming, and shows often had to be cut short to keep the group safe.

At one show in Birkenhead, the show had to be stopped after the band played three bars, with the group running offstage after that as the audience invaded the stage.

And then it was off to the US, where they were nowhere near as big, though while they were over there, Tell Me was also released as a single to tie in with the tour, and that did surprisingly well, making number 24.

The group's first experience of the US wasn't an entirely positive one.

There was a disastrous appearance on the Dean Martin show on T V, with Martin mocking the group both before and after their performance, to the extent that Bob Dylan felt moved to write in the lion lion notes to his next album, Dean Martin should apologise to the Rolling Stones.

But on the other hand, there were some good experiences.

They got to see James Brown at the Apollo, and Jagger started taking notes, though Richards also noted what Jagger was noting, saying, James wanted to show off to these English folk.

He's got the famous flames, and he's sending one out for a hamburger, he's ordering another to polish his shoes, and he's humiliating his own band.

To me, it was the famous flames, and James Brown happened to to be the lead singer, but the way he lauded it over his minions, his minders and the actual band, to Mick was fascinating.

They also met up with Murray the K, the DJ who had started the career of the Ronettes, among others.

Murray had unilaterally declared himself the fifth Beatle, and was making much of his supposed connections with British pop stars, most of whom either had no idea who he was or actively disliked him.

Richards, when talking about him, would often replace the K with a four-letter word usually spelled with the C.

The Stones didn't like him any more than any of the other groups did, but Movie played them a record he thought they'd be interested in, It's All Over Now by the Valentinos, the song that Bobby Wilmack had written and which was on Sam Cook's record label.

They decided that they were going to record that, and handily Oldham had already arranged some studio time for them.

As Georgio Gomelski would soon find with the Yardbirds, Oldham was convinced that British studios were simply unsuitable for recording loud, blues-based rock and roll music, and Phil Spector had suggested to him that if the Stones loved chess records so much, they might as well record at Chess Studios.

So while the group were in Chicago, they were booked in for a couple of days in the studio at Chess, where they were horrified to discover that their musical idol Muddy Waters was earning a little extra cash painting the studio ceiling and acting as a roadie, helping them in with their equipment.

It should be noted here that Marshall Chess, Chess, Leonard Chess's son who worked with the Stones in the 70s, has denied this happened.

Keith Richards insists it did.

But after that shock, they found working at Chess a great experience.

Not only did various of their musical idols, like Willie Dixon and Chuck Berry as well as Waters, pop in to encourage them, and not only were they working with the same engineer who had recorded many of those people's records, but they were working in a recording studio with an actual multi-track system, rather than a shoddy two-track tape recorder.

From this point on, while they would still record in the UK on occasion, they increasingly chose to use American studios.

The version of It's All Over Now they Recorded There was released as their next single.

It only made the top thirty in the US.

They had still not properly broken through there, but it became their first British number one.

Well, baby used to stay out all night long.

She made me cry,

she done me wrong.

She hurt my eyes open,

that's no lie.

Tables turning now, my turn to cry.

Because I used to love her,

but it's all over now.

Bobby Womack was furious that the Stones had recorded his song while his version was still new, but Sam Cooke talked him down, explaining that if Womack played his cards right, he could have a lot of success through his connection with these British musicians.

Once the first royalty checks came in, Womack wasn't too upset anymore.

When they returned to the UK, they had another busy schedule of touring and recording, and not all of it just for Rolling Stones work.

There was, for example, an Andrew Oldham Orchestra session, featuring many people from the British session world who we've noted before.

Joe Moretti from Vince Taylor's band, John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, Andy White, Mike Leander, and more.

Mick Jagger added vocals to their version of I Get Around.

It's possible that Oldham had multiple motives for recording that.

Oldham was always a fan of Beach Boys-style pop music more than he was of RB, but he also was in the process of setting up his own publishing company, and knew that the Beach Boys publishers didn't operate in the UK.

In 1965, Oldham's company would become the Beach Boys UK Publishers, and he would get a chunk of every cover version of their songs, including his own.

There were also a lot of demo sessions for Jagger Richards' songs intended for other artists, with Mick and Keith working with those same session musicians, like this song that they wrote for the comedian Jimmy Tarbuck, demoed by Jagger and Richards with Moretti, Page, Jones, John McLaughlin, Big Jim Sullivan, and Andy White.

My clothes are fine.

Still fresh and clean, her sweet perfume.

And I go remember this which contains

that I see.

They've been thinking the same as me

Nothing that we're learning.

But of course, there were also sessions for Rolling Stones records, like their next UK number one single, Little Red Rooster.

I am the Little Red Rooster,

too lazy that I crow for day.

