I lied, I made all of that up....but there's a good snippet here of what he did that's a better story than my imaginary one
GROSS: You have a great story in your book about how you co-wrote, well, how you got "Satisfaction" started. You co-wrote the song with Mick Jagger, but you originated it, and you didn't know you were doing it. Can you...?
Mr. RICHARDS: I wish all the songs could come this way, you know, where you just dream them, and then the next morning, there they are, presented to you.
But "Satisfaction" was that sort of miracle that took place. I had a I had one of the first little cassette players, you know, Norelco, Philips, same thing, really. But it was a fascinating little machine to me, a cassette player that you could actually just lay ideas down and, you know, wherever you were.
I set the machine up, and I put in a fresh tape. I go to bed as usual with my guitar, and I wake up the next morning, I see that the tape is run to the very end.
And I think: Well, I didn't do anything. You know, maybe I hit a button when I was asleep. So I put it back to the beginning and pushed play and there, in some sort of ghostly version, is (singing) da, da, da, da, da - I can't get no satisfaction.
And so it was a whole verse of it. I won't bore you with it all. But - and after that, there's, you know, 40 minutes of me snoring.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. RICHARDS: But there's the song in its embryo, and I actually dreamt the damned thing. You know, and I'm still waiting for another dream.
GROSS: So, do you think you kind of did that while sleepwalking or something?
Mr. RICHARDS: Oh, I wasn't walking. I was lying down, and I did it lying down, darling. I don't know about you, honey, but I do most of this stuff lying down.
(Soundbite of laughter)
GROSS: You said as usual, I went to bed with my guitar. Did you always take your guitar to bed then?
Mr. RICHARDS: It always has to be at hand, even now. I have to...
GROSS: Because?
Mr. RICHARDS: I have to know where it is in case I have another dream.
GROSS: In case you get an idea?
(Soundbite of laughter)
GROSS: Right. So do you always have a recording device on hand, too?
Mr. RICHARDS: No, not anymore. I rely upon my memory more now.
GROSS: So you still have your guitar in case an idea comes to you, and...
Mr. RICHARDS: Absolutely. Where would I be without it?
GROSS: Okay, so you bring this germ of a song, basically the first verse, to Mick Jagger, and then you flesh it out into a more complete song. What's the process between you and him in making a full song out of what came to you?
Mr. RICHARDS: Well, at least in those days, and pretty much throughout the whole thing, is I'll come up with a riff, the idea and maybe the subject matter, the type. And then I'd go on to write the next one, and Mick would flesh out and finish it off and make it into a real song.
I'd come up with the ideas. Mick turns it into a finished product, you know. And we were working so hard in those days that you couldn't write them fast enough. So any idea, I came, I'd shove it to Mick, and Mick would work on that, and I'd have another idea, with a little luck.
GROSS: Now, how did the line I can't get no satisfaction come to you at a time when you should've been having a lot of very satisfying, gratifying moments?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. RICHARDS: Darling, I don't know. I dreamt it.
GROSS: True, okay.
Mr. RICHARDS: I mean, nobody's ever satisfied, right? And it was just a phrase that obviously, you know, was buzzing through the mind, and whether you could express anything or enlarge on that idea of because otherwise, I can't get any satisfaction is kind of, you know, sort of moaning.
But if you then you can take it and expand it, which Mick did brilliantly. There it is. I mean, these things are all made out of little sparks of ideas that come to you, and you're lucky to be around to grab them. And that's kind of basically the process of how we work.
GROSS: Okay, so let's hear "Satisfaction." This is The Rolling Stones. My guest is Keith Richards, and he's written a new autobiography called "Life."
(Soundbite of song, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction")
The ROLLING STONES: I can't get no satisfaction. I can't get no satisfaction 'cuz I try and I try and I try and I try. I can't get no, I can't get no.
When I'm drivin' in my car and that man comes on the radio and he's tellin' me more and more about some useless information, supposed to fire my imagination, I can't get no, oh no, no, no, hey, hey, hey, that's what I say.
GROSS: That's The Rolling Stones, and my guest is Keith Richards, and he's written his autobiography. It's called "Life." Now that cassette that you mentioned, that you used to write down the idea for "Satisfaction" in the middle of the night that so surprised you when you played it back in the morning, that cassette or one just like it was also really helpful to you in coming up with a kind of transformative guitar sound.
Would you describe how you would plug your acoustic guitar in motel rooms, into the cassette machine?
Mr. RICHARDS: I'll try. Yes, no, it was a good question. You know, I'll try because there I am, I now have my hands on the best amplifiers in the world and the best guitars. But I'm trying to translate another sound in my head that I can't find through conventional means.
I was, at the time, finding it I always play a lot of acoustic guitar, and the cassette machine, in those days, before they had things on them called governors, which mean that you could not overload the machinery, I would just shove the acoustic guitar and use basically, I would use the cassette player as an amplifier, basically, and overload the acoustic guitar so it becomes an electric guitar.
But at the same time, you see, you still have that feel of an acoustic, which is totally different to an electric. So and I'm still looking for the perfect example of this, but I'm going to keep going.
GROSS: So what you would get is like an electrified acoustic guitar that was also distorted.
Mr. RICHARDS: Yeah, exactly. You've got it, Terry. You've got it. That's it. I was trying to get the quality and the touch that you can get from an acoustic guitar and then overload it and make it sound like an electric guitar.
But at the same time, you have that original acoustic touch because, you know, this gets complicated, because guitars are strange animals. But there's a touch that you can get off an acoustic guitar that you'll never get off an electric.
And so I was trying to figure how to electrify the acoustic feel and still translate it, and so that was the name of the game. That was it.
GROSS: Now, it was surprising enough to me to read how you did this in your motel room, but then reading how you did it also in the recording studio was fascinating, that you wanted that sound so much that you brought in the cassette machine and plugged your acoustic guitar into it.
Mr. RICHARDS: Yes, I mean, I took these ideas, and the Stones were in the studio, and we were all looking at it and saying: It doesn't have what you had on the, you know, on the original idea.
And so finally, after many attempts to try and reproduce this sort of idea, you know, with amplifiers and, you know, conventionally, I think it was Charlie Watts, maybe. Let's go back, you know, to how you did it in the first place and work it from there, you know, which is why you've got "Street Fighting Men" and "Jumpin' Jack Flashes." There are no electric guitars at all. It's just overloaded acoustics.
I don't know. I like that denseness, of color, feel that you can get out of that. And it's an experiment I might take up again once they start making cassette machines again.
(Soundbite of laughter)
GROSS: So you think "Jumpin' Jack Flash" is a good illustration of what you were doing?
Mr. RICHARDS: Yeah, yeah, and "Street Fighting Men" is probably another great example of it.
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