“How about 'Satisfaction'?
I wrote that. I woke up one night in a hotel room. Hotel rooms are great. You can do some of your best writing in hotel rooms; I woke up with a riff in my head and the basic refrain and wrote it down. The record still sounded like a dub to me. I wanted to do... I couldn't see getting excited about…”

Excerpt From: A, N. “50 Years The Rolling Stones - Part 1.” The Atavist. iBooks.
This material may be protected by copyright.

No mention in the mammoth Robert Greenfield interview in 1972 about the infamous myth? What else is not true but been embellished over time?

I've written things down - all kinds of things. Only to find them later and actually say out loud WTF? Unless he had actual music sheets with time signatures, cleffs, etc - there's no way he wrote it down the way it is on the record. How could anyone remember how something goes by reading 'DAH DAHNN DAH NAH NAAAHHH NAH NAH NAH NAHHHH'? How would you remember what it SOUNDS like?

Dub? He obviously means that in hindsite, since 'dub' hadn't been invented yet.

The story he usually tells is not that he "wrote it down" but that he woke up, recorded on cassette the little snippet he heard in his head, then went back to sleep. A "dub" the way he's using the word is a demo recording.

My (and the all iorrians?) theory is that he used Nowhere to run, pretty much the same riff on horns, and changed the rhythm a tiny little and Mick used that riff on their song. The story about how the riff was supposed to be a hornsection is indeed a funny story. Satisfaction is Keiths riff because it's on guitar and he kinda changed it (not the notes though) but he obviously took it from Nowhere to run.

Or Dancing in the Street?

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TeddyB1018
Or Dancing in the Street?

Yes, I seem to recall that in an interview, Keith mentioned ""Dancing In The Street" as an inspiration.

Nowhere To Run and Dancing In The Street were both done by Martha and the Vandellas.

The Satisfaction riff is very similar to the Nowhere To Run horn riff.

The Satisfaction riff has nothing in common with Dancing In The Street.

Mixing up Nowhere To Run with Dancing In The Street would be pretty easy as they were both hits for Martha and the Vandellas.

Nowhere To Run had been a hit just a few months before Satisfaction was recorded.

So using a similar riff to a song that had just been a hit, may be why Keith was a bit reluctant about Satisfaction.

Maybe Keith wanted to change the riff a bit more or do some other thing with it to get more distance from Nowhere To Run but it seems they just released it with Keith's placeholder fuzzbox riff and hardly anyone noticed the similarity to Nowhere To Run anyway because the fuzz tone is very different to the horns tone and Satisfaction has different words and melody etc to Nowhere to Run.

I love the cassette story. Especially when Keith says that the rest of the tape was just him snoring. Can't we just let sleeping stones lie?

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memphiscats
I love the cassette story. Especially when Keith says that the rest of the tape was just him snoring. Can't we just let sleeping stones lie?

When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

The Myth could be right.

It's not uncommon for a writer to think that the riff or parts of a song they came up with were new to them but later it turns out to be very much the same as something they had already heard.

That's how K.D. Lang got on the credits of a Stones song.

I would tend to believe Keith's Cassette account.

For The Last Time though it's pretty clear that the Chorus was lifted from the Staple Singers.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 2013-01-06 08:06 by howled.

One time he told the story he sort of "apologized" for being a rock star on tour in a hotel room...who was sleeping alone.