'(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction,' 45 Years Later

May 6, 2010— -- Forty-five years ago, a sleepy Keith Richards was playing his guitar and a riff stuck in his head, so he took his tape player and recorded the riff along with the words, "I can't get no satisfaction."

The next morning, he and vocalist Mick Jagger finished the Rolling Stones classic. They recorded it as "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," and it went down as one of the greatest songs of all time.

The summer of 1965 was full of singles still heard blasting from stereos today -- including "Help Me, Rhonda" by The Beach Boys, "Mr. Tambourine Man" by The Byrds and "I Got You Babe" by Sonny & Cher.

But they all were overshadowed "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." The single won a gold record award by the Recording Industry Association of America for selling 500,000 copies, giving the Stones the first of many gold discs in the United States.

"It is probably the most famous rock and roll song of all time," said Stanley Booth, an American music journalist who spent a lot of time touring and hanging out with the Rolling Stones and wrote a biography of the group, "The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones."

"There were so many great songs that summer," Glenn Gass, a professor at the School of Music at Indiana University, told ABC News, "and it still claimed that summer."

When the track was released, it shot to the top of Billboard's Hot 100 chart and stayed there for four weeks in July 1965.

More recently, Rolling Stone magazine placed the song at second on its list of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time."

In 2006, it was added to the Library of Congress National Recording Registry.

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, the song wins acclaim on that front as well, with covers by artists as varied as Otis Redding, Devo and Britney Spears.