It is usually the reserve of pasty, fat white blokes in cord jackets and ill-fitting stonewashed demin kecks to parp on about the greatest riffs in rock. Smoke On The Water and Voodoo Chile are predictably wheeled out for the gazillionth time, leaving them sounding pedestrian and wan.

However, one riff that never fails to send your hair on end is the opening fuzz of the Rolling Stones’ ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’.

And it was on this very day, back in 1965, in a hotel room in Clearwater, Florida, that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards sat down with a newly purchased Gibson fuzz-box and worked out one of the most electrifying riffs in rock, paving the way for everyone to get in on the fuzz guitar action.

The song itself had inauspicious beginnings. Keef is on record as saying that he came up with the riff in his sleep, waking in the dead of night, recording the riff and the words “I can’t get no satisfaction” on a cheap tape recorder and promptly passing out, waking to find a recording of “two minutes of ‘Satisfaction’ and 40 minutes of me snoring.”

However, it was at the Jack Tar Harrison Hotel in Clearwater that the song really began to take shape. The song was wrestled away from its folky foundations and gravitated toward a much heavier sound.

Despite the fact Richards’ thought the song was too close to Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ ‘Dancing In The Street’, and generally dismissing the whole thing as a bit throwaway, the track became a single and the first US number one for The Stones.

So popular was the track, and in particular the fuzz opening, that sales of the Gibson Maestro fuzzbox rocketed, with the device completely out of stock worldwide by the close of 1965.

Of course, ‘Satisfaction’ isn’t the first record to feature fuzz guitar. Many old rock ‘n’ roll records featured (largely accidental) fuzz thanks to dodgy amps. One of the earliest intentional uses of fuzz came with the thunderous ’20,000 Pound Bee’ from surf group The Ventures.

However, ‘Satisfaction’ does retain a certain magic not held by many other songs. There’s no doubt that the fuzz is part of the track’s huge appeal.

Jagger has said of the song:

“It was the song that really made The Rolling Stones, changed us from just another band into a huge, monster band… It has a very catchy title. It has a very catchy guitar riff. It has a great guitar sound, which was original at that time. And it captures a spirit of the times, which is very important in those kinds of songs… which was alienation.”

The snarling fuzz of ‘Satisfaction’ went onto influence whole swathes of underground US bands to invest in fuzzboxes. The Electric Prunes’ surprise hit, ‘I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night’ saw the group utilising overdriven guitars and becoming accidental posterboys for Vox, recording a series of radio commercials advertising pedals.

One of the best uses of fuzz is on the wonderful, sneering ‘Beg Borrow Steal’ by Mouse and the Traps who managed to make a record that sounds like you’re being mugged by hooligans in jackboots.

And, largely, it is all thanks to the global smash of ‘Satisfaction’ who popularised that now famous BZZZZ. And so, we’ll leave you with the Stones’ performing the track… but seeing as you know the original so well, we’ll sign off with a take on the track you may not have heard.

As seen in the controversial Stones’ doc, ‘Cocksucker Blues’, here’s Mick & Co performing the track with Stevie Wonder’s backing band in ’72.

God bless you fuzz guitar and all who are assaulted by it.

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For years the Rolling Stones have been giving hope to the dead and the nearly dead. Not through their music – no, just in the fact that they can still get around reasonably well without having had an actual pulse in over thirty years. Seriously – its inspiring.

Get on that Lifetime.

OK, well sometimes the hope-giving is through their music. Take a man who was recently in a coma, for instance. His wife plugged some headphones into his ears, blasted I Can’t Get No Satisfaction, and then the guy’s ears started to tremble and bleed. That song does the exact same thing to us. It usually starts 1/3 into verse 1.

The guys ears didn’t really bleed – he miraculously woke up.

Nowadays whenever any of the Rolling Stones make the news, its for things like poon-jabbing a Russian bar-maid who’s so young she’s not entirely sure what communism actually is. Also they make the news for getting hit in the head with coconuts or something, getting those coconut-hit heads operated on (or something), and imbibing their parents by whatever means necessary.

No or something necessary for that last bit of sentence. Allegedly.

The Rolling Stones’ news-worthiness has just been stood on its ear. Suddenly they are famous for good reason. Suddenly they can be looked upon, not as gross and prunish, but as brave and overly-skinned.

Here’s what ContactMusic.com reports on the matter:

“The ROLLING STONES have been hailed unlikely life-savers after waking a British fan from a coma. Sam Carter lost consciousness after contracting severe anaemia but came to when his favourite Stones track, (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction was blasted into his ears. Ironically, the single was the first the retired baker bought when he was a teenager in 1965. Carter, from Stoke, England, was given just a 30 per cent survival rate by doctors, who advised his wife Eva to play his favourite track through headphones strapped to her husband’s head. Carter says, “I suddenly had a burst of energy and knew I had a lot more life left in me and that’s when I woke up – to the sound of the first song I ever bought.”

What Contact Music didn’t tell us in there is that the man who just awoke from the coma, well he’s gonna wait until the girl Geri Halliwell woke from a coma comes of age, and then they’re gonna make ex-coma babies to the beat of an extremely mediocre soundtrack.

Incidentally, there’s a reason Contact Music didn’t tell us any of that.

A very good reason.