{"id":1852,"date":"2011-01-31T22:58:45","date_gmt":"2011-02-01T03:58:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=1852"},"modified":"2015-09-25T20:18:53","modified_gmt":"2015-09-26T00:18:53","slug":"i-cant-get-no-satisfaction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=1852","title":{"rendered":"On a Losing Streak"},"content":{"rendered":"
\u00a0Theme Songs Page<\/a>\u00a0| Previous Theme Song<\/a>\u00a0| Next Theme Song<\/a><\/div>\n
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On a Losing Streak<\/h2>\n
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\u00a0(I Can\u2019t Get No) Satisfaction, by the Rolling Stones 1965, encountered 1965<\/h3>\n

Buy it here<\/a>\u00a0| See lyrics here<\/a>\u00a0| See video here<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 One-twoooo, one-two-three!\u00a0 One-twooooo, one-two-three!\u00a0 First you hear Keith Richards\u2019 fuzz guitar playing this rhythm, lancing upwards in one of the most famous riffs in all of rock.\u00a0 And then Charlie Watts lays down almost the same rhythm on the drums, an abortive march ending each measure with the little cha-cha-cha that keeps the beat as jerky and unfulfilled as the lyrics proclaim the singer to be.\u00a0 Lyrics full of disdain for commercialism and sexual frustration \u2013 and what could more potently articulate the psyche of a 16 year-old in the summer of 1965?<\/p>\n

Certainly nothing I was listening to that summer.<\/p>\n

Now, my thesis about the way most of us listen to most rock lyrics is that we don\u2019t take them in as a whole, especially at first.\u00a0 Partly because of the vexed acoustics they\u2019re embedded in.\u00a0 (For instance, when Mick sang \u201cI can\u2019t get no girl reaction,\u201d I\u2019ll bet half the listeners heard what I heard: \u201cI can\u2019t get no girlie action\u201d \u2013 which is a little bit more risqu\u00e9.\u00a0 And on the other hand, I\u2019ll bet lots of people heard \u201cI\u2019m trying to meet some girl\u201d rather than the blunter \u201cI\u2019m trying to make some girl,\u201d which was what Mick actually sang.)<\/p>\n

That\u2019s one reason.\u00a0 Another is that little fragments of words and music mean so much they tend to distract you from the bigger picture.\u00a0 It took me a while to get past \u201cI try and I try and I try and I try\u201d sung as a rising cadence, because that spoke to me.\u00a0 I was trying very hard the summer of 1965, and not provoking much girl reaction.\u00a0 Or any other kind.<\/p>\n

That was a summer in which it seemed as if everywhere, people were doing big things.\u00a0 The Great Society had been proclaimed.\u00a0 A Michigan grad was doing a space walk.\u00a0 We were told we were winning the Vietnam War \u2013 or would anyway, once we responded properly to that Gulf of Tonkin thing.\u00a0 And here I was not doing much.<\/p>\n

Harmonica Don’t Cut It<\/h3>\n

One of the ways I wasn\u2019t doing much was musically.\u00a0 With rock at what many would consider to be its highest tide ever, we all wanted to go on down to Yasgur\u2019s farm and join in a rock-n-roll band,[1] me as much as anyone else.\u00a0 But my instrument was (sigh) the harmonica.\u00a0 I\u2019d sort of flamed out on the piano, in equal parts from a) a lack of talent on my part, b) my mother and stepdad\u2019s interest in making me play classical, which just didn\u2019t cut it in 1965, and c) my father\u2019s inability to stake me to a Farfisa organ<\/a> despite my begging him. \u00a0I think if I\u2019d been given that Farfisa I would have been able to fight my way into some kind of music group.\u00a0 I would never have had people in ecstasy over my fingerwork, but I might have been just good enough.<\/p>\n

But I played the harmonica.\u00a0 And not just any kind of harmonica.\u00a0 A couple of years before, my father had given me, out of the blue, a Hohner Chromonica 64.\u00a0 Unless you play harmonicas, that may not mean much to you.\u00a0 Suffice it to say that it\u2019s a classic; the same instrument is sold to this day.\u00a0 It\u2019s extremely versatile, with a huge four-octave range, and you can play it in any key, which all sounds like a plus, but playing it in almost any key except C major and A minor takes a good deal of practice, and because of the Well-Tempered Clavier problem<\/a>, it is not as exquisitely tuned in any individual key as are key-specific diatonic instruments, aka blues harps.\u00a0 And it\u2019s really only for melodies; it\u2019s not built to play chords on.\u00a0 Also bending notes is quite hard.\u00a0 So you have to work at it to sound really good.\u00a0 The day would come when I would sound pretty good at this monster,[2] but that day was not one of the days in1965.[iii]<\/p>\n

