How the Rolling Stones' 'Out of Our Heads' and the Fuzz of 'Satisfaction' Changed Everything at RCA Hollywood

The most interesting thing about Out of Our Heads is that it marks the moment the Stones stopped being a covers band and became a rock-and-roll powerhouse. Earlier London sessions at Regent Sound and Olympic Studios were cramped, mono, and rushed—they’d bash out a single in a few hours. But RCA Studios in Hollywood in May 1965 gave them eight-track tape, a bigger room, and engineer Dave Hassinger, who let them spread out and layer sounds in a way they couldn’t before. The result? A louder, punchier album where Keith Richards’ guitar finally cuts through like a razor.

The recording of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” is a perfect example. Keith came up with that three-note riff in a dream, woke up, grabbed a Gibson Maestro Fuzz-Tone pedal, and recorded it on a cheap cassette deck. The fuzz box was supposed to mimic a horn section—they’d experimented with horns on earlier tracks but didn’t have a brass player handy that day. At RCA, they transferred that demo to tape, but Keith’s fuzz guitar was so aggressive it nearly blew the speakers. Andrew Loog Oldham, their manager/producer, insisted on keeping the fuzz raw and unpolished, even mixing it out of phase in mono so it sounded like it was coming from inside your skull. The rest of the band lay down a simple shuffle, Mick Jagger wrote the lyrics in the studio (mostly about frustration with commercialism and a girl who won’t say yes), and the whole thing was cut in a single take. They released it a month later and it became their first US number one.