The band’s first manager, Pete Meaden, decided to make them the band of the mod subculture. Mods were usually young people who worked in offices and spent all their money on stylish clothes, obsessed with cutting-edge Italian suits, vests, and shoes. Their ideal weekend was to take amphetamine pills and stay up for days dancing to R&B and soul.
Mods’ rumbles with the rockers became legend. Typically, rockers were from the tradesmen class. They were the descendants of the Teddy Boys, the first teenage subculture in post–World War II Britain, and their motorcycles and leather were in sharp contrast to the mods’ Vespas and parkas.
In the beginning, the rockers and mods didn’t fight—it was actually the mods and the police—but sensationalistic newspapers changed it to “mods versus rockers,” and soon, life imitated art.17 During the spring holiday of 1964, both sides massed to brawl on the beach in resort towns such as Brighton, Margate, Hastings, and Broadstairs, though how different this really was from typical post-football game hooliganism is open to conjecture. Still, it was enough of a newspaper story for a journalist to ask Ringo Starr in A Hard Day’s Night if he was a mod or a rocker. He’d been a Teddy Boy as a teen, but the Beatles’ manager had remolded the band with a proto-mod look. Starr deftly answered that he was a “mocker.”
The Who took the mods’ style and, equally important, as author Nicholas Schaffner writes in The British Invasion, channeled the spirit of the mod-versus-rocker feud into their music.18 Townshend was the first guy on the circuit to use two amps at the same time, which made his distortion and feedback richer. He rubbed his guitar on his mike stand and shook the guitar in front of the amp to get a throbbing pre-psychedelic cacophony. He created a Morse code effect by flipping the pickup of his guitar off and on, and then hitting another switch to make it sound like he was gunning the audience down, pointing the end of his guitar at them like an Uzi, making his way murderously from one end of the stage to the other.
When Townshend opened for the Stones, he saw Richards warming up by windmilling his arm. When Townshend realized it wasn’t part of Richards’s act, he took the pose for himself onstage, one of many he would develop to compensate for his nose, which he felt was too big.19 A few ballet lessons taken as a kid helped his natural grace as he jumped and bent down on his knees, transforming himself into one of the great posers of rock.
One night, while the band played “Smokestack Lightning” at the Railway Hotel in West London, Townshend lifted his twelve-string over his head and it went through the venue’s low ceiling. It broke his guitar, but he acted like he’d meant for that to happen, and continued slamming the guitar into the ceiling over and over. The crowd loved it, but next week he didn’t have an extra guitar to smash, so he pushed over his amps. Not to be outdone, Moon shoved over his drum kit.20 (Later, Moon took to stocking his bass drum with explosives to detonate at the climax of their sets.) The press, who had started coming by, told the band that if they did it again, they’d put them on the front page. So Townshend would ram his guitar into the speaker, throw it in the air and catch it, then bring it down over his shoulder and smash it on the ground.
In art school, he had seen the “auto-destructive” work of Gustav Metzger, who would spray hydrochloric acid onto nylon sheets to make the nylon disintegrate, as a symbol of the destructive power of nuclear weapons.21 Townshend branded his instrument smashing an “auto destruction” happening, which went along with the band’s Pop Art clothing, such as Moon’s bull’s-eye T-shirt and Townshend’s coat made out of the Union Jack.
The destruction was also Townshend’s catharsis for an abusive childhood. He had been left in the care of his cruel grandmother, who spanked him excessively, possibly as a result of dementia. In Townshend’s memoir, he writes of being haunted by a few foggy, horrible incidents with her and her boyfriends, though the experiences were traumatic enough that he still couldn’t write about them in therapy in 1982.22 Then, when he joined the Sea Scouts, scoutmasters sexually abused him in the showers. He and a friend developed a penchant for setting fires.
When the Who recorded their single “I Can’t Explain,” Townshend didn’t feel he could push the producer to let him include the feedback tricks they were exploring onstage. But when the Beatles’ scooped them by using feedback at the beginning of “I Feel Fine,” Townshend decided to make the effect the centerpiece of the Who’s next single, May’s “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,” perhaps the most avant-garde song to hit the U.K. Top 10 to date.
