I dedicate this to Fox, who published it in his literary magazine,
The View from Here.

SATISFACTION

Well I was just seventeen, you know what I mean, and before too long I had just graduated from high school and gotten my first VW beetle, a brand spanking new Bahama Blau ’64. The Beatles had come out just six months earlier, right after JFK was blown away, and America was reeling under the first wave of the British Invasion. The new music was everywhere, and we were all affecting British accents. I was spending my last free summer before college started in the fall, and I was determined to party. My Uncle Manny, my mother’s younger brother, lived in Hollywood and off I went to visit him and my cousin Bobby, much later to be known as Bobby the coke dealer, but for the time being he was just a surfer.

Uncle Manny was a trip, he was a musician, a drummer, who played the big Miami Beach hotels, and he was a good one, #3 Latin percussionist in the country, according to a Downbeat poll (Tito Puente was #1!). With his blond hair, blue eyes and Bronx accent he could pass for an Anglo, and even had his name legally changed from Rodriguez to Rodgers. But his specialty was Latin music, and when the style caught on in Miami, he had to play under the stage name of Rodriguez, and sing in Spanish so people would believe he was a genuine Spic. There is a moral in there somewhere, and I made it a point to let it sink in: be neither proud nor ashamed of your heritage, it is the one thing about you that you can neither be praised nor blamed for. You had nothing to do with it.

Cousin Bobby had turned out like his grandfather, not his abuelita, he was dark with black wavy hair, and a very Aztec nose, rather like mine. The only false touch was his bright red hair, an unfortunate result of a peroxide accident while attempting to achieve the appropriate sunbleached surfer do. Until it grew out he would just have to explain to everyone what had happened. Bobby was on to all the latest clothing styles and dance steps, and his slang changed hourly. Back then those things mattered to me. My own Saturday night Tampa hangout, the Palladium Ballroom in West Tampa, was definitely bush league compared to the War Memorial Auditorium in Hollywood. There was British invasion on the radio, but R&B still ruled America, I even had another cousin, Rod Justo, who fronted the quintessential W Tampa big band rock and roll outfit, Rodney and the Mystics, at the Palladium.

But that’s another story for another time: my Saturday night fever days. For the time I had wheels and I was going to South Florida, I was out of high school, college bound, and I had a new car. Life was good. I made several trips there that summer before school started, and eventually I could make the trip at an average speed of 67 miles per hour, not bad for a car that topped out at a modest 72! And this was in the days before the Interstate, East on 60 and then South on 27. If I traveled at night, I could just pick up the Miami stations just as the Tampa ones were starting to fade on my bug’s Blaupunkt radio. And I always kept one button reserved for CMCA, “the friendly voice of Cuba”, when the Feds weren’t jamming Fidel’s English language broadcasts. You could pick up that monster transmitter in the Panhandle on a good night. It was during one of these mad dashes through the sugar cane barrens of South Florida that I heard the song that changed my life, it was my epiphany, my road to Damascus. It was the Rolling Stones’ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.

I had heard the Stones before, they had come out with their first American release just a few months earlier, a creditable version of the old R&B classic “All Over Now” (Becuz’ I uuuuused to luv her, but it’s alllllllll ovah now”) But Satisfaction was different. From the pounding hypnotic base beat to the signature fuzz bass opening notes, this was like nothing I, or anyone else had heard before. Most popular music was about love, or lust masquerading as love, this was about sex, violence and politics and money. Mick Jagger struck a note that resonates in me to this day, this was not about simple adolescent sexual tension, it was about how that natural, awkward, inevitable teen horniness was recognized, manipulated, used, and eventually exploited for commercial purposes. Capitalism had found a way to make a profit on testosterone, and Mick was hip to their scam and he was clueing me in on it. And from that day on our generation was also wise to it, and we were not going to fall for it any more.

“When I’m watching my TV,
and a man comes on and tells me,
how white my
shirts should be,
but he can’t be a man ‘cuz he doesn’t smoke
the same
cigarettes as me.”

It was all there, the media control of the natural human urge to find a mate, expressing itself as consumer products designed to enhance your attractiveness and sexual status (we all wore mod suits, white shirts and neckties to dances then) and we all smoked the right fags. How clear, how true, what economy of language, what clarity of thought. The song goes on, the singer’s own art is turned against him, he runs around the world, drives his car, he can sing his song and sign his contracts but he still can’t get laid. “Baby better come back maybe next week, can’t you see I’m on a losing streak? I CAN”T GET NO…..Satisfaction. “ In three tiny verses and a bridge, it’s all there, the whole consumerist marketing mechanism that devours society, seasoned in its own sexual juices. The Blues of the American Negro filtered through the soul of the British working class, and spoon-fed to middle-American suburban teen culture; what a trio of hell-bound demographics that is!

“…a man comes on the radio, telling me more and more, about some useless information, ‘sposed to try my imagination…”

You get the impression Jagger has not quite figured out just what is happening to him, but he knows something is going on and it’s not right. The song is only superficially simple, it is a marvelous multilayered construction alternating with anger, sarcasm, outrage and despair. After Satisfaction, no one wore white shirts any more. Even the Beatles Carnaby Street fashion was exposed for the elitist sham it really was. And all this time, a little just-turned-17 kid driving through the darkness, his mind throbbing with hormones and media images, suddenly saw how it all came together, the music, the clothes, the fashion, the hair, the slang, the dances, even the cars and Bobby’s surfboard, it was not our folk art any more, it had been expropriated by a few dozen old men in New York and LA and (now) in London, who were telling us what we wanted so they could turn around and sell it to us. And for a brief moment Mick had grabbed the microphone away from them just long enough to scream out loud that we STILL could… get no, satisfaction…

This was subversive shit, and it struck at the heart of the system. And I ain’t been the same since.