I am the Little Red Rooster,

Too lazy to crow for day.

Little Red Rooster is a song that is credited to Willie Dixon, but which actually contains several elements from earlier blues songs, including a riff inspired by the one from Sunhouse's Death Letter Blues.

A melody line and some lines of lyric from Memphis Minister If You See My Rooster.

If you see my rooster,

free ride on back home.

If you see my rooster,

free ride on back home.

I have found ways in my basket.

And some lines from Charlie Patton's Banty Rooster Blues.

What you are well,

you are pro

body

Dixon's resulting song had been recorded by Howlin Wolf in 1961.

I have a little red rooster

to the lady to crow for day.

I wouldn't rare rooster

Too late in a clover day

Keep everything

in the board

That hadn't been a hit, but Sam Cook had recorded a cover version in a very different style that made the US Top 20 and proved the song had chart potential.

He keeps everything in the barnyard

upsetting every

way.

The dolls begin to ball.

The Rolling Stones version followed Harlan Wolf's version very closely, except that Jagger states that he is a cock, I'm sorry, a rooster, rather than that he merely has one.

And this would normally be something that would please Brian Jones immensely, that the group he had formed to promote Delta and Chicago Blues had managed to get a song like that to number one in the UK chart,

especially as it was dominated by his slide playing.

But in fact, the record just symbolised the growing estrangement between Jones and the rest of his band.

When he turned up at the session to record Little Red Rooster, he was dismayed to find out that the rest of the group had deliberately told him the wrong date.

They'd recorded the track the day before, without him, and just left a note from Jagger to tell him where to put his slide fills.

They spent the next few months ping-ponging between the UK and the US.

In late 1964, they made another US tour, during which at one point Brian Jones collapsed with what has been variously reported as stress and alcohol poisoning, and had to miss several shows, leaving the group to carry on without him.

There was much discussion at this point of just kicking him out of the band, but they decided against it.

He was still perceived as the group's leader and most popular member.

They also appeared on the Tammy Show.

which we've mentioned before, and which we'll look at in more detail when we next look at James Brown, but which is notable here for two things.

The first is that they once again saw how good James Brown was, and at this point Jagger decided that he was going to do his best to emulate Brown's performance, to the extent that he asked the choreographer to figure out what Brown was doing and teach it to him, but the choreographer told Jagger that Brown moved too fast to figure out all his steps.

The other is that the musical director for the Tammy Show was Jack Nitchy, and this would be the start of a professional relationship that would last for many years.

We've seen Nitchie before in various roles.

He was the co-writer of Needles and Pins, and he was also the arranger on almost all of Phil Spector's hits.

He was so important to Spector's sound that Keith Richards has said Jack was the genius, not Phil.

Rather, Phil took on Jack's eccentric persona and sucked his insides out.

Nitchie guested on piano when the Stones went into the studio in LA to record a chunk of their next album, including the ballad Heart of Stone, which would become a single in the US.

From that point on, whenever the Stones recorded in LA, Nitchie would be there, adding keyboards and percussion and acting as an uncredited co-producer and arranger.

He was apparently unpaid for this work, which he did just because he enjoyed being around the band.

Nitchie would also play on the group's next UK single.

recorded a couple of months later.

This would be their third UK number one, and the first one credited to Jagovin Richards's songwriters, though the credit is a rather misleading one in this case, as the chorus is taken directly from a gospel song by Pop Staples, recorded by the Staple singers.

my last time

I don't know

why

in the morning when

Lord

Jagger and Richards took that chorus and reworked it into a snarling song whose lyrics were based around Jagger's then-favourite theme, how annoying it is when women want to do things other than whatever their man wants them to do.

Don't try very hard to please me

with what you know it should be easy.

Well, this could be the last time,

this could be the last time,

maybe

the last time.

There is a deep, deep misogyny in the Stones' lyrics in the mid-sixties,

partly inspired by the personas taken on by some blues men, though there were very few blues singers who stuck so unrelentingly to a single theme, and partly inspired by Jagger's own relationship with Chrissy Shrimpton, who he regarded as his inferior, even though she was his superior in terms of the British class system.

That's even more noticeable on Play with Fire, the B-side to The Last Time.

The Last Time had been recorded in such a long session that Jones, Watts and Wyman went off to bed exhausted.

But Jagger and Richards wanted to record a demo of another song, which definitely seems to have been inspired by Shrimpton.

So they got Jack Nitchie to play harpsichord and Phil Spector to play, depending on which source you believe, either a bass or a detuned electric guitar.

you will add some others

But you better

watch your step girl Or start living with your mother

So don't play

with me cause you're playing with fire

So don't play

with me cause you're playing with fire

The demo was considered good good enough to release, and put out as the B-side without any contribution from the other three stones.

