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: Althouse

"In 'Satisfaction' I was imagining horns, trying to imitate their sound to put on the track later when we recorded."

"I'd already heard the riff in my head the way Otis Redding did it later, thinking, this is gonna be in the horn line. But we didn't have any horns, and I was only going to lay down a dub. The fuzz tone came in handy so I could give a shape to what the horns were supposed to do. But the fuzz tone had never been heard before anywhere, and that's the sound that caught everybody's imagination. Next thing I know, we're listening to ourselves in Minnesota somewhere on the radio, 'Hit of the Week,' and we didn't even know Andrew had put the fucking thing out! At first I was mortified. As far as I was concerned that was just the dub.... And I learned that lesson ? sometimes you can overwork things."

That's Keith Richards, in his autobiography, "Life," learning a lesson about spontaneity and minimalism. (Page 177.)

Here's the Otis Redding version, with the horns as Richards had originally intended. Speaking of intent, I don't think Richards intended to imply a criticism of Redding's version, only to tell the story of how he produced the sound we hear on the Rolling Stones original recording. He's essentially giving himself a double compliment: 1. I imagined the full orchestration that the best soul music people of the time produced, and 2. I ingeniously used the guitar (with a Gibson fuzz tone pedal) to produce that sound and outdid them by cranking it all out quickly.

But Richards did, backhandedly, put down Otis Redding. You can overwork things. 

Full post as published by Althouse on November 23, 2010 (boomark / email).