I attended a concert by the Rolling Stones on July 11, 1966 in Houston, Texas at the Sam Houston Coliseum the day before my seventeenth birthday. I recall Mick Jagger strutting across the stage wearing a white blazer decorated all over with large blotches of caramel color and he couldn’t get no satisfaction.
Neither could the kids.
They held aloft the new disposable butane cigarette lighters by the thousands, ignited in a flagrant violation of every fire code ever written when the Vietnam War killed 6,000 American soldiers that year and wounded another 30,000 and more than quadrupled those numbers for the enemy. The kids didn’t give a shit waving their lighters back and forth and if it all ended in nuclear war so much the better.
Mick Jagger said if he couldn’t get no satisfaction he’d blow a fifty amp fuse and I wondered, what would happen if he really did blow a fifty amp fuse? All the music would stop. The lights would go out. Kids would scream. The Rolling Stones would leave the stage and people would get hurt trying to get out in a panic. So in my humble way I gave credit to the electrician who wired the concert and realized despite all the shouting and rhythm and hype and despite the intensity of the performance the most important thing is often what you never see, the way things work and the ones who keep them working.
I didn’t become an electrician, but I also wondered in my search for meaning when people called Mick Jagger evil or a detriment to society if they ever asked themselves why God let him live so long and live so fast and so hard and record so many songs and continue on stage for decades when so many people died so much younger just trying to be good.
You might not believe in God, but you might ask yourself the same question.
Maybe satisfaction isn’t what you get.
Maybe it’s what you give.
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