So I was one of the crowds who would hang around and listen while the bands played.<\/p>\n

Proto-Aftermath<\/h3>\n

I\u2019m called to mind of one sticky summer evening.\u00a0 I was on a corner on the east side of the campus, I think near the Michigan League.\u00a0 Some early version of Aftermath (later known to Motor City fans as Rhinoceros, and then as the Charging Rhinoceros of Soul<\/a>)[4] was playing up on a temporary stage.\u00a0 Actually, I don\u2019t think they were even Aftermath yet, since that name was a rip-off of the Rolling Stones\u2019 album name, and the album titled Aftermath wasn\u2019t released until mid-1966<\/a>.\u00a0 But I remember them as Aftermath.\u00a0 They had guitars and, if memory serves, horns.\u00a0 And they were playing Satisfaction<\/em>. \u00a0\u00a0And my frenemy Paul was playing with them.<\/p>\n

I remember listening to those lyrics, and feeling they were written about me.\u00a0 Paul<\/em> of course was playing an instrument they wanted.\u00a0 Paul<\/em> was playing well enough to get invited to participate.\u00a0 Paul<\/em> had the girls looking at him.\u00a0 And the band was very good, by local standards, anyway.\u00a0 I could see that.\u00a0 Paul was getting some Satisfaction.<\/p>\n

As for me, I had nothing to show yet. \u00a0Only the folkies in my circle would let me play my harmonica with them.\u00a0 And high school hootenanny parties simply did not compare to wowing a bunch of university students right up there in public.<\/p>\n

Forever after, when I hear that song, I think of that evening.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u2026\u2018cause you see I’m on a losing streak.<\/address>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I can’t get no, oh no no no.<\/address>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0a Hey hey hey, that’s what I say.<\/address>\n
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[1]\u00a0\u00a0 Okay, I know perfectly well that that\u2019s a lyric<\/a> that refers to an event four summers later.\u00a0 A little poetic license, please, if you can spare it.<\/p>\n

[2]\u00a0\u00a0 I expect to write in a later Theme Song entry about the moment I got passable.\u00a0 I\u2019m never going to be professional quality, but I can rock the room now \u2013 almost fifty years too late.<\/p>\n

[3]\u00a0\u00a0 I grew so attached to the Chromonica and its slightly upscale chromatic cousins that I played nothing but chromatics until my sixties.\u00a0 When I finally experimented with diatonics, in many respects they were a piece of cake.\u00a0 Going the other direction would have been harder.<\/p>\n

[4]\u00a0\u00a0 I think I remember hearing that they had to enlarge the name to dispel confusion with a Chicago band called Rhinoceros.<\/p>\n

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn (except for commercial images)<\/p>\n

Theme Songs Page<\/a>\u00a0| Previous Theme Song<\/a>\u00a0| Next Theme Song\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Mick sang \u201cI can\u2019t get no girl reaction,\u201d I\u2019ll bet half the listeners heard what I heard: \u201cI can\u2019t get no girlie action\u201d \u2013 which is a little bit more risqu\u00e9. And on the other hand, I\u2019ll bet lots of people heard \u201cI\u2019m trying to meet some girl\u201d rather than the blunter \u201cI\u2019m trying to make some girl,\u201d which was what Mick actually sang. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,968],"tags":[2183,2070,2194,2196,2186,2192,2190,1022,340,2030,2191,2197,2185,2188,2060,2195,1509,2184,2187,109,2193,2198,2189],"class_list":["post-1852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-closeup","category-theme-songs","tag-i-cant-get-no-satisfaction","tag-2070","tag-aftermath","tag-charging-rhinoceros-of-soul","tag-charlie-watts","tag-chromonica-64","tag-farfisa-organ","tag-great-society","tag-gulf-of-tonkin","tag-harmonica","tag-hohner-chromonica-64","tag-joni-mitchell","tag-keith-richards","tag-max-yasgur","tag-piano","tag-rhinoceros","tag-rolling-stones","tag-satisfaction","tag-space-walk","tag-vietnam-war","tag-well-tempered-clavier","tag-woodstock","tag-yasgurs-farm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1852"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1852\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5473,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1852\/revisions\/5473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}