“I was inspired by listening to Charlie Parker, feeling that this was really a free spirit, and whatever he’d done with drugs and booze and everything else, that his playing released him and freed his spirit, and I wanted us to be like that, and I wanted to write a song about that, a spiritual song.”23
Townshend came up with the title; macho Daltrey toughened it into a universal ode to self-confidence, asserting that he could go anywhere and live any way he dared; nothing could stop him. Moon’s hyperkinetic drums synched with Townshend’s guitar as if the band were speeding through hyperspace like the Silver Surfer dodging asteroids. They incorporated all their stage tricks: machine-gunning, surf-rock drum rolls, rim shots, jazz lines, Morse code insanity. Onstage, Daltrey began swinging his microphone above his head like a lasso.
* * *
Originally, Townshend had written “I Can’t Explain” as an imitation Kinks song. He loved the Kinks’ sound so much he wanted their producer, Shel Talmy, to produce the Who as well (which he did). Kinks’ guitarist Dave Davies discovered the sound after his girlfriend’s parents said he couldn’t marry her. He was so angry that he slashed the speaker cone of his crappy amplifier—inflicting damage that resulted in the fiercest, most distorted guitar on record in “You Really Got Me,” from whence heavy metal and punk eventually sprang.
It seemed that the Kinks were destined to make it big on American shores. “You Really Got Me” and its follow-up, “All Day and All of the Night,” had both made it to No. 7 in the States the previous year. They slowed things down for the jangling “Tired of Waiting for You,” which made it to No. 6 (No. 1 in the United Kingdom) in February. Lead singer–rhythm guitarist Ray Davies wrote all but two of March’s Kinda Kinks tracks, at a time when the Stones were still primarily a cover band. “Everybody’s Gonna Be Happy,” backed with “Who’ll Be the Next in Line,” continued the run of strong singles. The band also had the perfect uniform for the U.S. Anglophiles: red riding jackets and frilly shirts.
But they almost blew apart before they even made the trip overseas. On May 19, when an onstage fight escalated in Wales, Kinks drummer Mick Avory knocked Dave out with his hi-hat stand in front of five thousand people. Avory hid out from the cops while the group auditioned Mitch Mitchell (who later joined Hendrix) to replace him on drums. Eventually, however, the charges were dropped, Avory returned, and the group remade “Tired of Waiting for You” as “Set Me Free” for their trip across the Atlantic. The B side, “I Need You,” had more power chords in the “You Really Got Me” vein.
Dave led the single rocker lifestyle, but Ray was a married homebody whose first daughter was born just a few weeks before their first tour. Thus he wasn’t in the best frame of mind when they arrived in the States on June 17 and the JFK customs agent asked, “Are you a boy or a girl?”
“That’s right, I’m a girl, and so is my brother,” Ray replied, a retort that held up the band and delayed their press conference.24
On NBC’s Hullabaloo, Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello introduced the band, and Ray and Avory danced cheek to cheek, which alarmed various homophobic powers that be. But Ray believed the incident that resulted in their ban from the States occurred during their appearance on Dick Clark’s TV show Where the Action Is. A man who may have been a union official in the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) asked Ray if his wife, who was Lithuanian, was a Communist. Ray pushed him, and the man fell over.25 The band also failed to pay their dues to AFTRA. After that, they were denied permits to
reenter the United States for the next four years, the period when English artists made the most money touring overseas.
Still, perhaps they were lucky even to have made it back to Olde England. After playing a concert in Illinois on June 23, the Kinks were invited to the home of a member of the local branch of the Jaycees, a civic organization. He plied them with drinks, but something unnerved the guys about him, so they left abruptly. Later, they discovered that the man was John Wayne Gacy, who was executed in 1994 for killing thirty-three young men and boys.26
Back in Britain, they released “Till the End of the Day,” an ebullient remake of “All Day and All of the Night” that celebrated their freedom to do whatever they wanted. Along with the Stones’ “I’m Free” and the Who’s “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,” it was the year’s happiest statement of youthful empowerment. But the B side, “Where Have All the Good Times Gone,” reflected Ray’s worries about the group’s future in the shadow of the American entry ban. He would go on to write many songs about dead-end streets over the next few years. Yet the ban was what would transform him into the most quintessentially English lyricist, nostalgic for the simpler traditions of old Britannia in the face of social upheaval.
* * *
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.’”1 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.2
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.3 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.”4
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.”5 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.”6
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 f
rom 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.
1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music Page 11