Keith Richards

TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Today we begin a weeklong series featuring a few of our favorite music interviews from our archive.

And that became - that was a bit of a shock to me at the time, but I lived with it. And Mick - see; I write songs for Mick to sing, you know? And this was - you write how, you know, in the early '80s - this is right after you had kicked heroin. And I wouldn't take it as a - as any, you know, sexism. I was trying to get the quality and the touch that you can get from an acoustic guitar and then overload it and make it sound like an electric guitar. You know, and these are all - these are relationships and stuff. And then - it doesn't have what you had on the - you know, on the original idea. I took these ideas, and we - the Stones were in the studio. And it was just a phrase that obviously, you know, was buzzing through the mind and whether you could express anything or enlarge on the idea of - because otherwise I can't go - satisfaction is kind of, you know, sort of moaning. Now, that cassette that you mentioned that you used to write down the idea for "Satisfaction" in the middle of the night that so surprised you when you played it back in the morning, that cassette or one just like it was also really helpful to you in coming up with a kind of transformative guitar sound. And you write about, you know, when the Stones started getting going that you didn't want to copy The Beatles and you decided to be the anti-Beatles. You co-wrote the song with Mick Jagger, but you originated it and you didn't know you were doing it.