1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (15 page)

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One artist who was barely
on the radar was a mod named Davy Jones, who shared the same producer as the Who and the Kinks, Shel Talmy. (Next year, when the Monkees’ Davy Jones appeared, the mod Jones would be forced to come up with a new last name, derived from pioneer Jim Bowie’s knife.) In his third single, “You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving” (his first self-penned A side), the young Bowie’s voice sounds almost wimpishly juvenile upon first listen. But then his band, the Lower Third, bursts into a Who/Yardbirds-style feedback rave-up for the instrumental. When they swing back to the verse, proto-Ziggy Stardust has hit his groove. The B side is stranger; in “Baby Loves That Way,” he lets his girl fool around with other guys. It’s the first stirrings of the sexual ambivalence he would ride to the top as glam rock’s ultimate androgyne in a later kind of swinging London.

8

Satisfaction

Jagger and Richards release the anthem of the decade on June 6.

In his flat
in St. John’s Wood, London, Keith Richards woke up with a guitar riff in his head and recorded it on his portable tape deck. The hook recalled two Martha and the Vandellas hits, “Dancing in the Streets” and “Nowhere to Run.” Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham was pushing the group to move away from 1950s blues and toward contemporary soul.

The half-conscious Richards scrawled the words “I can’t get no satisfaction” to go with riff. He was between girlfriends at the time. The line was similar to one from a Chuck Berry song called “Thirty Days,” though Richards later opined, “It could just as well have been ‘Auntie Millie’s Caught Her Left Tit in the Mangle.’”
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Then the tape recorder captured the sound of him dropping his pick and snoring for the next forty minutes. Richards later rued not saving the tape.

When he woke up the next day, the riff struck him as unexceptional, just something for another album track. When the Stones resumed touring, he played it for Jagger as they relaxed by the hotel pool in Clearwater, Florida, on May 6. It sounded like a folk song then, perhaps in the vein of the “Walk Right In,” a No. 1 hit by the Rooftop Singers two and a half years before, complete with lyrics about letting your hair hang down and losing your mind.

Richards had the one line but no melody so Jagger came up with the lyrics. Since it sounded like a folk song, he started griping about advertising, as Dylan had in “It’s All Right, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” In the United Kingdom the BBC didn’t have ads, and Jagger was freaked out by all the commercials bombarding him from American radio and TV.

As Jagger and Richards worked, the rest of the band started congregating by the pool. The night before, Bill Wyman and Brian Jones picked up two models who spent the night with them. Wyman and his model joined the others, and then the model who had been with Jones emerged, battered and bruised. He had beaten her in the night.
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Disgusted, the band’s assistant, Mike Dorsey, found Jones and confronted him. Wyman wrote, “Blows were exchanged and Brian suffered two cracked ribs, to the satisfaction of everyone.” Jones had to wear an elastic belt, which the others dubbed his “corset.” The press was told that he had hurt himself practicing karate by the pool.

That night at the Jack Russell Stadium, people in the audience started throwing toilet paper and cups at cops guarding the stage. The confrontation between two hundred fans and the cops got so heated that the concert was stopped after only four songs.

Three days later the band pulled into blues mecca Chicago to record at Chess Records. They had already recorded there twice the previous year because it was the home of their idols: Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, Howlin’ Wolf, and many others. As a British teenager, Jagger had written away to Chess to order their albums by mail, since they were hard to find in the U.K., and it was these albums that sparked the formation of the Stones. Jagger and Richards had been childhood schoolmates until Jagger’s family moved to a different town. Then, when the two were seventeen, they bumped into each other on a train, and Jagger was carrying Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry albums under his arm. Richards was a fan as well, and surprised, since hardly anybody in England knew who Muddy Waters was. Their friendship was quickly rekindled.

Now, as the Stones covered Don Covay and Otis Redding at Chess on May 10 and 11, it was apparent they’d grown tighter since their last album. They coasted through the grooves with streamlined speed, in the pocket, having locked into an effortless swing to rival Motown’s Funk Brothers and Stax’s Booker T. and the M.G.s. At the end of the session, they banged out a version of “Satisfaction” with Jones on the harmonica, wrapping at 5:00 a.m. Deejay Scott Ross, a friend of the band, bet Jones a pair of boots that the tune was going to be a hit.
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Richards still thought it was suitable only for a B side or an LP track. It was the last time they recorded at Chess. In a nice bit of symmetry, the final track they laid down in Chicago was the song that graduated them from blues students to soul trendsetters.

