Satisfaction (I Can’t Get No) (The Ray Charles Orchestra)

Album3 (VHS): The Big T.N.T. Show, Anchor Bay, 1988.
Album3 (DVD): The Big T.N.T. Show, March 2011.

For most of 1965 Ray Charles limited his public appearances to a few high profile TV shows and films, such as Murray The K’s It’s What’s Happening, Shindig! and The Big T.N.T. Show.
The latter was shot before a live audience at the Moulin Rouge club in Los Angeles on November 29 and 30, 1965.
Ray was billed with “his band”, but since he wasn’t touring at that time, the orchestra was, just for this occasion, “composed largely of Los Angeles jazz artists” (as Jet magazine wrote).
Ray performed What’d I Say, Georgia On My Mind, and Let The Good Times Roll, but the band was also involved in the show’s opening and closing.

Although the odd arrangement of Satisfaction (according to legend, charted by McCallum himself, although this has been disputed by others) hardly asks for serious musicianship, that’s certainly… Don Peake playing a few chords on his guitar. And, looking closer, some of the other musicians from the “Ray Charles Orchestra” also seem to make moves which may imply that they play along with the studio band. Researching this a bit further, my next conjecture is that the “Ray Charles Band” must have contributed (or at least must have mimicked that they were contributing) also  to the closing tune, One, Two Three (1-2-3), where David McCallum was again “conducting the orchestra”.

In 1966 McCallum also put both tunes out on his album Music Is A Part Of Me.

When Billy Preston toured with the Ray Charles group, Satisfaction was often on his setlist. It was taped once, in Amsterdam, but that recording seems to be lost for ever.

Live:
’68 LC Amsterdam NM