The Rolling Stones Top 75 Countdown (#09-07)

Today we'll be dealing with 3 more Rolling Stones' songs: Nos 9, 8 and 7 in our list. All three are monumental. Time to get to know them.

At #9, there's Wild Horses: my favorite song off my favorite Stones' album, 1971's Sticky Fingers, yet it only makes #9. Apparently, the competition is very tough near the top.

"Songs written by two people are better than those written by one," Richards said in 2002. This is a perfect, heartbreaking example of that sentiment. The chorus was Richards', written to his infant son, Marlon, as the Stones set off for their 1969 US tour. "The interesting thing," Richards noted, "is what you say to someone else, even to Mick, who knows me real well: 'See what you make out of that.' " Jagger turned to the complicated emotions in his relationship with Marianne Faithfull. The song's pining country grace reflected Richards' new friendship with Georgia native Gram Parsons, who cut Wild Horses with the Flying Burrito Brothers and issued it first, with the Stones' blessing. But the Stones' recording, at Muscle Shoals in Alabama, near the end of the '69 tour, reflected Jagger and Richards' deeper empathy – "together with the fifth of bourbon, passing it back and forth, and [singing] the lead and the harmony into one microphone," Jim Dickinson, the pianist on the session, recalled. In short, two as one.

It was only released as a single in North America and it peaked at #11 in Canada and at #28 in the US. It's the Stones' song that's covered the most in various talent TV shows around the world. Here's the Stones' studio version:

Here's a live version (Japan, 1971):

... And here's the 1970 version by Gram Parsons & The Flying Burrito Brothers:

At #8 we find the song that started it all: it is probably their best known tune and it made megastars out of them. A few years ago it would probably have been in my Top 3, but over-exposure to it brought in a certain weariness. It's still a magical song, mind you.

Built on the Stones' greatest riff, (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction near-singlehandedly turned Rock & Roll from a teenage fad into something far heavier and more dangerous. The guitar line was conjured by Richards while he was asleep. "I had no idea I'd written it," he recalled in his memoir, Life, explaining how he awoke to discover the bones of the song – evidently recorded the previous night with his acoustic guitar – on a bedside cassette machine. Jagger thinks his partner got the title from a line in Chuck Berry's 1955 single 30 Days ("I don't get no satisfaction from the judge"); the singer wrote the remaining lyrics sitting next to a hotel pool in Clearwater, Florida, in early 1965, during the band's third US tour, distilling his "frustration with everything," especially with "America, its advertising syndrome, the constant barrage." The verses took him all of 10 minutes.

The Rolling Stones first recorded the track on 10 May 1965 at Chess Studios in Chicago, Illinois – a version featuring Brian Jones on harmonica. The Stones lip-synched to a dub of this version the first time they debuted the song on ABC's Shindig!. The group re-recorded it two days later at RCA Studios in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, with a different beat and the Gibson Maestro fuzzbox adding sustain to the sound of the guitar riff. Richards envisioned redoing the track later with a horn section playing the riff: "this was just a little sketch, because, to my mind, the fuzz tone was really there to denote what the horns would be doing." The other Rolling Stones, as well as producer and manager Andrew Loog Oldham and sound engineer David Hassinger eventually outvoted Richards and Jagger so the track was selected for release as a single. The song's success boosted sales of the Gibson fuzzbox so that the entire available stock sold out by the end of 1965.

The single was a smash hit everywhere: #1 in the US, the UK, Germany, Ireland, Australia, Austria, the Netherlands, Norway, #3 in France and in Canada and #6 in Belgium. It certified gold in the United States (more than a million copies sold) and in Italy.

In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine placed (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction in the second spot on its list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time". The song was added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2006.

This is the studio version:

Here's a live version from that era:

Here's an all-star version from the 1988 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductions:

At #7 is a song that sticks out in the Rolling Stones' song canon. It is famous for its horn section arrangement (arranged by Mike Leander; this is the first Rolling Stones song to feature brass) and is one of the earliest songs to use feedback from the guitars.

I love the fact that the song is not an obvious hit: it creeps up on you and manages to surprise you more than once. There are also echoes of Motown there.

"The ultimate freakout," Jagger said of this single. It still sounds impressively nuts – from its long, vaguely scandalous title to its five-alarm horn blasts to its early use of guitar feedback to its haywire tempo to its decadent noir-psych lyrics. It was especially controversial for its cover, an image of the bandmates dressed in drag. After they shot it, they went to a bar, still dolled up in dresses and wigs. "No one said anything," Richards recalled.

A single-only release in September 1966, which eventually appeared on a number of compilations, Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow? has not been played live by the Stones since the 1966 tour. The single peaked at #2 in the Netherlands, #5 in the UK and Ireland, #6 in Norway, #9 in the US and Germany, #12 in Canada, #17 in Belgium, #22 in France and #24 in Australia. Here it is:

Here's Mick Jagger performing solo in a 1993 concert in NYC:

Tomorrow is our penultimate episode of the Rolling Stones. Be sure to be here. See you then.