#1. "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" (The Rolling Stones)

It's December 1981, a few days before my 4th birthday.  I'm standing with my grandmother at the counter of the Record Bar music store in the Asheville Mall, trying to tell the teenage girl behind the cash register—who is nice enough, but obviously wishing she were someplace else—which singles I want.
The first is "Trouble" by Lindsey Buckingham.  (Out of stock.  She gives us a listless shrug.)  And the second is a song I'd heard on the radio about a week before that had stopped me in my tracks and now can't get out of my head.  Problem is, I don't know the song title or who performed it—you know, exactly what every disinterested record store clerk wants to hear from a customer.
The only thing I can articulate about the song: "It sounds like mean bees."
As I've mentioned in other posts, my late grandmother worked stocking records and tapes for Sky City, a former regional department store.  She was no stranger to kids shuffling up to her and mumbling lyrics to the latest Go-Go's single or wanting to know which Ozzy album had "Crazy Train" on it.
So my grandma makes a suggestion.
"Sing it to her, Mikey."
By "sing," I know exactly what she's driving at: I re-created music with my mouth all the time as a kid.  (Think: a toddler version of Michael Winslow from the Police Academy movies.)  My family referred to it as "singing" because beatboxing wasn't really a thing back then.  I'd usually make up my own songs and imitate the sounds of guitar, drums, bass, and synths—not to mention the pops and cracks of a vinyl record if I also was pretending that my song was playing on a turntable.  But I'd often imitate stuff from the radio, too.
So there, in the middle of Record Bar, I start "singing" the riff that had lured me away from playing with my building blocks the week before, imitating the buzzing "mean bees" guitar sound as best I can: uhn-uhn...uh-uh-uhhhhhh-uh-uhn-uhn...
"Does that ring a bell?" my grandma asks the girl, who is standing there dumbfounded.
Eventually, the manager (who is barely out of his teens himself) comes strolling over to take a listen.  He listens with a half-smile and then asks me to perform it one more time.  At this point, I'm starting to get a bit self-conscious.  He starts tapping his pen on his clipboard in time with my riff, and a look of recognition suddenly beams across his face.
"I'm pretty sure that's 'Satisfaction' by the Stones," he drawls.  "That's an old song, little man.  Where'd you hear that?"
At this point, I go into shy mode and hide behind my grandma's legs, where I convince myself that I am invisible to everyone...

Obviously, the store didn't have "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" by The Rolling Stones available as a single because the song had been released 16 years earlier in 1965.  
But, to my ears, it didn't sound all that different from the punk rock and New Wave that was starting to get airplay in those days.  That Keith Richards guitar lick had the same attitude and primal crunch as the raw, unapologetic rock coming out of London and New York, circa 1981.
Mick Jagger's sneering anti-consumerism/vagabond lyrics did, too, even though I didn't understand a single word he was saying until I was a teenager.  Probably a good thing, because the words are raunchy.  Especially the part where he's trying to bed a groupie, but she rejects him because she's "on a losing streak."  Crass?  Absolutely.  But you can't argue with its honest snapshot of a performer's life on the road.
The story behind the song is the stuff of rock legend, too, meaning you have to take it with a grain of salt and a shot of tequila.
The Stones played Jack Russell Memorial Stadium in Clearwater, FL, on May 6, 1965.  They were four songs into the show when a group of young concertgoers got into it with local law enforcement, and all hell broke loose.  The show was shut down, and local politicians basically vowed never to let another rock band perform there again.
Back at the band's hotel that night (some sources say "motel"—probably because it sounds seedier), an exhausted Richards fell fast asleep with his guitar beside him and a tape recorder on the nightstand.  The next morning, he woke up to find the tape had spooled all the way to the end, even though he didn't recall turning the recorder on at any point.
When he ran the tape back, well, you might guess where this is going.
"So I put it back to the beginning and pushed play and there, in some sort of ghostly version, is [the opening lines to 'Satisfaction']," Richards told NPR's Terry Gross in 2010.  "It was a whole verse of it.  And after that, there's 40 minutes of me snoring.  But there's the song in its embryo, and I actually dreamt the damned thing."
As for the famous fuzz tone that makes the song the ugly, glorious thing that it is, Richards never intended to keep that guitar line on the final track.  Instead, he envisioned a Stax-style horn section, not unlike Otis Redding's late 1965 rendition of the song.  He only used his Gibson Maestro fuzzbox pedal in the studio to mimic the sound of saxophones, fully intending to overdub horns at a later date.
But as he noted in a video to fans from 2004, "The record company and management slipped it out.  They said 'this is a hit; why talk to them, they're on the road (promoting the album Out of Our Heads)?'  And I can't argue with that."

"Miss You" (The Rolling Stones)

I remember the first time I saw the music video for The Rolling Stones "Miss You" from the 1978 album Some Girls (the last album where they actually tried to make good music, in my humble opinion).  
I believe Casey Kasem was discussing some factoid about the Stones on his syndicated America's Top 10 T.V. show, and "Miss You" was the clip they chose to show before going to commercial.  I was probably about 3 or 4 years old at the time, and the clip was only about 30 seconds long.  But it made quite an impression on me.  There was something about that groove and Jagger singing his ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh vocals to the camera that clicked with my little brain.  
But it wasn't just, "Oh, that's a great song"; it was more like, "Well, I could do that."  
I spent the rest of the afternoon, strutting around the house and ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ing until my parents asked me to stop.
Anyway, I'd always known that "Miss You" was a by-product of Jagger spending many semi-lucid hours at New York's Studio 54, absorbing the sound and attitude of disco.  But I only recently learned that, although Keith Richards is credited with co-writing the song, he really had nothing to do with it.
In a 1995 interview with Rolling Stone magazine's Jann Wenner, Jagger notes that he and multi-instrumentalist Billy Preston came up with the song during rehearsals in Toronto while Richards was awaiting trial on drug charges.
Says Jagger, "Yeah, Billy had shown me the four-on-the-floor bass-drum part, and I would just play the guitar.  I remember playing that in the El Mocambo club when Keith was on trial in Toronto for whatever he was doing.  We were supposed to be there making this live record."
Preston also came up with the song's strutting bassline, which Bill Wyman then reshaped in his own Stonesian image.
And while the bass really is what grabs me, Sugar Blue's harmonica is what puts the track right over the top.  It's a gorgeous, soulful chunk of bluesy grit that keeps the whole affair from getting too glossy and slick.  Kind of a little reminder that, while Studio 54 might have been the height of toot and glam, the real New York of 1978 was a funky, brutalist shit show.