The Accidental Fuzz: How Keith Richards’ Tape Recorder Gave Birth to the ‘Satisfaction’ Riff

That riff – three notes, a growl, pure rebellion – wasn’t meant to sound like that. Keith Richards woke up in a Florida hotel room to hear his own guitar part played back on a cheap tape recorder, but the tape had run to the end. The stretched, distorted sound gave him the idea to use a Gibson Maestro Fuzz-Tone pedal, which turned the riff into the snarling hook that defines “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”

He’d written the riff the night before, recorded it onto the reel, and fell asleep. When he hit play the next morning, the nearly dead batteries and the warped tape made the guitar sound like a buzzing chainsaw. Instead of re-recording it clean, Richards kept the accident and overdubbed the part through the fuzzbox in the studio. The result was the first rock song to make a fuzz pedal the lead voice, and it hit #1 in 1965. The whole song almost didn’t make the album – Mick Jagger hated the riff at first, calling it “che