Other songs Chrissy Shrimpton would inspire over the next couple of years would include Under My Thumb, Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown, and Stupid Girl.

It's safe to say that Mick Jagger wasn't going to win any Boyfriend of the Year awards.

The last time was a big hit, but the follow-up was the song that turned the Stones from being one of several British bands who were very successful, to being being the only real challengers to the Beatles for commercial success.

And it was a song whose main riff came to Keith Richards in a dream.

I can't get no

sad disperfection.

I can't get

Richards apparently had a tape recorder by the side of his bed, and when the riff came to him, he woke up enough to quickly record it before falling back to sleep with the tape running.

When he woke up, he'd forgotten the riff, but found it at the beginning of a recording that was otherwise just snoring.

For a while, Richards was worried that he'd ripped the riff off from something else, and he's later said that he thinks that it was inspired by dancing in the street.

In fact, it's much closer to the horn line from another Vandala's record, Nowhere to Run, which also has a similar stomping rhythm.

It's not love, I'm running from

it, it's the heart, but I know we'll come.

But I know you're not before me.

You're not

much

apart.

You can see how similar the two songs are by overlaying the riff from satisfaction on the chorus to Nowhere to Run.

Nowhere to run to baby.

Nowhere to run.

Nowhere to Run also has a similar breakdown.

Compare the Vandela's

to the stones.

So it's fairly clear where the song's inspiration came from.

but it's also clear that unlike a song like The Last Time, this was just inspiration, rather than plagiarism.

The recorded version of Satisfaction was never one that its main composer was happy with.

The group, apart from Brian Jones, who may have added a harmonica part that was later wiped, depending on what sources you read, but is otherwise absent from the track, recorded a basic track at Chess Studios, and at this point it was mostly acoustic.

Richards thought it had come out sounding too folk rock, and didn't work at all.

At this point, Richards was still thinking of the track as a demo, though by this point, he was already aware of Andrew Oldham's tendency to take things that Richards thought were demos and release them.

When Richards had come up with the riff, he had imagined it as a horn line, something like the version that Otis Redding eventually recorded.

saddest fashion.

I can't get to know

Saddest Fashion.

I have tried, I have tried,

I have tried,

I have tried,

I can't get me no.

I have tried,

I can't get no.

So, when they went into the studio in LA with Jack Nitchie to work on some tracks there, including some more work on the demo for Satisfaction, as well as Nitchie adding some piano, Richards also wanted to do something to sketch out what the horn part would be.

He tried playing it on his guitar, and it didn't sound right, and so Ian Stewart had an idea, went to a music shop, and got one of the first ever fuzz pedals to see if Richards' guitar could sound like a horn.

Now, people have, over the years, said that Satisfaction was the first record ever to use a fuzz tone.

This is nonsense.

We saw way back in the episode on Rocket 88 a use of a damaged amp as an inspired accident, getting a fuzzy tone, though nobody picked up on that and it was just a one-off thing.

Paul Burleson, the guitarist with the Rock and Roll trio, had a similar accident a few years later, as we also saw, and went with it, deliberately loosening tubes in his amp to get the sound audible on their version of Train Kept A Rolling.

on that along.

The train kept her moving on up along.

The drink be kept for rolling up on that along.

With a heat and a hole where I just couldn't let her go.

A few years later, Grady Martin, the Nashville session player who was the other guitarist on that track, got a similar effect on his six-string bass solo on Marty Robbins's Don't Worry, possibly partly inspired by Burleson's sound.

That tends to be considered the real birth of Fuzz, because at that time it was picked up by the whole industry.

Martin recorded an instrumental showing off the technique.

And more or less simultaneously, Wrecking Crew guitarist Al Casey used an early fuzz tone on a country record by Sanford Clark.

Like the one you've got,

though you ain't much,

I guess you're all he's got.

You better go home,

just walk away.

Better go home and throw that blade away.

And the pedal steel player Red Rhodes had invented his own fuzzbox, which he gave to another Wrecking Crew player, Billy Strange, who used it on records like Anne Margaret's I Just Don't Understand.

But I won't start it all.

I just don't understand.

All those last four tracks, and many more, were from 1960 or 1961.

So far from being something unprecedented in recording history, as all too many rock histories will tell you, Fuzz Guitar was somewhat passe by 1965.

It had been the big thing on records made by the Nashville A-Team and the Wrecking Crew four or five years earlier, and everyone had moved on to the next gimmick, long ago.

But it was good enough to use to impersonate a horn to sketch out a line for a demo.

