There is a post discussing the meaning of “Satisfaction” on the website shmoop.com, and that makes reference to another line that I didn’t really understand at the time either (although I eventually decided that this must be what was meant): “The anti-commercial rant [in the early part of the song] rubbed some folks the wrong way, but [Mick] Jagger’s blunt recapitulation of his failed attempts to ‘make some girl’ was the real problem. Radio stations hesitated to play the song. Funnily enough, they were actually hung up on one of its tamer lines. When the Stones appeared on Shindig, a variety TV show, standards-sensitive execs bleeped ‘And I’m tryin’ to make some girl’. Meanwhile, the reference to a woman being on her period – ‘better come back later next week, ’cause you see I’m on a losing streak’ – made it on air with no problems at all.”
The same post about “Satisfaction” on shmoop.com also notes: “Richards claims to have heard the [song’s opening] notes in a dream, as a dead-asleep epiphany in a Florida hotel. Of course, this is Keith Richards we’re talking about — the distinctions between awake and asleep, day and night, are a bit sketchy for the hard-living rocker. But whatever nocturnal state he was in, Richards was wise enough to record the historic riff on a cassette player before slipping back into it. And the tape with the rock-changing riff (and about forty minutes of snoring) was enough to give Richards and his songwriting partner Mick Jagger a rolling start in the studio.”
(May 2015)
