Fort Harrison Hotel — Keith Richards and the "Satisfaction" Riff

Keith Richards has told the story many times: on the night of May 7, 1965, he went to sleep at a hotel somewhere in the eastern United States with a Philips cassette recorder on the nightstand. In the middle of the night, he reportedly woke, played a guitar figure into the recorder, then fell back asleep. When he replayed the tape the next morning he found roughly forty-five seconds of what would become the opening riff of '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' — followed by about forty minutes of himself snoring. The Fort Harrison Hotel in Clearwater, Florida, where the Rolling Stones were staying on that leg of their 1965 North American tour, is the location most frequently cited in accounts of the night in question. Richards himself has been characteristically imprecise about the exact address, and some versions of the story place the incident at a different stop on the same tour. The song was completed with Mick Jagger writing the lyric shortly after, recorded at RCA Studios in Hollywood within weeks, and released in June 1965 as the Stones' first US number one.

The Rolling Stones in 1965 were on the cusp of becoming the defining rock band of their era. 'Satisfaction' crystallised everything that made them distinct — rawer and more discontented than the Beatles, with a fuzz-box guitar tone (the riff was originally conceived as a horn part) that felt genuinely dangerous. The song's frustration with consumerism and sexual inadequacy connected immediately with young audiences worldwide, and it has been cited by musicians, critics, and fans as the greatest rock and roll song ever made more often than almost any other track.

The Fort Harrison Hotel is a grand 1926 building that has had a colourful post-rock-and-roll history: it was acquired by the Church of Scientology in 1975 and now operates as a private retreat for church members, known as the Flag Building. It is not open to the general public, and the interior cannot be accessed by visitors. The building is easily viewed from South Fort Harrison Avenue, but no plaque or acknowledgement of its reported connection to the genesis of 'Satisfaction' exists on site.