“I really have no recollection of doing it. I’d made a record in my sleep!” How Keith Richards wrote the iconic Satisfaction riff – without even realizing it

It's a truth universally acknowledged that the gods of inspiration can strike at any time – and, in Keith Richards' case, he wrote one of the Rolling Stones' biggest hits in his sleep.

“I remember absolutely nothing at all about writing Satisfaction because it was, in actual fact, one of those bizarre stories of me waking up in the middle of the night,” he says matter-of-factly in one of his many interviews with Uncut. “And I had a little cassette player next to the bed, one of the earliest ones – they’d just been invented, in fact.

“Without knowing it, in the middle of the night, I’d woken up, picked up the guitar which I quite often slept with,” he adds. “So anyway, it was one of those rare nights when I was actually alone, and obviously I’d recorded about 15 seconds of Satisfaction.

“But I had no idea and didn’t remember doing it until I woke up and saw that the tape had been run all the way through. So I must have hit the button in the middle of the night in one of those mad dreams.”

[I Can't Get No] Satisfaction (Mono) - YouTube

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As Keef recalls, when he rolled the tapes, there was a faint ‘Duh duh, duh duhduh, I can’t get no satisfaction’, which went on for 20 seconds or so, before drifting off into “40 minutes of snoring”.

He continues, “And it was only because I’d bothered to put the machine back and sort of say, ‘Well, how did that happen? What’s on there?’ And there it was. So in actual fact, it came in a dream… which has to be the easiest way to write songs!

“I really have no recollection of doing it. Obviously, though, I had because I’d made a record in my sleep!” Richards concludes.

The very rough “demo” would prove handy in shaping what would become one of the band’s most enduring hits – their first number one in the States and their fourth in the UK. As legend has it, a couple of days after he unknowingly crafted the riff, the band was off to America for a recording session. However, they were missing a key track…

“They said, ‘We’ve got nine, 12, 11 tracks and we need another track,’” he recounts. “So I said, ‘Well, I have this little thing.’ So we knocked it out, and I figured, ‘Well, it won’t do for this album. That’ll just be a demo.’

“So, we went back on the road, and a week later it’s on the radi,o and I’m in Omaha! And I was cursing, ‘How did you put that out, you bastards! It’s not ready yet. It’s only a dub.’ And meanwhile it’s Number One, and they’re going, ‘Shut up, Keith!'”

In a 2005 interview with Guitar World, the Stones' legendary guitarist offered more insight into how 10 of his all-time-favorite Rolling Stones riffs came about.