The group lived out the song’s line about riding ’round the world when they flew to Hollywood to take another crack at the song at RCA Studios on May 12–13. Richards decided that a horn section à la “Nowhere to Run” should perform the “Satisfaction” riff. But that wasn’t doable on short notice, so Richards decided just to record a “little sketch” with his guitar to show how the horns should play. To make the guitar sound like brass, Richards recalled, “I was screaming for more distortion:
This riff’s really gotta hang hard and long
, and we burnt the amps up and turned the shit up, and it still wasn’t right.”
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Someone realized that a fuzz distortion box on the guitar would sustain the notes. George Harrison said, “When Phil Spector was making ‘Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah’ [recorded by Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans], the engineer who’d set up the track overloaded the microphone on the guitar player and it became very distorted. Phil Spector said, ‘Leave it like that, it’s great.’ Some years later everyone started to try to copy that sound and so they invented the fuzz box.”
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Link Wray and the Ventures had used it. Big Jim Sullivan, the session musician Oldham hired for his other clients, used it. In April the Yardbirds used it on “Heart Full of Soul,” though that song wouldn’t be released till June. So, Richards recalled, roadie–piano player “Ian Stewart went around the corner to Eli Wallach’s Music City or something and came around with a [Gibson Maestro] distortion box.
Try this
. It was as off-hand as that. It was just from nowhere.”
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Richards kicks off with what
Newsweek
would later dub the “five notes that shook the world.” Wyman struts in on the third note, his jaunty bass bouncing off Richards like a subliminal second hook. Jones slices away at the acoustic guitar. In the second bar, Watts begins hitting the snare on every beat and does so unchanging for the entire song. His new beat is the key—by adopting the four/four beat of the Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself,” he changes the song from folk to soul. On the third bar, Nitzsche starts banging the tambourine.

Then Jagger saunters in, all nonchalant innocence, merely observing that he can’t get any satisfaction, despite the fact that he tries and tries. But his tension rises until, in the reverse of usual rock dynamics, he bursts out of the quieter chorus and into the irate verse, ranting in the humorous style that he would return to in later songs such as “Shattered” but never top, giving lyrics such as “on the radio” his own funky sustain.

You can hear Richards stomp on the fuzzbox pedal to turn it off and on. After opening with the fuzz, he switches to clean electric rhythm guitar. At 35 seconds he clicks the fuzz pedal back on between “get” and “no.” At 1:35 he comes back in with the fuzz later than he did the last round—perhaps a mistake. At 2:33 you can hear a burst of fuzz before the chorus—Richards making sure he’s got the pedal ready in advance this time.

On the third verse, Jagger leers in and suggestively enunciates “girl reaction,” the lusty twist that disturbed the censors the most. He returns to the heavy breathing for the final “no satisfaction”s before giving up in cathartic exasperation.

Oldham, engineer Dave Hassinger, and the entire band except Jagger and Richards were convinced it should be the single. Richards thought it still needed “working up,” perhaps overly concerned about its similarity to the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Streets” and “Nowhere to Run.” So they put it to a vote: Watts, Wyman, Jones, Oldham, Hassinger, and Ian Stewart voted for it to be a single, while Jagger and Richards voted no.

They knew the lines about trying to “make some girl” could get them banned, so Oldham and Jagger told Hassinger to mix the vocals deeper into the track so they weren’t easily understandable. Also mixed practically to inaudibility were Jones’s acoustic guitar and Nitzsche’s piano, the remnants of the song’s folk-rock origins, though alternate mixes released in the 1980s allowed them to be heard.

Five days after Jagger had written the lyrics, the song was in the can. Oldham released it on June 6 in the United States, Richards’s misgivings be damned. “I guess he thought, ‘They can work it up all they want, but it’s about the freshness and the timing.’ Which is, after all, everything,”
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Richards conceded. “Andrew spotted the spirit of the track … It was still not finished as far as we were concerned, but sometimes an artist’s sketches are better than the finished painting, and that’s probably one of the perfect examples.”
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The riff cut like a scythe across the airwaves. The Doors’ Ray Manzarek remembered, “The first time I heard ‘Satisfaction’ on the radio I couldn’t believe it. The lyrics were so terrific; they were talking to all young American males. This guy is singing a song to
us
.”

