Radio Satisfaction

In response to my recent post about "Satisfaction," I received the following email from Binky Philips, and with his permission, I'm sharing it with you. Read more of Binky's amazing stories at SonicBoomers.

Every night, my wife watches Diane Sawyer's World News. Last night, Diane ended her broadcast with the announcement that May 6th was the 45th anniversary of Keith Richards waking up in the middle of the night, taping the main "dada-dadadaa" riff of "Satisfaction" into his mini-recorder that he always kept by his bed, muttering, "I can't get no satisfaction..." and falling back asleep.

One month to the day later, "Satisfaction" was released in the USA on June 6, 1965. By July 10, four weeks later, it was the number one song in America. While it was only number one on Billboard's Top 100 chart for four weeks, on 77 WABC AM, a clear channel station that could be heard for hundreds of miles in every direction, it was the number one record for the entire Summer of 1965. Back then, WABC had a policy of running their 5 minute news breaks at 25 past the hour, and again at 55 minutes past the hour. They also had a strict programming feature of playing the number one song on their chart at the top of every hour. That meant for all of July and August 1965, "Satisfaction" played every hour on the hour on WABC.

I was at Camp Thoreau in Wallkill, New York, for eight weeks the Summer of '65 and I vividly recall a phenomenon I had never experienced before or since. That summer, there were dozens of campers who'd brought transistor radios with them. And every hour on the hour, every transistor radio in camp would suddenly go on, roaring out "Satisfaction" with full blast distortion. It didn't matter whether you were in the rec hall, the art barn, by the lake, down near the creek, in the main house, your bunk, the ball field, the infirmary, the pine forest...You heard "Satisfaction" all day, every day. And you LOVED it. Kids would keep tabs on the time..."Hey, only five more minutes 'til 'Satisfaction'..." It never let up. It never got old.

With the longest hair on any boy, I was acknowledged throughout the whole camp as THE Stones Fanatic. I'd come to camp the year before in '64 crazed about them after their appearance on Hollywood Palace where they were famously insulted by Dean Martin. And I was even worse in 1965. On August 31, about a week after camp was over, I even saw them live with Brian Jones. That's another story...I actually recently got a message on Facebook from another old Thoreau camper telling me that I changed his life 45 years ago by preaching the word about The Rolling Stones.

That summer of '65, I had two counselors, Chuck and Woody (two very cool guys, looking back) who both thought my Stones obsession was endearing. One afternoon, against all the rules, they took me into the counselors' lounge (literally a converted chicken coop) and sat me down and played me Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin' Wolf, Chuck Berry, Jimmy Reed... Much as I'd like to claim that I sat there mesmerized, my 12 year old ears couldn't acclimate to the real thing at all. That didn't start happening until I was about 15 or 16. God bless Chuck and Woody for that first taste. But, the truth is, as they kept playing me the real deal, I started to worry that I might miss the 3pm spin of "Satisfaction".