KEITH RICHARDS

HE FOUND SATISFACTION IN MAESTRO’S FUZZTONE. EVERYONE ELSE FOLLOWED

The buzzy riff on the Rolling Stones’ 1965 hit “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” is deeply engrained in guitar lore, but its creator, Keith Richards, conceived of it as a brass arrangement. “I’d already heard the riff in my head the way Otis Redding did it later, thinking, This is gonna be the horn line,” he recalled. When it came time to record the song, Richards plugged his Gibson Firebird VII into a Gibson Maestro FZ-1A Fuzz-Tone to sketch out the part for a later brass overdub, but the sound was so novel that they decided to release the cut as is. Said Richards, “That’s the sound that caught everybody’s imagination.”

Introduced in 1962, the wedgeshaped FZ-1A had front-mounted attack and volume knobs and housed a circuit with three germanium transistors. Gibson had trouble selling it until Keef made fuzz a super-hip thing, prompting guitarists — and other gear makers — to follow suit.

HEAR IT: “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” — The Rolling Stones