When kids weren’t yelling along with the “Hey! Hey! Hey!,” they tried to decipher the lyrics with the same scrutiny they had given “Louie, Louie” a few years before. Was the bit about how white his shirt could be racial commentary? Was the cigarette he smoked a joint or a Marlboro? Was it a critique of how people let consumer products determine masculinity and self-esteem?

There was no doubt about the sexual dissatisfaction of the third verse, though its finer points were debated. Jagger clarified the next year, “‘Girlie action’ was really ‘girl reaction.’ The dirtiest line in ‘Satisfaction’ they don’t understand, see? It’s about ‘You better come back next week ’cause you see I’m on a losing streak’”—that is, the woman Jagger is hitting on is having her period. “But (people) don’t get that. It’s just life. That’s really what happens to girls. Why shouldn’t people write about it?”
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The bottom line of the song was “I Hate Commercials and I Can’t Get Laid,” and millions across the planet related, just as they had to Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” seven years earlier. The song knocked “I Can’t Help Myself” off its No. 1 perch and stayed there for four weeks, till Herman’s Hermits “I’m Henry VIII, I Am” pushed it down—as if the sexual aggression of “Satisfaction” had scared teen girls back to their least threatening heartthrob. The Stones and the Hermits were tied for second most popular Brit band in the States, with two chart toppers each.

When various cities banned “Satisfaction,” and
Newsweek
blasted the “tasteless themes” by the “leering quintet,” it no doubt helped the record become the year’s best seller. The ultimate validation came when Otis Redding covered it in July with the horns Richards originally envisioned.

“I never thought that song was commercial anyway,” Richards would later muse. “Shows how wrong you can be.”
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In “Satisfaction,” the Stones found their golden formula, mixing the beat of Motown, the lyrics of Dylan and Berry, and the novelty of new technology to synthesize their own style of R&B/pop/rock. The Beatles were the biggest band of the 1960s, and Dylan the most innovative artist, but the Stones released the greatest rock song without even trying, because they were permanently trying.

9

Long Hair and the Pill on Trial

The Massachusetts Supreme Court takes its time to decide the fate of long hair in high school, while the U.S. Supreme Court renders its decision on the Pill on June 7.

In 1845, President Polk
had a mullet running down the back of his neck, but during the world wars, hair was kept short to keep lice and fleas at bay, and it stayed short for the next twenty years. Numerous dress code handbooks even expressly stated that boys’ hair could not be combed forward.
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But after the Beatles showed up, newspaper stories of boys being sent home from school until they got their hair cut proliferated.

Massachusetts’ Attleboro High School student George Leonard Jr. went to court over the issue. By night he was Georgie Porgie, the front man for a band called the Cry Babies, which played sock hops, churches, and amusement parks. On September 11, 1964, three days into his senior year, the school’s principal sent him home and said he couldn’t come back till his hair was decent. A hearing before the school committee upheld the principal’s ruling three weeks later. Porgie’s manager was his father, and in a brilliant PR move, George Leonard Sr. filed a lawsuit saying his son was a professional musician who needed to have long hair for his job. Besides, it was his constitutional right. Leonard Sr. asserted that the school was overstepping the parents’ domain and illegally keeping his son from graduating. He asked for a speedy hearing, but the Superior Court did not accommodate him—it would not be until a year later, on October 8, 1965, that “George Leonard, Jr., vs. School Committee of Attleboro” would go before the Massachusetts Supreme Court, with a decision rendered on December 7 (see chapter 25, “Christmas Time Is Here”).

Though the waiting was interminable, the front-page news coverage led to Porgie opening for the Stones in Rhode Island and playing with the Barbarians, the garage band that wrote the anthem “Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?” In real life, the Barbarians had long hair, but in the song, they took on the role of roughnecks taunting a proto-hippie, sneering that his long blond hair and skintight pants meant he had to be either a girl or from Liverpool.