Except, of course, that while Jaguar and Richards disliked the track as recorded, the other members of the band, Andy and Stewart, who still had a vote even though he was no longer a full member, and Andrew Oldham, all thought it was a hit single as it was.

They overruled Jagger and Richards and released it complete with Fuzz Guitar Riff, which became one of the most well-known examples of the sound in rock history.

To this day, though, when Richards plays the song live, he plays it without the fuzz tone effect.

Lyrically, the song sees Mick Jagger reaching for the influence of Bob Bob Dylan and trying to write a piece of social commentary.

The title line seems, appropriately for a song partly recorded at Chess Studios, to have come from a line in a Chuck Berry record, 30 Days.

But the sentiment also owes more than a little to another record by a chess star, one recorded so early that it was originally released when chess was still called Aristocrat Records.

Muddy Waters, I can't be satisfied.

Well, babe, I just can't be satisfied, and I just can't keep

on.

Well, I feel like snapping pistol in your face.

Satisfaction is the ultimate exercise in adolescent male frustration.

I once read something, and I can't for the life of me remember where or who the author was, that struck me as the most insightful critique of the 60s British blues bands I've ever heard.

That person said that by taking the blues out of the context in which the music had been created, they fundamentally changed the meaning of it.

That when Bo Diddley sang I'm a man, the subtext was so don't call me boy, cracker.

Meanwhile, when some British white teenagers from Essex sang the same words, in complete ignorance of the world in which Diddley lived, What they were singing was, I'm a man now, mummy, so you can't make me tidy my room if I don't want to.

But the thing is, there are a lot of teenagers out there who don't want to tidy their rooms, and that kind of message does resonate.

And here Jagger is expressing the kind of aggressive sulk that pretty much every teenager, especially every frustrated male teenager, will relate to.

The protagonist is dissatisfied with everything in his life, so criticism of the vapidity of advertising is mixed in with sexual frustration because women won't sleep with the the protagonist when they're menstruating.

Maybe next week, come and see.

I'm all a new street, I've been getting low.

It is the most adolescent lyric imaginable, but pop music is an adolescent medium.

The song went to number one in the UK, and also became the group's first American number one.

But Brian Jones resented it, so much so that when they performed the song live, he'd often start playing I'm Popeye the Sailor Man.

This was partly because it wasn't the blues he loved, but also because it was the first stone single he wasn't on.

Again, at least according to most sources.

Some say he played acoustic rhythm guitar, but most say he's not on it and that Richards plays all the guitar parts.

And to explain why, I have to get into the unpleasant details I talked about at the start.

If you're likely to be upset by discussion of rape or domestic violence, stop the episode now.

Now, there are a number of different versions of this story.

This is the one that seems most plausible to me, based on what else I know about the Stones and the different accounts, but some of the details might be wrong, so I don't want anyone to think that I'm saying that this is absolutely exactly what happened.

But if it isn't, it's the kind of thing that happened many times, and something very like it definitely happened.

You see, Brian Jones was a sadist, and not in a good way.

There are people who engage in consensual BDSM, in which everyone involved is having a good time, and those people include some of my closest friends.

This will never be a podcast that engages in kink shaming of consensual kinks, and I want to make clear that what I have to say about Jones has nothing to do with that.

Because Jones was not into consent.

He was into physically injuring non-consenting young women, and he got his sexual kicks from things like beating them with chains.

Again, if everyone involved is consenting, this is perfectly fine, but Jones didn't care about anyone other than himself.

At a hotel in Clearwater, Florida, on the 6th of May 1965, the same day that Jagger and Richards finished writing Satisfaction, a girl that Bill Wyman had slept with the night before came to him in tears.

She'd been with a friend the day before, and the friend had gone off with Jones while she'd gone off with Wyman.

Jones had raped her friend and had beaten her up.

He'd blackened both her eyes and done other damage.

Jones had hurt this girl so badly that even the other stones, who as we have seen were very far from winning any awards for being feminists of the year, were horrified.

There was some discussion of calling the police on him, but eventually they decided to take matters into their own hands, or at least into one of their employees' hands.

They got their roadie Mike Dorsey to teach him a lesson, though Alden was insistent that Dorsey not mess up Jones's face.

Dorsey dangled Jones by his collar and belt out of an upstairs window, and told Jones that if he ever did anything like that again, he'd drop him.

He also beat him up, cracking two of Jones's ribs.

And so Jones was not in any state to play on the group's first US number one, or to play much at all at the session, because of the painkillers he was on for the cracked ribs.

Jones would remain in the band for the next few years, but he had gone from being the group's leader to someone they disliked and were disgusted by.

And as we'll see the next couple of times we look at the stones, he would only get worse.

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